Experience for Killing Enemies

[Jojobobo]

So, would you like experience for killing enemies? I personally like it when experience is only rewarded for killing significant enemies, such as bosses, as this prevents characters from grinding to high levels by random ecounter fights early on. It also gives the developers a tight control on how a character levels up, as when only finite experience is dished out they know a player will only be at a certain level when they come to a certain point in the game. In an open world environment, this can be tackled by making some quests only open up at certain stages during the main story or when a character reaches a necessary skill level or reputation in a region - thereby allowing the character to explore freely but making sure not all quests are available from the off and making them revisit locations later on which helps the game feel less static.

 

I think my favourite example of this style of play was in Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines, whereby experience was rewarded only for significant fights and often there were other options available to a character that yielded similar levels of experience - such as sneaking or talking them down. It helped to shift the emphasis away from killing things and more to weighing up other options rather than just charging in head on every time. That being said, tactical RTSP combat is a feature of the game so perhaps experience for the killing of any enemy will be the case as gamers might feel cheated if they devise a good combat strategy and yet don't get rewarded for it.

 

I think it's safe to say that if they do give experience for combat, good scaling should be a given. Let me know what you think.

Edited September 22, 2012 by Jojobobo

[Darkpriest]

I would like to have the combat XP in the game, but at the same time I'd love to see XP for avoiding combat (like sneaking past the encounter, or great discussion/barter skill use, etc.)

 

In traditional PnP, you can put focus on the quest/RP more than a combat, so you don't really need that much xp for each kill. In a computer game, it shouldn't be that limited, but there should be extra rewards for managing with some situations in other way than straight up fight, and perhaps they even should have a higher overall xp gain, than a straight up combat

[WDeranged]

I vote yes to a small amount, hopefully not too insignificant because I do like getting xp in combat but save the big stuff for cleverly solving problems.

[Dem]

As long as other styles of play are equally rewarding.

[Luckmann]

Awarding experience for killing people has always been a terrible way to distribute experience. Deus Ex got it right. Experience distribution should be goal-oriented.

 

I think anyone ever trying to RP a rogue in any CRPG ever can relate.

 

 

I vote yes to a small amount, hopefully not too insignificant because I do like getting xp in combat but save the big stuff for cleverly solving problems.

Which would be absolutely terrible for the HULK SMASH kind of characters. Edited September 22, 2012 by Luckmann

[MinotaurWarrior]

Generally speaking, I do prefer the V:tM:B approach, but come on. This is supposed to be a game about recapturing the IE experience. The IE games were all about unlocking new divine power by killing twenty kobolds.

[Piccolo]

While Bethesda haven't always implemented it right, I prefer the TES approach of more natural skill progression that's actually relevant to the tasks your character performs. Just getting XP for killing stuff is a bit too gamey and unrealistic for my liking.

 

Or perhaps a combination of both would be good. Slow, natural progression based on your character's actions, with occasional experience rewarded for accomplishing significant tasks that really test your character's abilities (not necessarily just killing big monsters or bosses).

[Troller]

are you crazy?? experience for killing enemies? this is insanity...

[Rabain]

I think anyone ever trying to RP a rogue in any CRPG ever can relate.

 

One of the main issues going that direction though is that it is easy to be biased towards classes that can do both. For example a rogue could sneak past a combat encounter, get XP for stealing the whatsit and then backstab the enemy to also acquire the combat XP.

 

If XP was only acquired by getting the whatsit for MrX even players who's main character couldn't sneak past might consider sending in the party rogue/invis mage just for expediency sake rather than killing the guards to access the whatsit.

 

I bet it's a tough decision for the Dev's when they discuss XP because it is very easy to create situations that can be abused for XP or biased in favour of one class/skill.

[Luckmann]

[...]

If XP was only acquired by getting the whatsit for MrX even players who's main character couldn't sneak past might consider sending in the party rogue/invis mage just for expediency sake rather than killing the guards to access the whatsit.

 

[...]

Which is what would make perfect sense.

[Aotrs Commander]

I think Torment did it perfectly. You got XP for killing stuff, yes (sometimes a fair bit), but the really big rewards tended more to come from roleplaying, conversations and quest goals. (As well as disarming traps, learning stuff (e.g. spells).) I might even go as far as saying grant some XP for reading in-game books (or finding and opening them, anyway!) a la DA:O or something.

 

Sneaking past guys XP might be harder to implement, but if you could do it, I certainly wouldn't begrudge it.

 

I will say that I think party XP, as in NWN2/KotR2 (et al), rather than individual character XP is probably the best way to go around it; unless there is a very high level cap so that people can genuinely solo it without hitting the limit, as you could do in Torment. (You wouldn't want to do that in BG 1, or NWN 2, really.)

 

Which I also totally can get behind.

 

I fondly remember my second playthrough Torment as the Nameless Nutter, and scamming every last drop of XP I could find, soloing most of the time, and then grabbing Xakkon or Morte one at a time for their character-driven conversation XP and then ditching 'em out again until I needed to do it again; and finally finishing the game at level 60-odd, with 25 in every stat but charisma (which was 23), and having so many hits (about 600-700 of something daft!) and regenerating so fast that the last boss couldn't actually kill me, even if I stood there for about five minutes letting him try...!) Good times!

