I want an RPG with reverse leveling
You start at max level with everything unlocked. As you play the game, you slowly level down, choosing which attributes to reduce and which skills to forget.
Obviously, it will have to be tied to the story - maybe you are poisoned/cursed in a fantasy game, or an implant is malfunctioning in a sci-fi game. I'm sure a good writer can come up with something really cool to justify it narratively.
It will solve many problems modern RPGs have:
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Solves "the world-saving heroes are a bunch of murder hobos" issue. If killing levels you down, players will avoid killing as much as possible. Like, you know, actual heroes would.
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Fits the actual player skill level. When you start a new game, you are bad at it. Makes sense to compensate by giving you powerful abilities. Late game you know how to play well, you know the enemy weaknesses, you know how everything works. You can successfully kill the enemy with a much weaker character.
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Allows you try out stuff. You can try the abilities before you forget them, see what you like to keep. In current RPGs you don't know which are the cool (or needed) abilities so you might spec into something you dislike. The current "fix" is to allow players to respec later, but that always felt like a bandaid solution. And a bad one at that, as it removes the weight of making choices, as you know you can always undo it. And respeccing rarely makes sense narratively.
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Fixes pacing. Current RPGs start strong with the story, but then people put it on hold to do lots of side content. 80 hours of chasing question marks and 117 games of gwent later, people barely remember what the story was about and kinda speed through it just to finish it, because they are already kinda done with the game. But if you had leveling down, people would be naturally incentivized to move on and not level down too much in the same area.
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Creates urgency. I hate the ludonarrative dissonance in RPGs where the world is supposedly about to be destroyed, but the heroes are busy solving every rando's basement rats problem. It's ridiculous.
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Gives side-quests weight. Do you wanna help that orphan and level down, even though they won't give you anything? Or help the rich asshole who'll give you a powerful weapon you'll need late game? Or maybe you help both and spend hours on the next battle because you were underleveled, making you think twice before helping everyone in the next village?
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Solves item hoarding. People love to keep potions and scrolls for later "just in case". But that "case" never comes because you only get more powerful later on. But if you were to get weaker, those items are actually needed late game. A lot more uses for that stamina potion if your stamina actually is shit.
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Creates replayability. Instead of doing one run of a 200 hour bloated game, where you kinda got tired of it a while ago... you could have a regular 40 hour run and only do small part of the side-quests. Then you play something else. Then you come back to it and do another run, do a different set of quests, maybe this time spend more time in a different area.
Obviously I doubt any major studio will do something like that. I'm asking them to punish the player for playing the game. But maybe as the tools to create good-looking games become more accessible/cheaper, some smaller team can make something like this, I do think it has a lot of potential. I wouldn't be surprised if it already exists as a passion project in RPG Maker or something, but I kinda want to play something with actual graphics.
Idk, there are games that unintentionally worked like this and the reception wasn't very good. FF8 is an example.
Because of the way level scaling worked in that game, you got weaker the more you leveled up. That's because enemies got new skills and much more stats as they scaled with your levels, while you got mostly meaningless stat increases.
This part of the game is not well thought of by players. The fact that the game effectively punishes you for playing it more in a long-running game is just frustrating game design.
I mean, that's good? That means they are enjoying the side content? Adding side content then punishing you for doing it just seems like the worst of all worlds. You can just not have side-content.
I don't think this would work at all for an actual RPG. I can see it for a roguelike. Fundamentally each "run" needs to be short. If it's long, then it just becomes annoying.
I've been nerd sniped by FF8 slander, I'm so sorry.
FF8 doesn't weaken you on purpose* or clearly telegraph the level scaling though, adding to the frustration where sunset's idea would make it clear out the gate.
To be fair to FF8, leveling is only an issue if you try to power up by grinding levels and ignore the power systems -- you don't need to actively avoid battles to keep it from getting harder than other FFs of its time, you have to engage with junctioning and combining GF abilities. Unfortunately, it isn't intuitive that grinding is best done when drawing spells to max stacks, and that only doing the thing every other JRPG trained you for can make it harder. Although, giving the enemies better spells as you level can even work to your advantage if you are using the draw/junction system well by getting high power spells earlier in the game. There's even an ability for increasing an enemy lvl to facilitate that. I beat it when I was 13 without knowing about the leveling.
