Wie ermutige ich Spieler, mehrere Charaktere zu verbessern? [geschlossen]

In meinem Spiel ist es möglich, mehrere Charaktere zu erstellen. Sie können so viele machen, wie Sie möchten. Was ich normalerweise mache (und fast alle Spieler tun es), ist, einen einzelnen Charakter zu machen und ihn zu einer LOT zu machen und ihn einfach für alles zu verwenden.

Einige Spiele haben versucht, dieses Problem zu lösen, indem sie mehrere "Klassen" oder Charaktertypen haben, die unterschiedliche Aufgaben ausführen. Dies führt jedoch in der Regel dazu, dass jede "Klasse" nur eine hat.

Wie könnte ich die Spieler ermutigen, nicht ein oder zwei Charaktere mit wirklich hohem Level zu erstellen, sondern stattdessen mehrere Charaktere mit hohem Level, mehrere Charaktere mit mittlerem Level und einige Charaktere mit niedrigem Level zu haben, die gerade aufgerüstet werden?

( HINWEIS : Ich akzeptiere die zuvor akzeptierte Antwort nicht, da anscheinend viele neue Antworten eingehen. (Entschuldigung, Thomas Marnell, Ihre Antwort ist immer noch großartig :))

Einige Ideen, die ich in Aktion gesehen habe:

• Passen Sie die Wachstumszahlen an. Dies ist etwas, was Spiele mit einem Levelsystem fast immer tun sollten. Charaktere gewinnen normalerweise anfangs leicht und schnell an Stärke, benötigen jedoch mehr Mühe, um später eingesetzt zu werden. Indem diese Unterscheidung verstärkt wird, neigen die Spieler eher dazu, ihre Ressourcen für Charaktere mit niedrigem Level auszugeben. Verwandte: Wenn Sie die Stärke des Gegners erhöhen, können Charaktere mit niedrigem Level gezwungen werden, mitzuhalten oder zurückzufallen.
• Setzen Sie Teamplay-Boni oder Strafen für einzelne Wölfe ein. Einige Spiele bringen künstliche (Un-) Vorteile mit sich, basierend auf der Anzahl der Charaktere. Strategiespiele wie die Total War- Reihe verwenden dies häufig in Form eines Moralchecks, obwohl solche Mechanismen aus dem Zusammenhang heraus willkürlich erscheinen können.
• Erstellen Sie ein Risiko- / Ertragsschema. Wenn die Spieler dazu neigen, an einem Charakter festzuhalten, weil dies irgendwie vorteilhaft ist, riskieren Sie, dass dieser Charakter nicht verfügbar ist, und ermutigen Sie sie, nicht alle Eier in einen Korb zu legen. Spiele, die stark von der Geschichte abhängen (einige JRPGs kommen in den Sinn), spielen oft diese Karte.
• Teilen Sie die Zeichen auf. Nicht selten kämpfen mehrere Charaktere einfach nebeneinander. Das Fehlen eines kann ausgeglichen werden, indem das andere stärker gemacht wird. Das muss nicht der Fall sein. In Heroes of Might and Magic erhöhen beispielsweise mehrere Helden nicht nur die Kampfstärke, sondern ermöglichen auch mehr Kartenkontrolle und mehr Aufgaben pro Spielzug.
• Mehrspieler. Niemand mag es, der nutzlose Kumpel zu sein. Die Spieler treten von optimalen Strategien zurück, die keinen Spaß machen. Dies gilt natürlich auch für Einzelspieler, ist aber nicht so einfach umzusetzen.

Ein paar Ideen:

• Erlaube den Spielern, ihre anderen Charaktere als NPCs anzurufen, um ihren aktuellen Charakter zu unterstützen (rufe für kurze Zeit einen Heiler- oder DPS-Charakter an).
• Erstellen Sie eine gemeinsame Bank zum Teilen von Elementen / Ressourcen.
• Erlaube Spielern, zusammen mit ihren anderen Charakteren zu "trainieren", um ihre EP zu erhöhen, während sie offline sind. (Verschiedene Gruppen trainieren besser, gleichwertige Charaktere trainieren besser)
• Stellen Sie einige Quests nur zur Verfügung, wenn sie ein Team haben. (Ähnlich wie bei der ersten Option kann sich das zweite Zeichen an den Bedienelementen befinden, die Türen öffnen, oder was auch immer.)

Games like Pokemon have this problem a lot. I think they used two different methods.

1. Attrition. Make attacks and healing limited, encouraging multiple characters
2. Rock-Paper-Scissors. Make some characters better in certain situations

Techniques that promote multiple play-throughs like achievements can also help.

Edit:

After some thought, games like Final Fantasy have this problem a lot as well. I have seen them use story line to force multiple character progression.

Here are some more suggestions:

1. Make it impossible to advance to certain areas without having them previously unlocked with a special character class.
2. Make it possible to merge two characters into a single one in order to gain benefits.
3. Introduce crafting and collecting professions, WoW style, which has already been proven to work. You need at least a few characters to get the most resources (e.g. a miner, a blacksmith and an alchemist).
4. This is simple: make classes distinct and fun to play. This adds replay value to the game as well. No reason for the players not to go on another adventure if it wont be the same thing over again, and if they have new problems to solve and new mechanics to play with.

This might sound like heresy in today's entitlement world but consider a gameplay system where leveling up a character also introduces penalties (an aging mechanic perhaps or something else). This will enable players to grow in some areas but at the same time lose power in others. It might create interesting dynamics where a low level character might be better at some stuff than a higher level one

You haven't written what kind of game it is and why do you want players to play with multiple characters, so I could only speculate.

