Power creep is a phenomenon commonly seen in many long-running game series, especially for mobile games, to the chagrin of many players. In some ways, it’s almost like a natural phenomenon, similar to climate change.
Contrary to popular belief, however, “money” isn’t the only reason behind why it happens (although it’s a pretty big one). In truth, there are many factors behind the scenes which cause power creep to happen.
So, as somebody who’s had the (mis)fortune of working on a mobile gacha game, let me share a bit about how powercreep works, what makes it happen, which games are susceptible to it, how it’s a natural process, why developers artificially accelerate it, and various ways they mitigate it.
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0:00 – Introduction
0:45 – Defining “Power Level” and “Power Creep”
8:09 – Natural causes of powercreep
11:58 – Artificially accelerating powercreep
17:41 – How developers mitigate powercreep
22:00 – Creating non-gameplay value
29:20 – Closing thoughts
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Music used:
Battle Jacinthe [Pokémon Legends Z-A]
Gourmet Race [Kirby Air Riders]
AGL LR Super Saiyan Blue Goku & Vegeta Intro [Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle]
Halland Dallarna [Smash Bros Ultimate, Minecraft]
Journey’s End, Skyah (Alt) [Kirby Air Riders]
REINCARNATION [Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective]
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#genshinimpact #honkaistarrail #pokemon
40 Comments
Me gustaba honkai star, cuando salio ruan mei no tuve suerte con su carta, y cuando por fin le hicieron re-run me apresuré a sacarla porque supuestamente su mecánica tendría mas importancia en la nueva actualizacion, y un par de meses después ya estaba totalmente desplazada por un montón de otros personajes… de ruptura… Mejor me regresé al cod mobile, donde el gasto de la 117 mítica ha valido la pena casi ya por 3 años.
I'd love to hear your thoughts about RPG advancement more generally.
Tools, things to consider. How to make leveling fun. Etc.
The worst has to be Yu-Gi-Oh! I'm a long time fan and… pff. The games plays nothing like when it started.
Also, a suggestion: consider lowering the background music. It's a bit too distracting.
Fantastic video with a great message. I really like how you used multiple examples from various games in the medium. Amazing work.
your video is automatically stupid for putting genshin impact into the thumbnail. why? one simple thing. go look at amber's stats. go look at mavuika's stats. scream in despair. the difference is intentional, not inevitable.
Helldivers… i think more accidentally stumbled onto a possible fix for powercreep than actually solving the problem. A few of the warbonds, even very old ones, have unique key functionality that nothing fully matches since. The grenade pistol lets you trade your secondary for more boom, as well as making non-standard grenades far more viable since you have access to normal ones.
You can avoid total powercreep by ensuring some options have a unique and useful capability, even if their numbers start to fall off.
Genshin could do this with the archons intentionally off the top of my head, especially with how often they are rerun compared to the rest of the 5 stars
Kind of rough to understand the topic due to the flashy music in the background, but the main parts were still clear. Well done!
26:16 tell that the Waifu-Decks
Yknow regarding using pokemon despite their mediocrity because of how beloved they are is 0retty much exactly why people are trying their hardest to make flareon and glaceon work despite how bad they are. And the latter is more of a by-product of the type in general.
19:00 Honestly this is what I would hope more gacha games do, create content catered to new characters/mechanics, while the overall power level raises very little if at all. As the game I play the most Star Rail kind of does this, but also a 3.X team deals 1000% damage compared to a 1.X team against any enemy, completely invalidating the use of older characters even if they happen to be compatible with the newer meta.
I am surprised I didn't subscribe. I enjoy this video a lot and I feel honestly anything that lives will have something stronger, faster, better eventually show up. Games are the same way because they have living worlds. Even before this comment becomes specifically about live service, just keep in mind that we can't do everything, but when you find someone who can…there's someone or something around the corner who can do that +1 🙂
I do appreciate you for making these vids.
The Owl yearns for the Electro Swing
Yeah, except it doesnt. Powercreep only HAS to happen, when companies try to sell you stuff on the merit of strength ingame.
In predatory monetisation systems like Gacha-games, powercreep is the easiest way to sell your consumers characters that they might not be interested in otherwise, because if they dont pull, the game will feel worse for them in the future – create a problem, sell the solution.