I do love the unintentional side effect that you can sweep the game just by playing triple triad and converting cards to spells for junctioning.
*Ofc they meant to scale, what they didn't anticipate was how many folks got confused by the GF/junction system.
FF8's system is a complete mess, but it doesn't intentionally weaken you. It simply punishes you for actually using your magic and heavily incentivizes weird draw grinding. FF has always tried interesting systems, they aren't all winners. FF8's system stunk IMO. The story was decent, OST was great, but the actual mechanics belong in the trash.
It's easy to work around, there's more spells than junction slots. So you can rotate them and keep spells castable without dropping stats. Like near the start you'll have ~2 slots each and have fire, blizzard, lightning, and cure easily accessible. So you can junction fire and blizzard on Squall and he can cast lightning without a stat loss, fire and lightning on Quistis to keep blizzard for casting, and blizzard and lightning on Zell to keep lightning free. It does increase the draw grind, but that isn't so bad when you can draw 4-9 per character per turn, plus open world draw points up to 15.
The system is not well communicated, but I disagree that the whole thing ought be trashed. Some folks do enjoy it, it could shine in another game with some rework.
Every time I think a game system is straight up bad, I read a comment like this that makes me reassess my thoughts. It's been a while since I've played FFVIII, so I think I'm going to give it a go again, keeping this stuff in mind.
I know there's an argument to be made that if the game can be played "wrong", then it's inherently flawed or bad, but I like when games are able to convey a real sense of discovery through mechanics, and not explain every minute detail, so I'm excited to try seeing it differently.
I'm a FF8 ride or die, but I would agree that in this case, being able to play wrong is indeed an issue and not a totally undeserved part of its rep.
It tries to explain junctioning and guardian forces in a tutorial, but it's not well-placed or phrased and the menus don't help. There's a terminal with extra info (but you gotta walk up and interact, no one tells you that you can read the classroom computer). It does do it diegetically in some fights, but you have to already get the foundations to see it.
It's weird and lateral to standard power systems and has flaws because of trying to do that with no blueprint from someone having done it before. I certainly won't claim that folks that dislike it just don't understand it, it's totally valid to get it and still not like it.
It's the black sheep, but it's my black sheep. I'm glad to have helped you reassess it :) though I sorely hope I haven't convinced you to retry a game you still won't like lol
Even if I end up not being into it, I still value the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the game. I respect it for doing something out of left field when the safe bet was clearer than ever.
I really hated it in general. I didn't want to have to grind for spells. It simply made me rarely use them. Obviously some people liked the game, but it wasn't for me. It is consistently one of my least favorite games in the series. I probably still like it more than the 13 and sequels, but none of the other ones.
I don't like it because I think it destroys pacing in story-telling. I don't feel any urgency even though narratively the world is supposed to be under direct threat, while I'm running around looking for someone's lost cat. And by the time I do get back to the main quest, I'm kinda tired of the game because I did so much side content. And I'm not as invested in the story because the thing that invested me happened 80 game hours ago. It's just bad pacing.
Not having the side content is an option, but then the game becomes very linear and there is no replayability, nor any choice in what you want to do. It's good to have side content, and I do want people to play the side content. I just think it should be paced, so you don't end up abandoning the main story for too long. Leveling down puts a limit on how much you do and puts actual weight in deciding what to do.
I do agree with your point that it's punishing gamers and that players will probably find it annoying, which is probably why we don't see it implemented. I just think there's a lot of potential there - and as the souls games have taught us, what some people see as annoying game design, looks like a fun challenge for others.
It's kind of impossible to pace combative design against scale, player skill, and player preference in a largely acceptable way. I agree with you on some level, but you have to contend against a wide playerbase who will not find this appealing. Fallout 1 has a time pressure element so your player isn't technically supposed to dick around; even though it has a solid narrative function (and it's fairly generous!), there's a very vocal group of people who hate that kind of thing and find it's more aggravating than a fun vehicle for tension. You can find dozens of posts asking how to mod it out.
Alternatively, you've gotta make the flavor come across with little actual disruption to the player. Tellah loses physical stats on level in FFIV because he's old and tired, but it's not like you're using him for that...
