Players like progression, Period. And they like horizontal progression better, vertical progression is just easier to deliver.
Look at symphony of the night, one of the best action RPGs of all time. It had vertical progression like many RPGs, but what made it amazing was the diversity of alternatives you could access, magic, transformation, weapons attack in different ways, have unique properties, offer different attack specials.
It's not the vertical progression that made the game fun, in fact, one of the challenges was to bypass all the power ups and attempt the challenge of beating foes while weak.
When you fundamentally separate the horizontal progression in vertically oriented games, you have trash. A keen recognition of exactly what's preset radically alters ones perspective. Vertical development has its appeals, but they aren't nearly what people make them out to be, and their not being utilized in most games that rely on them.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
Originally posted by Eir_S Games don't "need" to adhere to any rules. In the past year, people have started realizing this. GW2 is doing fine, and the more variety the better. If you like gear progression, there are always games out there that cater to that type of player, but if you don't, there are companies that realize this too. People who state an MMO has to be one way or another... well that argument was proven wrong anyway.
Games need to adhere to economics, just like any other products.
Good thing GW2 was successful then I guess. I know you're still trying to say your opinion is the right one even if you deny that's what you're doing, but plenty of WoW model games failed miserably. If it were a surefire system, every game would have vertical progression, but they don't.
You seem to have a problem with acknowledging that there is more than one way to do an MMO.
People want to see progression in any game. It doesn't have to be vertical progression, it can be horizontal. But horizontal progression isn't something as simple as "cosmetic". It is more complex than that. Look no further than GW2 to see how exactly you shouldn't implement a horizontal design. They failed pretty badly.
If you look at GW2 sPvP servers there are less than 200 players on their sPvP servers during Primetime across all servers, yes less than 200. Why? Because sPvP felt like a waste, people don't care much about cosmetics. They care about ratings or vertical progression and GW2 doesn't have both. This is one of the several reasons GW2 failed in pretty much all aspects. And one of the reasons they lost 70% to 90% of the population since launch.
To me horizontal progression can work in heavy eSports oriented games that have a good rating system or can work with sandbox MMOs. But RPGs or MMORPGs without those aspects (Themeparks) are not ready for a non-vertical progression system.
I completely agree with the op, if someone can actually get horizontal progression right I would defiantly be one player that would choose that over the current vertical progression that most companies can't seem to get away from.Not every player is into the I've got to to get the best gear progression idea, that's probably why I'm enjoying defiance at the min because higher ego doesn't really mean much.
I do not agree with your analogy using those GW2 reasons.We are talking about an entire game design so it would take pages of detail to explain why GW2 doesn't do anything well.They also did not need any of their design choices to accomplish what they claim to be going for,imo they simply went for a design that was cost effective to build and run the game.
I do acknowledge that levels in general need some work a lot of work.Right now games are treating them as meaningless and using your example of GW2 they are making them even more meaningless.
IMo when you completely dump an aspect of game design,it tells me you are not a very smart developer,anyone can dump ideas and go for the simple approach.Levels should be treated as an aging tool,that means they should all be the same,not curved or any other medium.I mean that is the premise that games set out to imagine was they were levels to judge your learning.We all know you get smarter with age,you learn more as time goes by,more skills,more abilities and more over all knowledge.
Guess what that relates to gaming the exact same way.You might learn more classes in a sub class system,you learn more crafts,you become more skilled with your weapon and crafts over time.
I would LOL @ any developer who just says we can't do this Trinity or levels just don't work.However i do not lol @ Arena net because i am 100% sure they have the ability to do it right,they simply went for a cheaper game design,as simple as that,it had nothing to do with a "better way to go".
Like i said from the start ,i could break it down piece by piece,but going over an entire game design is not feasible in a forum.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I can give one reason why MMOs do not need vertical progression:
-Because games with diagonal or even 360 progression potential are infinitely more fun, do not believe me? Look at EVE Online (before you ask, it's 360 because if you get podded with a inadequate clone you lose SP, quite allot of em and you lose SP anyway if you get your tech 3 cruiser blown up).
Pure vertical progression is a bad idea for MMOs because the devil of power creep shows up in most games because most developers do not have the room to play to make systems which allow vertical progression without power creep and 360 progression isn't that much harder to achieve but adds a solid selling point to the game.
