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I was reading a different thread about Guild Wars 2 and how it differs from other MMOs and the topic of content came up, and the thought occurred to me:

What kinds of progression are there in games? How important is progression? Is progression vital to keeping a player interested in a game? Can too much progression be a bad thing? How would a lack of required progression in a game affect a player's opinion of the game?

The first type of progression that comes to mind is simply 'leveling up', your character's main variable goes up by 1 and many other variables that affect your character's functionality go up as a result of this.

Another kind is item progression, where your functionality depends on the overall power or use of your tools.

Individual skill progression is similar to leveling up, except that it only affects specific abilities. I find games that level up skills through use (the Elder Scrolls series) to be interesting.

Even outside of RPGs progression is a huge factor in games.

In the Metroid series a player will venture through the game, finding technology and abilities that will allow them to progress through areas that were otherwise denied to them.

In many games, a player has to overcome an obstacle and is then brought to the next area, in standard sequential level-by-level games.

MMOs really seem to bring up the topic of progression, because to be successful they have to be able to last. But if a player does feel any progression then they'd generally lose interest in a game, so there has to be some progression while still maintaining the length of the game.

I originally found Minecraft to be quite interesting... but then I lost interest almost immediately. There were no set goals (this was in February 2011) and not a lot to do, so it just wasn't interesting to me. Nowdays MC seems much more interesting, with a multitude of multiplayer servers and mods.

Has anyone else thought about progression in games?

I don't care (much) about which kind of PC progression is used (skill, levels, item etc), as long as progression changes the way you play the game. Take Morowind, improving skills there doesn't change how you play most of the time. If you play a warrior with a blunt skill of 50 you'll bash enemies with a stick, and if your skill improves to a 100 you are still bashing enemies with a stick.

Compare that to the mage in Dragon Age, who, with glyph of paralyze can take an enemy out of the game for a while, one level up later you can choose glyph of repulsion, which can be used on its own, or combined with paralyze to stun everyone in a huge area (including your own guys).

Basically, if a game want to keep my interest, it has to give me new options at a steady pace, not just have the numbers increase, and those options have to be meaningfully different from what I already have.

I've thought and written a lot on progression systems in games, but primarily I am interested in progression that is meaningful. The classic RPG staple is simply more hit points, mana and damage, but that itself isn't enough to keep leveling or gameplay itself interesting for a very long time.

A game needs to have abilities and skills, or even items, that open new potential for gameplay and change the way that you approach scenarios. One reason I dislike MMO-style combat so much is because it's always built around such simple ideas - DPS, AoE damage, stuns, heals, etc. - and once you've unlocked your core abilities, character progression becomes boring as all you get are ever-increasing numbers.

D&D provides incredible depth when handled properly, although even the best games out there pale in comparison to good tabletop play. Fallout is another one of those titles which I think really made character progression meaningful, albeit more for story reasons than pure gameplay ones.

murph wrote:Basically, if a game want to keep my interest, it has to give me new options at a steady pace, not just have the numbers increase, and those options have to be meaningfully different from what I already have.

I quite agree, I keep finding myself playing a game, realizing that nothing in the game is ever going to change from how it currently is as a result of my actions and then I immediately lose interest... it's making it REALLY HARD to stay entertained, because most games just aren't that deep.

One thing I took notice of is that in many games specializing in a single skill can make you a power-house, despite the extreme simplicity of it. The way to avoid having it oversimplified is to cause skills to become dependent on each other and introduce many variables that interact with each other in different ways.

I think I might end up having to stop playing video games without other people for some time, I keep plowing through every game I touch and realizing that my actions won't introduce any new elements into the game so there's nothing more to be learned.

Generally, I've found, games seem to start out by introducing a new system to a player, which causes interest. Then, after the player habituates themselves to the system, radically new variables stop being introduced and everything becomes simply numeric, based on the amount of a pointless imaginary variable rather than how many unique variables are being used in conjunction. I know I've already said so a few times but it's making it REALLY HARD to care about what I'm doing in these games... I don't know what to do.

I'm a bit in the same boat, which annoyingly has made me drift more towards action/fps games. Sure their stories aren't usually that good, and the gameplay is different, but at least plenty of those are short enough that the rewards arrive often enough, and are big enough to matter. Upgrading from the sword of suicide (1 dps) to the apocalypse ax (9999999999 dps) matters far less than getting the nanite rifle in Red Faction (it can snipe supports from buildings/bridges, letting you tip smokestacks on enemy armor from a distance).

I like the idea of making skills interact more. Which is why I think especially a medium amount of points in a skill need to be rewarded more than it is now, and the difficulty ramped up to compensate. An example, if a character is decent in mind affecting spells and melee give him the "four eyes" spell, which gives him and a nearby ally a large boost to dodge, to hit, critical chance and block.

murph wrote:I like the idea of making skills interact more. Which is why I think especially a medium amount of points in a skill need to be rewarded more than it is now, and the difficulty ramped up to compensate. An example, if a character is decent in mind affecting spells and melee give him the "four eyes" spell, which gives him and a nearby ally a large boost to dodge, to hit, critical chance and block.

That's just the kind of thing I'm talking about.

A system's base variables are simplistic, obviously, they have to be for them to be utilized easily. But what a player actually uses on the surface shouldn't tell them everything, they should have to get an idea of what does what and then try to find a way to use things together as best as they can.