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 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. 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean this sounds very interesting to me. If someone makes this, I would play it :)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.