 

(Of course, that does skew the balancing curve right out, so I won't be disappointed if the party XP.)

 

Actually, you could maybe do it both ways - award party XP, but the amount you get is divided by the number of characters you have, maybe. I dunno. (Mostly I'm just thinking that the problem with individual XP is that if you want to swap a companion character out for part of a quest (e.g. that companion's personal quest or something), if you haven't been using them, they may be way too low level, and it's not like you'll likely be able to grind them up a la JRPG.)

[evdk]

No. Bloodlines did it perfectly.

[Jaesun]

No. Bloodlines did it perfectly.

 

Agreed. Though I don't see that type of system being done in this game.

 

I really do wish more cRPG's would follow Bloodlines excellent model.

[Odarbi]

Awarding experience for killing people has always been a terrible way to distribute experience. Deus Ex got it right. Experience distribution should be goal-oriented.

 

Going to second this. While I have always enjoyed getting xp from killing mobs, it always ended up making me feel like I *had* to. Being able to sneak past or avoid combat in some situations while still getting the same XP for it gives players more options about how they play the game, which can't really be a bad thing.

 

Ultimately, killing may and probably will still end up being better in the long run because you can loot the dead to get more gold/equipment/whatever, but it's nice to have the option to avoid it if you really want to.

[Scryer]

How about awarding XP only for the first kill of an opponent type? Kill your first goblin - 100 xp, all other goblins after that - 0 XP and keep the big rewards for quests etc.

[faeriehunter]

I voted no. By rewarding a player with experience for every combat you condition them to fight enemies as much as possible. It discourages other courses of action, such as sneaking past enemies or manipulating others into doing the fighting for you.

 

This topic reminds me of Deus Ex Human Revolution, which was touted as a game where you could resolve situations in many different ways. That's technically true, but the game rewarded non-lethal takedowns and hacking so much that I was hard-pressed to do anything other than use a non-lethal takedown on every enemy I saw, and hack everything that could be hacked. Even Jennsen's own computer awarded 500 extra experience points for accessing it by hacking (instead of using the provided password)!

[Baudolino05]

I think my favourite example of this style of play was in Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines, whereby experience was rewarded only for significant fights and often there were other options available to a character that yielded similar levels of experience - such as sneaking or talking them down. It helped to shift the emphasis away from killing things and more to weighing up other options rather than just charging in head on every time. That being said, tactical RTSP combat is a feature of the game so perhaps experience for the killing of any enemy will be the case as gamers might feel cheated if they devise a good combat strategy and yet don't get rewarded for it.

 

 

Man, I can't agree more. If you REALLY want to push roleplay in a roleplaying game, you have to reward all possible play-styles with the same amount of Exp, and if you want to do that there is not better solution: giving Exp points only when a quest (or another important goal) is totally or partially achieved, no matter in which way...

 

While Bethesda haven't always implemented it right, I prefer the TES approach of more natural skill progression that's actually relevant to the tasks your character performs. Just getting XP for killing stuff is a bit too gamey and unrealistic for my liking.

 

To me TES's is the most unbalanced and clumsy system ever created. There is an boundless literature about all the stupid things you can do to max your skills in these games....

Edited September 22, 2012 by Baudolino05

[eimatshya]

My preference is generally going to be for a system like the one in Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines where experience is rewarded for accomplishing goals, regardless of the method used, rather than for killing enemies. This kind of system makes martial, stealthy, and diplomatic approaches all equally rewarding (you don't feel like you missed something by not taking one of the other routes).

 

That said, since this game is supposed to be a spiritual successor to the Infinity Engine games, I assume they will be using a similar experience point system, which may be for the best, even if I think it's an inferior system, because it's what people will expect from that style of game. People who backed the project out of a desire to see another IE game will probably be expecting P:E to be mechanically consistent with its predecessors. For the same reason, I'm OK with their decision to use RTwP combat, even though I think it's an overall inferior approach to combat than designing a turn-based system; the IE games all had RTwP, so it makes sense stylistically to go with such a system in a game that aims to mimic the IE feel.

[Shadeheart]

In my version of the perfect RPG, XP would be for "objectives" only. So it wouldn't matter how my character got the job done as long he/she got it done. Bloodbath, bribery, smooth talking, double crossing, whatever. I believe Alpha Protocol used this system. Along with its dialogue mechanic, the XP model was one of the most under rated things about the game. Shame really, Alpha Protocol was a flawed gem. A clunky mess of a game but an excellent role playing experience nonetheless.

[Slice0fLife]

IMO XP should be awarded for everything you do, killing mobs, making potions, diplomatic talking, stealing, sneaking, trading everything!!!!

 

It would rather hard to do everything with a single XP pool, so it would be interesting to see something like 3 types of XP pools: Killing XP poll or baltle pool - making it so that those points can be only spent on battle skills, non-battle XP pool - to able to spend them on herbalism, diplomacy ect. and maybe general pool that can be spent any of skill you wish

[Pangur]

Awarding experience for killing people has always been a terrible way to distribute experience. Deus Ex got it right. Experience distribution should be goal-oriented.

