@@adamgray1753 a simple answer would be money cap. Introduce the concept of the area becoming richer and richer as the quote on quote local HERO (that's you) does well and brings in a lot of loot. And then your local traders offer gear that is simply better quality and more expensive because the whole area grew more rich over time. It's a bit simplified but it would definitely be a solution.
I remember, in Oblivion, being accosted by bandits on the roads. I was high level, they were scaled to match me and were subsequently wearing a full set of glass armour. Claded with enough money to buy a small baronny, and they ready to fight and die if I didn't gave them a few coppers. I don't know if "broken" enven qualifies here, but I admire the dedication to their craft those bandits had.
It would definitely make more sense to simply swarm the high level player with multiple lower level bandit mooks wearing garbage armor and just a few coins each.
@@ClickToPreview or just do like Skyrim does and just allows you to easily overpower the pathetic bandits that once used to be a thorn in your side when you were lower level and didn't have the best armor/weapons. For example, in Skyrim my first character ever was a warrior Nord that wielded greatswords. She was tough but had to be careful to not get overwhelmed. 60 hours of game time later, my warrior Nord had maxed out her crafting skills and could actually craft Legendary Daedric weapons & armor which were so powerful that she could literally hack her way through an entire bandit/foresworn camp, mowing down scores of enemies without losing more than like 30% of her overall health and made those encounters hilariously trivial.
The best thing is giving the gold to the bandit, and then try stealing the gold back from him, just to hear him say that you can take it, because It's worthless for him. Even the bandit knows the economy of the game is broken.
Metal Gear Solid 4 had a neat in-world explanation as to why looted guns are not worth as much as guns you buy. Everybody has ID tagged weapons and ID tagged gear. You can still loot every weapon you find but the gun can't fire unless Drebin, a local gun merchant, hacks them (a service for which he charges a lot of money). Any excess guns you loot are sold to Drebin automatically for a fairly small amount of cash because the guns are basically ID locked junk and he's the only person who (probably illegally) hacks them. It's a neat way of making looting all your enemies still lucrative and easy but not so easy and lucrative as to break the economy.
A similar (mechanics-wise) way to handle this in non-sci-fi games, would be to label the majority of loot as "riddled with bullet-holes", "heavily damaged", or similar. Maybe those labels exist on the items themselves, and the player needs to pay a fee to remove them before using the items (same mechanic as your example), or maybe those "labels" are just descriptions that show up in the flavor-text, when the player visits the local shopkeep/pawn-shop/blacksmith.
@@JZStudiosonline True, I always wondered why people couldn't just buy up old weapons. Maybe that did happen and unregistered guns were all bought up quickly, or became illegal under the pretence of gun safety. They should have expanded on that in the codec conversations or something. This sort of thing definitely works better in a sci fi context.
@@AileTheAlien that is something i think alot, if i cleave someones head with an axe that helmet is probably not usable anymore, it could even make for a realistic armor that reduce the damage by 100% until the armor is destroyed like in rage 2, that is one game where weapons cant even be collected because A, your weapons are supperior and B abundant to the point nobody would pay for it, food is more valuable, skyrim could easilly get a away with vendors only buying rare weapons
Yeah except Drebin was with the Patriots all along and he doesn’t hack them, he just gave Old Snake up to date nanomachines with the new FOXDIE virus so Snake can use the guns as well
Dwarf Fortress handles this pretty well in two ways: First, money is essentially worthless. A coin is only worth a coin for its own civilization. two: Coins have weight. Enemies have weapons and armor, but nine times out of ten they're just not worth looting. Good armor and weapons are exceptionally rare and hard to come by. Finding something that fits your character can also be a hassle.
Then again everything in Dwarf Fortress is a hassle, so only players predisposed to accepting hassle are playing it. Integrate that economy system into a "normal" game and players will complain about the unnecessary complexity or that special gear is so extremly hard to find. Any attempt at aligning the game with reality will directly scare more people off.
You can always go the route of playing Fortress Mode, creating a bunch of incredibly high-end gear, then have the fortress fall so you can explore it as an Adventurer. Good luck getting past all the traps though, and whatever killed the fortress in the first place.
This is why broken equipment and repair costs are such an important mechanic. The problem isn't that the bandit is wearing armor, the problem is that the bandit's armor is still in pristine sellable condition after you just violently murdered them. If you just shot that bandit in the head, why is their helmet not ruined? If the majority of non-consumable loot starts in a broken state, you could sell most of the broken stuff to a "scrap dealer" but still run across the occasional item that's worth repairing. Note that this doesn't necessarily require the player's stuff to break all the time, and would actually require the player's equipment to be high durability (or repairable to high durability for relatively little cost) to compensate for all the broken junk they run across. Or maybe the item in question is not broken, but needs to be cleaned or sharpened to remove a debuff. Same thing mechanically in terms of money, but still allows the player to actually use the item if they really want / need to. Then you can have money sinks that allow players to pay money (or smithing with ingots of the appropriate metals) to further increase durability for their favorite weapons and armor, so their stuff breaks even less, and extra durability gear has a better resell price to compensate for when they eventually need to upgrade.
YO I agree 100 percent!!! HAving the loot being broken would help so much! You would be forced to buy weapons and armours from the shop instead of just getting it from enemies!
Reminds me of one of the ways dayZ standalone tried to cut down on kill-on-sight behavior; shoot someone in the chest ? Congrats whatever loot they had on and in their backpack is now severly damaged or destroyed, which couldve been avoided if you held them up and robbed them or teamed up/traded gear
diablo kinda had it with identifi item, you had to buy scrools or pay an npc before being able to use the item and the item would be worth less if you dont know the item
Dark Souls fixes this problem in the best way I have ever seen: 1. Make the player weight infinite and focus instead on their equipped item weight, so no walking back to town 2. Inherently limit the currency they can acquire to "one life" worth of items, and make death quick and easy, meaning they are incentivised to spend money quickly rather than horde it 3. Make essential items cost reasonable amounts of money constantly, but each usage is significant 4. Make all the best items in the game not tied to the economy at all (exploration) or tied to some other resource (Boss souls, etc) This results in an economy that functions very well as it has a lot of money sinks and not a lot of money generators. You can technically farm souls, but it's tedious and discouraged, the player won't naturally become a billionaire as they play, and as a result shopkeepers don't need to be stingy.
