Standard disclaimer: Cosmic Star Heroine is currently under development. Any ideas mentioned in this & other articles may be modified or discarded before the game comes out.
Why do the stores near the start of the game have cheap, low-quality equipment and the stores near the final dungeon have the best equipment money can buy? It’s one of those small details that can hurt a game’s overall world building. A few RPGs have tackled this problem by offering stores that LV-Up with the player (Atelier Ayesha & Tales of Xillia to mention two that I’ve played this year) & since I’m all for giving the player more things they can LV-Up, I think we’ll do something along those lines in Cosmic Star Heroine.
Here’s how I think it’ll work.
Stores are owned by huge mega-corporations & each comporation specializes in a certain type of good that you’ll need in your adventure like weapons, armor, shields, and items. By raising your LV with each corporation, you gain more and more exclusive VIP Membership statuses within each organization. The higher your LV, the higher quality goods you’ll be able to buy & the lower prices you’ll be offered. Also upon reaching certain milestone LVs, you’ll be given special Loyalty rewards as a gift (like a free unique piece of equipment you can’t get any other way).
There are a number of ways you’ll be able to gain XP with each corporation – buying items from their stores, bribing them with money or valuable items, completing certain quests, or hiring someone to hack their client database to make you look better. Plus, you’ll gradually gain XP with all corporations just by playing the game as your reputation & power grow (power attracts power after all).
In addition to the standard shops, there will also be a Black Market that will work in a similar way where you’ll be able to spend your money on purchases of a more… questionable nature. Mwahahahaha!
Well, an obvious to keep players from simply grinding one shop is to have them require items from each other. Sure, you can take Acme to level 24 but the owner’s going to want an item that only Johnson and Co sells at level 10 along the way.
You could also invest money in shops that you think are going to do well and get dividends from your investment! Cosmic Star Universalis!
If Johnson and Co is the only place to buy armor (or items or weapons or whatever), you’re probably not going to want to keep it at LV1. 🙂
My problem with this is that once I begin to invest in one set of shops, the other sets of shops grow increasingly uninteresting to me. After all, if Acme now has level 24 gear, and Johnson and Co has level 1 gear still, then I won´t buy any Johnson and Co gear, and Acme gets even more of my money, so it becomes a reinforcing cycle.
But on the other hand, what if which corporation you invested in shifted the “political landscape,” perhaps even altering the ending? Thus if I give all my money to Acme, then at the end, Acme is the most powerful corporation, for good or for ill, but if I spread my money around, then I can maintain a balance of power.
I like Spuuky’s idea, but in case you want something simpler, or the work gets out of hand…..
Why not just offer stronger gear, but make the prices higher than need be, and only allow people who are able to complete certain tasks for vendors to be able to buy it. It gives incentive to add reasons to go out into the world and explore it for what a vendor wants but also limits you to only the gear that you can personally unlock depending on your ability to kill certain enemies. Like one vendor says “if you want to buy my good stuff, bring me a black dragons tooth.” The black dragon can be a level 50 enemy that is a mini boss of sorts so it is stronger than typical enemies. You beat it, and you get access to the next tier of gear at that merchant. That merchant may only carry gear for one or two of your characters so you have to look around and take tasks from multiple vendors to gear out your team.
My idea can add legitimate playtime to your game and also give people a reason to go and explore. You can make the gear so much better because without it the next tier of monsters of a new area will massacre you if you didn’t take your time to explore and find the items the merchants want, or……you can try an underpowered run and see how that goes.
You could also do what a game like FFTA does with its bazaar – force players to collect the materials to forge gear, essentially, which dictates what stores have available. I like this a little less but it works in principle.
yeah shops that get more powerful as the game goes on always nagged me, sure a Podunk town should have weak items and a master craftsman in the wilderness should have the best, but the rest should be about equal (even if the higher stuff is too much to afford it should still be in inventory)
coming back to a town and it has a better inventory sort of alleviates this if they put in messages like we are low on stock, shipments late, new shipment just arrived, etc.
another thing that always rankled me about towns in games is they feel too small, and the area around them not built up at all, the majority of these towns should have farms or suburbs (if a modern setting) so the world doesn’t feel so empty with masses of life in towns/dungeons.
chrono trigger is one game that alleviates this somewhat where you see the large towns that you can only visit a small part of each one.
I sent you my idea on Twitter but I’ll expound upon it here. The problem with good shops is that they devalue “treasure.” The problem with good treasure is that they devalue shops. So I propose each of them doing very different things.
Treasure chests/drops from bosses/etc can drop equipment – the only place it appears is by finding it, one way or the other. This makes treasure very valuable.
Shops upgrade equipment – all of it. You can get a +x damage mod, or a +y armor mod, or whatever, and put it on whatever you’ve happened to find. This way the “best” weapon in the game, for instance, is always obtainable via a dungeon, but also the late-game shops still serve a very valuable purpose, making that weapon better. The more unique mods they sell (rather than flat bonus) the better, for my personal taste. Get an aiming mod for a gun, or a silencer that somehow helps, or a status affliction enhancement, or whatever. But those things, and personalize all your gear at stores that way.
Whether you have those mods be bindable to the weapon you first put it on is a gameplay decision I can’t make for you, but it might make sense for some and not others.
Maybe a recommendation approach would work for the same purpose. Maybe the shopkeeper only sells items that he/she thinks you can use properly (and that’s based on your level). As such, more damaging equipment that may hurt you if you can’t handle it properly wouldn’t be offered to you.
By the way, have you played Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale? It’s available on Steam. It’s an RPG in which you play as the shopkeeper, rather than the adventure. Very cool concept.
I look forward to the questionable stuff
It’s worked reasonably well in Xillia, though I tend to jump like 10 or 20 levels at a time, completely changing the landscape of my shops there each time I finally get that x3 Minerals I’ve been waiting for.