@@classica1fungusWell yes and no. It's just treating certain groups and individuals as if they're the players and we're the NPCs that exist to just make a more satisfying play experience for the oligarchs.
There are some games where it's hilariously obvious the designers had no idea how the economy was going to work while they were making it. For example, in the original Mass Effect, they deliberately leave your reward for quests incredibly vague ('I will pay you a fortune' and the like) and then just give you a huge sum of credits that scales with your level. Except for a memorable instance on Noveria, where the quest-giver explicitly offers you a few hundred credits reward for doing a quest. A few hundred credits. In a game where, in later levels, you will be earning millions of credits just from basic combat and exploration.
Yea it got ridiculous, especially after selling some of the junk weapons and mods you pick up lol. They did it better in ME2 from what I remember, I was always going broke from ship upgrades and armor etc.
It's even funnier how easy it is to hit the money cap. If you aren't constantly buying new equipment, there are basically no money sinks in ME1. You don't need to constantly buy equipment because you are constantly picking up new gear. I ended up outfitting everyone in the best gear money could buy, with fully upgraded modifications, and still ended the game with money capped. ME2 was kinda better. It has a finite amount of money to spend, but it was a little too tight. You have to be pretty selective about what you want to buy, even if you're coming in with carry-over wealth from an ME1 save. It's worse in the Legendary Edition where the DLC equipment is lumped into stores. ME3 kinda got it right. Money was still kinda limited, but you could waste a little bit on upgrading stuff you might not use forever. Also, the Citadel DLC gave you a chance to farm, so really a non-issue.
i was super aware of this in starfield recently. there are like 3 instances where they mention how much money you directly gain. a lot of the time they vaguely say "a ton of money!" and in reality is like a couple thousand
I see instances like that and I always wonder if that's something that didn't get caught during an editing pass or couldn't be fixed because they ended up accidentally recording the line early. I won't pretend that I think ME1 has a good economy, it clearly doesn't! But I think that specific instance was probably more of a result of oganization troubles than an outright mistake/disinterest on the part of the writers.
@@beautifulbearinatutu4455pretty much, Mass Effect 1 wasn't playable from start to finish until very late in the dev cycle. See Raycevik's video about it. So it's fait to assume that a balance pass on the Economy may not have been on the table
I really liked how Pillars of Eternity did the XP economy by saying "you fill out the info on an enemy type and then there's no more experience to be gained". I don't see it work for money, but when it comes to XP in RPGs, that was a very good system.
It effectively counters grinding for exp which is good. Underrail also has similar system with it's "oddity exp" where you get experience only from doing quests or finding specific items and monster drops
Some of my favorite RPG "quests" revolve around trying to raise enough money for something. I think of Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Dragon Age 2's first act. I really like the context it gives to going out and completing quests and gives you a direct reason for trying to make as much money as possible. Sometimes this obfuscates the game economy problem, sometimes it enhances it. But I always like the narrative and mechanical mixture here.
Dragon Age: Origins also was really difficult to make money in. There's some really good weapons that cost over 100 gold and it's really difficult to get that kind of money, even if you're a rogue and pickpocketing.
@@cmdr.jabozerstorer3968 I agree. Kind of tangential, but I thought the source/sink for health potions was also a really good economy experience on higher difficulties. I was always visiting merchants to bulk buy potions and didn't mind dropping a ton of money on it because it felt like it was actually worth it.
Cash inflation: there is always the option to add "ego based" money sinks. That could be very high priced cosmetics (wardrobe, weapon skins, decorations) or high priced minor boosts (like a 2% max weapon damage upgrade kit) that dont throw off the balancing. Or spending money for a funny or mean ingame event, that does not affect story progression. Players dont need those items to progress, but are incentivized to spend their unused cash on them, so they always have the option to shrink their money pile.
Tim, Dark Souls is the game where leveling up costs the main currency. Leveling up means boosting any attribute by a single point. That costs around 1,500 souls at the start. While doesn't multiply by the level you're leveling out of, it does does get more expensive for every level. More over when you die, you drop all the souls you're carrying on the spot. If you fail, or forget to go back to your bloodstain and pick them back up? Well the next time you die they'll be gone for good. Plus if you're buying a equipment, spells, and/or consumables from a vendor? That costs souls. Repairing equipment at a blacksmith? That costs souls. Repairing equipment with the repair box you bought costs souls too. Upgrading weapons and armor also costs souls and another less common currency on top of that. Anything from titanite shards on the low end for basic upgrades, to chunks of titanite near the top of the standard upgrades. Which you can do with a smithing box, but it still costs souls and resources. Then specific ascensions. If you want to add magic damage, then you need something like blue titanite and you can't do it with a smithing box. You need to find a blacksmith who can do that and bring them a unique item, a specific ember, to unlock that. In Dark Souls one there are 4 different blacksmiths too and they can't take just any ember. Each one has specialties. In Dark Souls 2 they made this easier, there's only one blacksmith that can ascend weapons and he only requires a single ember to do it. Still costs exotic materials to upgrade in those fields. But the point remains. From upgrading equipment, to leveling up, to buying items. All forms of character progression costs souls and those souls are trivially easy to lose. Which means you want to spend your souls as soon as you have enough to make a change, or buy something. It's both elegant and will brutally punish mistakes.
I'm not sure it really counts because Dark Souls unifies currency with XP, and no one bats an eye at the idea of spending XP to level up. It's a much better system than requiring both XP and money to level up, because it really makes it a tradeoff between upgrading your gear vs. upgrading yourself.
@@desertdude540 no one has a problem with it now because we've gone through demon's souls dark souls 1 through 3 bloodborne and ER. But I do remember when dark souls 1 first gained popularity there was a lot of people who didn't like or didn't understand why there was a unified currency for everything that they had to choose between leveling up or buying gear. Obviously I love the games and I think the way they do it makes perfect sense you don't really have to choose because the levels are very cheap early on and more expensive later on whereas the items stay the same price so it kind of self balances.
despite this, a sufficiently high level character in a soul ends up with huge amount of souls and no need/way to spend them. Fact is, in rpg sources are endless, character progression not
I was gonna mention Dragon's Dogma and the reason why they scrapped the Monk class, but you explained it in the video hahaha. Basically, the player character would never have to worry about buying or upgrading weapons. Dragon's Dogma economy is still super exploitable though, and after watching your video, I get a better sense of why it is so. Not a lot of sinks, and the ones there are (like resting) cost practically nothing (especially in Hard Mode, where one wolf can drop you 10,000 gold, but the most expensive inn still costs 500 gold). I remember farming for Discipline Points, going from the starting area to the encampment nearby (two early resting spots), and the cost of resting so enemies would respawn was nothing compared to the amount of gold I was getting on the way.
Dragon's Dogma hard mode hilariously enough makes everything but the very early game way easier. You get far more xp and money throughout the entire game. Anyway Dragon's Dogma did a pretty decent job on economy in that you still have to spend a lot of time acquiring rare items to acquire and upgrade the best equipment.
I didn't know they were ever planning on doing a monk class. That's fascinating. And definitely would go a ways to explaining why the Assassin class felt so much less distinct and fully realized than the others.
I've never thought "Why didnt they fix that" When I finish a game with a lot of money, Im usually a local legend by that point and it feels right to be loaded
This kinda reminds me about how I hate crafting systems (but love minecraft). I find that having crafting in games often feels 'tacked on' and if I specialize in it I just spend the whole game looking through menus to make useless (or wildly overpowered) items that makes the crafting kinda useless (or in the case of overpowered items, makes the questing feel useless). It is by far my most ignored mechanic when I play a videogame. There are a few games that go all in and really focus on the crafting (minecraft, monster hunter etc); and in those games I like the crafting. but I think it goes to what you are saying, since it was such a major part of the game it got a lot of focus (where in most games they are not the focus).
I get what you mean, crafting needs to be integrated into the game's design from the foundations. Then it can be a very interesting part of the game for players to engage in. If it's tacked on too late in the design, it typically ends up in either extreme: pointless or overpowered.
Crafting works well with good survival mechanics, like in Subnautica, but doesn't work well in games without survival mechanics or those with too much loot, like in Vanilla Skyrim on normal difficulty.
Elden Ring (Runes), and the Souls Games (Souls) by Fromsoft combine their money and XP together into one currency. When you level up it's because you spend enough XP to pay for it. On top of that, when you die in those games you drop all your XP on the ground and have to go try to get it back without dying again otherwise it disappears forever (Major Sink), which happens often because the game can be very challenging. You also use XP to upgrade gear (In addition to material components you have to search or grind for), buy things from merchants, and as additional costs to some niche situations or consumable items. I'm really inspired by these games, and I think they have some robust mechanics to learn from. Great video btw, I've been looking for a place I can learn more about game design, and it looks like I found it.
I've always found that survival horror games with rpg elements are better at pressing the player to use their resources, the trade off doesn't feel so bad because most encounters could spell death for the player so buying that extra item doesn't seem so bad. Plus because of the genre starving the player for sources is expected.
this is why strongholds, spaceships and sailing ships are such good things to have in RPGs, cause you can make their upgrades and maint be super expensive!
Arcanum has a big divide in sinks between builds. Magic builds can make do without anything really, mana pots if you want to make things faster, while tech builds have to use ammo like bullets or electric charges. Also, as there is no equipment in the game that increases the power of magic, the magic builds can just wear nice looking town clothes from start to finish. Could probably make similar point about Unarmed in Fallout (and 2), but as both of those games have infinite random encounters to generate infinite gear to sell, money doesn't really matter in either of those games.
Which is why balance should not be connected to money. Let us say the best weapon and armor costs 100 000. And it is easy to get money so that you 30% into the game can get them. This is not optimal but it isnt the end of balance if the best armor and weapon is balanced (for example just 30% better then other gear). Yeah you got nice stuff but you will still need to be level 50 for the endgame. And 30% into the game you are just level 15. You are missing a ton of hp, perks and skills. Economy is ok to be flawed. What cant be OP is perks and hp etc. For example if you got 300 hp 30% into the game and that makes you (like gold above) have infinite health (as enemies just deal 3-4 dmg and you heal about the rate you get damaged) then balance is broken. So to sum up; infinite gold shouldnt be a big issue. Infinite health is a huge problem.
Playing Arcanum right now, so google has recommended me this video (Google sees all) - You are spot on but it made me realise it's the opposite of Runescape's design whereby magic is probably the most expensive form of combat yet the strongest. I think magic reagents make a good gold sink.
In the currencies topic, one especially interesting game in that is Path of Exile, because there's no gold in that game. So the players arrived at an agreement of trading itens for special stones that changes the attribute of equipment. So those stones, which drops from enemies, essentially became the official currency of the game.
Yeah, PoE is very interesting as it's crafting takes out a huge amount of currency which is really good for it's economy. Think Grimro had interesting video about how different tiers of players interact and supply each other with resources, be it basic currency, fragments which go to higher tier players, those than provide uniques, crafted items and other stuff for lower tier players.
@@metagen77 There is because the players find better farms for the materials, and in many seasons the devs add more way to find those materials. So a chaos orb just doesn't have the same purchasing value as before.
Also makes it hard that some players will be completionists, and others will skip every optional piece of content and it should probably be possible to finish either way.
I think the Dark Souls series of games uses the "unavoidable money sink to level up", in addition to the ever present sink of dying before recovering your body. And even with sinks like that people still end up with way too much money in those games. money sinks are tricky because much like real life once you have enough money the sinks stop working.
Start fixing game economy by using economic truths: 1. No amount of money will buy favor from certain people or certain factions 2. The world is full of multiple economies and sometimes they conflict with each other 3. Sometimes too much money is a problem, a liability. 4. In the end money will not stop you from dying. 5. The richest experiences cannot be bought or traded.
This is especially true in open world games. Right now in starfield, I'm basically lugging every bit of loot from encounters to the same vendor, and when he's out of cash I wait 2 in game days on a chair to do it again. Sadly I haven't found many things to spend the money on.
Fallout 3 probably had the best way of counter balancing player wealth. No matter your level, no matter how many caps you have, you just can't buy the best weapons. They're exploration rewards for players who delve into the dungeons. This also applies to bobbleheads and skill books. Those are exploration rewards. And that's actually amazing.
