Leveling up continent civilization, is there a point?

[Wanderer]

That sounds pretty cool.  Devs, is there any chance of our talking you into this sort of thing?

I miss the little things, like going back to "My now burned down hometown" and letting Cait Sith punch slimes in the face for one hit joy.

You know, that might be one of my burnouts.  I never feel like I really advance in a continent...

I'm still sorting through my impressions of 2 continents and general gameplay.  It's inconsistent and I know that, and some if it's "THAT SUX" and others are "DUUUUUDE!!!, CHECK IT!"  Neither are really helpful and I'm not particularly sure I want to discuss them publically yet.

On the other hand, one of the feelings that there are things that you just are going to get WRECKED by if you don't level up was a driving force in many, many RPG games I've played.  One of my most favorite games was Phantasy Star.  The original with Meow (what an amazingly original four letter name, 'eh?).  You could push, HARD... right up until you hit the ice planet and got WRECKED... then you'd grind.  You grinded because no matter how many neat tricks you could pull out of your item box, you just couldn't find a way anymore without a little more health, or that better weapon, or...

To give you an idea, I tried to get to the third world without ever upgrading... anything.  You'll be amazed at what you can do with selective item usage.

I just don't have that feel in this game right now.  When you go back and box Glass Joe, you whack him upside one way and down the other.  Admittedly that's a player skill thing, but I just never get the feeling that once I got powerful, I could go back and talk to Joe like I should be able to.  I never get that 'empowered' feeling.  It's a perception, I can see the numbers.  I know I'm 'stronger'.

I never feel that way.

[TechSY730]

I just don't have that feel in this game right now.  When you go back and box Glass Joe, you whack him upside one way and down the other.  Admittedly that's a player skill thing, but I just never get the feeling that once I got powerful, I could go back and talk to Joe like I should be able to.  I never get that 'empowered' feeling.  It's a perception, I can see the numbers.  I know I'm 'stronger'.

I never feel that way.

TVTropes of all places has some good, descriptive (though admittedly not very academic) writeups about this.

See http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EmptyLevels and related tropes (it mentions in particular that this can happen in over-aggresive Level scaling systems)

AVWW isn't quite bad enough to be considered this trope, but it is close, and does suffer from many of the symptoms it describes.


In fact, I'm probably going to copy these links to the other 2 or so thread topics dealing with character progression and world progression.

[Quaix]

Man, you can't just go around posting TVTropes links without a warning.

[tigersfan]

I'm not going to rule these types of ideas out completely. I will say though that we're not likely to make any changes like this anytime soon. This would be a big change, with a lot of things to balance, and there are other matters we feel are more pressing at the moment. If someone wanted to make a mantis ticket with this thread summed up, that would help me out a lot, and would ensure that the idea was somewhere we could see it when the time comes.

[Martyn van Buren]

Can do. If I put a link to the thread is that likely to be stable for a few months?

[tigersfan]

Can do. If I put a link to the thread is that likely to be stable for a few months?

Oh yeah, no one is going to delete the thread or anything. But, if in 6 months it's down on page 12, no one is going to see it either.

[Martyn van Buren]

Here: http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=7317

I'm embarrassed to say this, but I realized while writing the ticket up that I've been doing most of my playing on an old pre-continent world that's already covered in wind shelters and has enough space to have two overlords, and I suspect that the current wind shelter mechanic may actually be a much better solution to the "expanding into a dangerous world" thing I thought regions tiers would help with --- I'm going to focus on a new world now, suspect I may change my mind entirely about them.  But anyway there are a lot of arguments here and it seems worth highlighting for you guys to look at later on.

[Bluddy]

Here: http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=7317

I'm embarrassed to say this, but I realized while writing the ticket up that I've been doing most of my playing on an old pre-continent world that's already covered in wind shelters and has enough space to have two overlords, and I suspect that the current wind shelter mechanic may actually be a much better solution to the "expanding into a dangerous world" thing I thought regions tiers would help with --- I'm going to focus on a new world now, suspect I may change my mind entirely about them.  But anyway there are a lot of arguments here and it seems worth highlighting for you guys to look at later on.

I agree with this, especially if areas deep inside the wind could get even a higher tier bonus, making venturing in there suicidal.

Perhaps some of the areas you've already explored should be stripped of resources and left at a lower tier to give you a feeling of empowerment in those areas.

Also, what do you guys think of this idea: instead of working to get windmill missions via guardian powers, every time a tier goes up, you get to build a windmill by carrying out a windmill mission where you want. So you have five stages of clearing out the continent. Maybe a few more can be available vis guardian powers. But this would really make the expansion of the non-wind area dramatic.

[Martyn van Buren]

That sounds rather good.  I like the idea of some areas getting stuck at low levels; it wouldn't do anything for gameplay but it would be cool for feel.  In the far future perhaps we could have little mini-towns go up around wind shelters.