Leveling Up

[Holy_Diver]

And, right from the beginning of the game, some enemies are extremely strong others are easy.

Whether or not that is good versus leveling up, its more realistic, and lends to a more natural feel. Coincidences only serve to challenge believability. Plus if there is leveling up, or not, then unbeatable monsters open up the field to other kinds of game play, avoidance and other kinds of natural problem solving...

The only thing you must be careful about, is the appearance of a monster should communicate its veracity. And a conservative player needs to be able to survive a good whack, because ultimately that's the only way to truly gauge a monsters power. In other words, trial and error should not necessitate Game Over.

Does anyone have thoughts on a good alternative to a "leveling up" system? Or maybe leveling up is the way to go after all?

While I am all for experimentation. I think in the case of SOM the leveling up system is at odds with the Strength Up messages you get from practicing with your weapon, which I think is far more interesting than experience based strength.

I prefer fixed HP, but that isn't very KF like and may not always be workable. So HP either goes up with level ups, or it is a function of Strength. I'd probably lean towards the latter myself.

I've always rebelled against Experience Points. My favorite systems are where everything is piecemeal. So you get points for actually doing something, and ideally the points are specific to what you actually did. So in a perfect world, if you hit a monster (etc.) you get experience fighting that monster. And if you haven't met that monster in a while, you conversely loose experience with that monster. Though you can transfer experience to similar monsters by having previous experience with similar monsters (edited: through receiving bonus experience versus the new monsters)

Ultimately I think experience points are better looked at like a Score in old school games. And Class is a rank based on your score and play style. They are an easy way to compare progress in save games but not much else. In theory if the game did things for the player. Like micro actions that you can't input with a controller, experience could be the determining factor in the effectiveness of that, but ideally that would be a function of more granular experience points as already mentioned.

In the end if experience or Score is based solely on violence, it could be a marker of how violent your play through has been. Especially if you are only awarded points on death of an adversary. Then the Classes could also reflect pacifism. Which is often associated with honor and heroics.

Anyway. What I would like to see catch on is a tristat system. I think games have way too many nebulous stats. I'd like SOM games to stick to Strength, Magic, and Speed. So that repetitive swinging increases Strength. Magic increases Magic. And dashing increases Speed. I think that's all you need (if you are not tuning a machine like you do in Armored Core.)

PS: With Ex another way to increase Speed is tapping buttons more quickly. This can shorten the hold detection timeout period and overall allow you to become a faster actor. If you become too fast for your own good you can increase timeout in the preferences to compensate.