The other great thing about Fallout 3's economy. Unless you're stealing everything not nailed down, and robbing every NPC blind. You're not going to have a lot of caps to your name. And what are you going to spend most of your caps on? Ammo. Ammo scarcity makes Fallout 3 into a survival horror game almost and it's really is a kind of survival mechanic. You might not have hunger, thirst, and sleep bars to keep filled, but... That ammo counter always shows your reserves depleting and replenishing them is going to cost you.
I never managed to spend much money in any of the Fallout games. Barter was all I ever did and so I'd end up with vast oceans of caps. Tens, even hundreds of thousands (or NCR dollars where applicable).
@@natsume-hime2473 At the start of the game? Yes, I remember switching my guns because I was running out of ammo. But sometime in the middle it stops being an issue and there was this machine in one of the DLCs for converting ammo that really made it not a problem. But yes, you really didn't have much caps, which is unlike New Vegas, where casinos are just a gigantic source of money, especially since the game also rewards high luck builds in general.
One of the things you kinda implied but didn't state directly is that the consequences of getting economy wrong in a single-player RPG are fairly benign. If players are rich, so what? There's usually an easy ceiling on how players can convert money into power, so you can just balance around a "powerful" player and shrug your shoulders if they have a backpack full of loot because they've gathered & sold every broom and fork in the world. It's a different beast in multiplayers, especially massively multiplayer games. Balance in general is - as a designer, you don't have the easy out of "let 'em play the way they want so long as they're having fun." Communities in competition with themselves will "optimize the fun out of a game" to pursue what's most profitable/powerful. I don't know if that's a topic you'd be interested in speaking about, but it's one I'd be interested in hearing about.
The problem with balancing money sources and sinks is that if you make it too realistic, you run the risk of just surviving and grinding for money becoming a real drag for the player. So games that aren't explicitly focused on that sort of gameplay tend to go the opposite route just so the player can focus on other things. The player might struggle initially with getting money but when they reach a certain level money just stops being an issue. Often this design is even intentional - it's a part of how the player is rewarded for their efforts and made to feel powerful through them. There are other games explicitly based around constantly having too few resources but then that deliberately becomes a main gameplay mechanic. One of the best examples of such a game is FTL.
I agree. It can be a particular challenge if primary sources are tied to combat and major sinks include healing/repair (or replacement of destroyed items). The actual net gain from combat sources is after subtracting those costs. Players tend to lower those costs over time as they get better at the game, develop more powerful character(s), and possibly obtain items that directly heal/repair at lower cost (or for free). And attempt at combat gain can end up as a cost if player has to flee without reward but still spend to heal/repair. So balancing sources and sinks too tight runs the risk that lots of players feel stuck in early parts of a game.
There's a couple of points you brought up that made me think of FromSoftware titles. The Dark Souls series, Bloodbourne, Sekiro, Elden Ring: All require souls/runes to not only level your character, but purchase items in the world, upgrade gear, obtain spells, etc. Whatsmore, they're also stripped away entirely upon death. (only half from Sekiro if I remember correctly) You're given an opportunity to reclaim them by returning to your corpse, but if things go astray and you die a second time they're gone forever. When you first mentioned the D&D cost for leveling I initially thought it sounded tedious and unnecessary. Shortly after I realised some of my favorite games of all time do just that, and I'd even say having a sink in this fashion contributed greatly to my overall experience. Perhaps there's some merit in the design.
I like how Metro 2033 approached Game Economy. It had two types of ammo; low-quality and military-grade. Military-grade ammunition was rare and did nearly three times the damage but it was also the primary currency. It's been awhile but I recall shops being spread out, so there also wasn't much opportunity for deliberation.
This applied in Metro: Last Light as well. The problem is that it meant you never used military grade ammo. It was too rare and valuable and upgrades bought with it were too necessary. A quicker kill was sadly never worth the loss of your precious military grade ammo. So while a neat idea, it was pretty heavily weighed against the player.
@natsume-hime2473 I did use it in Last light on hard playthrough, cause I ran out of everything else while fighting the boss. Military grade ammo actually saved me back there
This is why merchant classes common in jrpgs are such genius design. Money in games will almost always eventually become an abundant resource that you have no use for. The answer? Just make a class that burns money for combat utility or damage. Keeps money relevant far past the point where its actually useful.
This was very enlightening. As a little comment, back in 2020 when the pandemic started, I went back to WoW and played on a free account. I just wanted to immerse in a world without any form of reminder or stress or having too many things to do. Because of this, the characters I played were varied, but I could only really do so much, which kept my attention focused and realized I was thoroughly enjoying myself. Far more than I remember in previous years. After some tinkering with my characters and always having money issues, I ended up creating a worgen hunter and focused on well, hunting. I gave them skills in skinning and leatherworking and spent a couple of weeks doing that. Found myself having quite a sum of money but unfortunately not a lot to do with it. There is no ammo in the game, which is probably a good thing for most people. And today in retrospective, coming to these videos I think my growing desire to create my own world beyond just the comics, comes from this and similar and recent experiences in game. I think I will start drawing and writing a design document while I listen to your experiences and answers. And go from there.
I love game theory optimization-based dev meta theory and so forth related to digital economies more than anything. Really impressive to hear and learn this type of thing when it makes even a master like you scratch your head about it while presenting the difficult concepts-- and more than anything thank you for not dumbing your talks down! New fan yesterday and will be binge-watching all of your videos before I do anything else! ❤🔥
@15:20 Elden Ring/Dark Souls/Bloodborne: the _only_ component of leveling is also the primary currency of the game (to the point where I would say that its role as "currency" is pretty secondary-it is experience first and you happen to also buy stuff with it).
Hey Tim, can you talk about the Magick vs technology mechanics in Arcanum? I'm making a DND add on inspired by arcanum and I'm not sure on how to implement it in a fun or balanced way. Thanks!
I started writing up this comment for a concept I had, and then I heard the part where you talked about AD&D having you pay for levelling. I'll still post the comment though. "I had this concept that you can only level up a skill by paying for it. Maybe its a trainer, or the materials needed for a ritual. You earn the XP for the skill by using the skill, then when you have capped the XP on the skill, you pay to have the level go up."
I like rpgs that are poorly coded and allow you to int overflow by going into the negatives, I tend to include things like that as a feature but most of my narratives are literally about the player avatar becoming an equivalent to god within their setting One of my all time favorites was the original SMT on SNES which has int overflows absolutely everywhere and is almost impossible to complete without encountering a bug that makes the protagonist wildly overpowered in some way It adds to the narrative, because pretty early on in the game Tokyo is nuked by President Thorman of the US and you get to watch the countdown timer ticking with absolutely no way to stop it, you just have to make amends with the inevitability Or later revisions of Chrono Trigger where the ultimate boss can be killed by healing it because its hp sits near the 16-bit maximum
I've always wondered why more games don't have the highest quality weapons or armor be purchaseable and just have them be prohibitively expensive. I get that the designers want to encourage exploration, but in a lot of games it seems like high tier gear just ends up as random drops, requiring the player to grind the same encounters until they get what they want. I feel like this can also contribute to the economy feeling less broken, actually having something to spend your Scrooge McDuck stash on.
Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 did that and it's very effective. To have a few coppers in your level 1 pocket, go into a shop and see the Dagger of Venom +2 at 12,000 gold...
I think a great way to both add currency sinks and also detail out a setting is putting a diverse amount of sinks in cities. Smithies for armor/weapon repairs and purchasing, general shops, a wizard tower or clergy which sells services such as poison/disease curing, etc. You can add character to these small corners of a large city. You can also add quests around helping the owner which can lower your cost or unlock new items/services. You could also steal from or harm the owner’s business which could prohibit you from that shop. Maybe steal from enough shops in a city and word gets around, raising your price for services you haven’t even interacted with yet.
I really like the straight up gamba sink - like Borderlands or Diablo 2, where the more gold you get, the more you can gamble away at random items that may or may not be good. Lovely video tho, very insightful.
Hi Tim, I'd like to know how you manage damage reduction in your games and how the approach has changed over the years, thank you for these videos which have allowed me to better understand how the worlds that I love visiting so much are created
I've always found the mechanics of armor (and other damage mitigation systems) in games very interesting, yeah.. I'd like to hear about this too. I remember Josh Sawyer touching on this in a presentation he was making, I think it was for Pillars of Eternity, about how % DR has a cap as it starts to pass 90% and starts to approach 100% (diminishing returns work too but then the %DR increases become tiny), whereas subtractive damage reduction can be uncapped just like damage.
I have a question: Do you have any advice for people pitching games and; what's the optimal way of finding someone who would be interested in hearing your game pitch?
If you were ever up for it, I know that I at least would absolutely adore seeing lengthy courses on developing game economies. Or basically any design subject you think would warrant long form discussions like that, really.
I love that youve talked about economy so much lately. I would be one of those people in that hypothetical class, because i love discussing and playing with complex systems. I definitely think more games need to take it seriously, even so far as having someone whose main job is economy. For large-scale RPGs especially, it can significantly impact the player experience, so its importance should not be underestimated.
I would love a Tim Cain course on game economies 😁 How involved were you with Pillars 1 economy? It was surprisingly robust for a game that let you have an infinite stash! I really wish games tried to work in economy and resources more into their questing system. Speaking of which, are you planning a video on how to design a robust quest system? Thank you for the great video Tim! Have a wonderful day!😊
Thanks for this great explanation of game economies. Recently, I have noticed a trend of making games' economies extremely complicated for no apparent reason. I have played games that had as many as a dozen different currencies you needed to keep in mind, besides actual crafting materials, just to build a basic item needed to play. I have quit games that could have been enjoyable, but they made the player jump through so many hoops just to get to the action that it sucked all the fun out of it.
Thank you for thorough answer . Now , I will be less annoyed when i encounter next game with no good economy ;) . I really enjoy your explanation on topic . I think you would have been great university professor .
Great video Mr. Cain, as always but this one in particular. I could notice it must have taken its fair time to prepare, as the subject of economy is quite challenging.
i would love to hear more on balancing economies! i'm a new listener but would definitely like to hear about more details around balancing the experience or analytic techniques. 🙏 thanks for the video
"having lots of money like Scrooge McDuck makes games super easy ..." I don't think this is true for a lot of games. A lot of games have a ceiling for what you can get with your money. Often you can buy somewhat good items with it, but if you want better items you have to run a dungeon, kill a boss, do quests etc. So you still have to engage with the content even with a lot of money. Money often makes the game easier, but it rarely trivializes it.
A lot of games, that let you heal your character in a pause screen during combat are „trivialised“ once you can get a wheelbarrow of chocolate whenever you want. Afterwards people will complain you tedious it is ,to the pause the game constantly to heal, because they can’t be bothered to learn to dodge/block/counteract the attacks
00:47 I'm currently enrolled in a game design course, and one of my classes this semester IS Game Economies! Thank you for the extra lecture, Mr. Tim Cain, sir!
I really appreciate this breakdown of game economy, and the discussion of sources and sinks is a good starting point. I think the sink part of that unfortunately does not take into account the received value from said sink. If developers (which of course are not economists unless you happen to have one on team or hire one explicitly) only think of currency as something to be gained and then spent, they miss the mark on the value received from what is spent. Sinks can easily be considered just another source. My opinion with game economies is that absent a day to day upkeep for just existing (who wants that outside of some survival life sim?) the most effective way to balance it is to force the player to exert effort to participate in the economy itself. In short - if making money and acquiring valuable items happens during normal gameplay using other systems, then to offset that, it needs to be not nearly as valuable as actually pursuing mercantile activities, such as using non-combat skills for trading, and expanding these mechanics so that it takes time to make significant sums of currency which would then augment other aspects of gameplay. One example is Morrowind - the economy is horribly imbalanced, in particular because of alchemy, and certain vendors have restocking alchemy ingredients. Your initial play time could be spent exploiting this to create potions that are worth more than the ingredients themselves, netting a positive income flow. Rinse and repeat this and eventually you have enough money to dump into training skills, making you more effective in combat long before you even set foot on your first quest. It can trivialize, but also be a valid way to enhance your character by being a merchant first, adventurer second. To balance this, restocking inventories would have to take longer (or be eliminated forcing the player to harvest themselves). And more mercantile mechanics would have to be introduced if you wanted to leverage large sums into your character's overall combat proficiency. I think this should be encouraged in more RPGs in general. Since they purport to let you play a role, being a merchant would be a great way to navigate through the game's systems.