What are the acceptable interactions between multiple characters of one players? It gives more possibilities than simply create multiple classes.

Example A: inspired by Arena Albionu and Vallheru. Characters can be trained in multiple jobs, so that they can produce multiple resources. The final resources are weapons and potions. The energy is limited, so you need many characters to suppor powerfull warrior.

Example B: inspired by Diablo and the team play abilities. You could provide missions, where the player could play with all his characters. There's the rule 'non Hercules contra plures', so 10 low level characters would be more powerful than single high level one. Add the requirements for battle leaders, which would have to have higher level, and you'll result in optimal strategies for having a few high levels, a bunch of middle level and a lot of low level ones.

This really all comes down to the type of game you're making, and what you'd like to (/have time to) add, in order to promote this growth.

From the standpoint of making something like a traditional RPG, take a tip from Fallout 1 (NOT 3, whatsoever):
Build a game in which it is impossible to do everything with one character.

Build a game which doesn't support "classes", but rather customizations -- as the player customizes, open doors and paths and bonuses for those customizations (/modules/attributes/etc).

However, limit the AMOUNT of modules/perks/bonuses/boosts/etc, so that a character MUST either be semi-specialized, or suffer the penalty of being a very underpowered jack-of-all-trades, who has limited/no access to the additional content.

In the level/quest design phase, make it clear that a particular skill/stat/attribute (or one of a set, or several in conjunction) must be used, in order to access that content.
(eg: to go on a specific quest with a modern-day Robin Hood, you must have 75% lockpick, 60% speech, agility of 8 and a perception of 6).
Make it clear, as you pass each of these checks, that a user DOES need to meet these requirements.

Have entry to another quest be based on picking up the back end of a car, and moving it out of the way...
...or based around having a carry-weight of more than 300lbs...

These are things which would appear to the player as something they CAN do, in a meta-gaming sense, but CAN'T do with their current player, without coming back 20 levels later, and dedicating all of the rest of their stat-points to.

In terms of weapons and gear and crafting, you can apply the same concepts...
Looking at WoW and Diablo II, the kings of gear-grubbing (great retention-rates, too).
Instead of making gear have class-requirements ("only druids can wear this pair of gloves"), have gear be based on:

a) stat-requirements ("Boots of Sneaking [req: sneak <= 50%]")
b) att-requirements ("Goggles of Grokking [req: INT <= 7]")
c) story-requirements ("Sword of Swords [req: 'Quest of Awesomeness' -- must have DEX > 4 STR > 7 to begin quest]")

If you put an item-crafting element into the game, from there, you should be able to auto-generate stat/att requirements, based on, say, the components used to make the item (or used to enchant/patch the item), their quantity, if they have different potencies, et cetera.

Now you have gear that ANYBODY can use...... IF THEY HAVE THE ABILITY TO USE IT, or let them use it anyway, but apply a penalty to misuse.
Give everybody the ability to use a minigun, but if they don't meet the strength requirement, then slow their movement speed by req_str - player_str units of movement per turn (or a multiplier, depending on what a move-unit might look like in your game).

Give everybody the opportunity to use a sniper rifle, but without high perception and agility, make it impossible to hit anything...

The point of the whole thing is that if you want to foster replayability with characters who are unique, then you want to limit what each character is allowed to do.
Therefore, each character with different skill-sets will have different advantages and disadvantages.

Just be sure to spend a lot of time balancing them, and make sure that every major quest point is solvable in at least 3 or 4 different ways, based on characters who MUST play to match their skills, and make side-quests accessable in only 1 or 2 or 3 ways:
Not every character needs to access all content, and instead of thinking about adding class-specific stuff, think about removing access to things based on character-weaknesses.

Make the leveling fun, with support to multiple playstyles. I play wow and I'm always playing low level chars because I think it is fun to level doing only battlegrounds.

Also, if you have some achievements system, make it account wide, so the player can advance some achievements with any char, of any level.

The first key is to have a diverse system of customizing your characters, specifically giving each character choices in the abilities they'll have and what they can do, so you can make your super cool single character, but that single character can't do everything. What this accomplishes is it motivates multiple characters to have access to all the abilities. Maybe your main damage dealer won't be able to heal, so having a healer is nice, or some enemies are resistant to your main's abilities so you have a secondary damage dealer.

^This encourages diversity which is usually enough, but to help things along you can have higher level characters assist in leveling up lower characters, which will help those with high level characters bring up new characters without a long grind. Something that can be done in addition is allow different characters to give passive, boosts to the rest, which will encourage full teams of characters.

SWTOR has a legacy system which i love. You could somehow make new skills if items in the game available to all char's. So that way players will want those skills or items so they will try and keep all their "classes" leveling at the same rate to unlock the skills for example: when you have a lvl 10 "soldier" and Level 10 "medic" all characters can use the stimpack during a battle. and then have a super large ladder like that. You could have powers that required X levels chars in all classes.

What you're essentially asking for is for the player to like starting over again.

Games like Diablo or Diablo II had me do this because of the random generation, the possibility of finding new weapons or armor on different plays. Diablo kind of left you with a sense of something being unexplored in those other games you started but didn't progress in, which is I guess what made me go back and play those lower level characters further.

Games like Final Fantasy 6, did not have me do this (I had a single "important" save game with very high level characters) because the play through was pretty much the same, and the variability in play due to item drops was kind of minimal (barring that time I got 2x Minerva armor from defeating Pugs in a treasure chest! And of course what you can get in the Colloseum, but that is very late in the game).