And killing a scaled down sun bro while invading with your low level character and getting 500k souls still feels like Christmas, even when you have nothing else to buy, because all your consumables are stacked to storage box maximum.
@@_Just_John Yeah TBH the multiplayer in Dark Souls has always kinda sucked and ruined the progression system. It's absolutely the worst aspect of the game.
You raise a lot of valid points, but I honestly don't see why Dark Souls needs a currency in the first place. Item weight and movement is handled really well, but If special items are tied to specific Boss Souls and such, the only thing the currency really affects is levelling, which itself at least does pretty much nothing. (If it takes 40 hits to kill a boss and after levelling strength it takes only 39 hits, does that really make a difference? You still need to learn the attack patterns and how to dodge and ,you know, the actual game mechanics.) The only real effect levelling has is to prevent you from using certain items you've already found until you reach the arbitrary stat requirements, and I don't see the benefit in that. (Did you just explore a lot and defeat a really hard boss and you want to use his weapon as a reward? Well, too bad. You should've been levelling your Intelligence instead of your Faith. Now you need to farm Phalanxes for 5 hours or start over with a new character.)
I think a large part of the problem with in-game economies is that player characters don't generally have overheads like real people do, or if they do they're trivial in comparison to the amount of income they have.
One thing that's kind of messed up about a lot of games' economies is when the currency is implied or outright stated to be gold coins, with nothing smaller being available. The implications regarding the cost of basic food and supplies are kind of messed up, especially since there's very rarely any answer for why and how there's so much gold knocking about that a single Apple is worth the weight of several minted coins just by itself. It's not like it's something inherited from the pen and paper systems either because in D&D a gold coin is a big deal and most basic supplies are worth significantly less.
@@Intrspace granted but that then begs the question of why something so easily obtainable is being minted into coins. Minting currency needs to be beyond the means of the general public for it to retain any value. Counterfeiting gold coins would be incredibly easy compared to other metals, as it has a low melting point and doesn't need to be refined from ore, though the argument could be made that this may be contributing to the absurd levels of inflation depicted in these games.
I'm gonna approach this from JRPGs because I think it's even more common in those than it is in others, and I'll use the 2 big JRPG franchises to show how it's done differently. Final Fantasy has always used "Gil" as its currency in the games. It could always be adapted to fit whatever currency format makes the most sense for the world of each game, and in the ones where it's coins, they didn't need to state that they weren't gold. Japan's currency unit is Yen, but 1 Yen is essentially a penny in buying power, so a 1:1 correspondence is easy for them to understand and not question. Dragon Quest has always used gold as its currency, and stuff always costs a ton if you think about it in real-world terms (24 gold for a torch in DQ1, for example). Though I have noticed that as the DQ series progresses, they keep stuff below 6 digits unless it's exceedingly powerful/rare, and frequently, equipment doesn't go above 10000 gold in cost until really late in the game. I don't know all the other JRPG franchises that use made-up currency that isn't gold, but with any of those, they probably don't even think about its intrinsic value the way most of us from the Americas and Europe would, because their currency unit is just Yen, and stuff goes up to crazy high numbers without feeling weird because 100000 Yen for something is like saying 100000 pennies in the US.
"I shouted out; who killed the economeee.... When after all... it was you and me. "(mostly me, grr). In a medieval fantasy adventure with a high body count, you should be able to recruit scavengers to scratch all that personal equipment together. Sure, the upper classes will think of you as a king of vultures, but the peasants will get some new knives and pitchforks.
Underrail has good moneysinks: player-owned house, supersteel production (which LITERALLY melts money to produce high-quality crafting components) and, with the Expedition expansion, jetski. I think it's a good solution considering the game is the hoarder's dream.
EVE Online's economy is the pinnacle of game economies. The fact that I can do something like hold certain materials, wait for a war, and profit from the increased demand of said materials is mind boggling to me.
I can just imagine it: dungeon crawler, but with cookie clicker mentality. Raid a few caves, then hire mercs to do raiding for you, then build a guild house so it can hire mercs for you and so on and so on
Games like skyrim are just way too generous with the value of the loot they give. I just hacked a guy to death, or set him on fire, or whatever - who would want to buy his bloody chopped up burned armor?
"Maybe you can think of an example where you can pick up everything an enemy is wearing." The entire Infinity Engine Interplay/Bioware library: "Am I a joke to you?" Taking Baldur's Gate as an example, you leave a lot of low tier armour and a lot of short swords and so on on the ground, by choice. Similar thing goes for TES games. I pick up what seems useful and leave the rest. This is why I think it's better to let players loot everything an enemy is wearing, it means I get put into an immersed RP mindset, searching bodies and chests, going through the stuff, and then thining "oh, that's valuable/useful!" sometimes and taking it with me, while the typical MMO model that most games are following nowadays doesn't do that. "Drops" are presented more as a reward instead of just a neutral, PnP like "well, this is what he had...", so I immediately grab them, even if they are shite.
These game's limited inventory puzzle/grid also forced you to leave a lot of loot behind which made you very choosy by nature. Definitely hard to "get rich" with such a limited inventory.
I figure if I get to play an anime hero, I can put up with the game not having much for me to do with gold. But it's kind of a bonus when they manage to find a good way to manage the economy.
@@LOKITYZ No, it doesn't. If the player can get himself a spell that allows him to kill everybody he wants to, what's stopping all the NPCs from doing the same?