Dark Souls has a pay-to-level-up system. The core reason why people dont like systems like the one you described is it requires that 2 progression stats be earned at near the same pace. Short of perfect balancing, you'l always have more XP than money, or more money than XP, which creates (perceived) unnecissary friction. The Souls games fix that by making those 2 resources the same thing. Not that it would work for most games.
I think Yakuza 0 addressed this by making money an important game mechanic, even to the point of buying your skills/leveling up. eventually you need to raise and spend absurd amounts of money to progress the story.
An interesting option in my opinion is to include character needs. More survival based games have this to an extend, food and drink comes to mind first. But also 'self care' could be an option that the player has to care for, something like getting a nice bath, good inn rooms and the like. That be explored in interesting ways i think. For example you could base it on class or perks. A monk or a paladin wouldn't be spending money on brothels or luxurious foods, but maybe they have to always give up wealth to their order? Maybe you have to choose traits at character creation that give special interests you have to fulfill. And depending on how much wealth you have, the more you have to invest to satisfy your desires. For example: Your having a party consisting of a wizard, a paladin and a rogue. After some time adventuring in the wilderness you return to the central city. Once you enter the city, desires kick in: The paladin goes to his orders and has to return 80% of his earnings to them (but receives free provisions, informations etc in return). The rogue has to go to the local inns and brothels and has to, at least spend 30 % of his stuff on alcohol, love interests and gambling. With the option to invest more and get additional information, contacts or even earn some money through gambling. And the wizard wants a luxurious room to sleep and has to invest at least 30% in room, more books and ingredients for his studies. If invested more he might discover some magic spell, increase the potency of known ones or alchemist recipes. Just an idea for the most stereotypical desires. But maybe you could choose more options on character creation, so your wizard also has a gambling problem, or prefers expensive company etc. Maybe after reaching a higher level you need better clothing because you're now a high ranking person and can't just run around in your normal clothing, so silk clothes are expected, and gilding on your armor etc
this channel is really a gold mine for game design information, thank you for all of these videos! Could you make some vids related to multiplayer games like MMORPGs as well?
I am a little disappointed this comment is not one of the most liked. Its the first thing I thought of when he talks about it and asked for commenters to bring up examples. It is easily the biggest and best example of leveling up via currency in modern games
I play most RPGs and open worlds to become a millionaire as quickly as possible. As such I enjoy a broken economic system. The problems start when the game still "thinks" 3000 Bottlecaps is a fortune for my Bottlecap hoarding millionaire. "Your puny rewards do not concern me anymore, begone beggar I don't work for spare change" is a dialogue line that is most sorely missed, much more so than a working economy in the game. Bethesda "Open-Worlds" are the worst offenders in my opinion. Everyone still treats you like a broken and poor street urchin no matter how much bling you actually have, while the game mechanics make it almost impossible to stay poor. So that would be my suggestion to devs: Acknoweldge the wealth of players and you don't need to balance it too much. Those are my two cents, I mean bottle caps, uhm two million Bottlecaps... Anyway, as always thank you for the excellent video Tim!
I wonder how this changes on projects where they design the gameplay around the economy, like ftp titles. Maybe that's why they are rarely fun, and more like compulsion.
Often those systems cap your earnings per day or other unit, which gives devs a ceiling to plan around. And then you get into the scumminess of being able to get X% of what you need to feel satisfied for free and the cash shop is there with the Y% left over right there
That's really what it comes down to with single player RPGs/open world RPGs. If players want to find a way to make fast cash in games, they will. All you can do is try to make it reasonably balanced and let players do their thing.
15:20 The only modern rpg I have seen making you pay for level up is Elex. It's from the guys that made Gothic. You level up with xp, but to increase attributes and skills, which determine everything about your character, you need to pay a trainer.
I can add one better. Dark Souls. You pay souls to level up and every level is one point in an attribute. Plus the cost increases every time you level up. More than that, items as in consumables, weapons, and armor from vendors cost souls. So does upgrading and repairing equipment. Plus you need to spend other resources, like titanite shards, along with souls to upgrade equipment. That includes if you bought a smithing box and a repair box. Plus dying means dropping all of your souls on that spot. Which are lost forever if you fail, or forget to go pick them up before dying again.
@@cmdr.jabozerstorer3968 Pretty sure that game works with those same mechanics. There are things like being able to make alchemic potions to increase your stats permanently, but that generally isn't a thing people do in their first run.
@@natsume-hime2473 That's true, but in the Dark Souls case, xp simply doesn't exist. The currency, souls, is used to buy levels, but there isn't xp as its own thing. It's like buying a new gun in a FPS game, or paying to use the gym to up your strength. So you're never limited on buying attributes because you don't have the level for it. As long you have the money/souls, you can do it.
I remember playing and rpg where you buy spells from vendors. And in it you can max out barter and get infinite money just buying and selling back the spells. It was very amusing and extremely broken.
The problem with the economy is intertwined with the levelling mechanics. It's no coincidence that at the early levels, you're picking up 1 or 2 caps (or copper coins), but at end game? You're picking up hundreds/thousands of caps or gold coins. As you mention at 07:30, it's specifically because of meta gear. Once you have the BiS gear, what else is money for? There should be no best, but better for a specific role. And*equipment degredation. The best weapon might do the most damage, but it should be fragile. The worst weapon might do the least damage (outside of clearly trash items, like a stone club that takes 30 seconds of gameplay to make), but it should have the most durability. I blame the levelling mechanics we still have since the 80's, back when computers weren't able to do real time combat, large levels, complex systems, etc. To compensate for basic and short games, padding it out with a formula grind is how the game gets padded out. And now that computers are much better, that we have dozens of hours of content, active combat, etc.? We still have the exact same RPG design from way back when, which were developed as compromises. MMO's are the worst for this. Especially mature ones like WoW, because the inflation and content invalidation is so blatant and in your face.
Money becomes more valuable the more kinds of things there are to buy, just like IRL. Just using money as a tacit way to upgrade your equipment steps too much on quest rewards. Instead, to keep money relevant late game, it makes more sense to have more consumables for purchase, especially for non-combat application, such as for fast travel, aesthetics, or mini-games.
I would love to hear you talk about the “game development cycle” a lot of your videos reference it but as someone who works in a different sector I have no idea what you make first and what you work on right before launch. Would also like to hear about what your crunch time is like right before launch
Gold box games (adnd) had training halls but IIRC only asked for 1000 g regardless of the level. It hurt only at the very beginning, then 1000g became nothing very quickly
Tim, I was thinking on this topic after also watching your video on emergent gameplay and maybe more rpgs should have at least some rudimentary simulation of supply and demand to determine prices, and it could be abstracted to nodes so that the game doesn't need to necessarily over complicate the needs of every individual npc. basically learn from strategy games like anno, victoria 2, eu4, etc. and this would be a systemic attribute of the design. So you could have a player sell a lot of say, iron swords within a trade node, but once the amount of iron swords within merchant inventories in total within that trade node, the price will drop and the player, at least for a time, gets diminishing returns on selling certain items. you could also build on top of this to dynamically adjust the challenge of the area, so if at the merchants within a trade node the player sells a bunch of high level gear and the buy/sell price goes down, then after a certain amount of time npcs like town guards might start carrying the same high level gear that has recently been sold. Also, in the same way that players in rpgs can often have houses or a home base, it would be cool if the player could own their own store and have a management minigame as part of it, which would become both a sink and a source, and it works on the basis of market simulation mechanics described earlier. This would all make the experience of simply buying and selling goods in the gameworld more dynamic and offer more rp opportunities, even if it doesn't necessarily balance it. You could also have the barter skill of players impact how much immediate or precise data players have about these metrics in the ui (or in management minigame). Another potential way to have a sink is to have some kind of simulation of inflation, like in EU4. Could also even have unique events and quest chains based on predictable player behaviour, like the possibility of players causing hyperinflation or something like that.
I remember back in the day doing an infinite "sell to vendor/buy it all back for less money/repeat" in fallout 1 with sufficient barter skill... and honestly it was a blast! I didn't mind as a player, it gave me the joy of feeling like I was "pulling something off"
Unless its a game designed around extreme difficulty and scarcity/survival - with specific mechanics to counter the hoarder/grinder instincts of an average versed rpg player - any standard rpg-ish single player game with an economy will always have players be super rich at endgame. I dont really see it as a problem unless youre getting too powerful too fast or its really out of whack.
I'd love to take that Course. I think overall understanding each element of a game's design,both in a vacuum and interacting with other systems makes it so,hypothetically,one can close to designing the "Perfectly Imperfect" Game.
It's funny, I can't think of a single game I've played in the last 30 years that had a vendor in it that was actually useful. One that I would just go to and see if there's a weapon or tool or piece of armor that would be worth buying at any price. Vendors are notoriously useless while often being a source of exploitation. But you bring up a really great point in the discussion about difficulty of balancing an economy, which is players hated an unavoidable sink. We already have so many of those in our day to day lives just to stay alive and be able to even play these games. It is what it is, but it sure sucks when you analyze it. So games reminding us of this fact is exactly counter productive to the purpose of playing games.
In Gothic after leveling you got Learning points that you only were able to convert to skills if you found willing teacher that was more skilled than you... and most of them was willing to be willing if you paid them. And the higher level of mastery the more they expect you to pay up. I loved that system. If I were to remake it today I'd probably merge it with the skill system from Starfield where next level not only requires learning points but also practice and in my implementation also finding a proper teacher. Nice sink that prompts you to use skills and explore the world interacting with npcs at the same time.
Have you ever heard of a game that does the 3D spreadsheet mentioned at 7:34 but not with classes? Do you like survival games like Ark: Survival Evolved and The Forest? They hit similar progression feelings for me as RPG's. So before I even finished the video, I was wondering if you would mention weightlessness because in Ark PvP cementing paste is essentially money because it's nearly weightless. (Potentially unrelated but) in The Forest, when my cousin and I would get people trying to join our base we would tell them there's an entrance fee of a cart of sticks since them joining would sink some wealth cause they will need arrows etc but rarely log on again lol.
I am an absolutely outlier, both in your viewership (I think), and as a ttrpg enjoyer (which also i think makes me a bit of minority here as Im not a video game designer). As a minority in ttrpgs Im 41 and still play classic D&D and have not really enjoyed modern (AD&D 3e and on) versions of the system myself. As a mater of fact not only do I not mind the training cost as a player, but as a DM I not only still use training costs to this day but also charge players a tax each year. The tax is 3% of your total XP by years end - 1% goes to the gods, 1% to the guilds and 1% to the king - however I have also made it possible for players to avoid at least 1/3 of these taxes by creating the correct type of domain/stronghold. Love your channel and I really enjoy allot of the games you birthed into this wonderfully boring world we live in Mr. Cain!
Some thoughts about one of your last points: although I understand the balancing reasons, I always HATED the buy/sell ratio caps imposed on the players to prevent trading profits. Sure, these things could be abused, but as a counterpoint so too could a lot of sources of money. The caravanning trader fantasy is a legit archetype I always want to be but I feel like games unfairly go out of their way to penalize me to prevent it. In fact, I wish games would actually lean in to that path with skills/perks that embrace trading as a full build. The same way a fighter and a wizard may use their strength and magic to solve problems, I always thought it'd be interesting to let some trader class use their money as solution (access to the best items, hirelings, bribery, etc.). But for every reason you mentioned in the video, it's something that probably won't ever work in practice. One way or the other the economy won't ever function in the way I want to imagine it to let this fantasy happen in a balanced way ):
Main reason it doesn't work is you don't have to actually make the journey. For any game with fast travel and low/no fuel costs and traders decently accessible, buy low, sell high is a free money button with extra steps There's space trader and pirate games that limit fast travel to avoid this, and there's Death Stranding that goes all in on making walking up a hill a chore. Basically make getting the stuff from here to there an interesting challenge to justify the pay-off
This is honestly very educating. Am playing The Outer Worlds and am walking around with roughly 14 000 rounds of ammunition, as I tend to disfavour fully automatic weapons. With the hunting rifle I kill marauders in 1-2 rounds, and there's ammo everywhere.