Beyond that, powercreep can be contained relatively easily – even more so in games that have proper playtesting and/or beta-servers. Its neough to keep chracters within a set power-budget. What something we btw see very well even in gacha games, where you sometimes have several months, up to a year, only character releases, that are worse than the current ceiling, while still being strong enough to not feel like trash. If there is any proof needed, that powercreep happens only intentionally, then thats it.
I also dont agree that playstyle or "kit" is entirely subjective. If you build a character that goes against the best practices and even the core-structure of a game, then it can be easily called objectively bad or at least "unfitting" (what in the context of someone having to design it for that specific game, makes it a bad design – intentionally or unintentionally)
A good example for that is Zani in WuWa.
THANK YOU, FELLOW GAME DESIGNER.
I keep hearing people complain about powercreep in Hoyoverse games, but they don't have a clue how lucky they are. In 5 years, Genshin didn't have the same powercreep that Fire Emblem Heroes had in 1 year. Not only that, but now that they are adding a new "faction" feature to the game, they are going back and buffing old characters to include this feature on them as well. People are complaining about how "limiting" that is (it's not), but they have no idea how it is to invest so much in your favorite character (equivalent to C6), just to a few months later a new character releases which is baseline MUCH stronger than yours. And also has a completely new skill slot that others don't have. That's the life of a FEH player. And you can't even just chill and play on your own rhythm, because a lot of the game requires PvP to earn all daily/weekly rewards. You either follow the meta, or you are going to miss a lot of resources.
Compared to that, Genshin is a paradise.
The spore rhyhorn and golem made me chuckle, not gonna lie. XD
10:10 wow, if this is a hello from 2021
French dragon power wash simulator 😭😭😭🤣🤣🤣🤣
Great video 👏👏👏 inwill share it everywhere
Tbh , i have nothing against powercreep . it will always happen when people start to do meta calculation , for as long as 2 units have different stats it is inevitable that some bloke on the internet will do math just to prove one is better than the other thus META , and then the developer add more options and more idea , the old meta got replace by new one and the cycle is repeat .
No game will be balance , ever , not by changing the number , you just gonna swap 1 problem with another . Even chest game which is symmetrical yet people believe the one who move first tend to be the one who have more advantage …
@14:40:
Me: ::Cries in Dehya::
There is a form of powercreep that I don't think was mentioned. Its more of an internal development power creep. A designer that tries to outdo themself by making every new weapon or feature stronger than the last throughout development. They could easily reduce the numbers but for whatever reason, they don't as they seem to think its better that this new weapon can beat the enemy thats supposed to take X amount of time in X/2 amount of time. This isn't exclusive to weapons but any player character features or attributes could be affected as well. Seemingly chasing that high of making better and better features for the player without realizing how much they're hurting it by making it easier, as TTK goes down due to the disconnect between character ability and enemy ability or level length.
Guardian Tales: character Ascension, max level character increase, max level weapon increase, 6 star hero, 6 star weapon.
Also the ascension was meant to make certain rare characters into unique character power levels, then they quit after like 6 or so, not even all of the main story vital heroes got ascension. While an optional world one vampire quest character gets the ascension.
Also the main character having ascension and 6 star. Also the game releasing new heroes and 6 star versions of old heroes every week. Less than 2 percent unique character drop chance, and 400 myth crystal needed to 6 star heroes. Did I mention the 5 or so copies needed to fully limit break a single weapon and then a mechanic needing even more copies after that.
0:04 Powercreep is prevalent in MANY other long-running developing games, like CCGs, MOBAs, sometimes even fightings, etc.
Big numbers with no drawbacks = bad design
Those developer whose games often get plagued by frequent power creep, clearly have little to no experience with asymmetrical balance. And it's obvious they don't play their own game.
There is an interesting factor which most people overlook. Which is the culture of the country of origin. Chinese games are often about completing the game in the most efficient way possible, western games are often about open interpretation, japanese games are often about direct hard coded storyline with a good story telling and often offer closure. In my opinion, chinese games is the one that fail, because those games become just another problem to solve, i mean look at western and jp games, where players often doesn't care about completing the game, they just wish to craft a story of their own in the game, most chinese games fail at this for now, again i have nothing against chinese developers, but they make game just a problem to solve, and offer little about immersion and experience for the players.