 

I think anyone ever trying to RP a rogue in any CRPG ever can relate.

 

Exactly. That's always been my problem with many RPGs. Not only when I play a rogue (though I often do), but also when I play a pacifist diplomatic type of character (which I do even more often).

[Luckmann]

[...]

 

This topic reminds me of Deus Ex Human Revolution, which was touted as a game where you could resolve situations in many different ways. That's technically true, but the game rewarded non-lethal takedowns and hacking so much that I was hard-pressed to do anything other than use a non-lethal takedown on every enemy I saw, and hack everything that could be hacked. Even Jennsen's own computer awarded 500 extra experience points for accessing it by hacking (instead of using the provided password)!

Gah, yes, I remember this so much. Human Revolution was such a massive let-down. I don't understand how they could miss such an essential part of how the original Deus Ex worked.

 

And let's not forget that Non-Lethal Takedowns were always magically more silent than Lethal Takedowns. Just to make sure that any semblance of choice was truly taken away from you.

 

And then have the augments be experience-based and with no mutually exclusive choices, again just to make sure that you will always develop your character the same way, over and over again. Because by the end of the game, you had all the "important" augments anyway.

 

A sham and a shame.

 

To get back on the topic, though; Yeah, if I had it my way; Goal-oriented Experience. Please. In addition of being much more "fair" from a roleplaying standpoint (Diplomacy, Sneaking, Combat; all equally valid and potentially satisfying for all playstyles), it does allow the developers to more closely control the amount of experience that the player accumulates, allowing them to easier gauge what relative "power level" a character will have at any one point in the game. It also makes it much harder to exploit game mechanics (respawning rabbits that give 2xp? I'll just part my pet on "Hostile" here and go have lunch).

 

 

IMO XP should be awarded for everything you do, killing mobs, making potions, diplomatic talking, stealing, sneaking, trading everything!!!!

 

It would rather hard to do everything with a single XP pool, so it would be interesting to see something like 3 types of XP pools: Killing XP poll or baltle pool - making it so that those points can be only spent on battle skills, non-battle XP pool - to able to spend them on herbalism, diplomacy ect. and maybe general pool that can be spent any of skill you wish

Terrible idea. It would make everyone a multi-class. Because once I've snuck past all the mobs, accumulating stealth-experience, I will solve the dispute with the boss by diplomacy, accumulating diplo-xp, and I will then backtrack and murder the mobs, accumulating combat-xp.

 

I think it is impossible to create a system that is equitable if you award experience for doing everything, because it would encourage people to do *everything*. And splitting the experience between the various fields would only cement that, by making sure that you're not only getting experience, you are getting experience that you can only spend in a different field, therefore giving you a higher degree of utility - and whenever offered, utility trumps everything.

 

The only possible solution, which has been shown in several games (compared to there *never* having been a balanced game that awarded experience by combat) is Goal-oriented experience. The goal could be reaching a certain point in the game, finding a secret, uncovering a truth, reaching enlightenment, exploring a region or simply finishing a quest. But never, ever, should experience be awarded by the roll of a dice or by performing a feat specific to a character type (such as combat) unless that feat is mutually exclusive but equal to feats performable by all other character types and roles.

 

And before people start shouting "Immersion", this has nothing to do with that. The only way this is immersion-breaking is if you are metagaming anyway, which is between you and whatever god you're worshipping. This is purely a game mechanic that is woven into the underlying structure of the game, and experience have always been an abstraction of character growth. Goal-oriented experience would simply be there to allow all character types the possibility to play the game to it's fullest, without our Thieves having to become Assassins, or our Diplomats turn into Generals.

Edited September 23, 2012 by Luckmann

[fkldnhlsdngsfnhlsndlg]

As it seems much of the focus of the game is on combat, like the Infinity Engine games, I have to say yes. Besides, you should always have a way to grind XP just in case you really need it. Considering that we already know non-combat and combat skills are not mutually exclusive, there's no reason to not reward combat. That said, I also hope they reconsider that choice.

 

Exactly. That's always been my problem with many RPGs. Not only when I play a rogue (though I often do), but also when I play a pacifist diplomatic type of character (which I do even more often).

 

Except Eternity is a party-based game and rogues level up alongside everyone else.

Edited September 23, 2012 by sea

[Aedelric]

If we received no exp from kills we would be constantly avoiding combat.

 

It should be equal with non-combat orientated activities, so players do not feel compelled to play the game in one specific way.

[Luckmann]

If we received no exp from kills we would be constantly avoiding combat.

Unless your character(s) had no way of doing that. Unless you're playing a balls-out insane barbarian, most people do try to avoid combat. It is just that some people excel at it, making it the best solution. It makes perfect sense to avoid combat unless necessary.

 

It should be equal with non-combat orientated activities, so players do not feel compelled to play the game in one specific way.

And how would you achieve that unless it's goal-oriented?

 

Award experience for combat, and you've ensured that whenever possible, you will be pressed to fight, even when it makes no sense whatsoever to do so.