May

30

1001 Crazy Game Design Ideas: #7 Mob Tiers

May 30, 2011 | Leave a Comment

One complaint with MMOs is that so much content developed is simply passed by in the mad rush for the highest levels and then become non-viable.

So in a completely crazy moment, I wonder if this problem couldn’t be partially eliminated by tiering the content into larger and, more or less, equally difficult chunks. Sort of like Time Pilot, where you completed a level and moved on to the next after beating a boss and the next level was a different era in time. By tiering the mobs, everything in the beginning tier would be accessible (ie. killable) to a player from their very first step in the world.

Rather than level up the player, the character would receive skills along multiple skill trees (like spells, or combat abilities).  The player would receive no additional “hit points” or “health”

Tier advancement, to some extent, could be up to the player to decide, “Hey, I’ve had enough of this tier, time to move on.”

Mobs in a tier would all have a rating, similar to the level based system now used, the difference being that it wouldn’t be a 3-5 level range that would yield experience, but a whole slew of baddies all geared towards a bracket of characters. Setting the difficulty of encounters would now be more manageable, since all the characters would be locked in to a much smaller range of expected parameters. I am explaining this poorly, I imagine. I guess the easiest way to describe this would be that it would be like making completely separate games, in the same game.

Characters become: noobs, citizens, adventurers, heroes, elite, chosen, etc. as tiers. The player chooses when to “move up” after a certain criteria is met, but can spend time in each of the tiers as long as they wish. Each tiers will have its own set of monsters, raids, loots, etc. The difference is, the monsters in that tier will all be of the same tier as the characters and suitably difficult. No more progression of rats to bigger rats to wimpy kobold to wimpy goblin, but now rats no longer give “xp”. The first tier monsters will all be legitimate content.

Games like ‘The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion’ do this by scaling the monster difficulty to be in line with your character level. The difference here is that instead of scaling the monsters as you level up, you freeze the player at the same “level” while allowing them to collect gear and abilities to complete all the content for that tier. The gear and abilities transfer to the next tier, but would be essentially useless compared to base items and abilities in the next tier (or possibly rare items, like tier raid loot, would scale somewhat).  Players can be motivated to remain in each tier rather than simply opting-up, by: a) increasing the content in lower level tiers, b) adding titles and achievements and next-tier bonuses for completing difficult tier content, c) epic quests and raid content at each tier level (I allude to something similar here), d) making some of the most “hardcore” or challenging content part of the “end-game” for the lower tiers and lastly, e) possibly allowing players to create characters in any tier, or move between tiers at will… I’m not sure about this one yet.

I am thinking that in fact each tier might be a complete world instance of only content related to that tier. Dungeons and zones which only exist in the appropriate tier instances all hooked together with large city hubs for all tiers to mingle.


 

 

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