One of the things I like of Baldur's Gate, at least the first one (in the second you get asked a payment that's considered to be super expensive, yet you earn more than enough in just a couple quests) is that money was always scarce. I don't think I ever could get into a shop and just buy everything I wanted. I had to prioritize and give up on some stuff so I could get some other and include there keeping at least this much in case the next shop has something I want more than anything here. Personally, I kind of have the same issue with power level as with economy. Obviously, if I go back to a level 1 area as a level 40 character I want my progression to show in the form of easily dispose of the enemies there; but I'm not that okay if I get to a point that the dragon that was like a god when I was level 1 is now barely a challenge. Now, I'd rather find that the dragon was god like for me at level 1 and now at level 100 is a challenge I might have a fighting chance to overcome if I prepare properly... maybe? Do I need to fight that? Can't we do something like... I don't know, dupe him into believing there's a huge load of riches somewhere so far he'll want to go there but not to return? Yes, I could kill him, but I'd rather not try to find out.
Dark Souls solved this pretty nicely- you cant sell shit until end of midgame. And even then it makes no money. So Items are as valuable as they are useful for you. Also there is no difference between money and experience points.
Plus, just about every weapon and armor piece you get is equally good if you make your build around it, so the player isn't constantly buying the next level of gear and instead just investing in upgrading a weapon they like. That's why fashion souls became a thing; the benefit of min-maxing isn't overwhelming, so you can choose outfits based on style.
There's a simple solution to this: Make a good game, that doesn't put the focus on wealth, but on story, atmosphere, chracter design and real progress. So players won't waste their time on boring crap like item loops, because there are much better things to explore. Like Gothic. Best RPG ever, and the opposite of Skyrim. There's like no modern game that actually fulfills these classical criteria of a good RPG.
I for one always thought it odd that in-game economies were so *crude*: Players usually can lug around much more stuff than sensible (like a hundred swords in Skyrim). "Stuff to sell" is generally unending as soon as enemies or harvest nodes respawn. Merchants buy everything without question. I do not think a solution would be to completely axe or overhaul *one* valve in this economic pipeline, but rather adjust them all: Why not have players actually only be able to carry semi-realistic amounts of loot? Why not keep actually valuable items in short supply in the game world (pearls, jewels, etc.)? Why not have a system that for example makes it simply unappealing to sell off "scrap" to merchants? I mean, that armour your pried off a dead bandit? It's old, and scuffed, and it does not fit anyone well enough to be worth a lot. You probably dented it while hacking the bandit down as well. And who do you sell it to? Smiths may not be in the business of fixer-upping. Maybe there is a "guild rule" in place that lets smiths only sell their own branded stuff - if it does have another smith's mark on it, they will not buy it. I could go on. The reason in-game economies usually bloat like crazy, or treat the player perceived unfairly is, as far as I can make out, because multiple "adjustment valves" are heavily gamified. So, make an economy that has reasons for people to not buy your stuff. Trade agreements, licenses, guild mafia shit. Have a reason that the player cannot lug around an entire scrapyard in their pocket (like "where would he put ten suits of armour?!" needs a justification...). Don't have bandit armies respawn within a day. Do not have those bandits wear armour fit for a king. Have the economy even be an active one, self-adjusting: If the player supplies an alchemist with five gallons of fish oil, that alchemist would probably not buy another drop. Maybe he'll only take one barrel, because anything more would spoil. ...Hell, you could re-gamify other aspects of the game: Have a "scavenging" skill that allows players to pry valuable gems out of armour (for example), enabling them to transport value that they otherwise would have to leave behind. In fact, the longer I think about it: One core problem is how games treat loot: It's *heavily* encouraged to take everything that is coded for pickup. A few games may lampshade this by having a discussion about the morals of looting your enemies, because it's a nice mechanism to employ greed for engagement. Maybe another angle could be to make taking stuff off corpses at least dubious (akin to how Fallout slapped you with the Graverobber and Child Killer "perks")? Nutshelling: In-game economies spin out of whack because many designers take too few measures for them not to.
The economy in the first Fable game (and maybe sequels?) dropped the prices when the player sold too many of the same thing to the merchants. Fallout Tactics had similar mechanic, and it felt reasonable in-world / flavor-text, plus meta-game / player-wise.
Funny you should mention skyrim, as i played that game like i played fallout: picking up everything that isnt nailed down so i was overencumbered right around the time you have to sneak past the bear, reasonng id make some decent coin off that stuff, only for all those swords and armor to be worth like 1g a piece, not worth the weight, atleast until i spend time grinding speechcraft by selling 1 item at a time since i cant give it a starting boost by tagging it or having a high CHR stat, nor can i raise it passively by leveling up.
It is moral to loot your defeated enemy. Ever was, ever will. In fact, until the father of Alexander the Great, the only way to pay for war expenses was loot. Then, with the Roman Empire was a paid army, but poorly paid and let to be compensated by looked over corruption. After the Roman Empire until Napoleon -the bulk of the armies was made by unpaid soldiers. What was always theoretically forbidden, was ravaging and raping, looting poor houses, burning down villages. Loot was to be taken directly from the enemy army and those in power. Only barbaric hoards had no rules of engagement. .
Moral does not mean stupid, either I use those resources or the enemy will to attack me again. The moral part must be sorted out BEFORE THE FIGHT, not after. .
Another solution is to try the Path of Exile approach where you base the economy on bartering with items that have other uses (e.g. giving you a temporary attack bonus, scrolls of identify, etc.). That system isn't fool-proof, since the players have circumvented it by declaring an official currency, but it works for merchants, and would work in a singleplayer game.
I don't remember exactly what game it was, but a long long time ago(*), there was a game where shop keeper would pay more for item they didn't have and less (or nothing) for items they had in great quantity. This mechanics was also used for buying price. This made some stuff really valuable at first, but worthless as the player sold more and more of that stuff, reducing the incentive to bring it back. * Bard's tale? Wizardry III? Might and magic? Diablo I? Ultima III? Probably an other one...
