A Rant About Dungeon Crawlers

So the other day Titan Quest was on sale for $5, so I picked it up. Some friends had said good things about it, and since it was cheap I grabbed it and spent an afternoon on it.

However, dissatisfaction set in almost immediately. I chose a skill of some sort that gave me a +2% bonus to something-or-other per rank. It struck me hard and fast. Two percent? In order to see a decent effect from this, I'll probably need to get it to 25% or so (that is, to the point where it makes an appreciable and visible difference in immediate gameplay). That's 13 ranks, or 4 levels putting points nowhere but into this skill, and a level is gained only about every half hour or so (at this point at least).

And most importantly, it was a passive skill, meaning it wasn't any fun to use. In fact, if it was doing it's job I wouldn't even notice it was there.

So the goal of the game at this point was for me to spend two hours working towards something that would ultimately add nothing to the game. Hmm. What's going on?

Mirrored Escalation

One thing that has often and increasingly bothered me about RPGs is the idea of mirrored escalation. You work so hard gaining levels and upgrading your equipment, and the enemies are doing the same thing. Every average-joe baddie takes 3 strikes to kill. At the beginning of the game He's got 15 hit points and you do 5 points a hit, and by the end you're doing a whopping 10,000 damage per hit, but the enemies have 30,000 hit points (or move faster, or there are more of them, or whatever).

Basically, the challenge remains more or less constant through the game. Then, the application of points towards skills is important, and the fact that each skill is only a minor 2% increase in performance is important, because it makes the player sometimes a little behind the enemies, sometimes a little ahead, and keeps the balance from being too static.

As well, the game has well over 100 skills and abilities. By keeping the numbers small like this, it makes balancing much more feasible. Even if some skill or class is much better than another, it's only small percentage points better. Even if a player has put in hours more playtime and has several levels on another player, it only amounts to a few barely-significant ranks of a skill. This is important especially for single player, because no matter which class the player chooses, they still have to able to become the hero.

This is completely standard for the genre, and as much as I dislike it, it is what it is.

What I Would Do Different

Well first off, I wouldn't make a dungeon crawler. Mirrored escalation and incremental levelling are part and parcel with this theme, without them it's kind of a different game. But let's say that I needed to make a game that was 'in that same arena'. What would it look like?

Well, gaining abilities is fun, it's just levelling them that isn't. Giving a player a new verb enriches their experience. Making an incremental change that is nullified as soon as they walk through the next doorway... Well, that feels like a waste of time to me. An example of a game that I felt had a really interesting progression of skills was Ratchet and Clank (the whole series, really).

Not a dungeon crawler, but I blame that on camera and level design. Really, there were a wide variety of skills (weapons and gadgets) that the player could acquire, each with different play styles and special effects. Each one was very different from the next and had an immediate noticeable impact on the gameplay once it was acquired. Players would find their favourites and stick with them. (Yes, the weapons could be leveled up, but that's not the part I'm interested in.)

With more emphasis on verbs and terms of engagement, I think the gameplay could afford to become more tactical than it is in a standard dungeon crawler. Instead of just coming down to an equation of the total enemy hitpoints vs. the total player damage, it becomes more a task of being equipped for the job. This breaks down in single player... provided you want every player to run through the same game. (More on that in a sec.) In multiplayer, this really shines, reaching a conceptual peak at something like TF2. In any case, using the Fire Arrow Barrage because it's more my style, or it's right for the job, not just because it has 2% higher DPS than Mighty Ice Smash Wall.

And indeed, instead of the constant levelling and incremental rising of traits, I'd prefer to focus more on specialization. This happens kind of by default in these games (where putting points into Magic makes you less effective against equal-levelled enemies using Physical), so the difference between a level 40 mage and a level 40 barbarian are largely just a matter of specialization. But the difference between a level 1 and a level 40 are huge! Contrast this with the Ratchet and Clank example. The increased arsenal of the 'high level' player may give them tactical superiority over a newbie, but in any direct confrontation they have similar odds of achieving success.

Same Name, Different Game

Is it possible to make a dungeon crawler that eschews these rutted patterns in favour of something more tactical, where upgrades focus more on gameplay results than on tweaking the statistical engine?

Yes!

I call it Nox. If you even remotely agree with what I've said in this post, you owe it to yourself to play that game. (And if you have a hankering for some multiplayer, get a hold of me and we'll see if it still fires up!)

Although Nox still contains leveling, for the most part it's merely a gateway to acquiring new unique skills. A battle can be gloriously won or horribly lost depending on only on the placement of your character. There are only a dozen or so types of weapons in the whole game, and there is definitely no 'best weapon'. And the multiplayer was fantastic.

So what's my point? None in particular. This was mostly just a rant that somehow turned into a sales pitch. I guess if I was going to take something away from this it would be that we should never feel limited by the genres we build in; there is always room for improvement, and there's always room for improvement in the direction that you want to improve. Also, in my spite-filled opinion, incremental leveling sucks.

What are the big genre conventions that really get under your skin, and have you found any stand-out games that buck them while still staying true to the roots of the genre?