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Tagged News: killing experience

Monday, January 7th
Interviews

In his latest column, Jonathan Steinhauer continues his look at what he calls "The Killing Experience". He began two weeks ago in part one and today looks at more recent examples of this trend. It's all about RPGs and how they use killing as the primary form of advancement, or experience.

A second, much more recent, example is with Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series, particularly Oblivion. In this game which follows the standard RPG model, there is no experience gain from killing. In fact, there is no experience at all. Instead, character growth is built on an array of skills specific to a particular class. As those skills are used over an over again, proficiency grows. Once there are ten threshold increases in the class skills, a new level is gained. At that point health, stamina, magicka, and prime stats also improve.

Read more after the click.

Monday, December 24th
Editorials

No rest for the holidays, Jonathan Steinhauer keeps his MMO design column on schedule with part one of "Killing Experience". In this, he looks at the primary form of advancement in every major MMO: combat.

Why is it that the dominant method of character growth in almost every game in existence is through the killing of monsters and villains? Whether you are looking at the oldest of pen-and-paper games, your mainstream single-player RPG, or the newest MMO, character growth always seems to boil down to "I killed that goblin warlord so I get 100xp." On the other hand, if the same goblin was hacked and beaten to an inch of its life and then left alone to recover (which usually averages less than thirty seconds), the same player would get zero experience from the battle.

Read more after the click.