I'm talking about score, not HP. There are shmups (I believe Crimzon Clover is one of them) in which even an inexperienced player could get a score into the millions or even billions. The TVTropes article on this is called "pinball scoring", so it sounds like pinball games may have similarly high scores.

As far as game balance, it does help that score isn't used for that much. You might get extra lives, but typically there's a limit on the number of lives you can get, and even if there were no such limit, one could have the requirements scale exponentially (equivalently, have the number of lives you get scale logarithmically).

Speaking of 64-bit overflow, I remember seeing a video of a later Disgaea game (4 or 5) where players can create custom maps, and the video involved two monsters counter-attacking each other. They were on invincible tiles, so neither killed the other, and each counter did extra damage in proportion to the damage received (IIRC), with the proportion being grater than 1 (to get exponential growth rather than decay), allowing damage to eventually start overflowing a 64-bit integer.

Thing is, 64-bit integers are not enough to handle sustained exponential growth unless the base is rather small.

Even worse would be tetration, which is repeated exponentiation. Even small nnumbers can overflow a double precision float, and bigger numbers lead to amounts that even something like Python's mpmath library can't reasonably handle. And there's also pentation, which is even higher. And if you generalize that to "n-tation", at which point Donald Knuth's up arrow notation becomes handy, you get numbers so big that the English language doesn't have words to describe its size adequately (although I have a feeling that already happened by this point).

There's also Conway chained-arrow notation, which isn't as easy to explain, but can also get you some *really* big numbers.

(For those keeping score, these numbers, I mentioned in the last couple paragraphs are too big to write in scientific notation, even with the exponent also being in scientific notation, and so on.)

Thing is, in battles, damage numbers are a way to see what's going on, and when you take those away, it becomes not so easy.

In Final Fantasy 4, the fact that Meteor (a powerful spell that would normally not appear until the end, but which happens to appear in a mid-game cutscene, as well as on the spell list of a character who doesn't have enough MP to cast it) is shown to deal 9,999 damage in a mid-game cutscene really does emphasize how powerful that plot-critical spell is, especially compared to the much lower numbers seen earlier in the cutscene, or the damage numbers you've been seeing during normal gameplay.

I just remembered an interesting case, in Dragon Quest 6's secret ending. There's a fight between two powerful creatures, and while damage numbers aren't shown, there's one point where an attack is said to deal 9,999 damage. For those familiar with DQ games (particularly 7 and earlier, before the tension mechanic showed up to allow a character to do massive damage after spending turns psyching up), that is an *absurd* amount of damage. The most I've done in DQ6 is a bit over 3,000 damage, and I believe that involved the most powerful recruitable monster with multiple boosts, including the one that is a predecessor to psyching up; in more reasonable situations, attacks, even late game, do only a few hundered at *most*. Even the most powerful non-physical skill (if you don't count the one that takes all MP in a game that doesn't have any powerful MP restoring items) only hits for around 400.

From my experience it's mostly limited to MMORPGs and jRPGs, isn't it?

One example that immediately comes to mind is World of Warcraft in which stat inflation is an effect of peoples' expectations regarding their gear improvements, namely that their gear should be much more powerful with each passing expansion. Unfortunately, to keep things interesting devs have to also increase damage dealt by mobs, threat etc, which results in numbers skyrocketing with each expansion. It became so much of a problem actually that they tried to deflate the numbers in the most recent (or was it one before the most recent) expansion by basically... cutting away the zeros? I think. It's kinda like governments trying to fight hyperinflation by doing this trick.

Another example of game with stat inflation is TES: Skyrim. Here it's completely different though, you can inflate the numbers on your gear yourself by using a trick of crafting a potion which enhances your ability to enchant gear, the fact which you then use to craft gear which enhances the effect of crafted potions, which you then use to craft potion enhancing your enchanting abilities, which you then use to... You get the idea. It's completely in player's discretion though whether they use this trick or not, so it's not really that big of a problem, especially since there are other ways to immerse oneself in the world like survival mods etc.

