Decline Say No: Stop Skill Trees

[Castanova]

Skill trees can be quite fun in the right setting. Lots of games have great implementations, such as Diablo 2.

Skill trees are bad design because you are forcing choice on players they may not want to make. You are also limiting the creativity of your playerbase by preventing them from taking the passive/active skills you design and mixing/matching them.

Haven't you heard the cliche that creativity is borne of restriction? It's a cliche because it's true.

 

[set]

Diablo 2's skill trees sucked though. They encourage point hoarding and only encourage a handful of distinct builds.

Creativity comes about from restrictionwhen we are forced to work within some confined space to create some desired result. You can be creative in Diablo 2 and make interesting builds despite its systems, but the systems themsleves limit creativity instead of enhancing it.

I'm not saying players should have limitless freedom, I'm saying the way the game limits you is wrong. The limitation is pretty arbitrary (you can only have these passive skills, in this order, for this class). A better game would give you more options, but with costs that justify taking and not taking those options.

Look at Skyrim. It has skill trees - yet they do nothing to halt Thief-Warrior-Mage-all-the-time syndrome. They do little to enhance creativity. Morrowind was much better at player advancement systems than Skyrim.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Having to choose skills you don't care about because the one you like is further up the tree is annoying. I wish that would go away.

In most games with skill trees you still need to read through all the options, because you want to make sure that the tree(s) you choose will stay good throughout the game.

And you'll have to ask people online if you want to be sure, because the game will make every skill sound cool and useful.

 

[MRY]

Having to choose skills you don't care about because the one you like is further up the tree is annoying. I wish that would go away.

Especialy because this is used to justify boring or redundant skills.

 

[Dreaad]

It depends... I think even almost completely linear skill trees are fine if some them get locked out due to lack of xp i.e. Gothic series.

It makes perfect sense, and creates fun gameplay if you take alchemy at a early level and later on progress down a very minutely splitting skill tree which leads to more and more powerful potions depending on which ones matter to you. Blacksmithing, hunting, thief skills etc. That's all fine.

If we're talking about skill trees not to unlock the game content but to unlock combat moves.... yeah that's usually kinda shity. Not always but often, simply because of modern 'balance' which makes everything feel identical but with different exploding fireworks. It can work, if handled carefully, but usually is just some crap like Diablo 2, do you like wielding axes or swords bro? Or do you like cold nukes or fiery nukes? What a colossal waste of time programming skill trees and 'balance' for that shit.

On the other hand if you unlock new moves in combat like teleporting, rolling, parrying, duel wielding etc its fine. Passive skills in a skill tree (just making sure no one can claim I think passive buffing is bad, cause I know how the Codex works) are massive fucking decline. Keep passive changes in the stat/equipment area. Make your skills something that really diversifies characters and playthroughs, not just another % damage bonus.

 

[belowmecoldhands]

Skill trees are a pretty way to lay out strategic decisions in progressing characters in video games. They became increasingly popular with Diablo and World of Warcraft and have infected every kind of genre of game from action to puzzle to tower defense to casual money scams.

To sum up this post? Skill trees are stupid. Don't bother if you're a dev. They're an insufficient substitute for good design.
(.....)
Please say no to skill trees. If your favorite RPG has one of these things, tell the developers to come up with something better! The Witcher for me, is a classic exmaple of this. If they replced their stupid skill tree with something less passive, the game would be empowered for it. Please consider alternative, more creative avenues of advancement that restrict player choice in a positive way and keep creativity more open - giving your players a bigger sandbox means they're more free to define their character's in-game role. Players should have to actively empower their character! (and no, I don't advocate where systems are simply: spam the climb skill to raise its rating)

I like your post. It's something which I've wondered about. From my standpoint, ANY skill/stat system is flawed generally if:
1) Expensive to create - this can be a deal breaker no matter how good it's
2) Limits hybrid setups or otherwise diverse setups - diversity/choice is fun
3) Doesn't allow quick adjustments if one setup is too powerful or a skill/stat is worthles

On point (3), what I mean is if a class or skill/stat setup is too powerful or weak and other players can't quickly adjust as a response. For example, if wizards are very powerful (or otherwise imbalanced) then players, if desiring of it, should be capable of quickly readjusting their setup to posses those abilities. Or if you have a crap skill, you can replace it.

For me what kils a game, above all, is not having lots of choices to overcome a challenge or just getting caught up in the same tactics/strategy for long lengths of time. For a game to be fun for me, I need to pressured to use many different techniques to win. This is why I favor games which play like a hybrid class - sporting many abilities, especially non-linear ones.