Hey Tim, first, it's a pleasure to have you share your experience with us. Second, have you ever considered a dynamic sources/drains system? By that I mean a system that tracks the amount of currency a player has at any moment and manages some of the sources and sinks based on that value. Do you think it could help solve the problem for the average player?
the issue here is that players are quite happy to work now in order to gain money for easier later jobs - if you make the stuff scale, people will just not play the game because what's the point - you see the same issue irl with people refusing paid work because "that would put them into the next tax bracket", whether this is an actual existing thing or something they'll have to live with until they fill in their tax return next financial year
@@pnutz_2 Thanks for the feedback peanut! You being up an interesting point. Though taxes in my country work differently than in the US, so I can't relate to the example I'm afraid. But I believe I understand your point, this system could feel punishing to the player and many won't find it fun. I feel there might still be something here, the system can't just inflate prices at vendors as that will feel unfair and, worse, not fun. But there might be some other ways to control for player wealth. Limiting certain item drops, lowering item drop rates in a minor way. If the player has a lot of healing potions, increase some of the enemies levels/ other ways to endanger their hp. Has a lot of ammo that they could use to sell? Increase the amounts of enemies. Difficulty is a sink, we can use it like that. And even if players catch on, they're now encouraged to use up rare ammo/ automatic weapons, to stop picking up useless items to sell. And to stop hording money. It would definitely be questionable, but I feel like there might be something there yet, with the right implementation.
My general playstyle is "loot goblin". I'm a collector and completionist who hoovers up everything, then I spend an hour with inventory management and selling sprees.
I find taking the exact opposite makes games more engaging; they tend to ask more of the player in terms of skill, and feel more consequential. I'm kinda finding I increasingly resent loot in games these days... It's so common to find games where you quickly end up not really caring about what you're finding. And so you stop picking up crap just to sell, and even stop picking up ammo or heals. And then you realise locations are often just thinly disguised distribution points - sources for player wealth. And that's just not interesting when you break it down to that. I'm really enjoying Starfield, but I'm already at the stage of ignoring the vast majority of loot because barely any of it is interesting. Cyberpunk 2.0 at least pretty much axed heals as a pick-up. Seems to be a perk related cooldown. Not ideal, but better than trying to limit yourself to five or so charges to maintain challenge and reward.
the easiest sinks i can think of if very expensive items. worked like a charm in infinity games. doesn't matter if you made 3k, 10k or 100k - you'll be able to buy 3-5 items that are better than what you have tops. and that's with 50 or so slots to fill.
This is why I like vanguards diplomacy arc so people who didn't want to fight could still acquire gear despite not being able to kill and not just be limited to craftiny
@0:45 I experienced the opposite, Tim, GTA 3 has that game mechanic from previous games that it is easy to gain huge amounts of money ingame without almost nothing to buy by destroying things. In GTA 2 money represented damage and you need to incur a certain amount to get to the next level. @3:06 In GTA 3 IMHO it was relatively easy to fix because the gun shops were already pretty restrictive with the amount of ammo you could buy. @4:10 It is not the job of the government to control the economy anyway. @18:25 Yes, the infamous dupe glitch in Fallout 4 where you can save 1000 of hours grinding for money and resources that apparently is way too time consuming to fix for Bethesda. @18:53 Yes, but there are time and resource constraints.
The system where you have to pay to level up actually sounds great. You would have to save up and plan ahead. Unfortunately I think games are too focused on casuals to implement that. Not making a judgment on that either way by the way. Great video thank you :)
A big factor that you can't really fully balance a game economy is also that every player is different and plays differently. Some people mostly only play the main story and the economy should make it possible to do that. On the other hand, there are players who explore every inch of the map, pick up every single item, finish every single side quest, pickpocket every NPC, minmax charisma mechanics with vendors etc. Impossible to balance.
I think the gold that a player has to spend when gaining a level in DnD partly covered living expenses, along with guild fees and training fees. Surprisingly, the genre of tabletop RPG systems that seem to take into account living expenses the most are those with cyberpunk settings. For example, Shadowrun covers monthly/annual living costs for different qualities of lifestyles (minimal, average, comfortable, extravagant etc), and costs are also modified for different metatype races. E.g. dwarves and trolls end up paying a bit more in daily life, whether they're shadowrunning adventurers or normal corpo civilians, because clothing, equipment and appliances sized for them cost more, due to them being a relative minority. If you're running dangerous jobs against highly secured facilities for high profile clients, you should be making enough money to easily cover the monthly expenses of a normal lifestyle, but it's still a consideration. Economies in CRPGs will always be broken as long as there's limitlessly renewable sources of wealth generation, and the characters have no living expenses. If you throttle the rate of wealth generation, it simply makes it "grindier", so I think it's better to just let players go nuts with their money.
Also mention of Starfield it has multi sinks there is some are from this person which is end game and after you complete the game. Most the time you be spending it on ship building
One of the major rpg (tabletop, pen&paper one) has something along those lines: in Shadowrun, you can spend xp to get money, and vice versa. Depending on the editions it was a core or an optional rule, in the main book or a companion sourcebook, it varies. And while I personally don't like this level of gamification, it was from anecdotal experience (including a LOT of time spent on Dumpshock) a very popular option. The goal of the rule is to help GM balance reward (by making it simpler to do, less gotcha, less pitfalls), and to tackle the fact that various builds have very different needs. Some will need huge amounts of money to buy, upgrade and maintain cyberware or drones or state of the art computers, while others don't need a lot of equipment. It's possible to add a narrative twist to that (the best GM did in Shadowrun, but at least up to 4th edition there wasn't any meaningful guidelines or help from sourcebooks on that, at best a couple of paragraphs with example) mechanic to make it palatable to immersion fascists like myself: things like spending time and effort and social debt (i.e. xp) to get extra money or discounts, or spending money on special training equipment or personal trainer (i.e. spend money to get xp). It's not perfect and can fall apart very fast on tabletop ("I spent millions to get this unique rare magic tome to improve my magic skill... why can't I lend it to my teammates, or just re-sell it?") but in a more constraint and scripted game, i.e. a videogame, it could work.
Another tabletop rpg has a totally different take on money (and most things), it's FATE (specifically FATE Core). In FATE, almost everything is handled by game mechanics, and almost all actions are handled by a skill. Twist being, there is a Resource (meaning money) skill. And a Contact skill. And so on. So money, or contact/political power, is used EXACTLY like any other skill, with exactly the same mechanics and rules. You have this obstacle of guards stopping you entering the temple? Well you can fight them with the Fight skill, or get past them with the Stealth skill, or bribe them with the Resource skill, or get an official laissez-passer with the Contact skill. THe base difficulty is same for all, sale dice, same rules. And there is no equipment in the traditional sense. The game assume you have what you need to use your skills. If you use the Fight skill, it doesn't matter gameplay wise that you do it with bare hands kung fu, a chainsaw, a battleaxe, it's all the same (unless it's not the same and it's special, meaning it's narratively significant, and FATE has strict rules about that and how to manage it).
My all-time favorite game economy has got to be from OSRS. Player-driven, and scales nicely with character progression. Prices on items inflate exponentially as their utility increases, but these inflations tend to loosely align with the sources of wealth players have access to at the moments those items are considered worth picking up. Early game items are rarely valued at over 200k, mid-game items are rarely valued at over 20 million, and absolute best in slot end game gear is usually placed around the 1 billion mark give or take a few hundred million. When you're in the early game, you don't have access to the same reliable money-makers mid and end game players do. So it might feel like a lot for them to drop a couple million on gear upgrades to progress. They'll tend to feel the value for the price. Same goes for mid-game items. Since it costs a considerable amount to acquire these sets, the value isn't lost on players when they finally acquire them. And the end game best in slot items are so wildly expensive that it takes players quite a while to purchase them, but they have access to content that has a chance at the golden ticket. So it isn't a total pipe-dream for them to eventually obtain an item valued at 1.5 billion, when they're semi-routinely getting item drops valued at 200 million and up. The upgrade path is always closely tied to the means of the player all the way through the player's journey. And yes with it being an MMO they've got the issue of inflation and currency flooding the market because the items keep dropping so long as people keep playing the content, but they're attempting to curb it with a small tax system on selling items. 1% of the market value of the item is taxed from the seller, and sent directly to mods who use the tax money to buy items and delete them from the game, sinking both currency and items themselves.
Paying to level up reminds me of mmorpgs like Maplestory where leveling is free and you gain stats per level, but a majority of what makes your damage numbers go up is buying the next gear set every 5 or so levels. So you effectively pay to level up.
Problem with trying to balance an economy is you don't know how people are to play the game. Some people just run through the game doing quest and looting enemies. Other pickup everything that is not nailed down. And yet others rob all the stores blind. So some players might be tons of cash while others have just enough. It's like complaining about over leveling for the enemies when someone does every bit of side content to get the most XP. Where as some games players complain they have to do side grind because the main story content levels up to fast and they are under leveled.
The piranha bytes game also have you paid to level up and armors cost very much, you have to really know how to play to have a lot of gold in those games, the sources of gold are also mostly limited to quest which cant be farmed and monsters dont respawn. Kingdom come deliverance also is quite good at economy if you dont steal,if you dont stay on top of repairs of your armor,using repair kits( that cost significant amount of money) you basically pay for repair the full value of the item.
14:13 i'd Say it's not necessarely a bad thing, as for some players (usually those Who are Willing to invest time+effort to find loopholes in the economy system) finding loopholes and abusing them Is an enjoyable experience. In my opinion, assuming that is true for some players, the goals would be to make the process of finding loopholes in the economy system fun and rewarding(this should fixing itself by design, meaning the reward itself is the pride of being able to find the loophole and now being able to abusing it, being experienced as something scarce thst only smartest players can have), the fun stands in making so that Is not too easy(boring) to find loopholes giving no pride in player as the accomplishment Was not that much of an accomplishment + now they cannot experience the overall economy system that Was designed for the game. All this while trying to avoid players who do not enjoy this "feature" to experience it. So while lowering complexity of the economy system can solve this "problem" i think It Is worth considering tweaking It with some effort and time investment ti make It "an economy system worth to be exploited". Hope this made sense, what do you guys think? Why and when would this approach not work? What are your points of view on the topic?
Blades In The Dark has the party spend valuable money on rising in tier. It doesn't feel as bad because there are a lot of reasons that it makes sense to spend money like that.
I like how the Mount and Blade games approach economy through using real life economic principles. For example, towns generate wealth according to the resources gathered by nearby villagers, the movement of merchant caravans trading between towns, and the presence of bandits. Items that are scarce in one region are expensive, and those that are common are cheap. A pure RPG is a different beast, but I like this idea of using the principles of scarcity, supply and demand in this way to approximate a realistic economy. I think inflation also definitely needs to be incorporated, since in real life, increasing the supply of money leads to a dilution of the value of money. Perhaps if you keep track of the total quantity of gold in the game and calculate buy and sell prices based on the percentage of total items that are of the same class of item. I also think items in drops should come from a finite pool and not be infinite, as that's a huge source of imbalance imho.
I wish having way too much money was a problem I had in real life...
The USA devs added too many sinks... oops
Gotta get out there and slay those dragons brother
@@classica1fungusWell yes and no. It's just treating certain groups and individuals as if they're the players and we're the NPCs that exist to just make a more satisfying play experience for the oligarchs.
Zimbabweans definitely have too much money 362 ZWD=1 USD
I heard they're planning a hot fix in the future, but I think that may have been delayed.
There are some games where it's hilariously obvious the designers had no idea how the economy was going to work while they were making it. For example, in the original Mass Effect, they deliberately leave your reward for quests incredibly vague ('I will pay you a fortune' and the like) and then just give you a huge sum of credits that scales with your level.
Except for a memorable instance on Noveria, where the quest-giver explicitly offers you a few hundred credits reward for doing a quest.
A few hundred credits. In a game where, in later levels, you will be earning millions of credits just from basic combat and exploration.
Yea it got ridiculous, especially after selling some of the junk weapons and mods you pick up lol. They did it better in ME2 from what I remember, I was always going broke from ship upgrades and armor etc.
It's even funnier how easy it is to hit the money cap. If you aren't constantly buying new equipment, there are basically no money sinks in ME1. You don't need to constantly buy equipment because you are constantly picking up new gear. I ended up outfitting everyone in the best gear money could buy, with fully upgraded modifications, and still ended the game with money capped.
ME2 was kinda better. It has a finite amount of money to spend, but it was a little too tight. You have to be pretty selective about what you want to buy, even if you're coming in with carry-over wealth from an ME1 save. It's worse in the Legendary Edition where the DLC equipment is lumped into stores.