Icewind Dale did this too. Was pretty annoying because selling everything of the same thing at once got you more money than selling it one after another.
there is also the bean merchant in zelda, that sells them cheap and eventually increase the value as the player buys them, that makes sense and is a good money sink, and twilight princes has an armor that spends gold to use
You mentioned "not having merchants that will buy things from you" as completely killing the gameplay loop... but that doesn't HAVE to be the case. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild maintains a gameplay loop of constantly looting, but none of the weapons and armor you pick up from enemies can be sold. Instead, you are strongly incentivized to personally use every piece of loot you pick up. This is because every item that drops is also something of a consumable-- maybe like ammo. But unlike ammo, the actual uses of each thing you pick up is varied and interesting. Yes, having your stuff break is annoying and gives you the feeling of "loss", which is disempowering. But on the other hand, once you lean into it, it really does make gameplay, and the game LOOP, a lot more interesting, while also keeping the game economy sane. You *CAN* become rich quick by selling things... but the things you sell actually seem VALUABLE. Like diamonds. Or divine dragon scales. (also: algorithm)
You're running into realism issues in a different way by tuning wear mechanics harshly enough to matter. Weapons don't last forever, but if they're quality they last a good long time and low quality often goes hand in hand with repairability. An iron or bronze sword will bend pretty easily, but it can be bent back several times before work hardening makes it to brittle to use. An axe haft may break, but you'll find someone in every village who can rehaft your axe head. Bows last a very long time if properly cared for and not abused almost independent of how good they are as bows.
The way I always explained merchants underpaying you for your loot is that you're just setting the price so low that they'd be a fool not to buy whatever you're willing to sell them. If you tried to sell them at market value then the merchants would probably only want to buy a thing or two from you, but making everything super cheap basically guarantees that they will buy everything you're willing to sell them
Two things helped Eve Online. First, one of the two founders of CCP is a real-life economist. Second, although Eve is the most developer hands-off in online game history, CCP is the most ruthless in policing RMT....Mossad ruthless...Putin ruthless.
Other possible solutions: 1- consumables (water, food, items which help the upkeep of gear, potions, etc) 2- gear wears over time, requiring upkeep, eventually expensive repairs 3- gear acquired from dead folks often has some kind of damage/wear and is worth less prior to repair 4- inflation
In Skyrim too, @@tiagodarkpeasant, you can craft one or more pieces of armor that enable you to increase your Carry Weight. So you can be the only one in all of Skyrim, or even Tameriel really, to be carrying multiple Daedric weapons, armors, and/or other high weight objects should you be killed. Maximum absurdity to the rescue!! lol
@@adamgray1753 if armor and perks give that then any human can do that, if it was related to dragon souls somehow then the main character could be the only one
@@adamgray1753 anyway i was talking about powerful creatures that have nothing of value to loot, giants even have weapons that you cant use, they could use more sapient non humanoids, like centaurs that use armor that couldn't be used by humans
One thing I always liked as a money sink in games is cool stuff that doesn't actually affect gameplay too much. Like buying a house and decorating it with cool stuff or buying cool outfits. Sort of like secret bases in earlier pokemon games or clothes in the newer pokemon games. They don't break the game, give you something cool to spend money on, and let you express yourself a bit more and make things more your own.
The other way to get around this problem is to apply the real-world trade logic to quest design. Have player actively seek out those buyers for the loot, since there is no way that general village store will be interested in buying even one of that rusty swords. But the shopkeeper can direct the player to the head of a local farming community, who will gladly buy those swords as a scrap metal to reforge as a farming equipment. Or the shopkeeper can tell the player of a warrior guild that can actually use all of these weapons. But the warrior guild must already have some kind of weapons supplier, so the player will have to compete in already crowded market, or find a way to deal with the supplier.
So far the best example of an in-game economy I’ve seen is octopath traveler. The only real problem I’ve found, is that it isn’t particularly hard to farm for coin in high-level areas once you have a good rhythm going.
Best solution - bartering with other Exiles in a world where its perfectly okay to leave bilions of gold coins on the ground - they wont help you survive Wreclast. Currency is items, that "merchants" are too weak to obtain, so best they can do is scraps and if you dont like that u can get nothing instead. Best solution. At least until bots come.
The first Pillars of Eternity allowed you to loot basically all your opponents' equipment and had no carry limit. You'd end up walking back to town with what must've been caravans full of armor, weapons, spellbooks, and whatever else you snatched up. Even though you could only sell them for like 1/5 of their value, the sheer amount of stuff would quickly add up. They mostly disallowed this sort of thing in the sequel, only letting you fully loot certain enemies but not others.
Here are a few suggestions: 1. Make it so merchants only buy certain types of items 2. Make common loot much less valuable 3. Make good loot much more rare 4. Dramatically reduce carry weight 5. Fill the world with a 50/50 mix of player-levelled and static-levelled enemies, not just one type or the other. 6. Make the in-game currency a consumable item that has inherent value (imagine if clean water was the currency in fallout instead of caps) 7. Remove money completely and have the economy be based on bartering goods and services
I get your joke but in all seriousness to do that you have to play a character that has lockpicking as a main interest. Several of my Henrys have been noble goody-two-shoes and I could not open hard or very hard chests. KCD has done economy right in my opinion.
I am engaged with this content. Regarding in-game economies, they are not always broken; more on-rails games can easily control how much money the player would have so that the player can afford only some of the late-game purchases (KotOR if I'm not mistaken and SR:Returns are examples of this). And I don't really mind that I can't loot all enemies, as long as I'm getting some interesting loot somewhere (and better some interesting loot than 25 generic longsword)
if you like thinking about game economies i recommend checking out Path of Exile. i don't necessarily think it "solves" all of the problems you bring up but it does use a very interesting and unique system that remains engaging well into all but the most extreme endgame scenarios
The simplest way to balance an economy is to just remember to implement a basic simulation of supply and demand. If your player has 100 daggers, a shop keeper is going to pay less per dagger for the whole 100 than they would for each individual one, as each additional dagger is less necessary than the one before... If you want to really integrate this with the world, if players do this, daggers will become cheap enough that you'll start seeing every NPC carrying or owning multiple daggers at around the point the price reaches the floor; you may even see a blacksmith smelting down a whole cart of them to make swords. Hording money will have a similar effect, as each additional coin you have will make the items you want to buy less expensive as there's less money in the economy (assuming you've gotten that money by selling to merchants, rather than digging it out of a dungeon). Conversely, each item you buy will raise the price, until you find people lining up outside a store to sell the item in question to pay for more... Necessary ends; until many villagers start learning to produce those goods themselves and start making enough to suit your demand. A pleasant side effect of this system is that it would mean that the economy is driven by player action, and gives it a very reactive sense of being alive, and responding to the player's actions. The world can become noticeably better as a result of their actions; a player could build a house because they notice they're the most expensive item they can reasonably obtain, they sell it and watch as the person who moves in turns out to be a gatherer of the very materials the player bought to make the house... Or maybe the place most of that material is shipped in from turns from a run down shanty town to a thriving city; and you don't even realize it until you've crossed the map to get there.
