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[st33d]

I think Tower of Heaven is the best implementation of this mechanic.

You get crippled more with each level, but it becomes more and more fun.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/544332

[brog]

this story and this thread remind me of each other: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_in_Luck

[J. R. Hill]

I think Tower of Heaven is the best implementation of this mechanic.

You get crippled more with each level, but it becomes more and more fun.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/544332

Oh man, why didn't I think of that sooner?  I had just played it again like 3 weeks ago.  But yeah, that's definitely the gist of what I was thinking.

[st33d]

(Got the Tower of Heaven tune stuck in my head again - it'll take days for it to go again)

Strangely, just as I responded to this thread I found out about KOLM, which I felt was a really good example of the complete opposite of regression:

http://armorgames.com/play/7446/kolm

Starting blind, unable to jump, shoot, walk, etc. I think I mostly enjoyed it because I've never had the opportunity to play through Metroid, so I might have been entertained by a rip-off. It's a pretty good rip-off though. Nice to see Armor Games doing something other than iterations of Shift.

I think a good regression would play like KOLM in reverse.

[Ego_Shiner]

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.

this could make a really interesting beat-em' up. your actual physical strength weakens but your martial arts technique increases, requiring more finesse as the game goes on.

[mirosurabu]

Alexitron made a game called "And Everything Started to Fail" that implements something like that.

Check it here

[snowyowl]

"And everything started to fall", not fail. And you only lose abilities at the very end, for most of the game you're growing in power. It's supposed to be a metaphor for a human life: you start out as a baby, then you grow up, but at the end of your life you're an old man in a wheelchair again, as helpless as a baby (but you have your happy memories now).

For some reason, the thing that stuck in my mind about KOLM is the way the first room had words in it, but you can't see that until you get some functioning eyes. And once you're there, you can't get back again until you have completed most of the game (since you need triple-jumps to get that high).

Tower Of Heaven is the best implementation of this idea.

[Raptor85]

You mentioned survival horror, there's actually a pretty good example there

Eternal Darkness has a chapter where you play as "Anthony" and you're cursed at the beginning, and you're slowly turning into a zombie as the level progresses (getting slower, limping, and visibly getting pale skin then later patches of skin missing)

You're not really losing powerups or anything, just at set points during the chapter the curse "progresses" and you're significantly weaker.

Someone mentioned Bioshock earlier, but I don't think that's a really good example. It's a temporary thing about 2/3 of the way through the game, you only lose your powers for about 5 minutes. (granted that's a significant portion of the game....it only takes about 4 hours to beat). It's actually a pretty easy area, as you're losing your powerups there's not really all that much in the area that can kill you.

[st33d]

That losing your powers thing that you say Bioshock does was already played out in Half Life 1.

It's a classic moment in the game where you get caught by the army and they try to kill you in a James Bond manner. I'm pretty sure all shooters do that these days.

[tsameti]

I love a lot of the points folks are making. Red, St33d

This topic ties closely in with a complaint I have about level progression in a lot of RPG or MMO systems. Often a signal of level progression is receiving progressively more numerically effective incarnations of the same 'power' or skill.

Fireball 1,2,3,etc. They're not hugely different, so you end up using power_max (and eventually power_{max - 1,2,etc} for the sake of conservation of fuel-stat). There's always a power_max-i where i>=n such that you never use the power anymore.

For a game, the perfect power progression is: 1) an average increase in the overall potency and effectiveness of all character actions, and 2) an effective increase in the options and complexity for play.

So! My point is, regression could be an awesome game mechanic if power reduction is paired with an increase in player options. Adding that stealth element, adding that element of anticipating enemy behavior, adding that reliance on environmental advantages, they all serve to make the game more interesting and fun as long as the player is capable of doing more with less.

Now, the question is: who's going to make this game?

[sandcrab]

Some games already do this already, or at least the players can!  As the player starts out, he's overwhelmed with options and different weapons or abilities, and as soon as you start to find one that works, you begin to ignore all those other ones, and become increasingly focused on specific abilities.  In a game where you level up, you might find that you have so much invested in some areas that it's not even worth it to power up those areas that you ignored because 1. it'll take forever and 2. you're doing fine without magic or swords by just punching guys to death in two hits.  Or some games "regress" by giving you something so awesome near the end that you don't ever use anything else because it's just so stupidly powerful.

[gimymblert]

Organic and logic character regression

You start as a character with a lot of potential energy, but as you progress in the game, this energy is being divide and distribute equally between all the skill you get (health too), you got increasing gameplay options but decreasing power. Would be neat with a megaman like collecting progression.