I think the terms that you guys are using are faulty. Just saying. Horizontal and Vertical are the same things to a point on a line. They are directions to travel which are different from where the point began, and like someone was saying earlier, if when that dot travels in any one of those directions it translates into a reward, then the members of our stupid community will find a way to skip over most of that line and get to the biggest reward available.
What needs to happen is we need to go back to putting the other arrow on the line.
RPG's used to be like this....
<----------> Meaning that you could move forward or backward depending on your actions. When this was the case, actions were more thought out. Losing a level, losing your gear, those were serious considerations that gave extra depth to the games we played.
But someone got weak COUGHdevelopersCOUGH! And all of a sudden games started looking like this...
o------------> Meaning that you started at a point and you moved forward with no threat of ever having to go backward. This caused the push to move forward to become all that there was, and because there was no threat of moving backward, because the only threat was not moving along the line, games started to suck.
o<-----------> Even this would be better. This is where we started. You could move forward or fall back but never beyond the starting point. But this was too much for a lot of people, because teaching an American kid about cause and effect evidently required a surgeons general warning.
Now you can spin these drawings so that they go up and down or left and right and the same thing will always be true.
It's not about horizontal and vertical, it's about having enough balls to require your player base to have some too.
And that's not just me pointing fingers, that's a solution.
Life stays interesting because there is always the threat of death and a million ways for it to happen. On your best day you could just keel the freak over because of some decision you made years ago, and you'd be dead, that'd be it, game freaking over. Likewise you might live through something that might have killed everyone around you. That is adventure. That is interesting. Sure it also sucks, but what stories we get to tell! Games need to learn to embrace some reasonable facsimile of this experience in order to stay interesting. Endgame is BS. There should always be the threat of loss. That's what life is all about.
And that's not to say that the easymode games don't have a place either. I'm just saying that all should be equally represented and given the opportunity to grow and flourish in all genres.
Who cares if you want to race to the end and get all the phat loots, as long as there is some kind of real, palpable challenge to getting that done, things should be fine.
Right now the biggest challenge is getting a lot of you unsocial bastages on the same page long enough to get something done. And even that challenge has been slowly wiped out of most titles.
But horizontal and vertical? A true Jedi knows not of such things.
Look, the next time I go on like this someone please just slap me. I don't do it on purpose.
After 8 years of playing WoW it was nice to play guild wars. Most the content is relevant and didn't have to skip it cause it was from an old expansion. I'm done with vertical progression I can't stand to work for new gear every 2 months. I used to love WoW for the PvE aspect, but I don't have time to put in for what I'd like to do.
Originally posted by kabitoshin After 8 years of playing WoW it was nice to play guild wars. Most the content is relevant and didn't have to skip it cause it was from an old expansion. I'm done with vertical progression I can't stand to work for new gear every 2 months. I used to love WoW for the PvE aspect, but I don't have time to put in for what I'd like to do.
With every level the mobs you fight get higher stats, so they need to look more menacing too. Therefore the game starts as low as possible with lame opponents like rats and then makes the mobs larger and larger until you end up with dragons. And once there is an expansion the game has to come up with something like Super-Dragons and then Ultra-Dragons.
Or the high level mobs look just the same and are mysteriously much more powerful than their low level counterparts.
Either that or it's the ridiculous WoW system: you're strong enought to kill the Lich King and 2 months later, with the next xpac, you are killed by a bunch of bunnies that have more health and do more damage than Onyxia the legendary dragon.
Sounds like Socialism too me. And that concept is completely asinine. Having a vertical process is a must., because as people learn new thing they will be smarter then then the average person or they work harder then the average person to get nicer things then the average person but in your world that shouldn't happen ever which again is asinine.
Originally posted by kabitoshin After 8 years of playing WoW it was nice to play guild wars. Most the content is relevant and didn't have to skip it cause it was from an old expansion.
I agree. I absolutely HATED this in WoW. Some of my favorite raids were in BC but I only joined at the tail end so I never go to run them much. When Wotlk came out, no one wanted to do Karazhan anymore. Now the only reason anyone goes in is because of weapon and armor skins. That's not the same. It really turned me off of the whole "vertical" progression (at least, of WoW's magnitude) when you could just quest for an hour at the new xpac's release and replace all that hard-earned gear with freaking GREENS.
Way to take some of your most brilliant content and throw it under a bus.
