Levelling up in RPGs & Calculations

[Vidd]

I want to get into computer game design and one aspect of video games that intrigues me is the mathematics behind RPGS.
I wonder how they come up with the calculations behind combat etc. but one important part in a lot of RPGs is the focus on levelling up.

Which of the following do you prefer:

1. Static enemy EXP and increasing level up requirements
In some games the enemies will always produce the same amount of EXP but the level up requirements experience exponential growth.

2. Decreasing enemy EXP and set level up requirements
The enemy EXP lowers as your level rises but you still require, say, 100 points to achieve the next level. Paper Mario has a simple level-up system like this where although you will always need 100 points. As you level up, enemies that produced 3 EXP produce 2 and eventually 1.

3. Decreasing enemy EXP and increasing level up requirements.
Not only does the EXP gained from each enemy lower but the requirements to reach the next level increase each time.

They can all be used to achieve roughly the same effect but I believe that you can have a personal preference.
In the same way that Mario produces a 100 instead of 1 when he stomps on enemies, there's something more pleasing to collect larger points even if it's impossible to get "1". For this reason I dislike when EXP drops.

I'd like to know more about the thoughts going into these mechanics but it'd be interesting anyway to discover what people prefer.

 

[Surgo]

I wonder how they come up with the calculations behind combat etc.

If most games are anything like Dungeons & Dragons, they probably wing it and hope it works.

 

[just some chick]

I like #1 or #3. #2 is broken unless done right, and my evidence is FF8... though it's the only game that comes to mind in which I had a serious problem with how they handled xp/levels.

In FF8 it took only 1000 xp for you to level, and enemies dropped an amount of xp depending on what level you're on. That amout of XP would be divided equally between all 3 party members. That meant that if you had a character at level 30, a character at level 21 that you didn't use often, and a character at level 35 that was the protagonist and was always in the party, they would all level at the same rate. Characters 1 and 2 could NEVER catch up with 3 unless you took him out of the party for a long, long time. I remember killing Squall on purpose and fighting monsters with only 2 party members for several hours, trying to close the gap.

The thing that really exacerbated the situation was that you could never go back and kill level 1 enemies, or level 10 enemies, etc. All enemies in the whole game, from bosses to trash monsters, were the level of your highest character. That meant when you fought a boss, you had one character on their level, and two who were probably at least 5 levels lower.

It was bad. Evidence of a game that was badly designed on the whole >_>

Of course, there would've been ways to fix that. Either don't have the enemies level with the party, or don't have the XP divided equally no matter what level you were. But no, I guess that would've made too much sense.

 

[nardd]

I like it when your exp needed increases as well as enemies' exp given. More fulfilling that way when you get into the higher levels.

 

[Hustino]

I prefer #2 since it usually makes it constantly easy and accurate to judge how long it'll take to level up at any given time, although #1 is just fine. #3 is fairly annoying since there's not really any need to both decrease the EXP earned and increase the EXP needed to level-up.

 

[Synre]

1 is pretty tried and true although 3 is basically the same thing in practice with smaller numbers, there's not an real difference between them outside of 3 potentially making it harder to catch up lowbie party members. Outside of that type of situation both systems are pretty identical and both work well as long as you're giving proportionate numbers.


As far as coming up with numbers like Surgo said I'm pretty sure it's just trial and error. It's probably relatively easy - they determine the rough level range they want the party to be at a specific area, have people test it and see where they actually end up being and adjust the xp rewarded or xp required as necessary. I don't know for certain obviously but that seems like the most logical way to do it.





As an aside most of FF8's problem was the junction system really, the game still functioned fine if you had like squall(25)/quistis(21)/rinoa(20) or whatever (although it was fairly easy to keep them equal) and the added difficulty would be a good thing anyway but the problem with the whole enemies-level-as-you-do-thing was that since bosses didn't give you xp and you could get the whole No encounters thing off Diablo almost immediately it was pretty easy to go through the game at level ~7 and then exploit the fact some bosses still let you draw shit like ultima from them which is a ridiculous junction when your base stats are level 7 instead of level 50 since it doesn't scale with your level... FF8 ended up being the only RPG I can think of where it was actually counter effective to level your characters.