[Ninja Disguise]

I feel like linear regression is really gimmicky. A neat idea once (maybe not even that long), but the novelty of the concept wears thin quickly.

I think the best way to handle it is the strategic balance of progression and regression - empowering you in certain moments and taking away some of that power in others. This is present in survival horror to some degree already, as conserving resources keeps your power level in check. 15 shotgun shells make you a virtual god now, but when you only have 2, you're in a much different situation. The Siren series is an especially good example: only one or two characters have guns and only a handful more can use weapons of any kind. You switch between these characters often, so you never get too comfortable.

[st33d]

This thread gives me a great idea for a shoot em up:

You've got auto fire streaming backwards in to you that makes explosions and then enemies appear. Then then enemies suck up bullets which you have to dodge otherwise you get lives. A full rack of lives and then you're booted to the start screen.

You'd start at the credits / play again screen and get launched into a reverse dying boss that you're sucking bullets out of.

It'd be bloody hard to make playable levels for it without thinking laterally about the challenge, but it's certainly a game I haven't seen before.

Pity I haven't got the time to have a crack at it...

[iffi]

This thread gives me a great idea for a shoot em up:

As in a backwards shmup? I think that's the concept behind Retro/Grade, though it's more of a rhythm game disguised as a shmup.

[starsrift]

IMHO there's a lot of pitfalls with doing this... There are many good reasons why progression is the way to go.
Learning curve. I don't think this needs much explanation... A regressive game inverts it. Careful design could get around this, maybe.
Players like being rewarded. That's generally the motivation to play a game. Being punished(character ability loss) for playing is the opposite. You'd have to compensate with holyshit plot elements or something to keep a reward/playtime curve.
This is kind of the same as the learning curve - but regression cuts player options, and level design options. The game has to be the most complex, most ambitious, most open to possibilities to start with, and then at the end of it, you only have a couple different challenges to put at the player, restricted as they are with their abilities to overcome challenges in general.

So I'd say it's tricky, but not impossible. The first kind of regression game that comes to mind for me is a time-travel game, and regress by locking off times to travel to as the player explores them. This could be quite intricate though, because if you're going to have a meaningful time travel game, it'd be hard not to keep the plot content exponential. For instance, you could have a number of player abilities existing in a quantum state so that the player both has and doesn't have them, until their choice is confirmed in a level that they journey through and it shuts one of the abilities off.

[snowyowl]

You could design a game where although you get more powerful equipment and items later on, you still have to use the base versions from time to time. Perhaps to conserve resources?

Example: You start the game with Fireball 1. Later on, you learn Fireball 2, which deals 3 times the damage but uses 10 times the mana. When fighting a battle against enemies with high attack and low defence, you want to finish them quickly, so you use the spell with the highest damage-per-second/damage-per-turn (depending on what genre you're in) - in this case, Fireball 2. But you also face enemies with low attack and lots of health points, or perhaps large quantities of cannon fodder to weaken you before a boss. In these cases, you want to kill the enemy without running out of mana, so you spam Fireball 1.

There are variations. Perhaps Fireball 3 is even more powerful, but uses an item that can only be gotten from random drops, not bought at the shop - so you generally want to conserve your uses unless you have no other option. Maybe Dark Fireball negatively affects your karma meter, making enemies harder and preventing you from getting the best ending.

But generally, my idea is that gaining a new ability should not make you more powerful - it should make you more versatile.

(In case you're wondering, I was originally thinking of Minecraft and its diamond pickaxes. Sure, they're fast and they can dig through anything, but if you use them when you don't have to, the 1025 uses you get from each one will be gone in minutes, and good luck finding more diamonds. Stone pickaxes give you 65 uses each, but stone supplies are practically infinite, so they're what actually gets the most use.)

[Fallsburg]

IMHO there's a lot of pitfalls with doing this... There are many good reasons why progression is the way to go.
Learning curve. I don't think this needs much explanation... A regressive game inverts it. Careful design could get around this, maybe.
Players like being rewarded. That's generally the motivation to play a game. Being punished(character ability loss) for playing is the opposite. You'd have to compensate with holyshit plot elements or something to keep a reward/playtime curve.
This is kind of the same as the learning curve - but regression cuts player options, and level design options. The game has to be the most complex, most ambitious, most open to possibilities to start with, and then at the end of it, you only have a couple different challenges to put at the player, restricted as they are with their abilities to overcome challenges in general.

