I can't see this image at work due to the crappy filters they have in place. Can you upload this to the wiki?

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Microsoft XNA MVP

I think I've done that right. I've never edited a wiki page before

I was thinking this morning of another solution:

Actually looking at those times it seems much too long at higher levels. I'm thinking this needs to be more of a bite-sized thing, where a dungeon can be cleared in one session of no more than 30 minutes. Obviously this is going to take a bit of testing once things are done to see how long it takes. The rooms and # of mobs needs to increase steadily though. The random generation of the level should be able to be done by itself and the populating of the level tacked on afterwards.

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Yeha, I always thought the idea of an RPG is to feel like a superhero by end game. Making battles take like 6mins would detract from that. Boss battles, sure, regular enemies ... not so much.

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Hmmm, boss mobs! Maybe every 10 levels or so?

Scope creep is too tempting!

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Um, what happens when several people are playing? And they have very different levels (i.e. a level 1 and a level 50). I don't think basing the dungeons/enemies on the characters is a good idea. You also totally take away the reward of leveling (like Oblivion where the game is easiest if you intentionally stay as low level as possible). This also means everything from spell damage to armor defense needs to take into account the level of the character. Otherwise whenever you level the game gets harder. Leveling should make the game easier, until you progress further in the game and encounter harder enemies.

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm thinking. I think with most hack 'n Slash games what they do to make the enemies "harder" is add immunities and resistances to them, not jsut give them a tonne more health and defense. Mean you'd have to change your tactics for enemies instead on just chipping away at their health.

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One way to handle this is the way City of Heroes worked with its Sidekick option. The lower level character basically gets temporary offensive and defensive bonuses to offset the level difference. It seemed to work well in CoH.


The game is just a one-shot deal though. Each dungeon is generated on the fly based on the character.

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I don't think a player character's equipment should be a factor in the level generation. Otherwise every dungeon is the same difficulty, independent of the level, or how well armed we go in.

The game should provide a dungeon for a character of level = maximum level of entering adventurer.

So a two person team with lvl 12 and a lvl 6 character, will be entered into a two player lvl 12 dungeon.

The dungeon difficulty should be for a player with a degree of armor, proportional to the dungeon level.

So if the game expects us to have 200 armor points provided by armor gear, by level 20, and we enter a level 20 character, it is a dungeon built for a character with 200 armor points provided by armor gear, independent of what we actually have.

If we have good gear, with 300 armor points, we will find it easier than if we enter under-protected with 100 armor points.

This should cover expectations of armor, magics, and weapons.

The first few levels should feel progressively harder, until we find newer better gear which offsets that, and so on.

It would couple well with my previous suggestion of discrete spell strengths across the golem family, for example. There you get the same creep class feel progressively easier because it's spells are relatively less potent until we step up to the next class in the family.

Furthermore, to encourage balanced teams, the dungeon should also expect a good mix of fighters, mages, and clerics. So if we enter a 3 person dungeon with 3 of a kind, we'll surely feel imbalanced.

So the player never progresses in the game? There is always a dungeon that is hard and they can never go back to an easy dungeon and beat up on easy enemies? How do they win/end the game?

That won't work if you use the example Struan gave. The lower level character would be wiped out in the first battle. Having played MMOs were I was the lower level character, there's no fair, easy way to generate a dungeon appropriate for a wide level difference.


The gear the character has should have nothing to do with the level generation. If a play chooses to keep crappy gear on his high level character that's his problem. It should be strictly level based.


Making it level based should do that.


That we'll work out in the magic system. I haven't thought much about specifics on it yet.


Mixing magic using mobs with non-magic using mobs would be good.

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The player progresses in the game by increasing in level. If we add scoreboards for level and/or total loot gained it would be about getting to the top of the scoreboards. If a hardcore mode is added it's about how long the character can stay alive.

The idea is to keep from having to have to someone manually create levels.

There is no winning the game in the traditional sense.

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Well it depends on how much power difference there is between adjacent levels.

I would say, don't forbid it, it's upto the players. If a level 20 team can't find enough level 20 players to team up with (say the team is looking for a much needed priest), they are free to add some level 18s or 19s priests to balance the group, or indeed any lower level player character.

