Da ich noch (immer) keine einzige Antwort auf meinen Parallel Progression Post erhalten habe, poste ich ihn noch einmal!
Since many people have made it to the lvl 60 Inferno content the question comes up: How do you motivate them to keep going? Well, as in most RPGs progression is the right answer to it. Progression is the slow development and improvement of the character, making him at least feel more powerful than he was before. The most common way of creating progression is the leveling. A very quick and rewarding level up at the first minutes of gameplay can lead into dedication and commitment.
But Diablo 3 is designed to not make use of this kind of progession after reaching the maximum level. So other types of progression have been made available and these lead to a few problems.
Firstly, we look at a few kinds of progression you can make:
- Achievements
- Content Progression
- Gear
- Gems
- Gold
These progressions happen simultaneously, they are parallel. On every run, you can improve on one of these "tabs", making it feel like an overall increase in power. But why does it stop to motivate? Well, one reason of course is that the amount of power gained from an additional 10.000 gold on a run is to marginal and might not even exist. So the power increase mustn´t be to small/must be noticable. However this is not the big problem. The issue is the stats screen and it´s effect on progression tab of the gear.
Right now, there are quite a lot of slots you can upgrade (12, i think). Still i referred to it as one tab in the list. Why is that? Because on every run you are not looking for progress in your waist slot, progress in your belt slot or ring slot, but in progress of your DpS-slot. Since, it is not possible to farm a specific type of items, you don´t farm for 12 itemslots but really just for dps or defence increase. Even gold/gems can be perceived as a transformed dps increase.
How to improve on this? How to make item-slots feel unique?
Titan Quest (another ARPG) has done a really good job: It had a specific artifact slot. Only artifacts could be put into those and they were pretty much just another item. However these items had a 10-30% chance to drop of specific bosses of specific acts. So every time you killed that boss, you didn´t just want loot for the dps-slot, but also a nice artifact scroll. You progressed in two tabs. I did about 200 runs on that boss, which take exactly 3.03 minutes per run until i got just the artifact scroll i wanted.
Torchlight 1 also had a great form of parallel progress. It just added a second XP tab to your character. As idiotic as this sounds... it worked. There was the regular XP-tab which increased on every regular kill and then there was this second xp-tab called "fame" which only increased on bosskills but also rewarded a skill point on hitting the limit. So it felt really rewarding to kill mobs thanks to this parallel progression.
Diablo 2 had specific areas where runes dropped more often. So people weren´t farming just for the dps-increase through gear but they were farming for runes or gems or levels or uniques. But no matter for which tab they chose to grind, the others also always progressed.
Now we finally come back to Diablo 3 and a few suggestions what paths can be taken to motivate the (simple) minds that fall for motivation trough parallel progression (which is 95% of Infernoplayers):
- New items called imbues (we can also call these items the "Bashiok wont read this anyways"): Basic idea is to trick the blacksmith into doing what you want him to do. We allow specific mobs, for example every act 4 hell mob, to drop a recipe. This recipe holds an affix, like dexterity 8. So the next time you craft a belt you can chose to toss in this "Bashiok wont read this anyways" and the blacksmith is forced to create an item with this affix. You could cube 3 of these recipes of the same type to get a recipe of the next higher tier, dexterity 9. You could allow a maximum of 4 imbues per item per craft, or whatever. The only thing i would like to see is this imbue to be character or account bound. There is no need to being able to just buy all those imbue you want and then just craft what you want. This is designed to be a parallel progress. On every run you don´t get a gear upgrade you can at least get an impregnation or gem or achievement.
- Skillimbues for items: Basicly it´ll allow you to let the jeweler enchant your some of your items, e.g. those slots that can´t hold sockets, to hold skillspecific affixes. While there are some great skillaffixes out there, and they feel like a great addition, it would be much cooler if these skillimprovements could have an own itemtab, which you collect and upgrade. Let once in a while (same droprate like uniques) drop one of these scrolls and give it five tiers. You can add flavour/strength to your build and be a little commited to your skillchoices.
- Kripparian´s "champion levels": For every champion mob killed while having 5 NV stacks you recieve these champion expirience points, which allow you access to a new dye, allow you to dress your blacksmith in a bunny suit or allow you to participate in a contest where you can win a romantic dinner with Bashiok. Again, this is about progression in as many tabs as possible: gear, gems, gold, champion levels, impregnations and achievements. That´s already a whole lot easier to fall for than just dps increase.