ME3 kinda got it right. Money was still kinda limited, but you could waste a little bit on upgrading stuff you might not use forever. Also, the Citadel DLC gave you a chance to farm, so really a non-issue.
i was super aware of this in starfield recently. there are like 3 instances where they mention how much money you directly gain. a lot of the time they vaguely say "a ton of money!" and in reality is like a couple thousand
I see instances like that and I always wonder if that's something that didn't get caught during an editing pass or couldn't be fixed because they ended up accidentally recording the line early. I won't pretend that I think ME1 has a good economy, it clearly doesn't! But I think that specific instance was probably more of a result of oganization troubles than an outright mistake/disinterest on the part of the writers.
@@beautifulbearinatutu4455pretty much, Mass Effect 1 wasn't playable from start to finish until very late in the dev cycle. See Raycevik's video about it.
So it's fait to assume that a balance pass on the Economy may not have been on the table
I really liked how Pillars of Eternity did the XP economy by saying "you fill out the info on an enemy type and then there's no more experience to be gained". I don't see it work for money, but when it comes to XP in RPGs, that was a very good system.
It effectively counters grinding for exp which is good. Underrail also has similar system with it's "oddity exp" where you get experience only from doing quests or finding specific items and monster drops
I really liked the first Gothic because economy and setting (magic ore in a jail colony) worked so well together.
Some of my favorite RPG "quests" revolve around trying to raise enough money for something. I think of Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Dragon Age 2's first act. I really like the context it gives to going out and completing quests and gives you a direct reason for trying to make as much money as possible.
Sometimes this obfuscates the game economy problem, sometimes it enhances it. But I always like the narrative and mechanical mixture here.
Dragon Age: Origins also was really difficult to make money in. There's some really good weapons that cost over 100 gold and it's really difficult to get that kind of money, even if you're a rogue and pickpocketing.
@@cmdr.jabozerstorer3968 I agree. Kind of tangential, but I thought the source/sink for health potions was also a really good economy experience on higher difficulties. I was always visiting merchants to bulk buy potions and didn't mind dropping a ton of money on it because it felt like it was actually worth it.
Right, this worked for instance in Baldur's Gate 2.
Cash inflation: there is always the option to add "ego based" money sinks. That could be very high priced cosmetics (wardrobe, weapon skins, decorations) or high priced minor boosts (like a 2% max weapon damage upgrade kit) that dont throw off the balancing. Or spending money for a funny or mean ingame event, that does not affect story progression. Players dont need those items to progress, but are incentivized to spend their unused cash on them, so they always have the option to shrink their money pile.
Tim, Dark Souls is the game where leveling up costs the main currency. Leveling up means boosting any attribute by a single point. That costs around 1,500 souls at the start. While doesn't multiply by the level you're leveling out of, it does does get more expensive for every level. More over when you die, you drop all the souls you're carrying on the spot. If you fail, or forget to go back to your bloodstain and pick them back up? Well the next time you die they'll be gone for good. Plus if you're buying a equipment, spells, and/or consumables from a vendor? That costs souls. Repairing equipment at a blacksmith? That costs souls. Repairing equipment with the repair box you bought costs souls too. Upgrading weapons and armor also costs souls and another less common currency on top of that. Anything from titanite shards on the low end for basic upgrades, to chunks of titanite near the top of the standard upgrades. Which you can do with a smithing box, but it still costs souls and resources. Then specific ascensions. If you want to add magic damage, then you need something like blue titanite and you can't do it with a smithing box. You need to find a blacksmith who can do that and bring them a unique item, a specific ember, to unlock that. In Dark Souls one there are 4 different blacksmiths too and they can't take just any ember. Each one has specialties. In Dark Souls 2 they made this easier, there's only one blacksmith that can ascend weapons and he only requires a single ember to do it. Still costs exotic materials to upgrade in those fields.
But the point remains. From upgrading equipment, to leveling up, to buying items. All forms of character progression costs souls and those souls are trivially easy to lose. Which means you want to spend your souls as soon as you have enough to make a change, or buy something. It's both elegant and will brutally punish mistakes.
I'm not sure it really counts because Dark Souls unifies currency with XP, and no one bats an eye at the idea of spending XP to level up. It's a much better system than requiring both XP and money to level up, because it really makes it a tradeoff between upgrading your gear vs. upgrading yourself.
@@desertdude540 no one has a problem with it now because we've gone through demon's souls dark souls 1 through 3 bloodborne and ER. But I do remember when dark souls 1 first gained popularity there was a lot of people who didn't like or didn't understand why there was a unified currency for everything that they had to choose between leveling up or buying gear. Obviously I love the games and I think the way they do it makes perfect sense you don't really have to choose because the levels are very cheap early on and more expensive later on whereas the items stay the same price so it kind of self balances.
despite this, a sufficiently high level character in a soul ends up with huge amount of souls and no need/way to spend them. Fact is, in rpg sources are endless, character progression not
I was gonna mention Dragon's Dogma and the reason why they scrapped the Monk class, but you explained it in the video hahaha. Basically, the player character would never have to worry about buying or upgrading weapons.
Dragon's Dogma economy is still super exploitable though, and after watching your video, I get a better sense of why it is so. Not a lot of sinks, and the ones there are (like resting) cost practically nothing (especially in Hard Mode, where one wolf can drop you 10,000 gold, but the most expensive inn still costs 500 gold). I remember farming for Discipline Points, going from the starting area to the encampment nearby (two early resting spots), and the cost of resting so enemies would respawn was nothing compared to the amount of gold I was getting on the way.
Dragon's Dogma hard mode hilariously enough makes everything but the very early game way easier. You get far more xp and money throughout the entire game. Anyway Dragon's Dogma did a pretty decent job on economy in that you still have to spend a lot of time acquiring rare items to acquire and upgrade the best equipment.
I didn't know they were ever planning on doing a monk class. That's fascinating. And definitely would go a ways to explaining why the Assassin class felt so much less distinct and fully realized than the others.
I liked DD because the money wasn't really that consequential, skills were more important
I've never thought "Why didnt they fix that" When I finish a game with a lot of money, Im usually a local legend by that point and it feels right to be loaded
This kinda reminds me about how I hate crafting systems (but love minecraft). I find that having crafting in games often feels 'tacked on' and if I specialize in it I just spend the whole game looking through menus to make useless (or wildly overpowered) items that makes the crafting kinda useless (or in the case of overpowered items, makes the questing feel useless). It is by far my most ignored mechanic when I play a videogame.
There are a few games that go all in and really focus on the crafting (minecraft, monster hunter etc); and in those games I like the crafting. but I think it goes to what you are saying, since it was such a major part of the game it got a lot of focus (where in most games they are not the focus).
I get what you mean, crafting needs to be integrated into the game's design from the foundations. Then it can be a very interesting part of the game for players to engage in.
If it's tacked on too late in the design, it typically ends up in either extreme: pointless or overpowered.
Mmos like wow and eve online usually have crafting to complement what you have or can't loot, you still need to hunt for blueprints and recipes
Crafting works well with good survival mechanics, like in Subnautica, but doesn't work well in games without survival mechanics or those with too much loot, like in Vanilla Skyrim on normal difficulty.
Elden Ring (Runes), and the Souls Games (Souls) by Fromsoft combine their money and XP together into one currency. When you level up it's because you spend enough XP to pay for it. On top of that, when you die in those games you drop all your XP on the ground and have to go try to get it back without dying again otherwise it disappears forever (Major Sink), which happens often because the game can be very challenging. You also use XP to upgrade gear (In addition to material components you have to search or grind for), buy things from merchants, and as additional costs to some niche situations or consumable items. I'm really inspired by these games, and I think they have some robust mechanics to learn from. Great video btw, I've been looking for a place I can learn more about game design, and it looks like I found it.
I've always found that survival horror games with rpg elements are better at pressing the player to use their resources, the trade off doesn't feel so bad because most encounters could spell death for the player so buying that extra item doesn't seem so bad. Plus because of the genre starving the player for sources is expected.
Re4 was great at this
this is why strongholds, spaceships and sailing ships are such good things to have in RPGs, cause you can make their upgrades and maint be super expensive!
Arcanum has a big divide in sinks between builds. Magic builds can make do without anything really, mana pots if you want to make things faster, while tech builds have to use ammo like bullets or electric charges. Also, as there is no equipment in the game that increases the power of magic, the magic builds can just wear nice looking town clothes from start to finish.
Could probably make similar point about Unarmed in Fallout (and 2), but as both of those games have infinite random encounters to generate infinite gear to sell, money doesn't really matter in either of those games.
Which is why balance should not be connected to money. Let us say the best weapon and armor costs 100 000. And it is easy to get money so that you 30% into the game can get them. This is not optimal but it isnt the end of balance if the best armor and weapon is balanced (for example just 30% better then other gear). Yeah you got nice stuff but you will still need to be level 50 for the endgame. And 30% into the game you are just level 15. You are missing a ton of hp, perks and skills.
Economy is ok to be flawed. What cant be OP is perks and hp etc. For example if you got 300 hp 30% into the game and that makes you (like gold above) have infinite health (as enemies just deal 3-4 dmg and you heal about the rate you get damaged) then balance is broken.
So to sum up; infinite gold shouldnt be a big issue. Infinite health is a huge problem.
Arcanum has Ristezze so whatever :)
playing a non-caster in wow with a huge repair bill every time you finished a dungeon vs the mage...
Playing Arcanum right now, so google has recommended me this video (Google sees all) - You are spot on but it made me realise it's the opposite of Runescape's design whereby magic is probably the most expensive form of combat yet the strongest. I think magic reagents make a good gold sink.
I found this channel yesterday, can't stop watching, pure gold, thank you for sharing your experiences with us
As an economy designer, I love this summary. Great overview of the chaos of game economy. 😂
In the currencies topic, one especially interesting game in that is Path of Exile, because there's no gold in that game.
So the players arrived at an agreement of trading itens for special stones that changes the attribute of equipment. So those stones, which drops from enemies, essentially became the official currency of the game.
Yeah, PoE is very interesting as it's crafting takes out a huge amount of currency which is really good for it's economy. Think Grimro had interesting video about how different tiers of players interact and supply each other with resources, be it basic currency, fragments which go to higher tier players, those than provide uniques, crafted items and other stuff for lower tier players.
Totally agree
Was just going to comment the same. Near perfect system. Not a fan of arbitrary gold piles.
So, is there inflation?
@@metagen77 There is because the players find better farms for the materials, and in many seasons the devs add more way to find those materials.
So a chaos orb just doesn't have the same purchasing value as before.
Also makes it hard that some players will be completionists, and others will skip every optional piece of content and it should probably be possible to finish either way.
I think the Dark Souls series of games uses the "unavoidable money sink to level up", in addition to the ever present sink of dying before recovering your body. And even with sinks like that people still end up with way too much money in those games. money sinks are tricky because much like real life once you have enough money the sinks stop working.
Your channel is like a course on what makes a good RPG game.
Start fixing game economy by using economic truths:
1. No amount of money will buy favor from certain people or certain factions
2. The world is full of multiple economies and sometimes they conflict with each other
3. Sometimes too much money is a problem, a liability.
4. In the end money will not stop you from dying.
5. The richest experiences cannot be bought or traded.
This is especially true in open world games.
Right now in starfield, I'm basically lugging every bit of loot from encounters to the same vendor, and when he's out of cash I wait 2 in game days on a chair to do it again.
Sadly I haven't found many things to spend the money on.
Fallout 3 probably had the best way of counter balancing player wealth. No matter your level, no matter how many caps you have, you just can't buy the best weapons. They're exploration rewards for players who delve into the dungeons. This also applies to bobbleheads and skill books. Those are exploration rewards. And that's actually amazing.
The other great thing about Fallout 3's economy. Unless you're stealing everything not nailed down, and robbing every NPC blind. You're not going to have a lot of caps to your name. And what are you going to spend most of your caps on? Ammo. Ammo scarcity makes Fallout 3 into a survival horror game almost and it's really is a kind of survival mechanic. You might not have hunger, thirst, and sleep bars to keep filled, but... That ammo counter always shows your reserves depleting and replenishing them is going to cost you.
I never managed to spend much money in any of the Fallout games. Barter was all I ever did and so I'd end up with vast oceans of caps. Tens, even hundreds of thousands (or NCR dollars where applicable).
