I would love to see something new in RPG - Games.

No DPS system. No character levels.
Magic items that realy deserve that name.
(No + 500 dps to shadow damage and such things)

More something like....
Realy special powers... "This sword can cut through stone, iron, diamond etc."

"This ring will give you power. The power to command."

This is how powerful magical artifacts should be designed.

No hp system for monsters and characters.
Just health levels. This way you can make combat quick and lethal.

Spells and much more special abilities should be useable outside of combat.
Combat should be just one little part of an rpg.

DPS will almost always lead to cookie cutter builds.

Character creation and leveling could be handled this way.

Create your character from scratch. With a pool of points and good balanced attributes.
A long list of skills, feats and abilities to choose from.

No classical character levels. You just level up your skills, when you use them and/or training with a trainer.
Later you can create a class/prestigeclass. To gain special class abilities.

And i want choices, many choices that realy matter.
You should be able to become a powerful, noble queen.
The best cook in the entire game world. ^^
The evil *big bad* necromancer queen bitch of doom.

This would be my personal "perfect rpg."

After many years full of heroic adventures. The same old stories about heroes and dark lords.
I have become sick of this cliche.
Fantasy (books, rpgs) can be so much more.

And i hate "choosen one prophecies" with a passion. xD

depends completely on the game and the genre (this is now my copy-paste respons to all your posts)

The novel, Legends & Lattes, has your name on it, calling you to read it. (I just read it over the holidays.)

Ever since Final Fantasy 8, I have not been a fan of enemy leveling in any game that has had it. I like to put the work into becoming a mighty colossus that can lay waste to anything in my path.

I think you are confusing two things here.
What you are talking about is simply the existence of enemies in a level/area/dungeon that are (yet) too strong for the player to defeat (or only with a lot of work, resources and endurance put into it).

It's only reasonable that your four level 2 adventurers aren't up to the task of defeating (e.g.) a band of level 6 wargs.

That's normal. It's used to keep players from wandering into (parts of) areas/dungeons that they are not yet meant to enter (nothing is better suited than a premature player death, to tell you: "you're not good enough for this dungeon, yet!").

What eric5h5 is talking about, are enemies that level up, alongside your adventurers and whenever your adventurers level up.
So, your group of four level 2 adventurers may have a hard time defeating a group of six level 2 wolves...but as soon as your adventurers are at level 3 or 4, you'd expect them to defeat the same group of wolves or any other group of six wolves (relatively) easily, right?

However - if the wolves in the game level up, whenever you level up, and therefore - wherever and whenever in the game you clash with wolves - all wolves automatically match your level - all the level up you do in the game, becomes meaningless.

You could as well try to play through the game with level 1 - 2 adventurers, simply by trying to avoid most, if not all, battles.
Which might pose an interesting challenge, for some players, but is probably not the intention of the devs.

Of course not, you are absolutely right. In certain games levels are absolutely ok, but more often than not the devs try to squeeze role playing aspects even into Tetris these days.
And "progress" keeps people playing. I think there are quite some players that lose interest once they reached max. level, who don't care for the story at all.



Someone up there mentioned another modern aspect: choices.
While they are a good addition to most RPG games, in other games I am so sick of them ...
When Telltale started thet trend, it was something new and fresh, but by now every friggin story must have choices here and choices there, in some games that's the only real "gameplay" aspect. What's so bad about playing through a well written story?
It becomes even worse if every choice leads to a fucked up outcome, when you have no chance to make a "good" choice, never can do anything right.

Well, that is absolutely right. Maybe Elden Ring is a perfect example of a so called 'mechanical game' I haven't played it yet but i have this impression that it is very appreciated by players, all dark souls lookalike games btw, that favour mechanics over anything else?

This reminds me of a facebook group i attended in for a couple of months. at a certain point i tried a minor staff role and suddenly found myself also in a discussion concerning the group's future. One of the idea's presented was the creation of separate pinned posts handling different popular topics for the sake of clarity and ease of handle. I immediately had to think about the garbage receiving stations in our hoods. Nicely separated. Plastics here, Metal here, Electronics here, Batteries please here on the table etc etc etc.