My first experience with your content was with one of those 2 videos: Reset Button: Megatextures & The Biggest Game Ever (I dont remember exactly in which order I watched them) I really need to say I enjoy your content, you speak about interesting topics I somewhat-thought about, but didnt really came to an end. You create great content and I think all respect the effort you put into those videos. Thanks.
Economy is broken when murder hobos can quicksave/respawn, and enemies do as well; without the risk of permadeath you have infinite money. Economy adjusts by devaluing looted/basic items; blacksmithing, leatherworking and similar crafting professions vanish. Magic item trading and services become the only path to riches, and everyone must cozy up to the immortal adventurers, who effectively become the only law in town. Would be interesting to see "The Boys" realized in a roleplaying game. Die a hero, or live to be the villain.
The very first solution that came to my mind was this: You stab your enemys to death, slice them open, burn them with spells and whatever, so it only would make sense if the gear the enemy is wearing would be "burned" or "ripped" and therefore making the gear useless and hard to sell (who would by burned leather trousers with one leg torn off?). That would make perfectly sense, especially when you go for the "realistic" route. That idea could reach from simply gear being "used" or you could make a whole system out of it with gear hitboxes, attack recognition and used percentage etc.
yeah, one of the only avenues that would be effective at preventing exponential yikes would be for a game to have a hard start and end. which then lets you adjust the inflation curves to fit. but that usually means a short-ish game and we don't want that either. i think we're just screwed as very few people are up to either the task of creating or managing a fully organic Economy like in EVE as you mention.
the problem with an organic economy like eve is that the people with the most money end up manipulating the economy heavily. either by controlling the means of production or by market manipulation. the developers intervene and have it in their best interests to do so... unless it leads to other consequences. with eve that's kind of why you play the game so its fine but it doesn't work in a game like WoW thats heavily structured. in eve, infinite run 'original blueprints' for tech 2 items are basically an infinite fountain of money because they make more blueprints. if you have one of the handful that exist, and they sell for trillions. when they introduced them the economy functioned at a much smaller scale and it didn't become a problem until tech 2 became the 'norm' rather than hyper-expensive rarities. back then, nobody had the raw materials to mass produce them. now you can just buy them in the trade hub. they avoided adding new high value blueprint originals on newer items by having npcs sell limited-run blueprint copies but they couldn't just remove a player's trillion dollar bargaining chip and sole livelihood, because the fat cats lighting cigars with rare battleships are ultimately just as important to the economy as the people suicide running freighters for pocket change. because they buy the stupid gaudy rare shit nobody in their right mind would ever use and bankroll entire wars. you get rid of them and you don't have people to buy the loot from the deadspace raids everyone runs or the people telling other people what to do with the fat check that pays everyone's rent
@@Cheesemonk3h that the Corporations wage war over the Galaxy is what keeps things in check generally. groups try to dominate something for sweet profit and then someone else burns them to the ground for it and the cycle repeats.
It seems like the core of the problem is that the supply is continuously increasing while the demand is infinite. How about a game with stores that are only willing to buy a fixed number of everything? That way you can still make some money early on, but pretty soon you hit the limit for noob level iron shortswords, so now you've really got to be on the lookout for better loot rather than just farming tons of the basic tier stuff. With enough variety of loot, and rare and unique items, you can still get the satisfaction of getting something new and cool, even if it's not an upgrade for your character, because you found something you can definitely sell, and meanwhile it might stop us OCD gamers from trying to pick up every damn thing that has value even after we've become multi-billionaires! ;o)
Just implement fake supply and demand, with each item sold by the player, after a certain delay merchants should drop the price, given demand is kind of constant in a certain city. Then the player can try to sell a shitton still, but won't get much money. Also if there are many merchants, implement a connectivity factor that will make all other merchants that you didn't sell to also have to drop the price, so the economy seems like a world connected by trade. This way you just gradually remove the incentive for picking up certain classes of items (it should work strongly for the item in question, but to some extend for all similar items, since they can be alternatives).
There's an excellent mod for the Witcher 3 called "Lore-Friendly Economy" that gives you an in-game menu to nerf or buff prices and rewards. I have the quest rewards slightly nerfed and resale prices basically nonexistent: a relic sword is worth 50 to sell and 500 to buy, for example. Such a simple fix that made a 250 g reward from a Witcher contract into big exciting money, rather than the letdown it was before. Transforms the game for me. There's a quest where you can bribe a guard 100 gold to let a group of asylum seekers through to the city and now it feels like a genuine sacrifice for Geralt. P.s. it's a good time for a replay of TW3 if like me you hadn't picked it up for a few years. Still looks sensational (especially with some easy .ini tweaks) and the gameplay loop is fuckin solid.
Nice video, I always felt that better inventory mechanics is the best solution to that problem, first of all a weight only inventory limitation is a bad or at best an incomplete system, how cumbersome an item is should be taken into account, carrying 10 plate armors should not be possible, inventories need to have slot system + weight limitation. All what's need to be done afterwards is to adjust item values accordingly, add some transportation mechanic that can be unlocked (carry heavier/bigger items on horse back/magic...) and that's it.