Vertical progression is the digital, code language everything-must-be-defined in numbers, causality as a way of life interpretation of the classic literary mechanics of the Hero's Journey trope.
Period.
In computer code, the Hero can't grow in skill and acquire rare magical items and defeat the Great Evil and save his people etc. etc. without vertical progression.
One and really only way to not do vertical progression is to not have the Hero's Journey as the basis of your adventure.
Most sandbox games get this really, really wrong in that they remove the Hero's Journey without removing the vertical progression mechanics.
So you are left without adventure, but left with a vertical progression.
I agree with this. Lessons have been learned in the past about vertical progression but younger people think it's new so here we go. It's why we get a new version of the three musketeers movies every 15 to 20 years. Kids haven't seen it so it must be original.
What does originality have to do with anything?
How many times have we seen batman on the movie screen? People watch it not because it is new, but because it is entertaining.
You don't have to do something brand new to be entertaining.
It has to do with what I find boring. It was a personal opinion. VP is boring FOR ME. You can love it for all I care. We are giving opinions not debating.
Well, the market obviously do not agree with you.
Look at all the sequels making huge amount of money. Most people want well crafted, polished entertainment. Originality be damned.
And yes, i do love it. In fact, almost all games have some VP. Feel free to find one that have HP that you like. How is that working out for you so far?
More games have horizontal progression than vertical progression and in vertically oriented games, all the fun parts are still horizontal progression, show me where vertical progression is worth anything by itself nari...
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
Originally posted by BahamutKaiser More games have horizontal progression than vertical progression and in vertically oriented games, all the fun parts are still horizontal progression, show me where vertical progression is worth anything by itself nari...
Are you talking about games with vertical progression that have an aspect of horizontal progression? Because that is a pretty big statement. Show me a list with the side containing only HP being longer than the side with VP or with VP and HP.
Also SotN was not a great game. So you shouldn't say things in absolutes.
Adding secondaries to already existing abilities is VP. As your character is now growing in strength. Be that from a greater sense of utility that the ability offers, or outright damage increases.
The user and all related content has been deleted.
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
SotN maintained top game between 1-3 on most RPG ratings over a decade after the playstation declined RandomDown, I'm not concerned about whether your willing to acknowledge a wildly successful and popular game.
And there are generations of games with little vertical progression, I've been around long enough to remember when character growth started to become a widespread part of many genre, but they remain within reason in many games because deep vertical progression can take away from a game as well as give.
But the most important point is that nowhere have I said that purely horizontal development is better. I plainly state that horizontal development is superior and the true attraction in most games. I made it clear to begin with that horizontal development naturally makes you more powerful anyway, the main difference is that it also makes the game more fun. Fun in a way that vertical development can not even approach. Failure to realize that is simply failure to distinguish what we are discussing as vertical and horizontal. Just like disagreeing with a wildly popular and timeless classic being great is a personal bias that holds no weight.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
I disagree. Vertical progression is the way to do it. If you've ever played a horizontal progression game, you'll start to notice that retaining access to horizontal options, you create vertical progression. Even if it's as simple as a small boost once or twice by unlocking certain features/skills/abilities/visual effects/skins, these boosts still provide vertical boosts to the mentality of the player that make you inherently better than players that do not have access to these. The only way to create this as a purely vertical progression based game, is to provide no changes. You cannot give players anything, as players see access to anything as an advantage whether or not it actually does anything at all.
I played WoW up until WotLK, played RoM for 2 years and now Rift. I am F2P player. I support games when I feel they deserve my money and I want the items enough. I don't troll, and I don't take kindly to trolls.
For me none of these points have any reflection on vertical character progression, and while you most probably have determined that the cause of these issues is vertical progression, too me all of these points just scream "Environment Design Issues".
Comments
Look at symphony of the night, one of the best action RPGs of all time. It had vertical progression like many RPGs, but what made it amazing was the diversity of alternatives you could access, magic, transformation, weapons attack in different ways, have unique properties, offer different attack specials.
It's not the vertical progression that made the game fun, in fact, one of the challenges was to bypass all the power ups and attempt the challenge of beating foes while weak.
When you fundamentally separate the horizontal progression in vertically oriented games, you have trash. A keen recognition of exactly what's preset radically alters ones perspective. Vertical development has its appeals, but they aren't nearly what people make them out to be, and their not being utilized in most games that rely on them.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes.
