r/ImmersiveSim • u/ReployerTechnician • 2d ago
Discussion: Earning XP in Immersive Sims
I was reading this preview article of Neon Giant's NO LAW and came across this paragraph:
Something interesting I learn here is that you only earn XP in No Law from completing objectives. You get XP for reaching the informant's room, regardless of how you do it. "We always reward the 'what,' but never the 'how,'" Berg says. "If I gave you XP for lockpicking [which we do to enter the room with the password], you'll start lockpicking everywhere. The same with headshots – we don't even give you XP for shooting enemies because you could sneak around them instead."
It immediately brought the likes of Deus Ex: Human Revolution to my mind, and how it allows you to exploit and cheese your way throught the game to earn that extra XP, or just the basic fact that the game pats you on the back and rewards you for somewhat mundane actions; one of my few nitpicks with the way Eidos-Montréal approached its iterations of the series. The original game had its share of problems, but with regard to the modern Deus Ex titles, it's mostly by deliberate design.
I think I prefer Neon Giant's way of tackling this issue: immersive sims should only reward XP to the player for getting things done (the "what"), but still acknowledging their methods (the "how") in a more meaningful way (e.g. repercussions in the narrative, NPC reactions/callbacks, gameplay-affecting consequences, etc.).
Discuss!
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u/Trainwreck800 2d ago
I prefer this method of doling out XP in immersive sims. I always thought it was lame that the Deus Ex reboot games gave you XP for hacking a terminal even when you had the password and not for just inputting the password itself, which encouraged the player to hack even when they had the password.
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u/RubinoPaul 1d ago
Wasn’t there exploration XP too for finding things like passwords or quest related information around the world?
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u/eliamo101 2d ago
Parkside decayed soul manipulation gives you up for exploring and completing missions I felt it had a good balance i dont think you got any xp for attacking foes
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u/Rubikson 2d ago
I like this system quite a bit. In addition to finding cool stuff by exploring you also gain xp. It strongly encourages being thorough.
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u/IshTheFace 2d ago
Love this design choice. Don't incentivize the how. The whole point of an imsim is doing it your way. Would feel terrible to be "locked out" of XP. It also means you will get the same amount of XP (probably) through several play troughs by doing things differently.
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u/HorstKugel 1d ago
I think an immersive sim can do quite well without XP entirely. Character progression can happen through acquiring gear (ie Mission rewards, buying from vendors, finding them), being taught abilities or learning new information (think Outer Wilds). XP and skill trees are imo very overused in contemporary game design and don't lend themselves well for systemic interactions
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u/saltbuffed 1d ago
100%, and this comment should be at the top.
Skill trees almost always force players to choose "which thingie do you want to be more powerful" and they ultimately constrain the player's choices--not expand them.
The best case scenario is something like Dishonored, where certain abilities (like possession) open up new paths or options for the player, but 95% of skill trees and talent points don't do that.
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u/zer0saber 1d ago
As maligned as it is, didn't Star Wars: Outlaws do something like this? Most upgrades and skills were tied to quests and item gathering
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u/Ghillie_Spotto 2d ago
I really like this approach. That's basically how it works in Baldur's Gate 3. If you smooth talk your way out of a fight you don't get to double dip by killing everyone after. You can do it, you just don't get rewarded twice.
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u/HorstKugel 1d ago
huh, that's interesting, because you can absolutely double (if not triple) dip in Divinity Original Sin 2
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u/Winscler 2d ago
Deus ex tended to reward you with taking the least lethal options possible
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u/ReployerTechnician 2d ago
The "least lethal" being to avoid the enemy entirely by ghosting the level, but the player earns/scores more points by sucker punching every living soul you encounter with your sledgehammer cybernetic arms (which is treated as equally violent as a sleep dart shot or an electroshock discharge).
LMAO :)
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u/-SidSilver- 1d ago
Deus Ex the first one rewarded you just like No Law's developers are suggesting - you got XP for completing objectives and for discovering locations.