This was actually handled reasonably well in Daggerfall. A game from 1996, made by Bethesda of all studios. Sure, carry capacity might not be great on the player character, but you could buy a cart to store stuff in, and access it from the dungeon entrance without leaving the dungeon. Now, this made the character obscenely rich, but Daggerfall had all kinds of stuff to spend that money on. Sure, enchanting your own items was kinda broken, but it was also expensive as hell, and then those items couldn’t be repaired so you’d have to do it (and for our purposes, pay for it) again and again. This also had the side effect of incentivizing players to hold more than one of any given late game item. Sure you could sell that Daedric broadsword for the kind of money that gives Bobby Kotic a hard-on, but if you’ve enchanted your only other Daedric long sword, it’s going to break and it’s probably a good idea to have a backup lest you end up trying to kill a Lich with your fists. Then there was the spell creator, where you could make spells to do literally any combination of the things stock spells were capable of in the game.... for a price. Oh, and Daedra summoning for 200k a pop, and buying ships, and houses. I’ve basically never NOT been rich in a Daggerfall playthrough after about level 8 or so. I’ve also never had enough money to do all the things at any given point.
Honestly, I wish videogames would move away from looting as a core mechanic. It's a frustrating waste of time 90% of the time, and kills the pacing (especially if you have an OCD like me and can't leave a single container or corpse unlooted). When I clear a room full of enemies, I don't want to play scavenger hunt checking every drawer and dead mook for 5 gold coins, a dirty napkin and generic vendor trash that's only useful to sell for very little money or for crafting (another cancer of modern AAA games). I'm not saying we should get rid of _all_ looting, but rather instead of having a world full of quasi-worthless trash and gear that's underleveled 9 times out of 10, have very few but very powerful upgrades in some select areas of the level.
Rimworld faces this problem, and tried to address it with equipment that gets "tainted" by the death of its wearer that ruins its value. Naturally, players took pains to stun their enemies and loot them before they actually died, thus preserving the items from the taint of death.
While I'm not too far to make an overall recommendation, Outward has had the most successful attempt I've found to make the in-game economy part of the narrative. You start off having to pay off a four months' accrue debt, and the game gives you multiple solutions to the problem. Or you could pawn off gear from looted enemies to get that money back, but there are other systems to punish reckless players from resource management, the in-universe game over screens that can strip the player's equipment or bags, the stamina and health degradation systems, or the chance of permadeath on Hardcore mode. Even at the early part of the game, and if you can solve the first problem without paying the debt, there is so many types of quality gear to find that can benefit your journey. Then there is the simple fact that coins have weight, so you will naturally have to store your money at home--and I'm curious if that debt collection will keep playing into the game as a way to prevent the player from hoarding everything.
The problem with most game economies is lack of something that exists in the real world, rot, rust, no magic drops and damage. Make it so weapons and armor don't last more than a couple of runs; make food and healing rot, make ammo scarce on the field....
Gameplay economies never really bother me, except I think Fable 2 was quite egregious in how easy it was to game the system because there were a couple of vendors who could sell you stuff and then buy it back above the rate they sold it for! :)
My wife loves playing games with interactive economies. Like, not just ones where you are basically a faucet of goods to be sold off at the first bid, like most games that allow you to loot stuff, but real mercantile stuff. She loved Fable 2 because it let her invest in real estate, and rent out half the world. We were both a little upset you couldn't sink the gold back into something tangible, but one of her favorite games was a little RPGmaker thing where you just ran a typical JRPG item shop.
One way to solve the problems would be to let you buy cosmetic items with in game currency, but microtransactions exist so that's not really an option...
Honestly I think part of the problem is that a lot of games don't really separate rewards that well. In most RPG's, entering a dungeon is guaranteed to net you tons of rewards as long as spend enough time playing. It also doesn't help that learned abilities and equipment in the field tends to be better options than store bought alternatives. If there was some sort of opportunity cost to stockpiling cash, it could be way more interesting
just removing the ability for the player to craft helps, like in the witcher, if you want a custom sword you need to pay someone if in skyrim you couldn't use someone else's forge you would have to build your own forge, and that would be a good investment and money sink, maybe let the player pay a fee for every item you make in someone else's forge, or make certain itens that take to much time to craft not elegible to neutral forges
Lineage 2 was a mmorpg with good economy. Npcs drop loot, top tier armour can only be crafted, materials drop better with special classes and your own equipment can get dropped if you die with a "killer" status on.
I think a good solution if the game has some form of levelling system, is to involve bartering skill tree that limits you in the early game where you can only sell a few things to only a few key merchants in certain cities at minimal, and then have it so the money you do make as an adventuer is likely spent on preparing your gear for the next adventure. And as you level the Barter skill, you can buy for less, and sell for more and to more people (within reason as a baker would likely not wanting to buy your rusty swords), till eventually you become effectively become a successful travelling saleman. TLDR make the player work to break the economy.
I think that a good cash sink that devs should add in would be expanding the business of the merchant. "Wow, man, those 23 swords/laser rifles/wheels of cheese are really high quality but I don't have the cash to buy 'em and the demand isn't there. How about we set up a trade caravan system to sell all the swords you get to the other towns." Eventually the merchant empire you build wants more gear than you can lug back to town, so you get more people/pack mules/automatrons/cars/whatever to help you clear bigger dungeons and lug all that crap back to base. Bonus points if the dungeon is some sort of large vehicle, that way you can drive it back to town and you get more loot because you can scrap the vehicle itself. Eventually, when you empire gets big enough, the bad guys start raiding your trading outposts/military strongholds/population centers/Minutemen settlements and selling crap too enemy/neutral towns. You raid their stuff and enrich your empire again, they raid you again and so on. Eventually you start seeing familiar gear and realize that that legendary leather left leg armour has been stolen and traded by you and the bad guys fifteen times over the length of the game. Eventually in the late game you start having supply problems because there are only so many swords in middle zealand and you have to start thinking about production and not flooding the market (you can only sell as much swords as there are swordsmen). Assassin's Creed 4 did some of this with the pirate fleet system but it was all done through menues and it was boring as hell. Fallout 4 did this with settlements, it wasn't as bad as ac 4 but it wasn't great. The mod simsettlements is trying to do this, and succeeding from what I can tell. This all sounds good on paper but the devs have to invest a lot into it or risk turning out like ac 4. It might not be a practical solution for most. Pickmen 3 did this in a biological way (enemy corpses = more units), I haven't played it but from what I've seen that game did it the best.