Anyway, stat inflation is definitely an immersion-breaking problem for me although thankfully it's not that widespread in RPGs I play.

Yeah, except unless its a dictatorship and all the currency is within the country, try telling everyone that in order to counter inflation, everyone (including people abroad that are not even citizens of said nation) should return 50% of their accumulated wealth in the currency and that if everyone does that in an orderly manner (and of course all prices of goods magically adjust to reflect this in order not to discriminate against people who have their wealth more concentrated in cash), it will all be as if nothing happened.

Watch the chaos that would ensue.

My intuition is that governments just can't do this so short of a major power grab by the nation, the value of a nation's currency relative to goods and services can mostly only go one way: down.

My apologies, maybe what I said was a bit vague. What I meant is currency revaluation, for example changing 1,000,000,000 "old dollars" into 1 "new dollar". I'm pretty sure that's basically what the government of my country did in 1989.

I'm definitely no expert though so correct me if I'm wrong.

That also happens in Morrowind, except there it's Fortify Intelligence potions that you use to boost each other exponentially. Of course, this isn't without its issues:
* Reportedly, the game will likely crash if you raise your speed to around 9,000 or so.
* Even without quite that much speed, you'll still find that collision doesn't always work properly, and you can go through walls sometimes, not to mention that controlling yourself becomes tricky.
* Also, these potions can last so long they're effectively permanent, and that can occasionally be a problem for some quests.
* It is possible, in both Morrowind and Skyrim, to trigger an integer overflow via alchemy and get a stat to go into the negatives.

Then again, keep in mind that Morrowind is the game that, early on, gives you some scrolls that will temporarily raise a specific skill by 1,000, in a game where the normal cap is 100. (I recommend saving before using these scrolls, especially since the game gives you some clues about the likely consequence of using such scrolls.)

I believe Zimbabwe, when it was experiencing hyperinflation, did that a few times, and the country *still* had poor trillionaires. Specifically, you could easily have more money, in terms of the number (as opposed to actual value), than the wealthiest person in the world, and still be poor. Of course, this creates logistical problems, like carrying all those trillion dollar bills around and computer systems that weren't designed to handle such large numbers. (And no, floating point is not an option; approximate numerical calculations may be fine in the sciences, but they're are absolutely unacceptable in the field of finance.)

I didn't think about that one, but it does make sense.

Just create a different kind of currency that is worth more and gradually phase out the previous one.

I'm sure it would create various problems we are not foreseeing, but as opposed to the other problem of changing the value of the same currency in-place, it seems surmountable.

I consider it a form of cheating and try not to resort to it, especially since Skyrim isn't that hard of a game and it's definitely possible to play through it without exploits even on hardest difficulty. I can understand the hardcore min/maxers though, as using actual game mechanics to one-hit last boss on Legendary difficulty, who in normal circumstances is supposed to be a big challenge, is definitely bizarrely satisfying. That's really the beauty of Skyrim, the freedom it offers to both hardcore min/maxers and hardcore role-players (or those who are both, if they feel like it). And that's without even starting your first mod which is another matter entirely.

I don't know about Morrowind but I'll definitely give it a try, that is after my current Skyrim playthrough.

You are absolutely right. I wasn't old enough in 1989 to really know what's going on but from the stories I heard people definitely lost savings of their entire lives amid a myriad of other problems. It definitely isn't just a matter of cutting away the zeroes.

Do they really need so much more HP for that though? How about mixing it with high defenses that make them take little damage when they are hit, and evasion that makes it hard to hit them in the first place, and/or regeneration that means that the effective damage is what you manage to deal per unit of time above how much they regenerate?
Just piling more HP is the cheap and easy way out.
Yeah, you're referring to redenomination. Over here it happened in 2005, 1 "new" Leu = 10000 "old" Lei, both being accepted in parallel for a time, and as the old ones got to banks they were withdrawn from circulation and replaced with new ones.

