Demonstration of progression in Orbus

[J11]

One issue that I wanted to start a thread about is the flat leveling experience and lack of obvious progression you can see throughout the Orbus world right now…

It is there and you are progressing… But where is it?

Lots of games focus heavily on progression bars and obvious progression hooks throughout gameplay.

Lets take the pokemon franchise which started in 1996 and has an est. $90 billion in revenues (We are talking enough to build 20 DDG 1000 warships).

Specifically let’s look at pokemon go from the pokemon franchise:

So what is positive psychological feedback?

Generally it can be described as… Telling someone they did something that positively effects their emotional wellbeing.

Let’s take a quick look at this ratata from pokemon go. I have highlighted progression hooks which contain positive psychological feedback:

As we can see, positive psychological feedback is contained within 3 separate places; The carefully designed non instrusive but obviously progressive progress bar at the top. A count of the number of upgrade materials you have and candy you have collected at the bottom and an extremely big call to action button at the bottom encouraging you to improve the power of your pokemon. Every item here causes a reinforced positive hook. That my friends is why you saw 20+ 30 year olds chasing a charmander down the street a couple of years ago.

SO this is what I want this thread to be about… What positive psychological feedback do you think Orbus needs to take it from side Bae game to your Bae, your mildly tasty snack to your favourite type of sweet?

We are in the VR world so we can get extremely creative with positive psychological feedback. Ill start:

• When chests are obtained, make it so that when you go to open it… It comes in to the real world as a chest, does a little vibration thing and makes an opening noise. Make sure chest rewards contain a variety of rarity of the items.

• Make NPCs smile the higher your rep is with them. Games like world of warcraft used to (maybe still do?) change the npcs hostility over time. This game is probably more suited to have some other way to demonstrate positivity through progression.

• Show progress on each individual quest. The bronze, gold and silver is a good starting indicator but a small hairline progress bar until the next level at the bottom of each of the quest boxes would work wonders for a more accurate measurement.

[Riley_D]

I think it’s a tough balance between adding bars for the sake of adding bars, which sometimes doesn’t work out how you think (hello Artifact Power system from WoW), and adding meaningful progression to the game. I do agree with some of your suggestions like the reward caches being more of an in-game thing with some excitement to it, we could definitely do that.

That said, I think adding additional ways to meaninfully progress the game is definitely on the roadmap. We have some plans to do a mechanic with the Post-30 Level Ups for really dedicated players to unlock some global perks, and I’d like to continue adding reputation tiers as people achieve them, as well as perhaps some more global meta-progressions (e.g. meta-achievements) that unlock things.

[J11]

I totally agree that bars for the sake of bars does not work… Reflecting progression is what I mean hence the example with chests. Generally transparently showing progression for things which make sense has worked for me on products I have managed and built in the past. Not neccesarily bars but ‘ways of showing progression transparently’. Bars was just an example of how mostly mobile games do that. Just to be clear about what I meant:

We are in the VR world so we can get extremely creative with positive psychological feedback

examples:

• Making NPCs smile and glow a bit the higher your reputation with them is.
• Having more pvp items appear physically in the world at the pvp vendor area when you are higher reputation.
• Overleveling progression hooks will be a huge addition (thanks for reiterating that a few of us are very excited about this addition). Something like ‘paragon points’ in Diablo III. movement speed increase, critical strike, strength, int, wisdom, vita, crit damage (to some relatively reasonable cap for end game players). Hopefully per class not per character.
• Change the skeleton position and idle animations of NPCs based upon lore progression and reputation (no need to manually animated rigged models just grab some stuff of mixamo would be immersive enough).

[Luvstosmooch]

We have some plans to do a mechanic with the Post-30 Level Ups for really dedicated players to unlock some global perks

Have always been really excited about this, and agree it would be a great way to expand progression.

Also really glad to hear that there are plans to expand the rep tiers once people achieve them!

[Metris_Marshmallow]

Not sure about the post level thing, looks like those leveling all classes except of only 1 or 2 start way behind just because of this… would really like to see overall xp counted in to have a fair comparison.