The dificulty should be in the combination of the envrionment and your abilities. It shouldn't be something which can be strictly denoted by HP/DPS or only a few numbers. Of course, this might mean it's harder to design or to ensure a fight is of a certain difficulty. I think games do tend to make linear or stat-based fights to more easily create a particular difficulty, but I think it's ultimately not fun because the attempt to "balance" it against the player's skills makes it blander.

Maybe what we ned are games with loosely desinged fights wherein if a fight comes out to be unwinnable or too time consuming a player can pull out of itand yet still feel rewarded. We needa flexible rewarding system where failure isn't just YOU LOSE. We need losely designed fights which're just as compelling and excitng as ones which're heavily designe. The challenge is how? All of the design work is meant to make the fight fun, but I'm saying it's not. My contention s games re restricted by his heavy handed approach to balancing difficulty.

 

[rpgcurious]

*Applaud*
Strongly STRONGLY agree, too many games use skill trees that force players into cookie cutout builds or characters.
If the skills in said game were actually balanced you would not need this nonsense choose level 1 skill, now choose a level 2 skill, etc etc.
I especially hate the ones where you ''pump'' a skill up with skill points instead of putting it into other skills, where the most effective choice is to simply pump one skill instead of diversifying, and having a multitude of skills.
Your post must be seen by every major game dev! someone advertise!

 

[Kalin]

Dialogue trees good.

Skill tress bad.

 

[Mastermind]

Dialogue trees are boring. Skill trees can be good or shit depending on design. Skill trees that just force you to spend points on shit skills to access better ones are shit. Skill trees that simply force you to make sacrifices are good. Generally I'd prefer to just have a list of skills limited by tier (IE: you can have X skills from each tier) as an anti-cherry picking measure. Informal skill trees like the feat prereqs in NWN make me rage (and in nwn's particular case, edit out the requirements ).

 

[adrix89]

On a related note.
One way to give feedback on what kind of traits or perks are good is to give them to enemies.
That way you can see how they function in enemies before you make a choice.

I agree that in skill trees the most important thing is the choice at the moment and its tradeoffs,some might be better then others and at the end there should be some cool stuff but its the choices in between that makes it a good or bad system.

 

[set]

My point is that more interesting choice can exist outside of skill trees. You can take the same passive skills and let players acquire them in a more novel way that begets more fun possibly because you now have more freedom to mix and match passive skills - or at least because discovering how to obtain passive skills through exploring mechanics or the game world is probably more fun than just being able to click on them and have them.

 

[Abregado]

Skill trees are getting old, but I can't think of a recent innovation that was pulled off successfully.

Nobody seems to have mentioned the utter chaos it would cause to the devs to balance a game where the skills have no hierarchy. Imagine if Oak gave you a lvl 1 Aron, or Ghastly.....

 

[set]

Skill trees are getting old, but I can't think of a recent innovation that was pulled off successfully.

That doesn't mean a damn thing. It just indicates most game devs are unwilling to take the right risks.

Nobody seems to have mentioned the utter chaos it would cause to the devs to balance a game where the skills have no hierarchy. Imagine if Oak gave you a lvl 1 Aron, or Ghastly.....

It's only utter chaos if nothing else changes. Pokemon was designed around the pokemon you could technically have at a certain level and it has that "badges effect pokemon loyalty" mechanic to reduce the power of trades on the gameplay. But if you properly designed encounters you could vastly increase the number of available starting pokemon.

Level 1 aaron isn't almighty, by the way, it's easily beaten by a status move and has trouble killing a lot of toxic-immune pokemon without a sandstorm. It can't do shit to ghost pokemon. It also isn't that great in a single player game, because there's no magical way to keep it from leveling up.

 

[Gulnar]

Maybe, instead of skill trees, we should talk about skill webs. Imagine a tree that, instead of having a single entry point, has multiples, and where the most powerful options are not on the 'other end' of the tree (since you have multiple entries, you have multiple 'other ends' too) but in the center (and on the 'entry points', if you can select only one as starting point). Such a skill tree would be interesting, would probably allow the creation of both hybrid and highly specialized characters, and would provide a classless system. As far as i can think, the only two games that did a similar thing were poe (but the tree was plagued by the presence of a metric fuckton of filler nodes) and one final fantasy (the tenth one, i think? Not sure tho).

 

[crufty]

I do think skill progressions are lame, most of the time; I think skill trees are beautiful and logical.

However why should players get to choose skills at all



Instead, racial and class selection should determine initial skills. Attribute bonuses should dictate initial skills learned above and beyond at PC creation...and that's it.

