Infinite Balance

[TechSY730]

Seeing as there are no real level caps to this game, you are in a tricky situation. How retain balance even as level approaches infinity (aka. goes arbitrarily high).

I think the move to compute level advantage/disadvantage based on direct level comparison rather than stats that vary with level is a good move, as it massively eases this balancing challenge.

This not only applies to just the character, but also spell tiers and all that. Most other games have a finite cap on levels, and thus can get away with a finite number of spell tiers. Like Final Fantasy traditionally has spells with up to 4 tiers. (eg, fire, fira, firaga, firaja). Here though, there is a potentially infinite number of tiers. You are faced with the challenge of balancing that.

Again, the relative level adjustments is a great idea, with the decay thing in place to simulate "obsolete" spells. This does have the nasty side effect of not being able to have a unique animation for each spell tier though. Aka, fire touch I must look the same as fire touch II, etc. With Final Fantasy, as there is a finite number of spell tiers, and thus they can have an infinite number of animations. Here, unless you want some sort of procedurally generated animations (which sounds like more trouble than it is worth), you can't pull that off.

So, I don't envy your challenge, as I don't know of any other game that has tried to pull of balance in the face of no caps.

[x4000]

Actually, that's the whole beauty of the relative-power thing.  The levels are meaningless in terms of absolute power.  As your level changes, your stats do not.  Enemy stats don't, either, except in relation to your level.  So fighting a level 99 enemy when you are level 100 is identical to fighting a level 9 enemy when you are level 10.  Not almost the same, not close -- literally in every way identical.  There's no balance challenge relating to levels at all; if it works at level 10, it works at level 10,010.

In terms of the spell tiers and not having distinct visual effects per tier, that was never on the table.  When you get a higher tier of launch rock, that's not like getting Fira in a Final Fantasy game.  If you're looking for Fira, that would be Launch Meteor.  That's why I describe the leveling effect in terms of a two dimensional graph, not a one-dimensional line. 

As you gain higher levels, you get access to new enemies, spells, crafting components, and so on.  That's where the traditional RPG-style progression of power comes from.  But given that we want this game to be infinitely replayable, that adds the second dimension which is the tiers on the spells themselves. 

In Final Fantasy, once you have found Fira, that's just it for Fire.  In a real fight where you are against competent foes, you'd never use Fire again, it's always Fira until you find Firaga.  In AVWW, that's not really true -- once you find Launch Meteor, that's certainly what you'd use against bosses instead of Launch Rock, but Launch Rock would be something you'd still consider upgrading to higher tiers so that you could use it in routine encounters with smaller enemies of your level.

That's the beauty of this system, which is that you get infinite replayability along with a traditional progression without ever having any balance problems that exist only at one point in the progression but not at other points.

[mrhanman]

Have you thought about at what level you will stop unlocking materials/spells/etc.?  Will the new "gear" start showing up less frequently at higher levels?  Will there be some super-awesome, world-remaking spell at level 1,000,000 (or higher)?

[x4000]

The bulk of the game, at least for 1.0, will be unlockable in an arc between levels 1 and 80.  There will be a few outliers in the 100s of levels, possibly something in the low 1000s.  But really, the thing is that we don't want to make it so that people have to grind in an un-fun way just to try again "get everything."  So that's really a fine line.

The goal is that the arc of "beating the game" (which isn't possible, but just for the sake of argument) would take about 80 levels.  Playing another 80 levels would be like beating the game a second time, even though the amount of content packed in would make it different than the first 80 levels to a substantial degree.  Kind of like how every game of AI War is different, the idea is that even once you complete the 80-level arc and most of the unlocks are behind you, you'd still be running into tons of stuff (and even spells) that you missed the first time around.  Because the density is going to be such, ideally, that by the time you reach level 80 you've unlocked everything, but not used or even found everything that got unlocked by level-gating.

The reason for that design is choice: if you like certain things better than others, then you can focus on those and get to level 80 that way.  And then if getting to level 160 sounds like fun to you, then there's still a bunch of new stuff to find.  But if we made it linear all the way to 160, you'd wind up just having to play the way we dictated, which I'm not as thrilled about.  I'd rather give you 4x the stuff that you can actually use or find as you go, and let you choose which 1/4 suits your interests and needs, and then the "replay" value is right in there as you level up beyond the cap, because you can find tier-appropriate stuff that you missed in the first 80 levels, even though they were technically available to you.