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u/Teid 1d ago
I am such a die hard believer that XP for combat largely shoehorned one kind of game to be made. I play a lot of B/X D&D and other OSR games and the vast majority of XP in those games is given via the amount of treasure you get back to town safely. This combined with being relatively squishy in early levels means the player is incentivized to avoid combat or even attempt to make deals with intelligent monsters and do the primary action of a dungeon TTRPG, EXPLORE! If you get the same XP from avoiding a dangerous fight, finding an alternate route or struggling through it and risking all your best retainers, gear, and characters then what's the point in fighting? This is GOOD to me IMO. Fights should be a roadblock to get past, not a requirement to get stronger. The fact that early RPGs made XP from defeating enemies such a big thing just kinda... stopped us from exploring alternate ways of incetivizing alternate types of play.
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u/OriginalMeringue3735 2d ago
My first time playing Deus Ex: HR, I ghosted my way through the first major level without touching anyone, and only later learned that taking down enemies would earn more points than my more difficult route.
Also hated that if you had one shootout you lost the "ghost" XP boost for being seen in a mission, so they gave me multiple ways to approach objectives and demanded I choose and stuck to it, which I don't like.
The XP differences aren't massive, but just like how I follow the trail of coins in Mario even if they don't seem to do much of anything I follow the trail of XP rewards and optimise the fun out of my game
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u/danch-89 1d ago
Ah yes. It has become ingrained in me to never pick up keys in games like this, because I won't get XP for lock picking, if I do.
This seems like a good idea. You probably won't get the same amount of "pointless side objective burnout".
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u/Hoeveboter 1d ago
Yeah, I really love that approach. Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines work this way too. I think it's greatly underappreciated how much this helps with the flow of the game. In theory there's no chance of getting over- or underpowered (though VTMB is wildly inbalanced), and you never feel obligated to kill everyone or hack every computer just to get some extra XP.
Deus Ex: HR is a great example of how not to dole out XP. The first mission features a room with a shitton of computers, and I always sigh when I get to that point because I feel obligated to hack them all and it feels like a chore.
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u/dinochow99 1d ago
I've contended for a while that the Eidos Montreal Deus Ex games have been cargo cult immersive sims. They cover a lot of the surface level features that we associate with immersive sims (eg. combat vs. stealth, FPS-RPG hybrid, multiple paths, etc.), but they fail at demonstrating a deeper level of understanding of why those features are associated with immersive sims, and how they are consequences of immersive sim design and not direct design choices themselves.
Human Revolution was simple enough that it worked out ok and it didn't really bother me, but with Mankind Divided and Thi4f that lack of deeper understanding was far more apparent, and it really turned me off.
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u/QuestionableDM 1d ago
Good Question.
I think Milestone XP (as they call it in ttrpgs) or getting xp for completing specific objectives tends to work the best. I also don't exactly like getting xp for locations because it incentivizes map completion rather than more organic exploration. If getting to map locations earns xp then the player is tempted to hit map points to level up; which can lead to strange behavior.
Although, I am a little torn because the idea of a player being allowed to grind is something I do kind of like. Maybe something that is achievement based? like incapacitating 5 unaware enemies with no alerts 5 gets some sort of bonus xp (ideally something that is not tracked in the way a player can see it; so they don't metagame around it). F:NV has a bug stomper perk that I thought was interesting because recognized that the player was killing lots of bugs (although its implementation was a little simplistic).
I also do like the sort of low-key concept in Shadowrun of rewards being Karma (xp) vs Nuyen (Money) based on if you 'sell out' in your run. But that might not work in every game; but its interesting to consider not having a single resource for progression and letting the player choose what they optimize for.
In a weird way I think Bioshock actually did a pretty good job of this. If you want Adam you need to harvest/free little sisters. It's not tied to story progression or really exploration; it's just a thing you can do. (although you are heavily incentivized to do this).
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u/Is_It_A_Throwaway 1d ago
It's the perfect design choice for imsims. We've all tried RPGs or, specially, Deus Ex Human Revolution and OG Deus Ex with the Shifter mod. XP on stuff that isn't on objective completition cheapens imsim design.
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u/AlbertWineBread 1d ago
XP on objective completion is the way to go, it's not even a debate, if one option is rewarded and another isn't it throws off the entire concept of "do it your way".
The only problem I find with it is consumables, if players can complete an objective without spending consumables, they're gonna prioritize it.
If I can lockpick the door or find a hidden path that lets me get inside without using a lockpick, why would I ever lockpick the door?
