» Thu Jun 28, 2012 4:38 am Brings out the power of "Levels", whatever that means!
=== === === === === === === === === ===
Skyrim is a great game, and can entertain any fan of role playing games for hundreds of hours, but just like its predecessors, it can evolve into even a better experience, thanks to the unparalleled mod-ability that is inherent in TES games.
Here is my attempt to evolve this great foundation into what I consider my ideals for a great role playing experience, or as close to them as is possible with the modding tools currently available.
In classic RPGs, which I played when I was younger, the concept of hand holding and freely giving out the good stuff to players was not introduced into the games yet, and I know that those games gave me much more satisfaction when I could accomplish a conquest, or when I could overcome initial limitation that my characters always struggled with, to reach goals and boundaries that were not previously possible.
Morrowind was not as harsh with inexperienced players as those old rpgs, but it had much less hand-holding than current games, and IMHO it was a in a perfect middle place when it came to hand holding, and providing challenges. Not as harsh as Daggerfall, for instance, and not as easy as Oblivion and shall I say Skyrim?
When I play an RPG game, I want the game to provide me with enough challenge that sometimes, at some point I have to retreat, and rethink my strategy with the problems ahead, and return when I'm more prepared for the tasks, so that when I finally conquer such challenges, I feel that I really have done something, which was not the case for most of Oblivion game challenges, and even Skyrim feels too easy for me in that regard.
Another problem with TES games is how to continuously provide challenges for the players through-out their entire game, which was never accomplished quite the right way, IMHO, so here I will list the ones that I have played the most and compare their approach regarding this problem with "Might and Magic 7, for Blood and honor" for instance which was one classic RPG that had a perfect approach for the problem.
- Morrowind: You started in a harsh and unforgiving world, which had little tolerance for mistakes, but some places were easier to survive in and some were very dangerous for the newbie players. As you gradually became more and more powerful, you would out-grow the hardship around the world, and quite soon become a god-incarnate amount the mortals, and little challenge would remain for you to tackle with. A great approach at first as it provided the satisfaction of watching your character becoming such a force within the game, but after that, well, no challenge ahead.
- Oblivion:As an answer to the problems above, the developers introduced the concept of one hundred percent level scaling to any thing around you, and destroying two big aspects of role playing games in one shot, the aspect of exploration, and the satisfaction of character development, as everything around you grew more powerful along with you and every loot that you found was a random mess adjusted to your level, regardless of where you went and how you developed your character, but on the other hand you had the same constant amount of challenge and reward, around you no matter how much you developed your character, and where you went. That was an arcade game, not an RPG.
- Skyrim: This one had a much better approach with level scaling than Oblivion, and provided somehow different amount of challenge in different places, but it seems that developers thought that providing a lot of challenging situations that could easily defeat inexperienced players if they made mistakes and bad choices, might scare them off, so they scaled down the amount of challenge through-out the entire game, and as a result this game an easy piece of cake for any player who is not a complete newbie with role playing games. And also the level scaling problem is still there even if toned done compared to Oblivion, and does not give us the feeling of great accomplishments in our tracks.
- MM7:You started your carrier in a harsh world with absolutely no trace of level scaling, and little hand holding, except for the fact that you started the game in a relatively safe place, but quite nearby was a forest with giant dragonflies that could easily eat you for breakfast.
In every step you would had to overcome great challenges, and as a result gained great rewards, and if you went the wrong direction and found yourself in a place that you could not survive, you had to hastily retreat and leave that place for when you became more powerful, and man, the sense of satisfaction when you finally returned and mopped the place with the foes that had previously nearly killed you, was GREAT!
Every conquest that you made opened new doors for further adventures, and as the result the previously challenging areas became like a child play, but still there were places that you could not safely enter, and even when you felt like a god among the mortals in a lot of places, you still would not dare to tackle with some other places that were above you.
But also you were constantly growing, and any new places that you conquered had loot and opportunities that provided you with the means to be able to tackle with the next big challenges ahead, and this feature continued right to the end of the game, as it was not really an open ended sand box with indefinite game-play opportunity.
Right at the beginning of the game, there was a cave with a relatively low level dragon within, that could one-shot our newbie characters, and we had to dodge its attacks as we ran around that cave to gather required loot. Later in the game, would come the time that we would enter an island filled with lots of titans and dragons of any rank, and we could clear the entire islands from those pests if we wanted and persisted for the task.