After that, it's improve by doing or training, with caps based on level progression. Certain class levels require skill growth in order to advance (ex: thief classes). A skill tree allows for say proficiency in daggers to result in rollover ability in
-- other small sharp weapons incl axes, improvised (broken bottles, shards of whatever)
-- all sharp weapons incl swords of various sizes
-- one handed combat incl one handed blunt weapons, ranged weapons, various maneuvers, weapon maintenance etc
-- one handed tasks in general, including pick pocket if class allows it
-- physical tasks in general

Players should only be allowed to learn or do the very bottom of each skill tree. Skill growth in one node is capped; to maximize, need skill growth in others. so specializing in dagger is possible, but neglect other skills and dagger never goes above x%.

Certain skills that are common to everyone are more talents and should not be part of the skill tree. Talents should be driven by attributes, race, class selections and improve by level.

I also think that level progression should include both class (ex: thief) and race (ex: dwarf), with special racial quests required for racial progression at appropriate intervals, with overall level and skill progression capped until the racial quests are completed. A racial quest would be something relevant to the racial culture of the PC--perhaps a dwarf has to return to a stronghold to pay a tithe to an elder in exchange for adventuring rights, or something else expensive.

 

[Innsmouth Dweller]

It's not shit design. It's just there is no good implementation of it.
Imagine a node Fireball. This Fireball can become three things: huge AoE spell with meh dmg, normal area with huge dmg (which is basically the regular fireball, but cast by master mage), normal area with normal dmg but with additional DoT. The same can be done with Rain of Fire - you can still use it as AoE or focus it to hit only one target. If you go for the AoE Rain of Fire and DoT Fireball - you can have pretty decent AoE DoT. Your skill tree is your specialization, not the only way of casting spells character knows. They should have faster casting time, lower mana cost, whatever - your PC should be able to cast specialization spells with eyes closed and half asleep - other versions need some extra concentration. Thus they came up with passive talents and it makes some sense,... cuz after casting 1000 fireballs and hitting your targets, you should have pretty good idea how to do that effectively (fast and painless, also you are less likely to fire upon your allies), no matter the "passive talent" you have.
Hybrids are bad. You cannot be good in five things at once, thus centralized "master talent" is unrealistic imho. But if you grasped the mechanics of fireball casting, you can pretty much use some other... entity than fire. Like acid. Or ice. Or lightning. Or even unicorns. So there is a switch for "object", but every object change should require practice (again, the mass of fire is not exactly the same as ice, lighgning bounces and so on... you still need your X casts to use it effectively). Think of it as reputation/alignment between forces - if you cast fire all the time, you'll have hard time adjusting to ice and unicorns.

Too bad in WoW existed only one viable build for each spec... They changed that in WoD, which basically forces players to shuffle tallents (insta rebuilds) between battles, depending on boss tactics. I'm not sure what is worse - rebuild each 5 minutes or one, inmutable build for entire expansion.

 

[Gozma]

The Long War mod has "skill trees" for each class that are roughly designed to support three role archetypes per class (example: A Medic specialized for healing vs. a Medic specialized for carrying and throwing support grenades vs. a Medic specialized for overwatch fire). Each level-up gives you the choice of three perks - except there are no prerequisites, so you can decide to take the "overwatch" perk on someone who took a "healer" perk on the previous level. There are also a lot of un-archetypal good perks that just give you stuff like better base stats mixed in that compete with role specific stuff. It works.

Now the thing is Long War was balanced for this system with criticism based on thousands of aggregate hours of playtime and criticism from the world's biggest spergs, and even then some of the classes have failed archetypes no one uses, the MEC classes aren't that well put together, etc. And there are only like 7? levels of perks per class, so it's not that much stuff. For a regular game that isn't an alphaish patch storm with lots of unpaid testers, forget it.

 

[Johannes]

In most games with skill trees you still need to read through all the options, because you want to make sure that the tree(s) you choose will stay good throughout the game.

And you'll have to ask people online if you want to be sure, because the game will make every skill sound cool and useful.

If I ever make a game, I'll be sure to point out to the players which options they should pick.

 

[set]

In most games with skill trees you still need to read through all the options, because you want to make sure that the tree(s) you choose will stay good throughout the game.

And you'll have to ask people online if you want to be sure, because the game will make every skill sound cool and useful.

If I ever make a game, I'll be sure to point out to the players which options they should pick.

I hope this is sarcasm? If there's only one or two clear choices there wasn't much choice to be had and you wasted a lot of development time on choices no one wants to make or you made a linear corridor shooter where the action of choice is just an illusion.

 

[epeli]

The first thing that came to mind when I saw the thread title: Jeff Vogel.

Remember the skills in Exile? Avernum? And then the Avernum remakes? Textbook example of doing it wrong.

 

[gaussgunner]

The first thing that came to mind when I saw the thread title: Jeff Vogel.

