I find myself wondering if some people around here have actually played RPGs because monsters getting stronger as players also advance has more or less been a common practice.
Even looking back to an old game like Shining Force, damage was calculated as something like an absolute value of the target’s defense subtracted by the attacker’s offense. Assuming you hit, you always did 1 damage. If you crit, damage doubled. Still, there were points in the game where certain characters may have struggled because they hadn’t received a weapon upgrade in a bit or needed to get promoted/leveled. Nonetheless, there was an eventual “end” in monster growth because the story ended and we weren’t in an online era with post-release patching. You could beat the game with characters around promoted level 20 (and maybe even lower if you hated yourself), but it was also possible to still level to 99 and one-shot all but the final bosses with offensive characters because said bosses had multiple HP bars (or more accurately, went over 99 HP and thus ??? HP).
Whether numbers stay small or get larger doesn’t matter in the end, as long as the devs prescribe a minimum expectation of power for content. Because to argue otherwise would be like saying you should be able to defeat the final bosses in SF with Level 1 unpromoted characters in starter gear because eww stat bloat, but rah rah player skill. It’s just not how most RPGs work and the few that “allow it” are often more in the exploitive sense like abusing pets or ranged attacks and primitive AI.
Now, having probably played more mobile RPGs than the average person here, I’ll simply say this: Rampant, infinite stat growth pretty much never happens. Power creep does happen, yes, but this is usually accompanied by challenges also getting more difficult. The only times this is fundamentally a problem is if growth into the new tiers requires spending or is something that takes months of resources to prepare for. The latter point is actually something I consistently and vehemently argue against for a game like Diablo, as I certainly don’t believe it should takes months to “finish” a build. Flipping the platform from PC to mobile doesn’t change that belief, either. However, unlike Shining Force, mobile games today are largely expected to continue to grow and evolve. Players in D:I will not be launch level cap forever. Progression may even resemble MMOs with gear tiers within caps before cap increases reset it all. Again, none of this really new, but the argument some have made in the past relative to D2 that they should just be able to not play the game for years and come back top dog is the actual development oddity in expectation. So, it’s one thing to fight power creep in sudden, drastic numbers, but it’s another to say power creep should never be happening in an RPG at all. It’s a foundational premise. Otherwise, there’s no point in having levels or gear. So, assuming D:I lasts long enough, maybe one day mobs do have a million % in a stat. So what? “Keep numbers small!” is a philosophy that tends to run counter to persistent development, and stat squishes after the fact is actually a different animal that just trying to say they should’ve been squished by default as it infers a balance between initially intended difficulty and making it easier for latecomers to catch up with older gear getting a longer shelf life.
Well said. Had D2 keep getting balance patch and update like D3, the number will eventually go big as well. Just in one expansion span and few balance updates, the D2 number went from 300 damage on average for Lv20 skill to 60k+ damage for the endgame easily.
D2 Damage at the Endgame: https://i.imgur.com/tyYhl3g.png
Even Final Fantasy 14 can’t avoid the power creep and have to do stat squishing for their new expansion when their number increment/bonus is rather minimal (10%~30% bonus damage) thru the whole game.
FF14 Stat Squish https://i.gyazo.com/b3aaa744d10e5aa9a98bbc09ca4ae23b.jpg
Now I am not sure if this was meant as a response to me, but I did say that monsters getting more defense is one of the oldest systems in RPGs.
There might be some confusion about what power creep is, especially in Diablo 3.
It is not a problem that numbers sometimes go up. Heck, it would be really problematic in an A-RPG if numbers did not go up.
It is a problem when numbers grow exponentially, and my point in the post above was that this exponential growth remains problematic even if you hide it in the actual dmg numbers. Like you have 1 quadrillion DPS and monsters have 1 quadrillion defense so you end up dealing 500 dmg. That small number at the end of the calculation does not solve the issue you created.
Small or large numbers do matter. Or rather their growth matters. If you dmg grows exponentially all the time, your journey becomes meaningless. Nothing that came before on your journey can compete with the quadrillion DPS at the end. The trillion DPS you did before equipping your new amulet was pointless. Which is part of why people suddenly only care about reaching “the end”, hating the journey, or what should have been the actual game.
It has nothing to do with doing all content at lvl 1 (which I really agree is a design flaw in ARPGs, as it takes away the significance of progressing).
As for power creep, the issue comes from dmg going up for no reason.
If you add a new game system, and that adds some new power, great. Power creep happened, not so good, but it did so, due to adding new gameplay elements, which was hopefully worth it.
D3 power creep is not that. It is increasing dmg numbers on items from 1000% to 10000% in a patch. For no reasons other than misplaced attempts at balancing, or maybe rather flavor of the month game design.
Or if TLDR, indeed this.
Keep growth small. Related, but not the same.
Anyway, persistent development doesnt have to mean, and shouldnt mean, that numbers go up all the time.
Again, adding a new system, like the D3 cube? Sure, power creep. No problem!
But no, each new patch or whatever does not have to make all numbers go up across the board. That is just senseless hamster wheel design. Senseless grind.
WoW does that, since they want you to play each month, of course. No need for that here.
The only thing that matters is with how many hits you kill a monster. If the aRPG makes it possible for you to insta-kill monsters you’d previously killed with 20 hits then no matter how exactly numbers grow the journey gets meaningless. You have jumped on the hamster wheel. Enjoy!
This isn’t always the case, because: Power creep is a process that sometimes occurs in games where new content slowly outstrip the power of previous alternatives. This leads to players abandoning previous options in favour of the latest and more powerful alternatives, resulting in an inevitable increase in power throughout the game.