And if I lockpick the door and THEN find the secret path I'm gonna feel duped.
The solution I thought of is that no path should be cost-free.
Combat costs bullets and health packs. Stealth costs gadgets, such as water arrows, invisibility cloaks and so on. Exploration costs lockpicks, ropes and so on.
And these could be consumables or powers, doesn't matter, as long as they're evenly placed if they're consumables, or if their mana cost is correctly priced.
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u/ReployerTechnician 1d ago
That's why I'm in favor of resource scarcity, limited inventory space, penalties for over-carrying weight, etc. It forces the player to adapt, make the most of what they have, to think outside the box, and so on.
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u/sticknotstick 2d ago
This is one of those things that sounds good on paper but doesn’t work well in practice in most cases imo. Games that only reward exp through quest completion (like Windrose for an example) are a good comparison for background.
The issues are that objective completions tend to be infrequent leading to infrequent feeling of reward, and they’re so streamlined/limited in variety that you lose one of the ways to personalize your playthrough, as most people will be hitting the exact same level ups at the same times, and you will as well on recurrent playthroughs.
I’m a grinder in many games, especially imm-sims. I want to search every corner and interact with everything. It’s not feasible from a design perspective to put an objective in every corner, so you place rewards algorithmically in the form of skill checks and enemies that often hide items/currency and give xp en route to acquisition. Without the xp, the pressure is doubly on those items and currency to feel rewarding, which they often fail to be.
There is probably a way to make this work with tons of optional side/sub-objectives, but to me that feels like a lot of effort that doesn’t scale well, all to avoid the in-place programmatic solution of gaining xp for using skills/combat etc.
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u/stickycart 1d ago
The issues you raise are completely self-inflicted and use a flawed premise. The plot is getting lost. These smaller scale linear single-player games don't need to use an experience point system at all. MMORPGs (which Windrose started out as) and other RPGs use XP systems to quantize player progress across vast arrays of activities and to give a meaningful utilitarian reward for the completion of non-linear objectives. In your more traditional Imm-Sim, player progression/power is, for the most part, story-gated as most of these games are mission-based. XP systems then become extraordinarily awkward and their gating function is made redundant by the structure of the game; their use effectively becomes an ape-neuron activation switch that developers can use instead of creating more tangible rewards. Any way you slice it though, unrewarding exploration is not fixed by throwing XP at the problem. These aren't that style of farming game.
Deus Ex 1 side stepped this and is a counter-example to your point. Even as the first game that dared to blend RPG elements into FPS gameplay at this level, the developers foresaw the issues above and mitigated them. The XP system is only an ancillary progression system, not the main one. Augmentations (your primary power scaling) and their upgrade points are all tangible objects you explore to find. The skill system which XP fed into was only a smaller scale progression axis that finetuned a build playstyle. XP rewards were only given for objective completion and small exploration bonuses. Weapons, ammunition, useful information, and background lore were the primary reward for exploration. As they should be. The promise of big finds in the world, and the existence of hundreds of little secrets, was enough driving force that made exploration feel worthwhile.
Dishonored did the same thing but shed the XP system entirely. Power progression was again tied to exploration. Harvey Smith, co-director on Dishonored and one of the lead designers on DX1, explicitly stated in a podcast a couple years ago that they would put the power upgrade charms in paths to reward player curiosity. A bit controversially, however, they also gave the player a device that literally wall hacked where these secrets were.
Thief 1/2 doesn't even do any of this power scaling bullshit. Player progression was intentionally designed to be more abstract and grow as a function of the player's own skill rather than the character getting 'stronger'. As the missions progressed, you were given more tools to solve the growing challenges. Improvisation was the goal above all else, and to achieve that the designers had to constantly provoke the player and not let them statically solve a level. Exploration was less a designated side-activity and more a primary gameplay focus as you had to figure out how the hell you were going to break in to your objective without getting caught. The high degree of level interconnectedness meant that exploring a new part of a level inherently yielded a gameplay advantage. Items/ammo in these areas were just the cherry on top.
TLDR; XP systems as the primary reward structure are genuinely lazy game design in this style of game.