@@Flamekebab Well I guess if you're avoiding combat, that can happen.
@@natsume-hime2473 avoiding combat? Of course not - enemies have the items I need to barter with. Delicious, tradable items...
@@natsume-hime2473 At the start of the game? Yes, I remember switching my guns because I was running out of ammo. But sometime in the middle it stops being an issue and there was this machine in one of the DLCs for converting ammo that really made it not a problem.
But yes, you really didn't have much caps, which is unlike New Vegas, where casinos are just a gigantic source of money, especially since the game also rewards high luck builds in general.
One of the things you kinda implied but didn't state directly is that the consequences of getting economy wrong in a single-player RPG are fairly benign. If players are rich, so what? There's usually an easy ceiling on how players can convert money into power, so you can just balance around a "powerful" player and shrug your shoulders if they have a backpack full of loot because they've gathered & sold every broom and fork in the world.
It's a different beast in multiplayers, especially massively multiplayer games. Balance in general is - as a designer, you don't have the easy out of "let 'em play the way they want so long as they're having fun." Communities in competition with themselves will "optimize the fun out of a game" to pursue what's most profitable/powerful. I don't know if that's a topic you'd be interested in speaking about, but it's one I'd be interested in hearing about.
The problem with balancing money sources and sinks is that if you make it too realistic, you run the risk of just surviving and grinding for money becoming a real drag for the player. So games that aren't explicitly focused on that sort of gameplay tend to go the opposite route just so the player can focus on other things. The player might struggle initially with getting money but when they reach a certain level money just stops being an issue. Often this design is even intentional - it's a part of how the player is rewarded for their efforts and made to feel powerful through them. There are other games explicitly based around constantly having too few resources but then that deliberately becomes a main gameplay mechanic. One of the best examples of such a game is FTL.
I agree. It can be a particular challenge if primary sources are tied to combat and major sinks include healing/repair (or replacement of destroyed items). The actual net gain from combat sources is after subtracting those costs. Players tend to lower those costs over time as they get better at the game, develop more powerful character(s), and possibly obtain items that directly heal/repair at lower cost (or for free). And attempt at combat gain can end up as a cost if player has to flee without reward but still spend to heal/repair. So balancing sources and sinks too tight runs the risk that lots of players feel stuck in early parts of a game.
If you did your career over again, what would you do differently?
There's a couple of points you brought up that made me think of FromSoftware titles. The Dark Souls series, Bloodbourne, Sekiro, Elden Ring: All require souls/runes to not only level your character, but purchase items in the world, upgrade gear, obtain spells, etc. Whatsmore, they're also stripped away entirely upon death. (only half from Sekiro if I remember correctly) You're given an opportunity to reclaim them by returning to your corpse, but if things go astray and you die a second time they're gone forever.
When you first mentioned the D&D cost for leveling I initially thought it sounded tedious and unnecessary. Shortly after I realised some of my favorite games of all time do just that, and I'd even say having a sink in this fashion contributed greatly to my overall experience. Perhaps there's some merit in the design.
I like how Metro 2033 approached Game Economy. It had two types of ammo; low-quality and military-grade. Military-grade ammunition was rare and did nearly three times the damage but it was also the primary currency. It's been awhile but I recall shops being spread out, so there also wasn't much opportunity for deliberation.
This applied in Metro: Last Light as well. The problem is that it meant you never used military grade ammo. It was too rare and valuable and upgrades bought with it were too necessary. A quicker kill was sadly never worth the loss of your precious military grade ammo. So while a neat idea, it was pretty heavily weighed against the player.
@natsume-hime2473 I did use it in Last light on hard playthrough, cause I ran out of everything else while fighting the boss. Military grade ammo actually saved me back there
@natsume-hime2473 there's also players like me who just basically never used the store lol
This is why merchant classes common in jrpgs are such genius design. Money in games will almost always eventually become an abundant resource that you have no use for. The answer? Just make a class that burns money for combat utility or damage. Keeps money relevant far past the point where its actually useful.
Metro 2033 The local currency is cartridges for a machine gun, that is, you can safely shoot from your wealth 😅
This was very enlightening. As a little comment, back in 2020 when the pandemic started, I went back to WoW and played on a free account. I just wanted to immerse in a world without any form of reminder or stress or having too many things to do. Because of this, the characters I played were varied, but I could only really do so much, which kept my attention focused and realized I was thoroughly enjoying myself. Far more than I remember in previous years.
After some tinkering with my characters and always having money issues, I ended up creating a worgen hunter and focused on well, hunting. I gave them skills in skinning and leatherworking and spent a couple of weeks doing that. Found myself having quite a sum of money but unfortunately not a lot to do with it. There is no ammo in the game, which is probably a good thing for most people. And today in retrospective, coming to these videos I think my growing desire to create my own world beyond just the comics, comes from this and similar and recent experiences in game. I think I will start drawing and writing a design document while I listen to your experiences and answers. And go from there.
I love game theory optimization-based dev meta theory and so forth related to digital economies more than anything.
Really impressive to hear and learn this type of thing when it makes even a master like you scratch your head about it while presenting the difficult concepts-- and more than anything thank you for not dumbing your talks down!
New fan yesterday and will be binge-watching all of your videos before I do anything else! ❤🔥
@15:20 Elden Ring/Dark Souls/Bloodborne: the _only_ component of leveling is also the primary currency of the game (to the point where I would say that its role as "currency" is pretty secondary-it is experience first and you happen to also buy stuff with it).
Hey Tim, can you talk about the Magick vs technology mechanics in Arcanum? I'm making a DND add on inspired by arcanum and I'm not sure on how to implement it in a fun or balanced way. Thanks!
I started writing up this comment for a concept I had, and then I heard the part where you talked about AD&D having you pay for levelling. I'll still post the comment though. "I had this concept that you can only level up a skill by paying for it. Maybe its a trainer, or the materials needed for a ritual. You earn the XP for the skill by using the skill, then when you have capped the XP on the skill, you pay to have the level go up."
I like it when your main character is a bit of a god at the end of RPGs, and that also means being filthy rich. Not every game has to be Pathologic.
I like rpgs that are poorly coded and allow you to int overflow by going into the negatives, I tend to include things like that as a feature but most of my narratives are literally about the player avatar becoming an equivalent to god within their setting
One of my all time favorites was the original SMT on SNES which has int overflows absolutely everywhere and is almost impossible to complete without encountering a bug that makes the protagonist wildly overpowered in some way
It adds to the narrative, because pretty early on in the game Tokyo is nuked by President Thorman of the US and you get to watch the countdown timer ticking with absolutely no way to stop it, you just have to make amends with the inevitability
Or later revisions of Chrono Trigger where the ultimate boss can be killed by healing it because its hp sits near the 16-bit maximum
I've always wondered why more games don't have the highest quality weapons or armor be purchaseable and just have them be prohibitively expensive. I get that the designers want to encourage exploration, but in a lot of games it seems like high tier gear just ends up as random drops, requiring the player to grind the same encounters until they get what they want. I feel like this can also contribute to the economy feeling less broken, actually having something to spend your Scrooge McDuck stash on.
Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 did that and it's very effective. To have a few coppers in your level 1 pocket, go into a shop and see the Dagger of Venom +2 at 12,000 gold...
I think a great way to both add currency sinks and also detail out a setting is putting a diverse amount of sinks in cities. Smithies for armor/weapon repairs and purchasing, general shops, a wizard tower or clergy which sells services such as poison/disease curing, etc. You can add character to these small corners of a large city. You can also add quests around helping the owner which can lower your cost or unlock new items/services. You could also steal from or harm the owner’s business which could prohibit you from that shop. Maybe steal from enough shops in a city and word gets around, raising your price for services you haven’t even interacted with yet.
I really like the straight up gamba sink - like Borderlands or Diablo 2, where the more gold you get, the more you can gamble away at random items that may or may not be good.
Lovely video tho, very insightful.
Its a smart money sink to skim off unused cash.
Hi Tim, I'd like to know how you manage damage reduction in your games and how the approach has changed over the years, thank you for these videos which have allowed me to better understand how the worlds that I love visiting so much are created
I've always found the mechanics of armor (and other damage mitigation systems) in games very interesting, yeah.. I'd like to hear about this too.
I remember Josh Sawyer touching on this in a presentation he was making, I think it was for Pillars of Eternity, about how % DR has a cap as it starts to pass 90% and starts to approach 100% (diminishing returns work too but then the %DR increases become tiny), whereas subtractive damage reduction can be uncapped just like damage.
I have a question: Do you have any advice for people pitching games and; what's the optimal way of finding someone who would be interested in hearing your game pitch?
If you were ever up for it, I know that I at least would absolutely adore seeing lengthy courses on developing game economies.
Or basically any design subject you think would warrant long form discussions like that, really.
I love that youve talked about economy so much lately. I would be one of those people in that hypothetical class, because i love discussing and playing with complex systems.
I definitely think more games need to take it seriously, even so far as having someone whose main job is economy. For large-scale RPGs especially, it can significantly impact the player experience, so its importance should not be underestimated.
I would love a Tim Cain course on game economies 😁
How involved were you with Pillars 1 economy? It was surprisingly robust for a game that let you have an infinite stash!
I really wish games tried to work in economy and resources more into their questing system. Speaking of which, are you planning a video on how to design a robust quest system?
Thank you for the great video Tim! Have a wonderful day!😊
Great video!
Would love to see "Game Economy Pt2" with some examples of how you balanced the sources and sinks.
Great points made. I would love to see a more indepth video on this with some examples you may have encountered.
Thanks for this great explanation of game economies.
Recently, I have noticed a trend of making games' economies extremely complicated for no apparent reason. I have played games that had as many as a dozen different currencies you needed to keep in mind, besides actual crafting materials, just to build a basic item needed to play. I have quit games that could have been enjoyable, but they made the player jump through so many hoops just to get to the action that it sucked all the fun out of it.
Thank you for thorough answer . Now , I will be less annoyed when i encounter next game with no good economy ;) . I really enjoy your explanation on topic . I think you would have been great university professor .
Great video Mr. Cain, as always but this one in particular. I could notice it must have taken its fair time to prepare, as the subject of economy is quite challenging.
i would love to hear more on balancing economies! i'm a new listener but would definitely like to hear about more details around balancing the experience or analytic techniques. 🙏 thanks for the video
"having lots of money like Scrooge McDuck makes games super easy ..." I don't think this is true for a lot of games. A lot of games have a ceiling for what you can get with your money. Often you can buy somewhat good items with it, but if you want better items you have to run a dungeon, kill a boss, do quests etc. So you still have to engage with the content even with a lot of money. Money often makes the game easier, but it rarely trivializes it.
A lot of games, that let you heal your character in a pause screen during combat are „trivialised“ once you can get a wheelbarrow of chocolate whenever you want. Afterwards people will complain you tedious it is ,to the pause the game constantly to heal, because they can’t be bothered to learn to dodge/block/counteract the attacks
Even in those games you have a better chance of beating the dungeon or boss if you first tool up all your gear using in game cash.
Game Economies has always been a tricky thing, Especially wanting to make it engaging and have something to do with the money
00:47 I'm currently enrolled in a game design course, and one of my classes this semester IS Game Economies! Thank you for the extra lecture, Mr. Tim Cain, sir!
I really appreciate this breakdown of game economy, and the discussion of sources and sinks is a good starting point. I think the sink part of that unfortunately does not take into account the received value from said sink. If developers (which of course are not economists unless you happen to have one on team or hire one explicitly) only think of currency as something to be gained and then spent, they miss the mark on the value received from what is spent. Sinks can easily be considered just another source.
My opinion with game economies is that absent a day to day upkeep for just existing (who wants that outside of some survival life sim?) the most effective way to balance it is to force the player to exert effort to participate in the economy itself. In short - if making money and acquiring valuable items happens during normal gameplay using other systems, then to offset that, it needs to be not nearly as valuable as actually pursuing mercantile activities, such as using non-combat skills for trading, and expanding these mechanics so that it takes time to make significant sums of currency which would then augment other aspects of gameplay.
One example is Morrowind - the economy is horribly imbalanced, in particular because of alchemy, and certain vendors have restocking alchemy ingredients. Your initial play time could be spent exploiting this to create potions that are worth more than the ingredients themselves, netting a positive income flow. Rinse and repeat this and eventually you have enough money to dump into training skills, making you more effective in combat long before you even set foot on your first quest.