So I'd say it's tricky, but not impossible. The first kind of regression game that comes to mind for me is a time-travel game, and regress by locking off times to travel to as the player explores them. This could be quite intricate though, because if you're going to have a meaningful time travel game, it'd be hard not to keep the plot content exponential. For instance, you could have a number of player abilities existing in a quantum state so that the player both has and doesn't have them, until their choice is confirmed in a level that they journey through and it shuts one of the abilities off.

I think you have a lot of this backwards.  Why does this invert the learning curve?  If anything I think it heightens the learning curve.  If I start out powerful, then I have no incentive to learn, but as I lose abilities, things get harder, and I have to adapt and learn so as to be able to survive.  I guess a point could be made that you have to learn how to use ability X when you get it, but I really don't think this inverts (is this even the proper term? reverses seems more applicable) the learning curve.

I also feel that a lot of people on this thread aren't talking about character regression.  There are a lot of "You start out with X, but you lose that and get Y instead".  That isn't regression, it's mutation.  Regression would be "You start out with X and then you lose it. Deal with it." 

[starsrift]

Learning curve. I don't think this needs much explanation... A regressive game inverts it. Careful design could get around this, maybe.

I think you have a lot of this backwards.  Why does this invert the learning curve?

I was wrong. Okay, say you have a meaningful ability suite design - that is, the abilities unlock different puzzles and the like, rather than something like just a big gun that does lots of damage, and does less as you play - that's just increasing the difficulty (by means of not increasing enemy toughness).
So, to crib some abilities, lets say we start the player out with a jump, a double jump, a sword to kill enemies with, a bow to damage enemies and trigger far away buttons, a grappling hook that will attach to special attachment points in the levels, and a bomb that destroys cracked walls.
So in Level 1, we teach the player how to use all of these things. Huge starting curve, right there.
Level 2, we take away the player's bombs. So they can't destroy cracked walls now that impede their progress. That challenge element must now be taken out of Level 2, and all ensuing levels. Since it's a properly unique ability, there's no way to replace it.
Level 3, we take out the grappling hook. Okay, so we can't use that.
Next, the bow. So now we can't put switches over long pits or whatever.
Next, the double jump. Now we have to shorten "challenging" jump distances so that the player can make it. We can taunt the player about what they've lost and put in jumps they could have otherwise made, but we're still down to jumping and swinging the sword.
Next, we take away the sword. So now we have to make sure that the player can avoid all enemies, instead of requiring them to kill some.
That would be an inverted learning curve.

If we did it so that the player could always just get through challenges with a single jump ability, it just means we've given the player meaningless training wheels and are stripping them away as the game goes on, which isn't regressive, it's just a blunt difficulty curve that is much more apparent to the player.

[Fallsburg]

Well, I think maybe we're talking past each other. Or possibly we fundamentally disagree.

Your first example, start out with everything -- things go away with time.  It doesn't have an inverted learning curve.  It has a steep ramp-up, but then it levels out.  The learning curve, at least my understanding of it, would be Knowledge (or Mastery or Ability) vs. Time.  At no point in time is knowledge taken away (at least not by the game. life, booze, head-trauma, time, those can all take away knowlege, but the game can't).  I would argue that it isn't as mind-destroying as you seem to think it is.  The last 3 Metroids, Castlevania:SotN, others I can't think of right now, all start the player out with their full (or nearly full) set of abilities and then strip them away.  Sure the regression comes early and is there to give the player a taste of what they will later be able to do, but it is still a regression and the learning curve isn't life-shattering for the player being given all of the toys at the beginning.

As for your second point, I am not understanding what you mean.  Why isn't it regression? The definition from dictionary.com that I am going by is "reversion to [a] ... less advanced state or form ..."  This would seem to be exactly what your second example is, at least in my opinion.  And I don't quite get what you mean by "blunt difficulty curve" and how it is "more apparent to the player."  I think it is more seamless than most modern difficulty curves which tend to be "You stay the same, enemy gets stronger, game gets harder" or "You get stronger, enemy gets stronger, game stays the same". I think that "You get weaker, enemy stays the same, game gets harder" is a novel difficulty curve that isn't as immersion breaking as "This enemy looks like the previous but is red and takes twice as many hits" or "You are super powerful, but so are these enemies lurking around this surprisingly sleepy looking hamlet" (yeah, I'm looking at you Final Fantasy).

I guess at the end of the day, it really depends on how the game utilizing it would be designed.  The learning curve and difficulty curve of a game are very loosely coupled in my opinion, and low number of abilities doesn't necessarily correlate highly with either.