In single player games, economies tend to get out of control due to a combination of player actions and developer direction. Money tends to be more valuable early in the game, when the player hasn't had much opportunity to amass any wealth. Depending on the player, they will end up altering their gameplay loop to maximize their gains. As the game continues, these actions by the player cause money to accumulate at an increasing pace, often leading to situations where the player will have so much money that it becomes virtually devoid of value. A similar situation arises with consumable items and such, where the player will amass a collection of wares which they will postpone using until it's necessary. Oftentimes, this will lead to situations where the player completes the game while having never used any of the rarer and more useful consumable items. There's a variety of limitations that developers can put into place to try and limit exactly how much of everything the player can collect, like wallet size in various _Zelda_ games, relatively low inventory limits for consumable items (so players start being incentivized to use some of them), and other little tweaks to encourage less hording by the player. In practice though, the best thing is to just provide a bunch of money sinks for the player, high enough that they won't go out of their way to grind for money too early and with enough options that there will still be choices to make towards the end of the game. It's a tricky balancing act, but it's better too have too many things for the player to spend money on rather than too few things.
I love RPGs that offer income outside of looting. The trader is a character I always play in RPGs so I like when a game expands their economy to allow for this role to be further explored. I wish more games offered players to create businesses or do real estate. I can see the Skyrim character managing the Companions and selling their services. The business would be more in depth then just collecting payment from an npc, instead the player will have to do cost management, staff wages, service prices, advertising, training, expansion, etc. This would generate many of hours of content just on its own and would be something that fits in the game and is very rewarding once the player gets a feel for how the business operates.
I liked how in Ys 8 you're on a deserted island and everyone is just trying to get off so the "merchants" all just do everything for you if you have the materials because you're frankly the only shot anyone has at getting off the island. There's a stockpile of rare items another member supposedly keeps stocking up (though in gameplay terms it just has infinite) and you can barter for the crafting items you need by directly trading others you have. It's definitely not a perfect system. There's no real barter mechanic it's all just X for Y, but I like the idea of a makeshift bartering society trying to work together to get off an island. It makes for an interesting setting and bypasses the economy issue in a way that actually makes logical sense in a world that does explicitly have currency while also having still having some kind of economy.
Been playing fallout 3 and NV (TTW), and the most caps I've had was five thousand and something. All I did was ignore gear I didn't want/need, and only sold things I had too much of, the occasional expensive weapon, low barter skill and the most abundant thing I'd grab is food because I was playing on hardcore mode. Needless to say, it fixed the entire economy issue for my playthrough.
What if you design a game where you have a very small inventory however, once you get a certain amount of money and higher a donkey and cart or a resource team or something that you can bring along in your adventures that are very weak and can easily be killed but have a big inventory space and you can store things with them. Then you can take it back to a friend you have on the black market who takes the weapons you have and sells them for you. He won’t take low level armors, those you have to give away or breakdown. He only takes high level weapons and armors and stuff. You could also have a friend who runs a goods store and so if you get a big bulk in some form of materials he will buy it from you
Wouldn't having a steeper curve for supply and demand help, in that if you sell too much loot to a merchant, that loot falls in price to being worthless and not worth picking up anymore, etc. Rising in value the more time passes without you selling it.
Great video, but have you considered: Why exactly do our games need to have money and Experience Points in the first place? To my knowledge, RPG stand for Role-Playing Game, not Farmy Grindfest. I understand money is necessary for career games or games that have a certain career aspect, but I've rarely seen the whole thing reevaluated from the ground up.
Escape From Tarkov is a multiplayer game, but I think it actually does a good job of fixing these issues. First, you can't carry a whole lot of looted armor or weapons. They're extremely bulky items, so you'll only be able to make it out with a few sets, which don't even sell for that much money. The real cash is in loot items, which are strictly limited per raid. You can't just keep going back to clear out everyone you've killed either, because once you leave a raid, you cannot return. There's also the money sink created by having to buy more gear every time you die, which is quite often. To add to that, the NPC enemies you fight are usually equipped with very low-tier equipment, but are still dangerous simply because a bullet is, well, a bullet. Not to say it isn't still very easy to acquire boatloads of wealth in the game, but it isn't broken in the way most RPGs are.
How about giving merchants a demand-type business sense toward the player? The more of something you buy, the more expensive it and things of that type become. The more of something you sell, the cheaper that type becomes. That’s basically what players expect of each other. Of course, it’s useless if the supply is not hooked in properly: if a high level person sells a billion low yield HP potions and their price becomes nearly free, loot should contain more of them and merchants should always have tons. A major con is that the more ways there are to acquire each item, the more calculus care will be needed for its pricing scheme.
How about making enemy equipment broken? Meaning that in order to get valuable loot, you need to go that extra mile to not damage it in battle. For example, using grenades/flamethrowers/another high damage weapons could render some loot useless/worthless. All in all, it's an interesting design challenge.
In the Witcher 3, CD Projekt Red makes a nod to this problem by accosting the player with a tax collector who makes inquiries regarding your earnings. It doesn't solve the problem, but it is satisfying to see! In Tabletop RPGs, I always consider and expound upon the potential consequences of game-breaking financial holdings, whether it be in the form of the Revenue Agency coming down hard on the players, or certain, possibly criminal powers taking a keen interest in the players' affairs, or the exacerbation of political struggles felt throughout the world.
Maybe this is a very simplistic idea but what if we make everything lootable but merchants only buy like real good stuff "I won't buy that bullet riddle chest piece, that's useless" so that the player has to choose between keeping a real good piece of armor or sell it for a good price and buy a new piece from the merchant while the useless armor can be sold for very very very little as scrap or reused for crafting, making the player decide if it's worth piling up gear they won't put on right away
You really need resource sinks if you want some sort of balanced economy, especially in RPG style games. Things like ammunition, repair costs and consumable goods like potions or food etc. The problem is most of these mechanics aren't fun for the players to have to deal with. If you don't have any sinks the end result is hoarding or super inflation.