I think Magic the Gathering terms that come close are "Strictly Better" (as opposed to "Side-grade" or "Strictly Worse") for relative power creep, and something like "Format refinement" "Solved Format" for the Meta creep (as this is discussing the strongest options in a given competitive season's pool of options, what is and isn't viable, and what the best overall combination of options).
I don't even play gachas,but I respect that Owl actually considers the design behind them. It's very easy to fall into the trap that every single decision is motivated by money and nothing else, but every game was at the very least designed to be fun to SOMEONE.
I left the game due to powercreep, 90 % of my characters became useless.
Cyrene might have introduced waifucreeping
You said you should never cater to the vocal minority but that's what RTS balance is about which is, arguably, also wrong because it makes the game less fun for 99% of the other players.
I think the biggest issue with power creep is when it affects casual play. Pros and top tier play can deal with balancing issues; casual players shouldn't be affected. Like in MTG for example, super casual play (not even necessarily the commander format, 60-card casual, too) gets directly influenced and totally warped by the printing of each new set. When you've had a deck for years and suddenly 40% of it essentially gets made irrelevant by a single new set's printing, you feel either like an idiot for not buying the new stronger cards, or like you have to spend money on new cards to keep playing casually, because everyone ELSE is less casual, and wants to abuse the new power crept cards as much as possible.
Action games are more resistant to power creep. Hah. Someone doesn't know about frame analysis and combinations of stagger and iframe effectiveness.
Nah, Genshin still has very much relevant powercreep. All you need to do to see that is look at HP inflation in Abyss, and try out Stygian even just once. IT is not that demanding, but it requires an overall well-maintained overall account to even try this gamemode which is years for new players.
They expect you to beat this shit using latest waifu all the time. It does not matter for the vast majority of the playerbase, but it's there.
Although I can agree it's one of the least powercrept game in the genre, the cost for one 5* character is also very high.
Very nice. I was just about to finish editing my own powercreep video 😅.
explain fgo
I think the thumbnail could be wriothesley in a clown costume getting laughed at by ganyu in a clown costume, getting laughed at by ayaka in a clown costume getting laughed at by skirk (your choice if you wana put her in a clown costume and an even bigger flip off from off screen to symbolize her inevitable fate of being outclassed aswell). Genshin is filled with both powercreep and featurecreep, If you take time to look closely.
24:50 Owl went mask off and said that it's fine to exploit relationship starved dudes with waifu bait monetisation because their wellbeing isn't important, using the money to save starving children in third world countries and to stop climate change is. Because that will totally happen if we just throw enough money at these problems. No, the children and climate change are just convenient props for absolving him of his sins committed against his fellow man.
He even implied that he felt bad about doing it to the guys at first but kept doing it and eventually stopped caring. The dudes "aren't worth saving" so they should just be drained of all they're worth. That is just evil.
The proposed solution to powercreep is to… not even think about it. Just don't worry about progression being made into a chore by predatory design slowly suckering you into the cash shop. In truth, this is the whole business model. I learned this the hard way playing Warframe for years. Seriously, don't even start playing these games. Any game that has things like daily login rewards/missions, gambling in the shape of random chance loot boxes you can buy or increasingly grindy progression which can be conveniently bypassed by paying money is designed to exploit you by evil marketeer developers.
Don't fall for it.
0:17
I strongly disagree. I think that powercreep can pop up in tons of genres. Powercreep is worth thinking about if your game:
1. Will receive new content over time (content/balance updates, DLC, sequels)
2. Has gameplay options (different tools or characters that can solve a problem in differing ways)
3. Has an incentive to optimize (multiplayer, grinding, high scores, speedrunning)
If a meta can form, meta powercreep will naturally form. But direct powercreep happens all the time in various genres as long as the game meets those 3 criteria.
how i'd handle powercreep is by making different types of mechanics. Need a new dendro catalyst? make the dendro catalyst say a bond of life summoner type of character. need the billionth hydro catalsyt? make the hydro catalyst a dps that scales based on how little of your max hp you got. ect.
And yet in Honor of Kings, developers avoid powercreep at all cost.
Gacha gamers are parasocial people. Terrifyingly so