Ironically that is something I love about FFVIII. Most RPGs are too focused on being games and are lost that they should be role playing games. The game’s level scaling means that you don’t have to focus on fighting every single enemy and finding every single item and the game actually becomes more challenging if you do that, providing a difficult experience for maximalists and an easy experience for casual players who just want to experience the story and actually role-play.
The reason why I don’t fuck with RPGs these days is because they’re basically all unfinished in my perspective. They all become punishingly difficult at the end because they want you to go into the boring largely irrelevant side content, or worse - they just want you to suddenly master an element of the combat system that wasn’t terribly relevant until just now, or to just fucking grind because numbers must go up! I’ll give you that it’s terribly difficult to make a satisfying RPG ending because it must be difficult in order for it to be satisfying - but it’s a balance that designers almost universally push into difficulty rather than into ease.
A lot of people are just unable to not chase down every last thing. I think those people would reel awful in a game like this.
SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE does this, though only in the second half of the game. The idea is that you gain everything and then lose everything, coming full circle. I like that a lot, although it does make the game hard as hell near the end.
I've also seen someone on YouTube play a Pokémon romhack that did it. It was pretty cool, since it made the pokémon essentially "degradable" and thus encouraged constantly catching new ones, a style of play that most players don't engage with in the regular game.
+1 to the pokemon ROM hack. The concept was that instead of gaining EXP, you would lose it. So your pokemon would level down. It necessitates some interesting strategies just to beat the gym leaders.
Early shin megami tensei games also did something like this. Your demons did not gain experience so you had to constantly gets new ones to keep up with new enemies.
Fun fact: I actually skipped about 80% of cyberpunk 2077 AND Baldurs Gate 3 cause I didn’t realize the virus and parasite weren’t actually timed.
I just sprinted through going “no time! I don’t wanna die!” Lololol
Understandable, lol. It really makes no sense narratively, especially in story-heavy games like CP2077 and BG3, I don't blame you at all.
At least most games started having "Are you sure? This will end the game." dialog before the final quest, giving you a hint now is the time to do unfinished side-quests.
In Pyre,
Click to expand spoiler.
Every time the Nightwings win the Rites of Liberation you get to send one of your characters out of the Downside. This is narratively a good thing as they are freed from the cycle and ascend back to the Commonwealth, but you're also deprived of their skills henceforth.
I think that kind of solution is more interesting than just "reversing the numbers" on an RPG, and in this case the design of the game very explicitly solves several of the issues you mention.
I've seen this idea for the first time at least 20 years ago on a local gamedev forum, probably even earlier, and then a couple times since then. I assume that since nobody has actually made a game out of it, they came to the conclusion that it just wouldn't be as much fun.
These days with how good vibecoding has gotten, you could probably make a prototype yourself, though making it good looking still wouldn't be easy.
I mean, it seems like this is a straightforward concept to test:
My guess is that it will not be lol, & that's why there aren't really examples of this—if I throw a dart & pick any open-world game I've played, I invariably found some rando spot I was underleveled for early on, fought the dude with the thing one million times until I beat him, & then became like a toddler with a bazooka: that's my fav. playstyle lol, but if I said "There needs to be more games where they give you a giant overpowered weapon at the beginning," I mean maybe? But also I can just do that.
Honestly I think once you try to actually get it set up clearly before playing, it'll sort of come apart because it's contradictory to the theory & dopamine levels &etc that make people actually want to play games—like you want to play buddhist Monopoly & start with all the money & properties & then have to give them away. Like I play games to get that feeling of being so cool because I can fly now or beat that big guy finally, going the opposite direction seems like it would only work if you were playing a walking sim as a dementia patient or something, a slow decline. Eeesh.
Now: if you wanted a game with some shinobi master who was the greatest blah blah & could do anything, but to progress you had to sacrifice some things to focus your energy on others, ending as like the all-time greatest at one skill, I would want to play that game—but that's just regular leveling with a handicap lol
With an idea like this, you would obviously need to design the entire game around it to make it work. You can't just slap it on top of an existing game (like Skyrim) which was designed with regular leveling in mind, of course it will be terrible experience.
I do agree with your general point though, and assume that's why we haven't seen any serious implementation of the idea.
I just think there is a lot of untapped potential, both narratively as well as in gameplay if done well.