That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
Good thing GW2 was successful then I guess. I know you're still trying to say your opinion is the right one even if you deny that's what you're doing, but plenty of WoW model games failed miserably. If it were a surefire system, every game would have vertical progression, but they don't.
You seem to have a problem with acknowledging that there is more than one way to do an MMO.
People want to see progression in any game. It doesn't have to be vertical progression, it can be horizontal. But horizontal progression isn't something as simple as "cosmetic". It is more complex than that. Look no further than GW2 to see how exactly you shouldn't implement a horizontal design. They failed pretty badly.
If you look at GW2 sPvP servers there are less than 200 players on their sPvP servers during Primetime across all servers, yes less than 200. Why? Because sPvP felt like a waste, people don't care much about cosmetics. They care about ratings or vertical progression and GW2 doesn't have both. This is one of the several reasons GW2 failed in pretty much all aspects. And one of the reasons they lost 70% to 90% of the population since launch.
To me horizontal progression can work in heavy eSports oriented games that have a good rating system or can work with sandbox MMOs. But RPGs or MMORPGs without those aspects (Themeparks) are not ready for a non-vertical progression system.
Firstly, No its not. Its a Different system that can be stand alone or combined with vertical progression, It's not the polar opposite of any system.
Secondly.
Rpg progression systems need a power scale otherwise its not an rpg.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
I do not agree with your analogy using those GW2 reasons.We are talking about an entire game design so it would take pages of detail to explain why GW2 doesn't do anything well.They also did not need any of their design choices to accomplish what they claim to be going for,imo they simply went for a design that was cost effective to build and run the game.
I do acknowledge that levels in general need some work a lot of work.Right now games are treating them as meaningless and using your example of GW2 they are making them even more meaningless.
IMo when you completely dump an aspect of game design,it tells me you are not a very smart developer,anyone can dump ideas and go for the simple approach.Levels should be treated as an aging tool,that means they should all be the same,not curved or any other medium.I mean that is the premise that games set out to imagine was they were levels to judge your learning.We all know you get smarter with age,you learn more as time goes by,more skills,more abilities and more over all knowledge.
Guess what that relates to gaming the exact same way.You might learn more classes in a sub class system,you learn more crafts,you become more skilled with your weapon and crafts over time.
I would LOL @ any developer who just says we can't do this Trinity or levels just don't work.However i do not lol @ Arena net because i am 100% sure they have the ability to do it right,they simply went for a cheaper game design,as simple as that,it had nothing to do with a "better way to go".
Like i said from the start ,i could break it down piece by piece,but going over an entire game design is not feasible in a forum.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I can give one reason why MMOs do not need vertical progression:
-Because games with diagonal or even 360 progression potential are infinitely more fun, do not believe me? Look at EVE Online (before you ask, it's 360 because if you get podded with a inadequate clone you lose SP, quite allot of em and you lose SP anyway if you get your tech 3 cruiser blown up).
Pure vertical progression is a bad idea for MMOs because the devil of power creep shows up in most games because most developers do not have the room to play to make systems which allow vertical progression without power creep and 360 progression isn't that much harder to achieve but adds a solid selling point to the game.
I think the terms that you guys are using are faulty. Just saying. Horizontal and Vertical are the same things to a point on a line. They are directions to travel which are different from where the point began, and like someone was saying earlier, if when that dot travels in any one of those directions it translates into a reward, then the members of our stupid community will find a way to skip over most of that line and get to the biggest reward available.
What needs to happen is we need to go back to putting the other arrow on the line.
RPG's used to be like this....
<----------> Meaning that you could move forward or backward depending on your actions. When this was the case, actions were more thought out. Losing a level, losing your gear, those were serious considerations that gave extra depth to the games we played.
But someone got weak COUGHdevelopersCOUGH! And all of a sudden games started looking like this...
o------------> Meaning that you started at a point and you moved forward with no threat of ever having to go backward. This caused the push to move forward to become all that there was, and because there was no threat of moving backward, because the only threat was not moving along the line, games started to suck.
o<-----------> Even this would be better. This is where we started. You could move forward or fall back but never beyond the starting point. But this was too much for a lot of people, because teaching an American kid about cause and effect evidently required a surgeons general warning.
Now you can spin these drawings so that they go up and down or left and right and the same thing will always be true.
