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[J. R. Hill]

It just occurred to me that nearly every game I can think of employs character progression or just has static characters.

Character progression tropes:
- Powerups
- Leveling up
- Unlocking spells/moves/perks/gear

Some games don't rely on these, or they're secondary.  Games in the fighting genre or games designed for quick multi player skirmishes generally don't have any unlockables except for different characters.

But what if the game did the opposite?  Instead of powering up, there were only power downs?  Instead of getting stronger you continually get weaker?  Instead of learning new spells and moves you continually forget them? Maybe you choose which you remember?  Instead of getting new gear your gear deteriorates and can't be replaced?  Or maybe it just gets stolen?

I think this would not only be great for horror settings, but could add a different type of challenge to games.  Instead of getting better and defeating more/stronger enemies, the easy enemies you mowed down in hordes at the beginning suddenly become your worst nightmare.

So in short, I'm going to play around with this idea after I finish up my current projects, but feel free to add to or critique my ideas.  Also feel free to steal it.

[ink.inc]

I've been sitting on a game idea for some time, because if I ever did make it, I wouldn't want to spoil the gameplay elements. Frankly, though, it'll probably never get made. So, here it is.

Starting the game as a large, monstrous creature outside a village that believes you are terrorising them, you can kill everyone in it, ending the game, or go on a quest to help them. Every time you help them, you sacrifice one of your powers to increase their defenses; at any point during your quests you can seek out and destroy the actual monster that is terrorising the village, but to get the 'good' ending, you have to sacrifice all of your powers and face the monster unarmed, whereupon it kills you, but is in turn destroyed by the villagers.

Tried to cram that into a one-line pitch, but it really wasn't happening.

[Captain_404]

I made a game like this once. It came from a time in my life where everything around me seemed to be breaking apart, my computer was slowly dying, and my mind felt creatively dead.

It was a space shooter where you started out with every powerup and over the course of the game would have one randomly chosen powerup at a time removed from you and given to the enemies that were attacking you.

It had terrible programmer graphics and the gameplay was horribly imbalanced, so I never put it up anywhere, I would for the sake of discussion though. Should I?

[tesselode]

It had terrible programmer graphics and the gameplay was horribly imbalanced, so I never put it up anywhere, I would for the sake of discussion though. Should I?

You should.

I would think if the player gets continually weaker, the game would become more and more of a downer as it went on, since the player has less power. This might lead to some added strategy if there were also power-ups, though.

[s0]

If you made an artsy fartsy art game that's a deep and meaningful commentary on whatever, you could get away with a straight-up implementation of this idea, but if the game was meant to be fun, you'd be facing some tough design challenges.

The problem is that you're essentially designing two types of game. One is supposed to be easy-but-satisfying with an overpowered character and the other would be based on overcoming tough challenges with an underpowered character. And then you'd have to design some kind of smooth transition between the two. Or in other words, you'd have to start with God of War and gradually turn it into Resident Evil over time, all the while keeping it enjoyable.

I think it could work well with some counter-balancing. For instance, you could make the early, "weak" enemies have complicated AI patterns so that the player doesn't really have to pay heed to early in the game because they can blast hordes of them to oblivion with one hit anyway . Later, the combat against these same enemies would become more and more interesting as the player would have to actively engage with and exploit those patterns in order to win. Also, from a presentational perspective, you could turn the later enemies into real douchebags who taunt the player character and make fun of him for his weakness, so it'd feel even better showing them who's boss.
 

The second problem is that the two "design philosophies" the game is based on appeal to two different "groups" of gamers. The one group likes feeling "badass" in an easy game and the other group likes to "work" for their success and overcome "real" challenges. So you're running the risk of most people hating half of your game (which half depends on what "group" they belong to), and I don't really see a way of circumventing that. But if you can put up with that, great.
 

[unsilentwill]

We need some of these games!

I had an idea like this yesterday. Something like that awesome Game by it's Cover "20 Years Later" and "You Only Live Once". You start out young, and the level changes each time you play it as you get older with different strengths/abilities.

[gimymblert]

tetris (speed bump)? Space invader (shield, speed bump)? Old game relied a lot on "endurance" because the goal was the score, it was all about keeping what you only had for the longest time before dying pitifully.

I had thought on some idea like that before.

The player still need a sense of progression, if the gameplay became more and more restrictive it's not interesting. One way to do this is that some new option would make more sens as the player became weaker. For example cover might be useless at the beginning since you have so much defense, but as your health/armor is ripping down, you may fight start to use them. Before game had regenerative health, tension would vary a lot from section to section through each playtime because you didn't have the same level of health because of different kind of mistake you made. The cumulative mistake define the difficulty of a challenge in given place in a given playthrough. Those game were fun because with different degree of health you would never handle the same situation in the same ways two times + increase learning + skill variation (lost design trope gem), it was very dynamics.

At the end it's all about the depth of your mechanics and how it let you play safe (scarce and limited power) or risky (plenty of power). You can also add a layer of resource management, not unlike smart bomb in shooter but without the ability to find them later, each use is definitive and deplete the stock, why? it would create a false sense of security and the player may end the game without using them, they would be talisman (yay i made so far without using them) .

[Noyb]

I vaguely remember a topic like this. No idea where it went.