It can trivialize, but also be a valid way to enhance your character by being a merchant first, adventurer second. To balance this, restocking inventories would have to take longer (or be eliminated forcing the player to harvest themselves). And more mercantile mechanics would have to be introduced if you wanted to leverage large sums into your character's overall combat proficiency.
I think this should be encouraged in more RPGs in general. Since they purport to let you play a role, being a merchant would be a great way to navigate through the game's systems.
Dark Souls has a pay-to-level-up system.
The core reason why people dont like systems like the one you described is it requires that 2 progression stats be earned at near the same pace. Short of perfect balancing, you'l always have more XP than money, or more money than XP, which creates (perceived) unnecissary friction. The Souls games fix that by making those 2 resources the same thing. Not that it would work for most games.
I think Yakuza 0 addressed this by making money an important game mechanic, even to the point of buying your skills/leveling up. eventually you need to raise and spend absurd amounts of money to progress the story.
Kinda like the Souls games.
When you brought up paying to level, I actually think fromsoft operated like that a great deal. And it was a pretty good limiter or ‘setter of flow’.
An interesting option in my opinion is to include character needs. More survival based games have this to an extend, food and drink comes to mind first. But also 'self care' could be an option that the player has to care for, something like getting a nice bath, good inn rooms and the like.
That be explored in interesting ways i think. For example you could base it on class or perks. A monk or a paladin wouldn't be spending money on brothels or luxurious foods, but maybe they have to always give up wealth to their order? Maybe you have to choose traits at character creation that give special interests you have to fulfill. And depending on how much wealth you have, the more you have to invest to satisfy your desires.
For example:
Your having a party consisting of a wizard, a paladin and a rogue. After some time adventuring in the wilderness you return to the central city. Once you enter the city, desires kick in:
The paladin goes to his orders and has to return 80% of his earnings to them (but receives free provisions, informations etc in return).
The rogue has to go to the local inns and brothels and has to, at least spend 30 % of his stuff on alcohol, love interests and gambling. With the option to invest more and get additional information, contacts or even earn some money through gambling.
And the wizard wants a luxurious room to sleep and has to invest at least 30% in room, more books and ingredients for his studies. If invested more he might discover some magic spell, increase the potency of known ones or alchemist recipes.
Just an idea for the most stereotypical desires. But maybe you could choose more options on character creation, so your wizard also has a gambling problem, or prefers expensive company etc. Maybe after reaching a higher level you need better clothing because you're now a high ranking person and can't just run around in your normal clothing, so silk clothes are expected, and gilding on your armor etc
this channel is really a gold mine for game design information, thank you for all of these videos!
Could you make some vids related to multiplayer games like MMORPGs as well?
Maybe not exactly the same, but Dark Souls has you level up with the currency, and it scales similarly to the AD&D method you described!
I am a little disappointed this comment is not one of the most liked. Its the first thing I thought of when he talks about it and asked for commenters to bring up examples. It is easily the biggest and best example of leveling up via currency in modern games
Looking forward for a lecture on the games economy, Tim!
I play most RPGs and open worlds to become a millionaire as quickly as possible. As such I enjoy a broken economic system. The problems start when the game still "thinks" 3000 Bottlecaps is a fortune for my Bottlecap hoarding millionaire. "Your puny rewards do not concern me anymore, begone beggar I don't work for spare change" is a dialogue line that is most sorely missed, much more so than a working economy in the game. Bethesda "Open-Worlds" are the worst offenders in my opinion. Everyone still treats you like a broken and poor street urchin no matter how much bling you actually have, while the game mechanics make it almost impossible to stay poor. So that would be my suggestion to devs:
Acknoweldge the wealth of players and you don't need to balance it too much.
Those are my two cents, I mean bottle caps, uhm two million Bottlecaps...
Anyway, as always thank you for the excellent video Tim!
I wonder how this changes on projects where they design the gameplay around the economy, like ftp titles. Maybe that's why they are rarely fun, and more like compulsion.
Often those systems cap your earnings per day or other unit, which gives devs a ceiling to plan around. And then you get into the scumminess of being able to get X% of what you need to feel satisfied for free and the cash shop is there with the Y% left over right there
That's really what it comes down to with single player RPGs/open world RPGs. If players want to find a way to make fast cash in games, they will. All you can do is try to make it reasonably balanced and let players do their thing.
15:20
The only modern rpg I have seen making you pay for level up is Elex. It's from the guys that made Gothic.
You level up with xp, but to increase attributes and skills, which determine everything about your character, you need to pay a trainer.
I can add one better. Dark Souls. You pay souls to level up and every level is one point in an attribute. Plus the cost increases every time you level up. More than that, items as in consumables, weapons, and armor from vendors cost souls. So does upgrading and repairing equipment. Plus you need to spend other resources, like titanite shards, along with souls to upgrade equipment. That includes if you bought a smithing box and a repair box. Plus dying means dropping all of your souls on that spot. Which are lost forever if you fail, or forget to go pick them up before dying again.
Did ELEX 2 do this too?
@@cmdr.jabozerstorer3968 Pretty sure that game works with those same mechanics.
There are things like being able to make alchemic potions to increase your stats permanently, but that generally isn't a thing people do in their first run.
@@natsume-hime2473 That's true, but in the Dark Souls case, xp simply doesn't exist.
The currency, souls, is used to buy levels, but there isn't xp as its own thing. It's like buying a new gun in a FPS game, or paying to use the gym to up your strength.
So you're never limited on buying attributes because you don't have the level for it. As long you have the money/souls, you can do it.
I remember playing and rpg where you buy spells from vendors. And in it you can max out barter and get infinite money just buying and selling back the spells. It was very amusing and extremely broken.
The problem with the economy is intertwined with the levelling mechanics. It's no coincidence that at the early levels, you're picking up 1 or 2 caps (or copper coins), but at end game? You're picking up hundreds/thousands of caps or gold coins.
As you mention at 07:30, it's specifically because of meta gear. Once you have the BiS gear, what else is money for? There should be no best, but better for a specific role. And*equipment degredation. The best weapon might do the most damage, but it should be fragile. The worst weapon might do the least damage (outside of clearly trash items, like a stone club that takes 30 seconds of gameplay to make), but it should have the most durability.
I blame the levelling mechanics we still have since the 80's, back when computers weren't able to do real time combat, large levels, complex systems, etc. To compensate for basic and short games, padding it out with a formula grind is how the game gets padded out. And now that computers are much better, that we have dozens of hours of content, active combat, etc.? We still have the exact same RPG design from way back when, which were developed as compromises.
MMO's are the worst for this. Especially mature ones like WoW, because the inflation and content invalidation is so blatant and in your face.
Money becomes more valuable the more kinds of things there are to buy, just like IRL. Just using money as a tacit way to upgrade your equipment steps too much on quest rewards. Instead, to keep money relevant late game, it makes more sense to have more consumables for purchase, especially for non-combat application, such as for fast travel, aesthetics, or mini-games.
Very helpful insights!!!
I would love to hear you talk about the “game development cycle” a lot of your videos reference it but as someone who works in a different sector I have no idea what you make first and what you work on right before launch. Would also like to hear about what your crunch time is like right before launch
Gold box games (adnd) had training halls but IIRC only asked for 1000 g regardless of the level. It hurt only at the very beginning, then 1000g became nothing very quickly
Tim, I was thinking on this topic after also watching your video on emergent gameplay and maybe more rpgs should have at least some rudimentary simulation of supply and demand to determine prices, and it could be abstracted to nodes so that the game doesn't need to necessarily over complicate the needs of every individual npc. basically learn from strategy games like anno, victoria 2, eu4, etc. and this would be a systemic attribute of the design. So you could have a player sell a lot of say, iron swords within a trade node, but once the amount of iron swords within merchant inventories in total within that trade node, the price will drop and the player, at least for a time, gets diminishing returns on selling certain items. you could also build on top of this to dynamically adjust the challenge of the area, so if at the merchants within a trade node the player sells a bunch of high level gear and the buy/sell price goes down, then after a certain amount of time npcs like town guards might start carrying the same high level gear that has recently been sold. Also, in the same way that players in rpgs can often have houses or a home base, it would be cool if the player could own their own store and have a management minigame as part of it, which would become both a sink and a source, and it works on the basis of market simulation mechanics described earlier. This would all make the experience of simply buying and selling goods in the gameworld more dynamic and offer more rp opportunities, even if it doesn't necessarily balance it. You could also have the barter skill of players impact how much immediate or precise data players have about these metrics in the ui (or in management minigame). Another potential way to have a sink is to have some kind of simulation of inflation, like in EU4. Could also even have unique events and quest chains based on predictable player behaviour, like the possibility of players causing hyperinflation or something like that.
I remember back in the day doing an infinite "sell to vendor/buy it all back for less money/repeat" in fallout 1 with sufficient barter skill... and honestly it was a blast! I didn't mind as a player, it gave me the joy of feeling like I was "pulling something off"
it gave you a reason to sink points into it at least, like how gambling became reliably profitable after you got into triple figures
Unless its a game designed around extreme difficulty and scarcity/survival - with specific mechanics to counter the hoarder/grinder instincts of an average versed rpg player - any standard rpg-ish single player game with an economy will always have players be super rich at endgame.
I dont really see it as a problem unless youre getting too powerful too fast or its really out of whack.
I'd love to take that Course.
I think overall understanding each element of a game's design,both in a vacuum and interacting with other systems makes it so,hypothetically,one can close to designing the "Perfectly Imperfect"
Game.
It's funny, I can't think of a single game I've played in the last 30 years that had a vendor in it that was actually useful. One that I would just go to and see if there's a weapon or tool or piece of armor that would be worth buying at any price. Vendors are notoriously useless while often being a source of exploitation. But you bring up a really great point in the discussion about difficulty of balancing an economy, which is players hated an unavoidable sink. We already have so many of those in our day to day lives just to stay alive and be able to even play these games. It is what it is, but it sure sucks when you analyze it. So games reminding us of this fact is exactly counter productive to the purpose of playing games.
In Gothic after leveling you got Learning points that you only were able to convert to skills if you found willing teacher that was more skilled than you... and most of them was willing to be willing if you paid them. And the higher level of mastery the more they expect you to pay up. I loved that system. If I were to remake it today I'd probably merge it with the skill system from Starfield where next level not only requires learning points but also practice and in my implementation also finding a proper teacher. Nice sink that prompts you to use skills and explore the world interacting with npcs at the same time.
Have you ever heard of a game that does the 3D spreadsheet mentioned at 7:34 but not with classes?
Do you like survival games like Ark: Survival Evolved and The Forest? They hit similar progression feelings for me as RPG's. So before I even finished the video, I was wondering if you would mention weightlessness because in Ark PvP cementing paste is essentially money because it's nearly weightless.
(Potentially unrelated but) in The Forest, when my cousin and I would get people trying to join our base we would tell them there's an entrance fee of a cart of sticks since them joining would sink some wealth cause they will need arrows etc but rarely log on again lol.
I am an absolutely outlier, both in your viewership (I think), and as a ttrpg enjoyer (which also i think makes me a bit of minority here as Im not a video game designer). As a minority in ttrpgs Im 41 and still play classic D&D and have not really enjoyed modern (AD&D 3e and on) versions of the system myself. As a mater of fact not only do I not mind the training cost as a player, but as a DM I not only still use training costs to this day but also charge players a tax each year. The tax is 3% of your total XP by years end - 1% goes to the gods, 1% to the guilds and 1% to the king - however I have also made it possible for players to avoid at least 1/3 of these taxes by creating the correct type of domain/stronghold. Love your channel and I really enjoy allot of the games you birthed into this wonderfully boring world we live in Mr. Cain!
Some thoughts about one of your last points: although I understand the balancing reasons, I always HATED the buy/sell ratio caps imposed on the players to prevent trading profits.
