Some of you have asked
that we talk about how to
design a better Pokemon GO.
So today we are going to indulge
in something that we rarely do
speculative design,
lets take the Pokemon GO paradigm
and brainstorm up a game
designed in the same space
that improves on it.
*music plays*
So, lets assume that our game is
in the DnD (Dungeons N' Dragons) vein,
a swords and sorcery dungeon crawler.
Because without question someone is gonna try to make
one of those sooner or later.
So, first off we're gonna need a better combat system,
And a better character system.
because in this game
what you're gonna be collecting is gear.
Not Pokemon.
Character equipment has the advantage of being
much cheaper content to produce,
which would allow for a huge Diablo styled loot table,
With some hand crafted epic gear thrown in.
Which in turn means
that players will have thousands of things to hunt,
rather than just hundreds.
Hunting for cool new stuff is
the main driver of this type of game, after all.
But let's talk about how players will acquire their gear
to fill up those character sheets.
Imagine this: Instead of PokeStops, locations would be hidden caches of treasure
like the sites of old battles, that sort of thing.
These would be the basic loot pickups,
you'd find consumables in them but you'd also have a chance of finding gear.
Maybe not great gear, but gear nonetheless.
The thing about this gear though is that it would be level restricted.
So how do you level? Well, imagine if rather than catching Pokemon, you fight monsters.
Where in Pokemon GO you would see a capturable Pokemon, here instead you would find a combat encounter that
you could try your skill at.
The system here could be simple,
I mean a basic turn-based RPG (Role Playing Game) combat system would be
better than what we have in GO. And it would have the added bonus of being something that was easier to do while walking around,
than trying to swipe-throw a pokeball.
if the game has a wide enough variety of abilities and equipment,
finding an encounter that's higher level than you,
Offering awesome loot and XP for success could be an exciting strategic experience.
And if you throw in the possibility of maybe being able to setup a couple of equipment loadouts,
that you could choose from at the start of the battle,
That would create more interesting uses for the loot that you find.
And add a whole new layer of depth to your planning,
and if the company wanted to be greedy, they could also sell additional loadout slots.
I mean you gotta sell the executives on the project somehow right?
Next we'd need achievements.
In Pokemon GO the achievements don't really do anything.
Here the obvious go-to is to have achievements with experience or gold, maybe even gear.
But we can do one better than that, I think.
Instead what if we also gave the player quests?
Now it's VERY tricky to do local quests (ones that are unique to your particular park or neighborhood)
so let's just assume that we don't have the tech to do that.
That still leaves us with a lot of options:
Quest to kill twelve ogres, collect twenty rat tails, find and defeat the lich lord.
Those are all really easy to create, but we can do one cooler:
Remember those poke-eggs that you had to walk around to spawn?
Imagine if you had a quest that said it would begin in four kilometers.
Now the awesome thing about this is that if that's the prerequisite
then as developers we can do whatever we want with the game when the player gets there.
Instead of an egg hatching and you mulching that monster into candy,
an event would start, maybe you would get jumped by four gnolls,
and you'd have to beat them, then you'd run into a knight at the crossroads, and have to answer his question correctly, or else have to fight him too.
Then you'd find a wounded soldier,
and if you had a potion in your pack, you could trade it for a random loot drop.
Next is the lake of fire.
Which would require that you had 200 fire resist on your equipment or you fail.
And if you get through that, you reach the lava drake.
Which will net you some sweet loot, if you can take it down.
That's what would spawn on your phone.
Once you'd journeyed far enough and racked up enough steps, the quest would begin and
then you wouldn't have to move at all to proceed further in the quest,
it would all just play shockingly, like a video game.
And heck, if you wanted, you could still have eggs that hatched into monsters in this game too because.. I mean, why not?
Let's see, what else?
Well if you had enough people playing, you could also tag locations not just as a poke-stop,
but maybe adding a little bit more flavor, maybe people could tag places as taverns, wilderness, dungeons.
Adding just that little bit of granularity would let you do some cool things when you are designing quests and items.
But i think the last big change that would have to be added is some stationary play.
Because while the game should be played mostly outside, it's kinda lame that all those awesome things you find as you wander around don't really do anything for you when you are stuck at home.
Plus it helps with accessibility allowing your friends who,
maybe can't get out much can still get to play with you.
You could add a crafting mode where you you play a mini-game to enchant loot or craft new weapons.
For the sake of argument,
let's just call it a puzzle quest style match-3 thing.
You could also add a daily dungeon that you could play from home,
one which can be effectually infinitely difficult because it doesn't have a limit to scaling.
You would just have to limit it to being playable once a day.
Or maybe put in a energy system, just to make sure that the focus of the game
was still to gather stuff outside.
Oh and finally there's the question of parties and raids,
Both of those things would be amazing, I would have some safety concerns to address before I would try implementing them but the potential is totally there.
But if you did all of that you would have a much more
compelling pokemon GO style game.
Because the truth is, the hard part of creating a real world game
is the tech.
Getting the database of locations and the monster distribution well,
that's the big challenge.
But the game design that I described here isn't difficult at all,
the costs are basically negligible when compared with the tech costs of making one of these things.
Which is good because Pokemon GO basically insured that we're gonna see more real world games.
And design being such a small fraction of the cost,
makes it really silly to invest into getting your tech up and running and then not
invest just a tiny bit more to make a better actual game for the player.
I expect soon we will all be out questing.
Anyway, thank you for indulging us in some speculative design.
There's actually a lot of other important design questions that Pokemon GO raises about real world games,
we will tackle those questions soon, I'm sure.
Until then, see you next week.
(Music) Pika!
(Instrumental music)