Anyways, i'm enjoying a Tomb Raider (2013) playthrough atm. Wildly entertaining, and while the story is pretty much rubbish. The way it is presented, it feels good enough to qualify as a triple A title. Progress is also neatly done, maybe you are familiar with the title but if not. You don't have levels, you do have equipment progress and a branching out passive skill set to choose from. Equipment progress is nothing more then this amazing mcguiver type of girl that manages to upgrade weapons she took from her opponents, slowly changing them into a professional commando outfit worth of shade. Also no hitbar, which i do enjoy in this title, not in any tittle though but yea. Health bars are also pretty ancient, unless used as an indicator of a battlesuit's health.
After trying Valhalla, Cyberpunk and Horizon zero Dawn this game feels like such a relief. I'm not sure if i will ever purchase another open world rpg (especially in the single point of view or action department) after witnessing these debacles. At least from my point of view. I guess you can only experience so much cringeworthy 'stuff' that apparently open world games suffer from the most.
Control though, that was another nice one ;)

I do indeed prefer most games be divided into levels or stages rather than being open world. While some games have done open world well (and amazingly well), so many games might better be done if they were level-based. It lets the developers focus a lot more, and not worry about as much content padding.

Now there's also that city-builder puzzle game, Tinytopia. A couple of its stages made you have to build your city and make sure it was level. As in, you were building your city on a see-saw/balance-beam and had to make sure to keep it level and balanced (or build really fast), else it'd all come tumbling down and you'd have to restart that stage. Take a look at its launch trailer about 30 seconds in to see this in action.

Then in other builder games, it's important to have the terrain leveling tool, especially when you can only build effectively on flat sections. It's hard to make a game that works well with unlevel, uneven terrain. Rollercoaster Tycoon was notoriously expensive to use the terrain leveling tool!

I'm not a fan of flight sims, but I know you have to keep an eye on your trim and level there, else you'll end up crashing.

I've seen some games use a bubble level as an icon (or part of one) to represent some tools. I can't think of one right now. And making a bubble level is a common demo/tutorial for coding how to use a device's gyro. I guess that could lead to a Tony Hawk-alike mechanic for balancing. Of course, I despise motion controls though, and wouldn't want that personally.

Yes I know TR2013, like it a lot (my favourite from the reboot series). Here the progress is done rather well, also includes some metroid elements (blast doors open). The game is very straight forward, well done.

You mentioned "relief" ... that's a good word. I recently found the time to play a old style point & click adventure and had a much better time doing that than playing all these AAA+ Mega-Openworld games. No grinding, no leveling, just riddles and story.



But I actually also enjoyed Horizon Zero Dawn a lot too, I even gave the NG+ a try where all skills are already learned (except the ones blocked by the storyline) and you just play through the game. That gives the game a whole different experience.

I am not all against games with skill trees character levels and in general. It's just that many of these games really would not need that and it often feels more like work than a game.

What I hated most in Valhalla however was that they spread the story content over 2 years, putting in daily quests, arenas and rogue like content to keep players busy in the meantime. Far Cry 6 had the same problem. Ok, in the latter case it's everyone's own decision to keep doing weekly insurgencie for cosmetics. But let's just assume that one does. These weekly or daily repeatables make one forget the story part of the game.
The older games? Play, finish story, that's it, keep the game in good memory, wait for the next one.
But after repeating the same bs for months all the happy memories of the game are gone.

I wouldn't dare to imply that open world games in general are bad. It is just me. I seem to hit some kind of wall, for several years now, when I do any attempt at an open world game. Maybe it is because of the similarity in concept. Your quest icons, the time you have to spend. Lost story integrity due to the open world format etc etc etc. Also, from younger on, i've been more a strategy head than anything else. I'm pretty used to spending a lot of time exploring and playing, of course in games that can turn out to be pretty complex all in all. I guess in a sense my so-called complaints for open world could be applied to grand strat as a genre too from another ones point of view.

But yea, there is still is a distinct relation between genuine gaming fun and established studio's

I hear that Final Fantasy 8 is really easy if you intentionally keep your level low for the entire game, particularly if you play cards.

Also, Oblivion speedruns are done a t a low level, I believe without even leveling up at all, and the combat aspect ends up being really easy. (Then again, these speedruns also play on the lowest difficulty.)

Tetris has had levels since the beginning. Even back in the NES and Game Boy games, every 10 lines the level would increase by 1, causing blocks to fall faster and line clears to be worth more points. It's a way to prevent the player from just playing forever or never being challenged. (This mechanic dates back to the arcade days, where it's to the operator's interest not to allow a player to play forever on 1 credit.)

Do songs in rhythm games count as levels? Like, not the virtual stage a band might play on, but the songs themselves. Anyone else think of anything you can strip the "level" out of and keep it playable to some degree?

I've definitely heard one (back when I had a roommate that played them) that had all its levels out of whack. Random parts were too loud/too quiet, and it made the song sound terrible.

When it comes to character growth, it's more interesting when a character gets new abilities to play with. Spellcasting classes in Vandal Hearts get new spells after they reach a certain level. All other classes pretty much function the same from beginning to end, although archers do shoot further when promoted to their more advanced forms.