Because it's a game, not a simulation. Currency is a gateway to better items, unless you have a decent cost-power ratio on items then you break the actual game part of the video game. The only other option is to have "regular" shops everywhere that don't buy items from you and have limited coffers even if they did and to make players find fences for black markets or earn access to high society auctions. Most people would rather just play the game.
Kenshi, Kenshi addresses all of this. Building and taking over settlements, damage one too much another faction might make a move, enslave NPCs to work on your rice farms, etc.
I've never understood the argument of "It's unrealistic that people would make me pay for equipment I need to save the world." To begin with, in many RPGs your quest is usually more complicated than that, only resolving itself into "saving the world" close to the end of the game. It's not at all unrealistic that shopkeepers would charge you for stuff when you're just an adventurer. Second, why should any merchant be okay with you drafting them into your war, even if it is supposed to be about saving the world? It's not like you go around to NPCs demanding that they do chores for you and fight against the bad guys as cannon fodder. Merchants have spent their careers trading goods for money; they're not going to abandon their livelihood on your say-so, especially when it might take you months to save the world and they'll need to eat tomorrow. A working shopkeeper system is important not just because it's fun to buy items, but because it makes the virtual world of the game feel more complete and realistic. It's unfortunate that so many players react only to the mechanical aspects of in-game shops without valuing the contribution that a shop system adds to a game's story.
Typically, you don't start off by saving the world and you start by saving the local village... at which point you get a nice trinket and a small bag of money. And usually, those rewards don't even come from the trader. So the problem becomes "Hey, I just saved your village, home and entire business, how about showing some form of gratitude," In some games you do get a discount from local merchants after you've saved their collective asses, but a lot of games don't even do that. Also, I don't think the expectation is for the merchant to "abandon their livelihood". It's not like giving the hero what they need would bankrupt them.
It brings up the question of why is nobody supporting your quest. One of the Shinning Force games did have you kitted out in the begging by your king, your party get crushed by a unwinnable fight, you lose all that high level gear and have to claw your way back to that level on your own.
i imagine that being the dragonborn should award me free gifts, or maybe i could only eat the dragon AFTER he destroyed your particular city, it is not even by malice, but i was busing trying the get money to buy the equipment i need to kill the deagon
> Loot of enemies can "break" if you hit them. > Merchants don't buy damaged loot so you need to sell them as junk for less or repair them. > Not all merchants buy everything and. > Merchants have a budget. > Grid based inventory that still allows you to carry a decent amount. > Being able to buy actually useful stuff like healing, ammo, armor and weapons that is better then current loot. > if you sell a lot of weapons, armor or other categories of loot, you make them eventually worthless. '-> If you sell to much of it, merchants refuse to buy it. (The ones in the village or city) > getting progressively slower and louder the more you carry > You need to rest and eat but that costs money at the inn or price for a house and food. (Most are ideas from the comment section.)
the only way to fast travel being paid carriages and boats, people not letting you use their things for free everywhere (like free anvils and alchemy labs ins skyrim)
I actually like when a game puts limits on me. A finite amount of loot you can carry, which are in turn more valuable makes you prioritize. That on top of mony sinks. Everything keeps its value and you have to put in effort to achieve something, but it's much more rewarding. In skyrim after lvl 20 the game throws so much money at the player it's impossible to reasonably spend. Flawless gemstones everywhere and everything else is trash. Especially since the support skills are overpowered and no one can sell you gear that's better than what you can make for yourself.
This reminds me of a D&D GM who gave all mooks half plate armour, because it's too bad for players to wear, too heavy to bring it back to traders in large numbers and too cheap to make it worth to come back for it
I think Witcher 3 handled the in-game economy very well. Witcher's are essentially mercenaries, so it makes sense from an RPG standpoint that they will accumulate wealth over time, but I didn't feel like I had a great amount of cash until I was near the end of the game, and it made sense that poor villagers would pay really low
I actually really don’t care for everything can be looted in games as long as those games aren’t being stingy with basic equipment. I can understand the logic of not taking armor off a fallen enemy since if they fell the armor probably took some damage and understanding that I’m here on a mission not to prepare for the flea market.
1:50 my feels when I played RDRO (it was a gift), with the mindset of someone who played Fallout NV 7+ times.... 2:38 if the merchant buys everything you throw at them, ofc he buys at low price. The merchant should say (reasonably) "I am not interested into buying more stuff now" or something like that. A realistic economy for an RPG would be interesting though.
The more fundamental issue is that all of the games give the player the godlike power to kill hundreds of people with basically no risk, but try to frame the story like you're some scrappy underdog trying to "fight the power" to build tension. Ya can't have it both ways, it breaks down somewhere, developers just have to decide where.
Great video - and definitely an area that seems to never be quite right. As you say, you either are inventory limited, or collecting everything and selling most of it for 1GP until you want to die but can’t stop because those healing potions are 150GP ... until suddenly you have ten trillion GP and nothing to spend it on ... I tend to be OK in action-RPG games with systems like Torchlight where you can dump stuff on your pet to go sell, or others where you can choose to turn junk look to gold instantly upon collecting it. Neither fixes the problem, but it makes life less annoying.
Those early hours of every elderscrolls playthoughs are the best, when trade feels a lot more like barter and the coins are just there to be the grease between every exchange. If there were a way to extend that out to the late game, that'd be the ideal case, imo. I think a way to do it may be to just not make so many things be lootable, or don't let some many lootable things be monetarily valuable. Don't put modern coins in ancient dungeons. Don't let any old shop keep buy ancient artefacts, or more swords than there are villagers like you said. Like, the restrictions might seem a bit arbitrary, but I think it would be worth it if it worked.
Why not take an approach like, the merchant sells X sets of armour an ingame week. After his stocks are filled for the merchants foreseeable future he can buy them but at a huge markdown as he is buying to store for later up to a certain cap although this will only really work in less "small shop owner who lives in his shop" setting
regarding Skyrim, I end up buying crafting materials in order to progress in my non-combat skills, consider it paying for tuition. That, accompanied with the rotating skill progression system means I end up spending a lot of money being trained again and again.
