RPG Upgrades: Characters, gear or both?

Help and Feedback Game Design Support
#1

In RPG games, it is very common for users to be able to upgrade as they level up and gain items, experience or anything that is collectible. Through the various RPG games I’ve played, I can observe three types of upgrading:

  • Character upgrades: You upgrade stats of your character (health, damage, defense, so on). These also affect your gear. You do not upgrade gear, however - you use the stats that come along with the gear.
  • Gear upgrades: You upgrade stats of your gear (weapons, armour, spells, so on). These affect your character in terms of health, defense duration or durability and more. You don’t directly upgrade your character however, only your gear.
  • Hybrid: You upgrade both your direct character and the gear that you receive. As you level up, you attain points that you can allocate to certain attributes of your character. As for weapons, you must spend currency or use crafting systems to be able to put together stronger weapons.

Which one should I be more concerned with pursuing? I’m weighing the UX in heavily, since other factors are fairly irrelevant to the decision (i.e. monetisation - currency purchases are completely unrelated to the progression of one’s gear or character).

I’d like to have a bit of a grind in the game while not making grinding one of the game’s core tenets. There needs to be a sense of accomplishment and ability to get stronger as one ranks up, rather than having everything served on a silver platter from the get-go.

#2

I personally enjoy Hybrid better for this. Players will feel an extra sense of accomplishment when they craft a rare item after hours of grinding for materials. Skill points to upgrade characters directly helps the player know they are getting stronger too as they grind for more materials.
Being able to upgrade the crafted items helps them not feel like the game is just “Grind, item, grind, item” as the items will last longer.

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#3

Keeping to the conventional features of an RPG is important. But it’s not definite. Think about your game and what you think it needs. Will your game be more fun with Character upgrades? Or will it be more fun with Gear Upgrades. Why not have both? Will having both be detrimental to gameplay? Will is obscure the game’s dynamic?

Grind and Monetization is fun, but that doesn’t mean you have to build your features around it :stuck_out_tongue: . Monetization can also effect balance ya know if anything that’s purchasable happens to effect progression rates of players or their overall advantage over other players.

How about you serve everything up on a silver platter, and then start putting them on the gold platter one by one until they balance each other out? Doesn’t mean you have to put features behind a pay wall. A game I feel that does this absolutely well is Albion Online.

1 Like
#4

Moderate gear upgrades is my vote. Players generally get better at playing as they play. If you pile on character upgrades and gear upgrades, then experienced players can quickly become overpowered. Gear upgrades that have better effects (visuals) or that can affect more than one opponent at a time are things that give players something to strive for without making already good players unbeatable. Scale up the power slowly. Maybe set things up so that combinations of gear affect game play in some meaningful way, and then open access to different types of gear. Maybe limit the number of generic slots that a player has direct access to so that they have to purposefully choose among and balance defense/offense att/spells/etc for a certain style of play. Then try to balance the gear so that certain styles are more or less effective vs certain others. That way there’s more to it than just getting access to the biggest hammer.

That kind of thing could also encourage team play. Someone playing solo will have to balance their setup to cover all kinds of things in a general way. Players in a team can specialize so they can go all in for some spec.

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#5

Let’s analyse this!

Analysis

General
All these ideas are fine. In current games, we should add examples:

  • Character upgrades alone are rare, I can’t believe it! Unless you count skills as them.
  • World // Zero – Gear & Equipment
  • Swordburst II – Gear & Equipment
  • Fantastic Frontier – Hybrid – HP upgrades + gear
  • Dungeon Quest – Hybrid

Unfortunately, when the game ages, new players are sort of “shut out of it”, if there are large experience gaps or unfair advantages one upgrade can do. This depends on whether the game is PvE or PvP.

Character Upgrades
This is a rare choice, but it has some caveats:

  • Power never sinks; top players outmatching new and experienced players
  • Straight forward and dull – barely any cool features

This countered by the use of different stats – creating different strategies to choose one or another skill path.

Gear Upgrades
Seems to be common around Roblox. Allows a randomization of appearances, luck-based is optional if you’re going to add a rarity system. If skill-based, creates some kind of skill gap between players.

Raises interest between players trying to obtain the rarest item in the game.

Also adds up the features of trading and an working in-game economy, which benefits monetisations and maybe popularity.

Hybrid
Sort of exist in all games. In my opinion, this would be my recommendation due to previous observations of my brother’s gameplay in Diablo III, Blade & Soul… etc.

Has all pros and cons between both. Some of them cancels out each other and usually has more pros over cons.

Summary
Now when the analysis is complete. We can summarise that it depends on game’s features; PvP, skill trees, learning curves… etc. Hybrid would be the best choice out of these three.

More options means more strategies for players to develop around, creating a versatile group of top players with different strategies, not like the game where there are end-game stuff which 99% of the top players use.

5 Likes
#8

A hybrid system allows people to compensate for getting bad loot while still making good loot feel strong. A high level player can be on par with a low level player if the high level player has a bad weapon and a low level player has a good weapon. If it were weapon based, the high level player would be out of luck. If it were level based, the lower level player wouldn’t feel rewarded for getting a good item.