IMHO that was the right approach for providing enough challenge for any player, i.e. provide a static world with little to no level scaling, but with enough different places with different amount of challenge and reward, for characters of any level. Thus there would be safe places for the players to respite, and restock, and places that would prove to be fatal even for the most developed characters, and places for all the levels in between, and let the players choose the amount of the challenge that they wanted to tackle with, i.e. take it slow and only go to the moderately challenging areas in order to develop their character without a sweat, or go to places above their ranks to test their mettle with higher level challenges and rewards, for a quick passage to power or well, death.
With "Skyrim Classical Overhaul", my goal is to provide just such an experience, for myself, and you, if you like a challenge.
=== === === === === === === === === ===
Here is the list of my goals:
- Enhance the importance of our initial and later choices for our characters, and the uniqueness that each different character experiences, and introduce the character backgrounds and talents which could affect their entire experience with the game, and also the starting positions and items, and give them additional and unique advantages, disadvantages, and items not available otherwise, that would not be rendered ineffective, after a few levels, and probably provide a Daggerfall-esque way to fine-tune our characters.
I hope to introduce a new style of branching choices in the character development mechanism that would make each character a really unique experience. - Enhance the importance of the skill masters, and how we need them to learn new perks and tricks, and how to advance to greater levels of mastery for each skill.
In fact those masters would sell us Tomes of Power which we could use like spell tomes, but instead of spells, they would unlock skill perks for us to learn. Those tomes can come in different varieties, like unlocking a single perk, or a level of mastery for perks, or a branch of perks and so on, and can be hand placed at some specific places as well, as a reward for some quests, and the like. - Enhance the importance of character and monster levels through-out the game, and introduce two new parameters to the basic game mechanism: Item and Spell levels.
Those levels will play a great part in balancing the challenge/reward ratio of any accomplishment that our characters achieve, and in extending those challenges for extremely high level characters, without the need rely on player-based level-scaling for later stages. (More on that later). - Enhance the importance of any new found items, spells, skills and abilities, through-out the entire game-play, from when we are just a newbie character, wet behind the ears, until shall I say, indefinitely, forever?
Any new item that you find, any advancement of skills, any new trick that you learn from a tome of power, and any new challenge that you win, opens new doors and possibilities that you could not experience before, and expands your event horizon, minimally or dramatically. Seriously!
You start an extremely handicapped and limited character, and hopefully with relatively little hand holding, you can gradually free yourself from initial bounds and limitations and feel an exhilarating sense of triumph in each step as you free yourself from one limitation after another. - Enhance the importance of the adventuring part of the game, and give players rewards in those adventures that could not be achieved by mere power-play, crunching, and crafting, in a safe place. And hopefully balancing the amount of rewards for each challenge, through-out the life time of each character.
- Enhance the importance of gold and loots through-out the entire game, and give the players a reason to always look for new opportunities to gain additional wealth, and provide required and satisfying ways to spend that wealth away. Hopefully you cannot reach a condition that you do not know how to spend the abundance of gold in your huge purse.
=== === === === === === === === === ===
This mod will be for the players who do not like the easy and flat level of progression that your character experiences when encountering new challenges and reward level of the situations.
I mean Skyrim does not feel as if your character is progressing a lot throughout the game experience, as the challenges are not challenging enough and can be overcome easily and the rewards are not rewarding enough as they are mostly random and you can easily surpass almost the best of them by crafting skills.
I want to change that to introduce a new level of progression of challenges and rewards for each character, so that if you want, you can choose paths that forces you to work hard to reach goals and feel that you have gained a great reward for a great challenge in each situation that is not counted low level for your character.
I want to alter the basic mechanisms for some game-play foundations, like how much damage we deal/deflect in each blow/blast/block, and how fast we are in our attack/defense actions depending on the level of our characters and/or their individual skills, acquired perks, and the level of equipment/spell/skills of the attacking party compared to the level of equipment/spell/skills of the defending party.
I want to alter those mechanisms, so that each new item, spell or ability that you acquire which is better than your last one, would clearly show its effect in future encounters, and opens up new possibilities for your character, like new places that you can safely go, or new challenges that you can tackle with.
Any item or spell that you wield has a level, and your proficiency(level) in the skill required for that item/spell will define the speed that you can use that item/spell, and the perks that you would have for that skill would define your effectiveness with that item/spell, compared to the opponent's opposing item/spell in each interact that happens.