Hmm, I think maybe the level should be generated based on the party, not having to find a party to beat a level. This is especially relevant to the single player experience.

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But gear is relevant to how difficult a dungeon is going to be. A dungeon has to be designed to accept some sort of team... is that a team of unarmed characters?

Then by fortune of having a modest weapon and some armor, every level would become a walkover.


So again I'll advocate level generation be for characters with an expected (typical) set of gear, at that level. Actual characters may have gear slightly higher or lower than this, creating a blend of mild advantages and disadvantages for some characters, who for example a warrior might have a better than expected sword, but lower than expected armor.

So the idea is to just grind indefinitely with no goals? Then it is just a matter of who has more time to play, and single-players will never catch up to team-players on any kind of leaderboard.

Also, how do you balance continuously more powerful loot? You can't know what will and will not work if you have never done any playtesting at that level. And with no level caps there are too many levels to test.

Isn't that the goal of every MMO (other than hitting the level cap quicker than anyone else)?

The goal is to clear dungeons. And grind (to me, based on the MMOs I've played) suggests work. This should be challenging and fun, not work.


Why not?

There should be a way to scale leaderboards by time played. That warrants further thought.


Depends on what you mean by "more powerful loot". With a set list of gear, it would become more about strategy in battles and how you level your character.

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Because we'll know what loot the dungeons are dropping. It will all need to be considered in the level generator to anticipate player strengths. Play testing can help balance difficulty too, but we'll want it fairly well constructed beforehand.

As for a continuous grind... I don't foresee a 'you win - game over' screen of any kind, but progressively deeper dungeons.

But at the same time, don't really like the perma-death idea. It's too harsh, and it makes the scoreboard too impersonal, because you might have commanded many characters and you'd forget about them over time.

I prefer the idea of keeping your character for as long as you want it, but to penalise those who die in a dungeon somehow. At the very least, they will have to try it again. Perhaps the scoreboard can take failure into consideration with a ladder system ranking characters on experience. Getting killed in a dungeon loses some of that experience.

With a set list of potential dropped loot then the loot is effectively irrelevant at high levels since by then everyone will have the best loot.

If you just keep scaling difficulty by level then one of three things will happen.

1)Enemies get ever increasingly hard to kill so that at some point nobody is able to progress further effectively capping levels at that point. If this is the case, why not just use a fixed level cap and design the game around that like most RPGs do?

2)Enemies get easier and easier to kill as you gain levels (because they aren't getting harder as fast as you are getting more powerful) Player levels skyrocket, and you'll never catch up to the guy that started playing a week before you. There is no challenge and no reason to keep going.

3)Enemies remain the same difficulty constantly (The game is just a matter of grinding enough) And the game is utterly boring because it is exactly the same from beginning to end the only difference is the numbers/stats being displayed. If you do balance the dungeons perfectly for the level increases then what is the point of leveling at all? You could just keep the enemies and players at level 1 with the same effect.

I agree with all what you say here Struan, except that loot doesn't have to be liberally dropped. You may only get 10% of an armor set from one dungeon. So either have to sell old and buy new stuff from an auction house, or continue on with less-than-perfect armor. Being tight fisted with the drops means that not all high level players will have a full set of top quality items.

I'm not sure how we will prevent looted items from accumulating over time. Somehow they will have to expire to prevent them becoming so common that the economy collapses. Maybe after an item has changed hands so many times??. idk

For the rest of what you said, I agree with you. However, there is an alternative to option 3, I feel, which is like I said earlier, that each creep class can be mastered because it's spells become relatively impotent as you level up. (Enemy gets easier to kill) while your own gear becomes relatively impotent as you come up against harder creeps (Enemy gets harder to kill)

The player rides the difficulty in waves (more like sawtooth waves). And there are more than one of these waves being rode simultaneously from the different aspects of the game.

1. There is a continual sense of steadily mastering one creep class, and then all of a sudden coming up against it's bigger brother class.

2. A continual sense of your gear steadily growing sub-average and then finding a shiny new axe, which in comparison suddenly you feel like you're ripping through these monsters.

These don't directly cancel out because they are not synchronised waves. That's important.