I don't believe that it's necessary that taking away powerups would necessarily limit the player's actions (although some great games can come of this design philosophy.) Another approach would be to make the starting powerups detrimental to the player.

Like, you start with a high jump with no variable jump height, but a tunnel to another section of the map requires you to make short hops to avoid a spiked ceiling.

Or you start with armor that instantly kills enemies on touch, but a section requires you to keep enemies alive to bounce off them.

Or you begin with a gun that has a wide spread, but a weaker gun that shoots single, small bullets allows you to mold destructible blocks into a staircase.

[s0]

So basically a Metroidvania where powerups give you access to new areas but make you weaker in combat? Sounds interesting, particularly if you add some nonlinearity to the progression.

[J. R. Hill]

I'm trying to think of ways to implement this in different genres, not necessarily to do it all at once.

Examples:

Platformer - easy enemies, but avoid "powerups" that make gameplay harder

RPG - as you age, your stats steadily decrease.  Maybe if you're a mage you suffer from alzheimer's?  And so as you go on and the story progresses, the enemies become harder to defeat

Survival horror - you are stuck in some spooky old place and gremlins continually steal your supplies, knock your lantern over, etc.

[gimymblert]

Shrink the dragon

You start big and powerful but you have been curse by the last princess who was also a fairy. An army attack you but your size keep decreasing, you start from castle size and grow down to mice scale, you were once powerful but now you are powerless, the same attack serve different purpose, fire merely light a puny human, but you can still blow powder.

Old master the beat'm up

You start young and arrogant and with too much power, but as you age you need to trade power for wisdom and learn to control how to make efficient blow and keep your stamina up.

[tesselode]

Now that I think about it, any game that gets more challenging over time is similar to this, but the important difference is that the character's abilities don't get worse, the enemies' abilities get better. If you started limiting the player's power, that would make the player frustrated.

[iffi]

I think one part of Bioshock has you gradually losing the powerups you got throughout the game, but I didn't play far enough to reach that point.

The problem with losing powerups, spells, and such is that, at least in the case of forgetting spells and moves, you're taking away gameplay options and variety instead of adding to it as the game progresses (unless what you're taking away is the maximum health limit or something like that, which just makes the gameplay more challenging without actually limiting it). If you don't do it right, it could easily lead to frustration and boredom. I think a system like this has the most immediate potential in a horror-type game, since it would probably contribute to that feeling of increasing helplessness.

[Seth]

I remember discussing this idea with a friend years ago and I think it could work.  The way I would go with it would be as the player loses his powerups, he has to compensate with finesse.  For instance, taking away the double jump would mean the player has to learn to wall jump well.  I had also thought that maybe the antagonist in the game gets your powers when you lose them, so the final boss is basically what you used to be.  I think that would be a satisfying victory. 

I don't think it would work well if you turn from a cyberninja to Mario, there should still be some effective attacks and things you have that seemed unnecessary when you had all your powerups, but prove their superiority when mastered.  I think a game like this would do well to strive for a theme of 'beauty in simplicity' in its gameplay.

Also, I don't think it would get boring--I typically find myself bored with games after my characters gotten too powerful.  I don't know, I kinda hate the underlying idea of 'you are only as good as your items' that a lot of games have.

[AlexanderOcias]

Exploration of the concept of power loss is something the industry sorely needs in general, to both break stereotypes and gain a larger audiences.

I always felt that Unlimited SaGa dealt with this very elegantly: Sure, you're learning abilities occasionally, and your party grows in size, but every time you leave town, the enemies become stronger, and their increase in power is always larger than yours.
On top of that, with every skill/panel you learn, you must discard an old one, and at times you have no choice but to forget a more powerful panel.
You cannot even return to a hostile area, almost as though cannot remember them.

I don't think I've played anything else that communicated the feeling of being an aging warrior so subtly and effectively (and possibly unintentionally?).

[cynicalsandel]

I really wanted to do something like this with my so called "dream game," but it was more of a story idea rather than a game mechanic. It seems like it would be hard to implement in a productive way through game mechanics. I could easily see a lot of gamers get frustrated at losing power rather than gaining it.

It seems to me like the story of the game (RPGs specifically come to mind) would end with the death (or something similar) of the main character. I mean, if they progressively got weaker, it seems like it would be the next logical step.

Anyways, this post was just rambling on my part. I'd like to see a games with this mechanic. It would be interesting to see a game like this be successful.

[JMickle]

I had an idea where you play as a superhero, (in this case SQUIDMAN), and every time you complete a level, you get to choose a new skill. But each skill has a detremental skill attached to it, for instance you can learn to fly, but your attacks don't stun enemies any more. You can gain an invisibility power, but you don't regenerate health any more.

As long as it is balanced correctly you will find that your character at the end of the game is just as powerful as your character at the start, but much more customized to yourself. YOU will be able to use the character better, meaning you are better at the game, but your character is no stronger than it was at the start.

[Xion]

Ain't there a RL around where you continually age and your stats decrease...made for 7drl I think? I tried it a while ago but don't recall much, except dying quickly and then getting distracted and never trying again...I should give it another whirl.

[s0]

It's called "Passage". 

[Xion]

was that in response to me or the thread in general, because the game I was talking about is called "A Quest Too Far."