The main gameplay loop a lot of games rely on is introduce a new thing, let players try it out and experiment with it and by extension learn the new thing. Then later on new thing 2 is introduced, and it can be mixed with new thing 1.
That’s the problem you will run into, is avoiding overwhelming the player by starting them with all these interlocking abilities. See example anyone buying a boosted character in any MMO and being terrible and then quitting in frustration. You’d need a way to ramp up and then ramp back down.
I think you can compensate if you design the skill tree around the leveling down idea.
Make the top ability of the tree super-overpowered supernova or whatever and start the player with that selected as they play the tutorial. When they level down for the first time , they lose the top ability. Now they have to use one of the two next-to-best abilities. I mean, they could use lower stuff too, but it makes no sense to use some weak "sparks" spell when you can blast the enemy with a massive fireball.
But eventually you do lose the fireball too, so now you do have to use the "sparks" spell. But it's so weak, you need to learn to cast "oil" on the enemy first before sparks, to make them vulnerable to fire.
As you level down further, you have to learn and use more and more of the game mechanics to be able to defeat the enemies, while early on you just blasted everything with the fireball.
I’m sure it can be done — you’d just need to hit the player over the head with the idea they mostly need to ignore most of their stuff, which I think is harder than it sounds to do well.
Or try coming back to a game after years away and having no idea how the game used to work and having to put in a bunch of work to understand wtf is going on.
This is a fun idea, but I think you have this one totally wrong:
You're right that people won't get stronger and end up never needing them; they'll inevitably get weaker and need the potions more. You'll always be the strongest you're ever going to be for the rest of the game.
Somewhat reminds me of Gloomhaven (and presumably Frosthaven), where the fights start with full resources and then asks the player to pare them down over the course of a fight, losing options in exchange for tempo or more powerful 1-shot options. And that tension extends to time spent looting, since the ability to move is tied to these same resources.
But I think the simple answer is that most players don't want challenge in their RPG. They want to either steamroll or at worst have the option to grind/completionist their way to easy mode.
As for replayability, that tends to be found either through robust agency in character skill sets, or in other genres entirely. Players already don't complete games for the most part before considering how long the average RPG is. Even looking at RPGs I've replayed myself over the years such as SMT 3: Nocturne, it often comes with a laundry list of "don't abuse XYZ" since RPGs are notoriously unbalanced and/or buggy. And once I'm bothering to do that, may as well play a game where the replay value for challenge is intended rather than homebrewed.
I mean this sounds very interesting to me. If someone makes this, I would play it :)
I've been interested in RPGs where there's no skill progression at all. In Rogue, leveling is largely inconsequential. Your max health increases as you do, but you can do that by other means as well (which are likely your primary means later in the game. There is only one other stat (strength), which isn't affected by levelling. Progression is instead externalized in the sense that you'll pick up and eventually identify items that you can use to make your life easier as you go down to harder dungeon levels. At the start of the game, you know nothing about the game's items. A potion for example will only be known by a randomized color assigned to it at the start of a run, and you'll only know what (possibly adverse) effects belong to a color if you use it or identify it by other means. Over the course of the game you'll identify potions, wands and scrolls in this way.
A later game inspired by it, Brogue, did away with levelling altogether. I think it's cool because the experience that gives you better options isn't just some abstract number that goes up, but what your player character actually experiences and as a direct consequence then knows how to use.
In a reverse progression game, maybe a similar mechanic could be used so as to give players more choices later in the game. As you lose strength and forget skills, you can invest your time to gain wisdom of the stuff in the world. Say, if you lose speed over time you can make up for it by studying the local geography so that you know how to traverse otherwise impassable obstacles. Or you study the flora and fauna and learn of a tree that will release a thick cloud of pollen if you kick it, allowing you to flee more easily from combat. Stuff like that which aren't just stat modifiers but new mechanics you have to use in clever ways.
Otherwise, by the end of the game when the player is at their peak of understanding the mechanics and would have the best opportunity to use them to their advantage, their agency is limited by the lack of choice. This seems like it could be frustrating to me.