So when you wield a Dwemer mace toward your opponent which might be wearing an elven armor, your one handed skill level compared to the mace's level would define your speed in that action, but how effective is a blow from your mace on his armored body, depends on several factors which I will cover later.
Likewise When you shoot a bolt of lightning at your opposing monster, the time that it takes to prepare your spell depends on your Destruction skill level compared to the level of the spell that you are casting, and its effectiveness on the target monster again depends on several factors, which I will cover later.
I hope to redefine the encounter zones and their level of challenges and rewards, so that you would have a chance to find rewards of any level from the beginning of the game, but in order to acquire higher level rewards, you would have to pass triumphantly from higher level challenges, but if players with great luck, strategy, and persistence could acquire a higher level reward, when they are still at lower levels, then it should be like a treasure for their current situation, and well worth the effort.
So for instance when your newbie character, after a long and strategic combat, kills that bandit leader, or sneaks past him and loots his stash, and finds that Dwemer mace, when his previous weapon was for instance a steel dagger, then it should really show in the future encounters.
All of these levels for challenges and rewards would affect your experience in an exponential way, not a linear way, so that higher level challenges and rewards should seem really out of your reach, like a dream of a milestone to reach.
So all the items and spells would have exponentially higher costs depending on their level, and all the loots that you find should be worth exponentially more for higher level rewards, and the challenges would be exponentially harder in higher level places, and so on...
This exponential scale of advancement of your future challenge and reward levels would always keep you on toes for further advancement toward newer goals, you will have a lot of situations when you are forced to abandon a goal and retreat from the scene to prepare your character to have a better chance of success when you return later.
But on the other hand, I hope to include the parameter of the game's difficulty setting in the formulas, and for the easier settings it should seem more like current Skyrim experience, and in harder settings, the exponential aspect of challenge development should show itself clearly. I.e. in harder settings, higher level zones should be dramatically harder than lower level zones to conquer.
All of these can be achieved by altering the basic parameters like weapon speed and damage potential dynamically depending on the situation, and carefully redefining the characteristics and prices for each item and spell, and sorting them in different level categories, and use those levels in the formulas regarding their effectiveness against each other.
And rebuilding a new random list foundation based on those item/spell levels, and also the theme of the items/spells, which should greatly simplify the process of adding newly added items to the list.
And after that, I might start on available wealth of new items and spells and providing patches to place them at their appropriate positions within those lists to be used like any vanilla item in those formulas.
And maybe methodically visiting any encounter zone, defining their level of challenge/reward and weeding out the out of place ones from those zones, whenever I have the time, and hand placing appropriate new encounters and rewards.
This seems like a lot of work, but when I finish the scripting part of the mod and the random list foundation, the rest is not so hard, and only requires a formulated procedure that has to be done iteratively.
=== === === === === === === === === ===
My plan for this mod is an iterated progression for each part of it, so I will start with the character development, like changes to the races, and the like, then start on the basic scripts to alter the games mechanisms, then start to work on the new random list foundation, and then return to those scripts as the need arises, and make a routine that automatically categorizes the items and spells in their roughly appropriate levels, and styles.
Then I will implement those new random lists in the game and add a patch esp to alter the current lists with my new ones, and test the new mechanism in game, and then when I find the foundation functional enough, I would start working on individual items and spells to alter their prices and categorize them in more precise style and fine-tune their difference, and so on...
Hopefully those automatic categorization routines will remain to help me skip the items that do not require fine tuning, to reduce the chance of conflicts, and to help categorize the items and spells added by other mods, in roughly their appropriate place, until I make patches for their respective mods.
I want to use the level grades that I define for items and spells, heavily in my implementation of skill perks, in the basic game-play mechanisms, and in any other aspect of the game that they fit, and hopefully in the user interface as well, maybe with the help of other modders that have tackled with the UI.
When using my mod, you will always think about the level of the items, spells and opponents that you encounter, and compare those levels with other items and so on...
For instance if by any chance you find a bow that is high level compared to your current situation, you can use it, but it will become more effective as you advance in Archery skill, and gain more perks needed for its usage. But in the meantime it will be a lot more effective against your opponents than your current average bows, even if you are not good at its usage. And this might change its usages for you.
Your attacking speed of a higher level weapon will be lower depending on your skill level and the weapon's categorized level, like this:
Usage Proficiency, UP=(Skill level)/(Scale*Item level), in which the Scale will be about 2 by default.