Power creep is a problem for Non-Season. For Seasons, it’s irrelevant.
I agree keep growth on a much smaller scale than D3s exponential growth. While I have no issues seeing or comprehending very large numbers, when your growth is like that of D3 and basically only damage output and HP of enemies you take away any real decision making when it comes to gear. It always needs to be damage, health, res, then anything else.
They even did this in WoW, where gear upgrades weren’t too big until TBC where you got that 15% jump per tier because anything less wouldn’t “feel” like an upgrade. I’d rather have to decide between two interesting legendary affixes or the “secondary” affixes as opposed to just which one gives me the most damage output and defensive stats.
Yeah, the big numbers themselves are not an issue, you solve that by adding M, B, T etc. behind them.
The WoW example from Blizzard is funny, because 15% growth per tier is not exactly a lot. 15% increased dmg when replacing 13 item slots? I would call that quite small.
If they kept growth that low in Diablo, it would be fine. 15% per “tier” (whatever that meant in the context of Diablo) would probably be too low.
I have no problem with a BIS item being more than 15% better than a mediocre item you have when you start end-game. Heck, 50% better would likely be fine too, as the jump from mid-tier to BIS.
Just as too high growth is bad, too low growth is the same, obviously. We clearly should feel our characters gets stronger through gear, otherwise it would be pointless to get that gear (and as said above, the idea from D2 that you should be able to complete the game naked is a silly concept for an A-RPG).
Just dont make items 1000% better all of a sudden.
By definition, if your dmg grows 20x times in a second, then you would 1-shot those monsters which took 20 hits before, so the number growth is directly related.
But, it is not only about how fast monsters die. It is about how much your gear matters. With exponential scaling, only that very last tier of items have any meaning, since they deal “a trillion times” more dmg than what came before. Giving you a meaningless journey through the game. Probably also giving people like you the desire to pay to skip the journey.
Of course there is. I cant even imagine that would need explanation (although I already did).
Wyatt is correct about it in the interview.
But sigh, lets do this thing again.
If your character grows 1% over 5 years of playing, replacing all your items multiple times over, that is technically growth. It just wont matter to anyone. Making it feel pointless and stupid.
Going from 20 hits at Season start to 1 hit at Season end would be a proper journey. In D3 you reach that state in first day and you begin the hamster wheel.
What matters is when there’s a change in gameplay. The more tactical game you have the more noticeable the changes would be and practically you won’t have “too low” during the journey. Each second less the fight goes on would make a difference.
It’s not irrelevant. On season you still want and equip the highest damage multiplier. Your context is relative to the previous choices player had before. Yet season on itself has no previous options but still can be compared to the previous seasons with ease.
Yeah.
But it also affects the journey within each season. Power creeps mean that we jump from torment 1 to torment 16 in the blink of an eye each season. Like 95% of the progression in the game is gone, since only the highest dmg multipler matters the slightest.
In a way, the power creep is somewhat worse for season, since it is about starting over and over. Really showing us how broken the journey has become. Making the power creep much more noticeable than in non-season where you are only ever moving forward.
D3 RoS never had a journey. It’s all one never ending hamster wheel.
I wrote many times and Hades completely showed how D3 RoS should look. The big problem is again Blizzard have to start following the goals they say they aim so that botters aren’t regarded as important. It then would be a matter of a single patch to turn D3 into Hades with Seasons lasting a fixed month and players competing instead of botting.
Sure it did.
Never had a particularly good one, but it had a journey. It still has a journey. Just an immensely broken one.
Dear lord.
I am getting more and more convinced that the best thing Diablo (any Diablo) game could do, would be to get rid of ALL aspects of competition. Cleanse it with fire.
Seems like all it does is corrupt everything it touches.
Day 1 RoS journey lasted way more than a day. The silly droprates and crazy growth rates came later.
No. Remove ALL leaderboards. Remove all PvP. And so on. Leave not traces of it behind.
(not saying this should happen, only that it really seems like it could solve much of what ails Diablo these days)
As for paragon, another thing that should be cleansed with fire.
Weird, because they have worked perfectly fine without competition in the past. And no AIs in sight.
Now, I do consider competition to be an integral part of RPGs, and most games in general. In a sense you are competing with yourself, on efficiency gains for your character. But I hope it is obvious I am talking competition between players here (aka. leaderboards etc.).
It has become immensely broken.
It was never great, but Diablo 3 had a somewhat reasonable journey at release. Then stuff started to get really weird and unbalanced in Inferno Act 2-4, but even then, it had a meaningful journey. You lvled, you improved your gear, and you pushed on, step by step.
And even for a very short time in RoS it wasn’t all bad. Before inflated droprates/crafting and power creep took over.
This just extends the competition with yourself. Removing competition would mean you’d make every player’s decision have the exact same EV, which would be fine in an AI ARPG.
I don’t know. D3 was broken from the very beginning with that AH and itemization. It may had some journey, but it was crap nevertheless.
Because it had only one end game model, breaking their promise on PvP that early caused them to funnel for a PvE hamster wheel when trade portion of the game collapsed for this or that reason. Hence, why I think they’re that sticking to their gums about PvP content in D4.
You may despise PvP, but that’s the semi-competitive part of the game without having to race with ghosts of other players. It also offered an endgame model to pose as a plateau that players may rest and feel contempt with themselves upon. Current model only caused them to complain on forums non-stop because they’re not at top 500 leaderboards. No developer would be obliged to feel happy after reading pages and pages long complaints about their system.