I've heard of double logarithms being used in incremental games.

I happened to find a game called Reinhardt's House, which starts out like a simplified RPG, with stats that are reasonable (except for some of the item prices), but once you get a run going, the numbers really take off. For example, I currently have ee2.5e10057 gold; that's a number whose number of digits has 2.5e10057 digits. A bigint is not enough to handle that; while it could handle such large numbers in theory, the memory requirement for storing such numbers would be higher than the total amount of memory that could be fabricated with all the matter in the universe.

There's another type of player, the one who is more akin to a scientist, who likes to experiment with a game and see how things work; I'd say I am this type of player. A player of this sort may try to get stats up to really high values, if possible, just to see what would happen. For these players, even such things as glitches can be interesting content to seek out rather than things to be avoided at all costs.

Also, don't forget that high stats can have other drawbacks. For example, if your Morrowind character is too strong, the character's weapons will break too quickly. There's also the problems with speed that I mentioned. And, of course, having extremely high intelligence can result in your maximum magicka becoming negative, but if that happens, your intelligence is within an order of magnitude of the point of overflow. While it's possible to reach this point in Morrowind in a reasonable amount of time, it can get tedious.


If the enemy has high defense, it can feel like you're not making much progress.

If the enemy has high evasion, that issue is even worse, as the player will find their attacks randomly missing a lot, and that's just frustrating and rather RNG dependent.

If the enemy's only defensive trait is having high HP, then you still get the feeling that you're making progress with every attack.

So, high HP is probably the best way to make boss fights last long enough while remaining fun for the player.
But then you don't get to see a gain of 1 point anymore (at least once the numbers get to around 2^53 or so).

I checked the link you provided and it seems that in Poland it happened in 1995, not 1989. I'm not sure why I got that mixed up. I even remember people saying prices of stuff they bought in old currency, like referring to 100 złoty purchase as "paying a million".

Now that you mention it, I'm pretty much this type of player, but only on my n-th playthrough on which I experiment as much as I can to experience as much of a game as possible, although still I try to stay in confines of what I believe is what creators intended to be possible. At first playthrough I pretty much always pick the easier, story-friendly difficulty and role-play it as much as the game allows it. For example I never loot everything there's to loot in games like Skyrim, I just limit myself to gold, trinkets etc because that's what I believe actual adventurer would act like, instead of hauling 10 warhammers to the nearest merchant. (Who conveniently happens to be buying every piece of junk imaginable - if only making money was that easy irl)

Which actually brings me to another point, akin to stat inflation, namely what I'd call a gold inflation - when the player carries around millions of gold coins without anything reasonable to spend it on. Thankfully in Elder Scrolls games I can at least spend it on gemstones which I then put all over my house.

I'm pretty sure there's a hard limit on stats in Skyrim too, after which point the game simply breaks, although I never bothered to try to reach it.

There are games where gold is used as a score, rather than as something to spend. Rogue is like this; there's money, but not shops to spend it in, so the more money you find, the better your score.

Reinhardt's House, a small incremental game I found that looks like a simplified RPG at first, and does have a few things to buy, tends to use gold as more of a score as well. Or, rather, it uses gold as a way to showcase the large numbers that the game can handle, with gold scaling to the point of absurdity.

I remember seeing a Skyrim youtube video where the player uses Fortify Restoration potions and gets it to the point where the potion will fortify Restoration by a very large *negative* percentage.

I believe the size of 32-bit integer is the limit. Also it's patched by Unofficial Skyrim Patch. I'm not sure about recent versions but from what I heard Bethesda themselves patched it out officially in one of the most recent versions of the game.

I prefer reasonable stats but, no matter how crazy the numbers are, I believe your eyes get used to it after a while... So it doesn't bother me that much.