If the usage proficiency is above 1 then its square root is multiplied to the default weapon speed, until a defined limit like two times of the default speed, or 1.5 times, depending on the difficulty settings:
Speed = Sqrt(UP) * default Speed.
Otherwise, if it is below 1 then it is Squared and then multiplied to the default speed, like:
Speed = UP * UP * default Speed.
You start each skill at level 5, before racial and background adjustments, so an untrained skill is initially 5, and as this mod depends on the community uncapper mod by the great Elys, then there is no hard capped higher level limit, unless the characters reach the soft caps defined by this mod.
The item levels are scaled to something like this:
- Long Bow : 5
- Hunting Bow : 10
- Orcish Bow : 15
- Nord Hero Bow : 20
- Dwarven Bow : 25
- Elven Bow : 30
- Glass Bow : 40
- Ebony Bow : 50
- Daedric Bow : 60
So when my unskilled character with Archery of 5, finds a long bow and tries to use it, his usage proficiency would be like:
UP = 5/(2*5) = 0.5
His speed with the bow would be 0.5*0.5 = %25 of the original bow speed.
When he reaches the Archery level of 8 his speed would be 0.8*0.8 = %64 of default speed and at Archery level of 10 it would be equal to the default long bow speed.
By the time that his Archery skill is at 20 his speed with long bow would be like:
Sqrt[20 / (2 *5)] = 1.4 or about %140 of the default speed
By this time he is a real quick-draw with that bow, but then let's say that he finds an elven bow, which is a level 30 item, he will finds out that he is still a newbie regarding that advanced item, and his proficiency would be like:
20/(2*30) = 0.33 or %33, and his speed would be %33*%33 = %11, so he would be nine time slower than default speed while trying to use that bow, which would be a disaster in close encounters, but he can uses the basic long bow for close encounters and save the prized elven bow for one shot sneak attacks, as the superior default damage potential of the bow combined to the fact that it is a level 30 item will dramatically increase its effectiveness in delivering a fatal blow to the relatively low level opponents that have lower level armor skills and equipment.
So here we will have a strategy to save the higher level elven bow for when we have time to painfully draw its string and leave the long bow for the times that speed is of more importance than delivering just a single fatal blow.
This all will depend on the difficulty settings that we have chosen for the game, and the harder the setting, the higher the contrasts will be.
But in the end, if we find a really high level item that is way beyond our skill level, the speed level will not drop below a certain percentage of the default weapon skill, and if the penalty of in-proficiency below that level, would be applied to the energy toll that each attack will have on us, which with physical actions would be Stamina.
Thus if the item is much above our proficiency level, we will need a lot of stamina to use it, and if in the middle of the attack, the engine decides that we do not have enough stamina to finish the action, we will instantly enter the stagger state and a message will be shown about the fact that we do not have enough stamina to complete the action.
This method will effectively prevent us from using the items that are way beyond out proficiency level, instead of starting a painfully slow attack that might take ages to complete.
In lower difficulty settings, the skill level does not affect the speed of these actions a lot, and will be much more like the vanilla Skyrim behavior.
The exact scenario is repeated for shields and the blocking action, and the speed of that action is defined by our block skill compared to the level of the shield at hand.
The exact scenario is also repeated for spells as well, and our magic skill level, compared to the spell level, will define the time required to prepare the spell for attack.
So higher level spells will have their strategic uses, but also will not be effective in close encounters with multiple opponents, unless we can one-shot them all together with a single blow, before they can reach us.
The energy consumption of items and spells will also depend on required perks for the items or spells, and if we do not have the required weapon or spell perk, then we will use a lot of stamina or magicka for each attack.
The spells were always like that, and the items will have that characteristic as well, thus you will need to find the right skill master and pay him dearly to learn how to use "Exquisite Blades" effectively.
Further lessons will enhance their damage as well and also will make them more effective in other ways.
By the way, you can learn lower level and basic skill perks yourself in level-up sessions, but in order to learn the more advanced perks, you will need to find the right skill masters, and pay them exponentially greater sums of gold, depending on how advanced the perk is. And we are talking of several thousands of gold coins for master level perks.
At some point, when I have the time to implement or borrow them, the skill masters might require the completion of a quest for the lessons, instead of that sum of money, and those quests might require treading in dangerous waters. And you might choose to complete the quest, or pay the fee.
=== === === === === === === === === ===
In the next parts, I will delve into more detail about this mod's several different goals that I have listed above.