Sure, these things could be abused, but as a counterpoint so too could a lot of sources of money. The caravanning trader fantasy is a legit archetype I always want to be but I feel like games unfairly go out of their way to penalize me to prevent it. In fact, I wish games would actually lean in to that path with skills/perks that embrace trading as a full build. The same way a fighter and a wizard may use their strength and magic to solve problems, I always thought it'd be interesting to let some trader class use their money as solution (access to the best items, hirelings, bribery, etc.). But for every reason you mentioned in the video, it's something that probably won't ever work in practice. One way or the other the economy won't ever function in the way I want to imagine it to let this fantasy happen in a balanced way ):
Main reason it doesn't work is you don't have to actually make the journey. For any game with fast travel and low/no fuel costs and traders decently accessible, buy low, sell high is a free money button with extra steps
There's space trader and pirate games that limit fast travel to avoid this, and there's Death Stranding that goes all in on making walking up a hill a chore. Basically make getting the stuff from here to there an interesting challenge to justify the pay-off
This is honestly very educating. Am playing The Outer Worlds and am walking around with roughly 14 000 rounds of ammunition, as I tend to disfavour fully automatic weapons.
With the hunting rifle I kill marauders in 1-2 rounds, and there's ammo everywhere.
Hey Tim, first, it's a pleasure to have you share your experience with us. Second, have you ever considered a dynamic sources/drains system? By that I mean a system that tracks the amount of currency a player has at any moment and manages some of the sources and sinks based on that value. Do you think it could help solve the problem for the average player?
the issue here is that players are quite happy to work now in order to gain money for easier later jobs - if you make the stuff scale, people will just not play the game because what's the point - you see the same issue irl with people refusing paid work because "that would put them into the next tax bracket", whether this is an actual existing thing or something they'll have to live with until they fill in their tax return next financial year
@@pnutz_2 Thanks for the feedback peanut! You being up an interesting point. Though taxes in my country work differently than in the US, so I can't relate to the example I'm afraid. But I believe I understand your point, this system could feel punishing to the player and many won't find it fun.
I feel there might still be something here, the system can't just inflate prices at vendors as that will feel unfair and, worse, not fun. But there might be some other ways to control for player wealth. Limiting certain item drops, lowering item drop rates in a minor way. If the player has a lot of healing potions, increase some of the enemies levels/ other ways to endanger their hp. Has a lot of ammo that they could use to sell? Increase the amounts of enemies. Difficulty is a sink, we can use it like that. And even if players catch on, they're now encouraged to use up rare ammo/ automatic weapons, to stop picking up useless items to sell. And to stop hording money. It would definitely be questionable, but I feel like there might be something there yet, with the right implementation.
My general playstyle is "loot goblin". I'm a collector and completionist who hoovers up everything, then I spend an hour with inventory management and selling sprees.
I find taking the exact opposite makes games more engaging; they tend to ask more of the player in terms of skill, and feel more consequential.
I'm kinda finding I increasingly resent loot in games these days... It's so common to find games where you quickly end up not really caring about what you're finding. And so you stop picking up crap just to sell, and even stop picking up ammo or heals. And then you realise locations are often just thinly disguised distribution points - sources for player wealth. And that's just not interesting when you break it down to that.
I'm really enjoying Starfield, but I'm already at the stage of ignoring the vast majority of loot because barely any of it is interesting.
Cyberpunk 2.0 at least pretty much axed heals as a pick-up. Seems to be a perk related cooldown. Not ideal, but better than trying to limit yourself to five or so charges to maintain challenge and reward.
the easiest sinks i can think of if very expensive items. worked like a charm in infinity games. doesn't matter if you made 3k, 10k or 100k - you'll be able to buy 3-5 items that are better than what you have tops. and that's with 50 or so slots to fill.
Really enjoyed this one. Thanks.
This is why I like vanguards diplomacy arc so people who didn't want to fight could still acquire gear despite not being able to kill and not just be limited to craftiny
@0:45 I experienced the opposite, Tim, GTA 3 has that game mechanic from previous games that it is easy to gain huge amounts of money ingame without almost nothing to buy by destroying things. In GTA 2 money represented damage and you need to incur a certain amount to get to the next level.
@3:06 In GTA 3 IMHO it was relatively easy to fix because the gun shops were already pretty restrictive with the amount of ammo you could buy.
@4:10 It is not the job of the government to control the economy anyway.
@18:25 Yes, the infamous dupe glitch in Fallout 4 where you can save 1000 of hours grinding for money and resources that apparently is way too time consuming to fix for Bethesda.
@18:53 Yes, but there are time and resource constraints.
The system where you have to pay to level up actually sounds great. You would have to save up and plan ahead. Unfortunately I think games are too focused on casuals to implement that. Not making a judgment on that either way by the way.
Great video thank you :)
Elden Ring and Dark Souls are pretty good examples of that.
A big factor that you can't really fully balance a game economy is also that every player is different and plays differently. Some people mostly only play the main story and the economy should make it possible to do that. On the other hand, there are players who explore every inch of the map, pick up every single item, finish every single side quest, pickpocket every NPC, minmax charisma mechanics with vendors etc.
Impossible to balance.
I was wondering if you could do a video about “Things to consider if you’re thinking about getting into the gaming industry”
I think the gold that a player has to spend when gaining a level in DnD partly covered living expenses, along with guild fees and training fees.
Surprisingly, the genre of tabletop RPG systems that seem to take into account living expenses the most are those with cyberpunk settings. For example, Shadowrun covers monthly/annual living costs for different qualities of lifestyles (minimal, average, comfortable, extravagant etc), and costs are also modified for different metatype races. E.g. dwarves and trolls end up paying a bit more in daily life, whether they're shadowrunning adventurers or normal corpo civilians, because clothing, equipment and appliances sized for them cost more, due to them being a relative minority.
If you're running dangerous jobs against highly secured facilities for high profile clients, you should be making enough money to easily cover the monthly expenses of a normal lifestyle, but it's still a consideration.
Economies in CRPGs will always be broken as long as there's limitlessly renewable sources of wealth generation, and the characters have no living expenses. If you throttle the rate of wealth generation, it simply makes it "grindier", so I think it's better to just let players go nuts with their money.
Also mention of Starfield it has multi sinks there is some are from this person which is end game and after you complete the game. Most the time you be spending it on ship building
One of the major rpg (tabletop, pen&paper one) has something along those lines: in Shadowrun, you can spend xp to get money, and vice versa. Depending on the editions it was a core or an optional rule, in the main book or a companion sourcebook, it varies. And while I personally don't like this level of gamification, it was from anecdotal experience (including a LOT of time spent on Dumpshock) a very popular option.
The goal of the rule is to help GM balance reward (by making it simpler to do, less gotcha, less pitfalls), and to tackle the fact that various builds have very different needs. Some will need huge amounts of money to buy, upgrade and maintain cyberware or drones or state of the art computers, while others don't need a lot of equipment.
It's possible to add a narrative twist to that (the best GM did in Shadowrun, but at least up to 4th edition there wasn't any meaningful guidelines or help from sourcebooks on that, at best a couple of paragraphs with example) mechanic to make it palatable to immersion fascists like myself: things like spending time and effort and social debt (i.e. xp) to get extra money or discounts, or spending money on special training equipment or personal trainer (i.e. spend money to get xp). It's not perfect and can fall apart very fast on tabletop ("I spent millions to get this unique rare magic tome to improve my magic skill... why can't I lend it to my teammates, or just re-sell it?") but in a more constraint and scripted game, i.e. a videogame, it could work.
Another tabletop rpg has a totally different take on money (and most things), it's FATE (specifically FATE Core). In FATE, almost everything is handled by game mechanics, and almost all actions are handled by a skill.
Twist being, there is a Resource (meaning money) skill. And a Contact skill. And so on.
So money, or contact/political power, is used EXACTLY like any other skill, with exactly the same mechanics and rules. You have this obstacle of guards stopping you entering the temple? Well you can fight them with the Fight skill, or get past them with the Stealth skill, or bribe them with the Resource skill, or get an official laissez-passer with the Contact skill. THe base difficulty is same for all, sale dice, same rules.
And there is no equipment in the traditional sense. The game assume you have what you need to use your skills. If you use the Fight skill, it doesn't matter gameplay wise that you do it with bare hands kung fu, a chainsaw, a battleaxe, it's all the same (unless it's not the same and it's special, meaning it's narratively significant, and FATE has strict rules about that and how to manage it).
My all-time favorite game economy has got to be from OSRS. Player-driven, and scales nicely with character progression. Prices on items inflate exponentially as their utility increases, but these inflations tend to loosely align with the sources of wealth players have access to at the moments those items are considered worth picking up. Early game items are rarely valued at over 200k, mid-game items are rarely valued at over 20 million, and absolute best in slot end game gear is usually placed around the 1 billion mark give or take a few hundred million.
When you're in the early game, you don't have access to the same reliable money-makers mid and end game players do. So it might feel like a lot for them to drop a couple million on gear upgrades to progress. They'll tend to feel the value for the price. Same goes for mid-game items. Since it costs a considerable amount to acquire these sets, the value isn't lost on players when they finally acquire them. And the end game best in slot items are so wildly expensive that it takes players quite a while to purchase them, but they have access to content that has a chance at the golden ticket. So it isn't a total pipe-dream for them to eventually obtain an item valued at 1.5 billion, when they're semi-routinely getting item drops valued at 200 million and up. The upgrade path is always closely tied to the means of the player all the way through the player's journey.
And yes with it being an MMO they've got the issue of inflation and currency flooding the market because the items keep dropping so long as people keep playing the content, but they're attempting to curb it with a small tax system on selling items. 1% of the market value of the item is taxed from the seller, and sent directly to mods who use the tax money to buy items and delete them from the game, sinking both currency and items themselves.
Paying to level up reminds me of mmorpgs like Maplestory where leveling is free and you gain stats per level, but a majority of what makes your damage numbers go up is buying the next gear set every 5 or so levels. So you effectively pay to level up.
Problem with trying to balance an economy is you don't know how people are to play the game. Some people just run through the game doing quest and looting enemies. Other pickup everything that is not nailed down. And yet others rob all the stores blind. So some players might be tons of cash while others have just enough.
It's like complaining about over leveling for the enemies when someone does every bit of side content to get the most XP. Where as some games players complain they have to do side grind because the main story content levels up to fast and they are under leveled.
The piranha bytes game also have you paid to level up and armors cost very much, you have to really know how to play to have a lot of gold in those games, the sources of gold are also mostly limited to quest which cant be farmed and monsters dont respawn.
Kingdom come deliverance also is quite good at economy if you dont steal,if you dont stay on top of repairs of your armor,using repair kits( that cost significant amount of money) you basically pay for repair the full value of the item.
Enderal, Skyrim's total conversion, has skill books you have to purchase in order to unlock skill level ups.
14:13 i'd Say it's not necessarely a bad thing, as for some players (usually those Who are Willing to invest time+effort to find loopholes in the economy system) finding loopholes and abusing them Is an enjoyable experience.
In my opinion, assuming that is true for some players, the goals would be to make the process of finding loopholes in the economy system fun and rewarding(this should fixing itself by design, meaning the reward itself is the pride of being able to find the loophole and now being able to abusing it, being experienced as something scarce thst only smartest players can have), the fun stands in making so that Is not too easy(boring) to find loopholes giving no pride in player as the accomplishment Was not that much of an accomplishment + now they cannot experience the overall economy system that Was designed for the game.
All this while trying to avoid players who do not enjoy this "feature" to experience it.
So while lowering complexity of the economy system can solve this "problem" i think It Is worth considering tweaking It with some effort and time investment ti make It "an economy system worth to be exploited".
Hope this made sense, what do you guys think? Why and when would this approach not work? What are your points of view on the topic?
Blades In The Dark has the party spend valuable money on rising in tier. It doesn't feel as bad because there are a lot of reasons that it makes sense to spend money like that.
love this series of vids - nd yes, expolit early and exploit often! Being a god in a game is my personal way to enjoy it the most, balance schmalance!
I like how the Mount and Blade games approach economy through using real life economic principles. For example, towns generate wealth according to the resources gathered by nearby villagers, the movement of merchant caravans trading between towns, and the presence of bandits. Items that are scarce in one region are expensive, and those that are common are cheap. A pure RPG is a different beast, but I like this idea of using the principles of scarcity, supply and demand in this way to approximate a realistic economy. I think inflation also definitely needs to be incorporated, since in real life, increasing the supply of money leads to a dilution of the value of money. Perhaps if you keep track of the total quantity of gold in the game and calculate buy and sell prices based on the percentage of total items that are of the same class of item.
I also think items in drops should come from a finite pool and not be infinite, as that's a huge source of imbalance imho.