It's not about horizontal and vertical, it's about having enough balls to require your player base to have some too.
And that's not just me pointing fingers, that's a solution.
Life stays interesting because there is always the threat of death and a million ways for it to happen. On your best day you could just keel the freak over because of some decision you made years ago, and you'd be dead, that'd be it, game freaking over. Likewise you might live through something that might have killed everyone around you. That is adventure. That is interesting. Sure it also sucks, but what stories we get to tell! Games need to learn to embrace some reasonable facsimile of this experience in order to stay interesting. Endgame is BS. There should always be the threat of loss. That's what life is all about.
And that's not to say that the easymode games don't have a place either. I'm just saying that all should be equally represented and given the opportunity to grow and flourish in all genres.
Who cares if you want to race to the end and get all the phat loots, as long as there is some kind of real, palpable challenge to getting that done, things should be fine.
Right now the biggest challenge is getting a lot of you unsocial bastages on the same page long enough to get something done. And even that challenge has been slowly wiped out of most titles.
But horizontal and vertical? A true Jedi knows not of such things.
Look, the next time I go on like this someone please just slap me. I don't do it on purpose.
Either that or it's the ridiculous WoW system: you're strong enought to kill the Lich King and 2 months later, with the next xpac, you are killed by a bunch of bunnies that have more health and do more damage than Onyxia the legendary dragon.
Anyhow, good post ^^
I agree. I absolutely HATED this in WoW. Some of my favorite raids were in BC but I only joined at the tail end so I never go to run them much. When Wotlk came out, no one wanted to do Karazhan anymore. Now the only reason anyone goes in is because of weapon and armor skins. That's not the same. It really turned me off of the whole "vertical" progression (at least, of WoW's magnitude) when you could just quest for an hour at the new xpac's release and replace all that hard-earned gear with freaking GREENS.
Way to take some of your most brilliant content and throw it under a bus.
Vertical progression is the digital, code language everything-must-be-defined in numbers, causality as a way of life interpretation of the classic literary mechanics of the Hero's Journey trope.
Period.
In computer code, the Hero can't grow in skill and acquire rare magical items and defeat the Great Evil and save his people etc. etc. without vertical progression.
One and really only way to not do vertical progression is to not have the Hero's Journey as the basis of your adventure.
Most sandbox games get this really, really wrong in that they remove the Hero's Journey without removing the vertical progression mechanics.
So you are left without adventure, but left with a vertical progression.
That = grind.
Well, the market obviously do not agree with you.
Look at all the sequels making huge amount of money. Most people want well crafted, polished entertainment. Originality be damned.
And yes, i do love it. In fact, almost all games have some VP. Feel free to find one that have HP that you like. How is that working out for you so far?
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes.
That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
We need diagonal progression. Some of both.
That way we keep the simple-minded people (per earlier post) who like vertical progression happy
and we also keep the Mensa members happy (opposite of above group) with their horizontal progression
Are you talking about games with vertical progression that have an aspect of horizontal progression? Because that is a pretty big statement. Show me a list with the side containing only HP being longer than the side with VP or with VP and HP.
Also SotN was not a great game. So you shouldn't say things in absolutes.
Adding secondaries to already existing abilities is VP. As your character is now growing in strength. Be that from a greater sense of utility that the ability offers, or outright damage increases.
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
And there are generations of games with little vertical progression, I've been around long enough to remember when character growth started to become a widespread part of many genre, but they remain within reason in many games because deep vertical progression can take away from a game as well as give.
But the most important point is that nowhere have I said that purely horizontal development is better. I plainly state that horizontal development is superior and the true attraction in most games. I made it clear to begin with that horizontal development naturally makes you more powerful anyway, the main difference is that it also makes the game more fun. Fun in a way that vertical development can not even approach. Failure to realize that is simply failure to distinguish what we are discussing as vertical and horizontal. Just like disagreeing with a wildly popular and timeless classic being great is a personal bias that holds no weight.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes.
That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
I played WoW up until WotLK, played RoM for 2 years and now Rift.
I am F2P player. I support games when I feel they deserve my money and I want the items enough.
I don't troll, and I don't take kindly to trolls.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes.
That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
For me none of these points have any reflection on vertical character progression, and while you most probably have determined that the cause of these issues is vertical progression, too me all of these points just scream "Environment Design Issues".