Same here, hahaha. It's like fucking college. "You want Calculus? Take another year of Algebra.. bitch." These are supposed to be fully trained soldiers ready to hone their skills on the battlefield. The skill trees and dialogue trees are just filler to distract players from the fact that the game consists solely of trash mobs, kill'n'fetch quests, and overly talkative NPCs.

I remember the tech trees in early 90s strategy games like Civilization and Dune 2. There was a rationale for it but it wasn't fun or interesting. Definitely not when transplanted into RPGs by developers thinking "why improve gameplay when we can slap in a dumb GUI and boast another trendy feature?" I'm trying to think of a justification for RPG skill trees... progression? balance? character specialization? Nah.

 

[set]

I remember the tech trees in early 90s strategy games like Civilization and Dune 2. There was a rationale for it but it wasn't fun or interesting. Definitely not when transplanted into RPGs by developers thinking "why improve gameplay when we can slap in a dumb GUI and boast another trendy feature?" I'm trying to think of a justification for RPG skill trees... progression? balance? character specialization? Nah.

The way most skill trees are implemented is wrong, but most pnp RPGs give you a base character and then you're on your own to develop them. Skill trees are the virtual substitution for manipulating a character sheet, a pretty means to offer character development. The problem with skill trees is the way they restrict your specialization; at least PoE gives you a lot of paths to take, such that the restriction is maybe a positive thing because you have a lot of choice - just not infinite choice.

 

[hello friend]

Seeing a lot of mentions for Diablo 2's skilltree, which is one of the better skilltree systems I've seen, what with synergies and diverse abilities beyond "increased % chance to trigger weak dot" though it had that sort of thing as well. You could create such crazy builds as a Necro specialised around poison dagger and insanity - one of my favourites was an assassin teleporting around the place and entry tier kick attack that triggered many times very rapidly + debuffs for a completely different approach to items. Possibly most rapid-attack build in the game, but no weapon usage.

But for all of that, Diablo 1 did it better. You just find shit, and you make things up as you go with the shit you find.

Would be cool to see something like that combined with something similar to pokemon breeding where you would find multiple instruction manuals/spell books with every version of an ability having slight variations. Research one spell at a time by selecting two abilities of same type and keep playing. After a while, maybe you get an improved version of the ability. Maybe not.

Vancian casting is pretty cool. You permanently select abilities from a wide selection per tier, then create a new temporary build every day. Interesting way of creating a hybrid system between giving you real options and the freedom to change your mind/adapt to circumstances.

"Balanced" microchange-type skills are the worst. They don't significantly affect your playstyle. Every new addition to your repertoire should affect your playstyle and be influenced/modified by combination. Leaving traps. Passing through walls. Multiple attacks in succession. Attack an area in a cone. Create obstruction of X shape. Select X amount targets, unblockable. Delayed attack. Freeze.

Not just different flavour text for variations of "much damage is done". The more differentiated effects possible, the greater potential for combination.

Edit: Everything becomes better with destructable environments. Levitate. Make wall passable X milliseconds > lake on other side > flood dungeon > lightning spell > congratulations, you just killed all nearby enemies > flying lich, w/ev comes over > dispel fly > oops, game over.

 

[gaussgunner]

You just find shit, and you make things up as you go with the shit you find.

Vancian casting is pretty cool. You permanently select abilities from a wide selection per tier, then create a new temporary build every day. Interesting way of creating a hybrid system between giving you real options and the freedom to change your mind/adapt to circumstances.

"Balanced" microchange-type skills are the worst. They don't significantly affect your playstyle. Every new addition to your repertoire should affect your playstyle and be influenced/modified by combination. Leaving traps. Passing through walls. Multiple attacks in succession. Attack an area in a cone. Create obstruction of X shape. Select X amount targets, unblockable. Delayed attack. Freeze.

Skills that make a big difference. Traps and obstructions and shit. Fuck yeah.

Potentially there are at least three skill mechanics:
1. Gear you find at random that uses or enhances certain skills. You can swap it out any time.
2. Skills/spells/stats you choose to specialiaze your character as you level up. More or less permanent.
3. Adjustments to suit your play style, once you've played long enough to know what you want.

A lot of RPGs have a bland selection of gear, so they rely on skill trees for variety, and that's the only way to adjust for your playstyle, so you won't get it right until your second playthrough. I think I would rather have a set amount of stat bonuses I can reallocate anytime, and a handful of powerful skills; no need for trees.

 

[set]

I think you need to encourage role specialization though, as role playing games need to reinforce the idea of sticking to playing a role while fighting. Being able to change your role on a whim is bad - though if the game's presentation and story support it, it's not too bad to give players the option to redesign their role. Ideally, players should be allowed to experiment before picking a specialization.