What’s your opinion: RPG Elements in a Metroidvania?

What are your opinions on RPG elements in Metroidvania games.

Let me elaborate.

By “Metroidvania”, I mean any game (with any camera perspective) in which you have an open world that slowly becomes more open as you gather new abilities and items.

And by “RPG elements”, I mean any way of increasing the players power through normal gameplay, but not from picking up key items, and not necessary to complete the game.

These elements could be XP or Gold or any currency that may in turn be used to purchase better stats, or have the player simply go up in linear levels.

Here is how I personally see it:

The Pros are that it rewards the player for putting in effort, and not just avoiding enemies. And it means that with iteration it becomes easier and easier for unskilled players, but it never really FEELS like “rubber banding”.

The cons are it removes it as a straight challenge. It feels messy layered on top of the already in place key items. It makes it very easy to break the game and optimize the fun out of it.

 

The real problem is to find a way to make two gating system work together.

Metroidvania tend to be hard gating progression, ie you have to get the key (ability) and find the right door to progress.

Rpg leveling is a soft gating system, in order to progress you have to have the right power, divided by skills, to traverse a challenge.

So that's what jrpg are.

 

This is so true.

But we also know that by it's less admirable name, "Grinding".

I guess a good follow up is how do you allow character progression to be a perk, and not a demand?

Have the player progress from 50% effective to 100% effective?

By the end of the leveling process, the best you'll be is twice as potent?

Of course the obvious downfall there is that the level increments are no longer "chunky". Players like chunky increments.

 

Grinding is just a cultural artefact expected from the genre, not a problem inherent to the system, ultimately the designer is in charge. The equivalent in other progression would be bullet sponge, or the very famous "your level is too god damn long".

All progression can be flatten to a line and be abstracted to ttp (time to progress), and that's simply the length of the progression divided by the times it takes to cross it (or steps if non real time).

Rpg typically hide the progression in many subsystem. So while leveling happen at low frequency, loot happens at higher frequency and smooth the curve. The other way to fake chunkiness is to play with sub progression like ttk, consider an enemy that 11 of health, the player deal 4 damage, he need 3hits to kill the enemy, if he increase to 5 that's still 3 kills, its it's only at 6dmg that it would take 2 hits, that mean even if the number go up, the experience is having aliasing of number. Now this example is only a difference of 1 hits, but this can be abused to determine the thresholds at which different enemy reacts, by moving the aliasing to 1 or more hits.

So it's about managing the power curve and play with the various aliasing of that curve. On top of that add skills and weaknesses to move the curve around around design bounds. A d don't forget the interplay of other stats, a glass canon enemy change priority of target and can reduce ttk if dealt properly.

In a properly design system grind would simply be a guarantee that you would overcome a challenge and not get stucks as a form of implicit dynamic difficulty adjustment where lack of skills is trade off against time. For example a metroidvania thst require skill execution of key to open a door, a player can be stuck indefinitely (hard lock) which could be real problem if that's a disability problem.