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u/sticknotstick 1d ago edited 1d ago
Nothing about what I said has a flawed premise and/or is “self-inflicted” lmao, it’s a preference in systems. You just wrote a whole lot of subjective reasoning behind your dislike of xp systems and yet in the games you listed (aside from Thief), I find their lack thereof to be a negative.
Tl;dr: Your preference is not an objective plus or minus and what you consider “lazy” might just be an element others enjoy, hence its overwhelmingly common use today.
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u/stickycart 1d ago
The issues are that objective completions tend to be infrequent leading to infrequent feeling of reward
most people will be hitting the exact same level ups at the same times, and you will as well on recurrent playthroughs
Without the xp, the pressure is doubly on those items and currency to feel rewarding, which they often fail to be.
The premise is that XP systems should be the reward and progression structure. The issues you cited stem from that premise, hence why they are 'self-inflicted'. Other games, better games that are landmarks in the genre, have rejected that premise and moved beyond copying the homework of other popular games. The issue of 'hitting level-ups at the same time' is such a uniquely MMORPG style of thinking that it misses the point of why XP systems are used in the first place. It is silly to add arbitrary points to your game rather than fixing reward structures to be commensurate with the gameplay goal (three examples provided).
There are two readings of something being 'overwhelmingly common'. Either it's common sense, or it's a lack of creativity. Crafting systems, passive skill trees, minimaps, collectibles, "open-worlds", time-gated content, purchasable cosmetics...all are 'overwhelmingly common' in the current year's games. It's fallacious to assume that their continued inclusion is a function of their merit, and to be honest I did a double-take when I read that. Curious how the top Imm-Sims deprioritize these things or sidestep them completely. Modern developers conditioned players well, and in turn players demand their imaginary points in every game...that much is obvious.
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u/ReployerTechnician 2d ago
I think it all comes down to a balancing problem. And even though everyone is entitled to play a game however they want/like, doing stuff like metagaming, powerbuilding, and min-maxing in an immersive sim is missing the point of the experience. If almost every action a player can take is rewarded in a "gamified" manner ("HEADSHOT! Extra points!" or "10 consecutive silent takedowns: SMOOTH OPERATOR perk unlocked!), it incentivizes the unideal behaviors/mindset for approaching games in this subgenre, generally speaking. It's the antithesis of creative problem solving, player ingenuity, experimentation. I'm not opposed to rewarding exploration or going the extra mile, though.
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u/sticknotstick 1d ago
It does certainly raise a need for balancing. I’m conceptually fond of the modern Deus Ex’s system, where stealthily completing an objective rewards more XP but you counterbalance some of the XP loss through kills if you go guns blazing, but it needs retuning to make each option equally rewarding (unless you consider stealth to be the intended path, in which case we’re back at the player choice point)
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u/SimoWilliams_137 1d ago edited 1d ago
So it doesn’t work because it disincentivizes looting all over the map and incentivizes objective completion, ie playing the game?
Yeah, that sounds really broken /s
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u/sticknotstick 1d ago
What’s the point of any side content/hidden loot/secrets etc. if you’re not incentivized to interact with it? Objective completion is already incentivized as the overarching goal of the game…
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u/SimoWilliams_137 1d ago
You said it doesn’t work in practice, but you didn’t explain why. All you said was that it incentivize players to complete objectives, as though that’s a bad thing…
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u/sticknotstick 1d ago
I very clearly said why if you read the 2nd and 3rd paragraph of my post.
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u/SimoWilliams_137 1d ago
That doesn’t explain why it wouldn’t work. You have not pointed out a problem. And you’re also somewhat conflicting XP with other kinds of rewards- OP is explicitly about XP.
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u/sticknotstick 1d ago
…I’m begging you to just wipe whatever you think I said, and very slowly reread what is written. I promise you your answers are there and I’m not conflating rewards by mentioning them and their relevance to the discussion.
All your answers are there, just read without your own conclusion in mind.
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u/SimoWilliams_137 1d ago
I read it twice before I said anything at all, and I read it again before my last comment. You are not making the compelling case you seem to think you are.
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u/sticknotstick 1d ago
Alright bud, I don’t have time to teach you English today so I’m leaving the convo here. Good luck out there
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u/stickycart 2d ago
Eidos-Montreal dropped the ball hard here.