- Rune upgrades: Everybody who followed the development, as closely as i did, was pretty sad when blizzard announced the removal of rune levels. For those who did not follow the development: In earlier stages of the game each rune had 7 stages and each rune had to be found, picked up and bound to a skill. Later on, they cut out this idea and normalized every rune to be about lvl 3-5 and be unlocked on level up.
I did see the footage of wizards having 30 runes in the chest and how stupid it was to swap those and i agree this was in no way working as intended, but i do think there is a more elegant way to solve this. Although it does feel pretty good, to have access to every rune. But it would still feel a lot more satisfying to know this 40% dmg increase on cleave is not the last upgrade you make. You unlock a rune at lvl 15 that increases the abilites dmg by 40% but soon you find out that this is it. This is the last upgrade you make. This ability will always deal +40% dmg, it will always be rune lvl 5. So why not just let these last 2 tiers of runes drop as a "once-usable-recipe"? Rare drop chance and boundn to the character. Inferno act 2 drops crimson-recipe only. And when it drops you can either upgrade one crimson rune slot of your ability to tier 6 or you combine 3 crimson-recipes to upgrade it to allow for an upgrade to tier 7 rune ability.
- Introduce new affixes that don´t like each other: This one is a little harder to explain but i´ll give it a try: let´s say we allow gloves to have a new stat. One that is working AGAINST crit and critdmg. It´s called "increases dmg taken by 4000 per hit or increases dmg taken by 2 x dexterity per hit" and this affix is calculated after a crit. So on the first hit you crit for 50k on the next hit you crit for 54k on the next hit you crit for 58k. So crit does not scale with this stat unlike agility/attackspeed/thorns. Now how does this allow parallel progression? Everytime you get "increased dmg taken" gloves you put them to your "increased dmg taken"-gear. Everytime you get "crit/critdmg" gloves you put them to your crit gear. You progress on 2 tabs, isnt that great!?
- Global Events: Now the current event system adds a lot to the replayability system and is one of the greatest new things in the ARPG genre. But i´d like to see you go a step further. I played D2 a couple of weeks ago and in act 2 when i entered the Lost City the screen went black! Why is that great? Because it derails your mind from what you are doing currently, you start thinkin "Oh !@#$, what´s going on? How to stop this?" and you go on this new journey. Same thing with the Überdiablo Spawn in a hell game. You stopped your farm/pvp or whatever it was and tried to get that Annihilus. So introduce these global random events into D3. These should occur very rarely (a chance of 3% on every time you log out with 5 NV for the next game to have a global event) and they should really hurt your normal farmroute, by e.g. reducing your vision drasticly, reducing ressourceregeneration by 50% or deactivating itemslots of abilities until you have completed the event. If you don´t want to play this event, than just relog and you are fine, but if you decide to play it, you will have to rethink your spec or items for this one particular run. The event its self doesn´t have to be big new content or a dungeon. Let the eclipse or the stat cripple last until the player has defeated a certain boss, gathered and crafted certain tools, or salvaged 30 items. On completion the player recieves an imbue, a tier 10 gem or a rune upgrade. The important thing is, you let the player forget about the farming route he had in mind, while let him still farm make this one little run feel special and different.
These are a few ideas that were made up in like 5 minutes, but they all serve the same purpose: Parallel progression! This thread is not about the ideas itsself it´s just supposed to show that it´s exceptionally more fun to farm for 6 potential upgrades on one run. Or to focus on one of upgrade, while still progressing in the other tabs by small amounts.
Diablo 3 is a ridiculously high quality product and the foundation it has set allows for really really awesome constructions to be build. Allowing for as many tabs to progress in as possible is a really really easy way to keep a simple mind, that has put a lot of effort and commitment into it, interested. (Gear right now is just one tab you progress in that´s why its so hard to stay motivated).
P.S. Abschaffung des Dps-Charts im Mainscreen ist ein wichtiger Schritt, der gemacht werden sollte.
) is doch alles in Butter!
), der sollte zu d2 (und den dazugehörigen bots, cheats, etc) zurückkehren.