I had an idea once that there should be a game where you have access to powerups in the form of drugs, and it gives you a temporary big boost in abilities in the short term, but permanently decreases your stats by a miniscule amount. The game would be very difficult without the powerups, and they would be highly abundant to encourage people to use them regularly, but you wouldnt notice the long term effect of using it until late game because of how gradually the negative effects are applied. But then you get to the final dungeon and go "wait, has my health bar always been this small?"
This is a very interesting idea, I especially like the concept of not telling the player, lol.
Maybe it could have some kind of addiction mechanic too, so when people figure it out eventually, they can't stop using the drugs even if they want to.
Balatro does this to me lol
I think it's difficult to justify stripping away power in an RPG, largely because the point is for enemies to become more demanding in either raw stats or player capabilities. I think the reason why so many people feel board of this formula is how it has been over tuned to the point of many game systems being rendered pointless. The "golden path" through an open ended game that keeps you just engaged enough with a steady stream of currency, consumables and gear. A game like Lisa the Painful can end with the main character loosing almost all their limbs but it's barely noticeable in gameplay and combat. Simply because you still power scale at a predictable cadence, regardless of playstyle. I think games like Dark Souls, Fear & Hunger and Look Outside have started to buck that trend and make experiences that always seems to be staying well ahead of where the player is.
A lot of roguelikes also sort of get this right with the "Ascension" system. You keep your meta progression but you can choose to level-up the difficulty in interesting ways. My current obsession is Peglin and the game can get pretty challenging on the base difficulty, with no sure-fire way to stomp the hidden final boss. But I'm on Cruciball 18 and it's a nightmare with your deck being flooded with trash attacks, lack of resources/refreshing and enemies effectively getting 3 free turns when you reshuffle. It demands a lot of high-skill play but the amazing part is that I can still stumble into unexpected synergies and scaling. The problem is with how most experiences don't go beyond a single run so it's hardly an RPG.
Another example is the Warcraft 3 expansion. I think it's the undead campaign where you can watch your commander character be drained of power in real time. Its not utilized too meaningfully since its still easy to just tech-turtle and steamroll every encounter in the short campaign.
Theres also Extraction Shooters where higher level play makes you more of a target and amassing resources changes the way you play just to preserve it. Witchfire is probably the best single-player version of this. I can go into a map to handle some busywork, but as soon as I get a good chunk of currency and materials, the same combat encounters become far more dangerous.
It's not the same at all but if you're into TCG's, Flesh and Blood works pretty much like this. You start off the strongest your deck can be and slowly have to use your equipment to survive, slowly stripping down your deck and resources. It's pretty much a fighting game!
Breathe of fire: Dragon Quarter has a super skill with a bar that slowly fills after use and game-overs you when It gets full, with no way to lower It. It stll has metaprogession, and iirc you can still grind using the super skill with some conditions. It is not exactly what you are asking but the feeling of loss is similar.
This isn't quite what you're thinking for, but Lost Dimension is an RPG where you started with your fall party of 11, and by the end, it gets whittled down to 6. The conceit of the game is that there's a traitor in every floor, and you have to figure out which one. The traitors are always randomised (which makes sense in the world, once you know how the story goes), so you won't know what your final party will be by the end of the game. People you kill will give skills to other characters, including special skills only some characters know if using the skills from the dead ones, so it's a really fun game to play.
Your characters level up, so it's not the same as your request, but it's an interesting implementation of losing access to tools you started with little by little.
I think I can see a narrative where a deity figure is either splitting themselves up or giving up their power to bless others with the overall goal of restoring their region. While your own personel power would be lowered, you'd still have followers and faith for each divine act and increasing techonolgical resources until the diety is no longer needed and can move on.
The Star Wreck Roleplaying Game was kind of like this. In it your characters would have stats like "Stupidity" or "Clumsiness" which go up as you gain experience. So as you level up, you have to effectively pick how your character becomes as worse as they also become more "heroic" in some fashion. It was forever ago that I ran into it, but it was pretty interesting from what I remember.
I think Sifu does something similar? (I never played it just remember hearing about it in games press back when it was new)
I googled it, and while they seem to be doing something quite original, I don't think it fits.
If I understand this correctly, every time you die, you lose some health but gain attack. If you die ~55 times, you get perma-killed and have to start over. Though with each run you can unlock things that help you permanently for the next run.
Not really what you want, but in ttrpg land there is Realis.