Games being fun despite having grind? Thread

So this is my first post but I want to pose a question, I'm thinking about starting a game which is at its core a dungeon crawler with a sci-fi and fantasy style that I've been messing around with for a little while. However I'm worried about the game being too much grind and not engaging enough for people to really get into it. So I wonder what you guys think about how to take the grind out of a game like this and make it fun just as it is, I already have some ideas about this, for example.

• Loot (obviously).
• Interchangable skills system (think along the lines of diablo or dota).
• Make movement and attacks skill based rather than based on statistics.
• 4 player co-op (friends make everything less grindy).
• Boss battles that have specific weak spots and require some strategy to defeat.
• An 'overworld' where there are shops and other activities for players to engage in.
• Crafting custom equipment like headgear / armour / weapons (Monster hunter does a good job of this).

I understand to some extent grinding is required and can be sometimes fun but giving the game a purpose without the grind is what I really want to tackle at this point so that game itself is fundamentally fun. What games have you played that makes the game fun despite having massive grind?

Pokemon would be one, it really encouraged grinding because when it came down to it, they were 1 v 1 fights and no one pokemon could win. So every pokemon on your team always had to be strong enough to cover for the weaknesses of the others. But that might be the hype of pokemon when it was first released, and walking back and forth in tall grass was the cool new thing to do.

It can also be seen from the other side, an exploration type game were you just happen to grow levels. Think the old 8bit/16bit top view Legend of Zelda's, there were enemies all over the place. You could kill them for fun, items, rupees or just walk on by. They made the dungeons funner by adding an optional puzzle that had dozens of solutions to it. So going from point A to B was no longer just walking. One example were they kind of did this was Wanderers from Y's, except on a side scrolling view.

You need to make the player want to explore, to see what's going just past the edge of the screen and they'll gladly kill everything on their way to get there. But with no immediate escape route they would then have to fight there way back, so it wouldn't feel like grinding but just going to where you wanted to go.

I would look at Super Mario RPG, you have a low lvl cap and in most cases you don't need to grind in order to become powerful enough to defeat the bosses, just doing each world/level in its entirety is usually enough to keep you on par. Of course one of their major tricks is that saves outside of towns are usually in the middle of a monster infested route, so going forward or back, you'll still likely encounter a few monsters.

I wasn't particularly fond of the grind in pokemon, I did it because I needed to beat gym leaders so I'd like to try steer away from that kind of gameplay and more towards the grind being there if you want it but its not core to playing the game. Zelda's puzzles however really sound like a true reason to make a game more engaging and interesting. Exploration is one of those things that I feel needs expanding. Why is it that players want to explore in games? What makes exploration rewarding? Loot is one of those things, secret locations or secrets in general are another solid example but besides those things why else might a player want to explore? This is really what I want to drill into for the design of this game giving the player motive and enjoyment away from the grinding so that the game doesn't feel flat and 2 dimensional.

People want to explore for a lot of reasons, to see different things and experience different things. If you think of the working class people, they have very set routes which they follow. Driving from home to work/school and back again does not offer much in terms of new or interesting things. That's why some people will comment of new advertisements, new things the neighbours have, stop and slow down when they see a car crash on the side of the road. Think about when some people are given free time, what do they do? They leave the city, they go off to a different city, and it may just be 2 towns over but its still new and exciting for them because its different.

People want to know the answers even when they might never be figured out (like what ate that 9ft shark whole of the coast of australia). That's why people still talk about Jack the Ripper, that's why we have to watch one more episode/read one more chapter just so we can know what's going to happen. People need to know, from the smallest child to the greatest scientist curiosity drives us forward. In games it can be more rewarding, as unlike a different city were in a different universe entirely. One where anything can happen, where rules, logic and probability that happen in the real world would not happen there. The thing is with games you don't need to buy that plane ticket, reserve that hotel just to decide that maybe you don't like this foreign food and end up eating at a McDonalds. Games can be more rewarding in what they serve you, after all it is a canvas of your imagination, do not limit yourself.

'Wanna race cars on this serene country road, sounds fun. Oh no an earthquake and a volcanic eruption at the same time, only thing to do is drive faster. Oh no Godzilla is emerging from the ground right in front of us, i guess we should drive along his back, uh oh its...' If that was a game you'd keep driving because you have no idea of what crazy shit is about to happen next, because you don't want to/cant go back, otherwise you would have long pulled over long ago.

Longer games, especially rpg's and exploration type games start giving a feel where the original joy is lost on what your doing, enemies get stronger, locations are more exotic but it just doesn't feel as fun as when you started out. The investment of their time, usually 48-64hrs, has gotten them so far it would be a shame to stop at this point and not see what happens next/see the ending. However you need to get people up to that point for them to just play until they complete it, and people will decide in the first 5 minutes if they want to invest that amount of time into this game. To do that, within the first 5 minutes you usually need to greatly impress people with an artistic style, pose some great mystery or unanswered question that makes them want to solve it, or lastly do something so epic they cant wait to see what your going to do to top that.

Examples of each would be, Artistic - Limbo, Epic - God of War (you know were you killed the hydra in the tutorial), Mystery - Bio Shock (why is there a city underwater and how did it become like this).

Ima change Bio Shock to Mass Effect for my example. I think 'who are the reapers' poses a better long term question.

@ SoulSystem : IMO couple reasons why grinding is fun are:

1. It doesn't take long to level up or gain enough points to strengthen yourself

2. You can become stronger. Say at beginning you need to attack slime with 4 hits to kill it but after levelling up, you can do it with just single hit. It's fun and make playing different with different level

3. You can unlock stronger and alternate attacks. At first you can only slash but with level up, you can have projectile attacks and/or area attacks which can improve how you play

I agree with you that grinding should be feature of the game NOT main theme of the game IOW player grind because they want to not because they have to. So you should design the difficulty so players don't need to grind too much to complete the game. Even if you want to add grinding, make sure you pay attention to #1 above

What games have you played that makes the game fun despite having massive grind?

I don't recall game with massive grind nor I'm not sure how much grind is massive grind but from my experience, those games are games which has good gameplay and story while grinding is only side feature. Examples are Castlevania series from Circle of the Moon to Order of Ecclesia. All of them are metroidvanias BTW and they have explorations element. They have good basic mechanics and story to begin with

BTW I just recalled something, how much is required to complete your game? if it's pretty long, grinding might help kill the boredom but if it's kinda short, you might omit the grinding feature. Though I kinda doubt it's the latter since I don't recall any short exploration game

Well the reason that I'm getting some other opinions on this is because my game idea at the moment is very centric about getting stronger by killing enemies, we know that this is a typical tried and tested method for RPG style games however I don't want to make that the focus of my game.

I want some kind of advancement over time absolutely, however I want to try do that more through the loot you collect and the skills you possess where the levelling up / experience isn't particularly important or potentially omitted entirely. What's important to me is that you can have fun exploring a dungeon or new area while it has a reason to pick it up and do another level without it feeling too... samey. I also want to give players that opportunity to feel powerful when they have worked hard to collect some of the rarer loot and upgraded their skills despite the game actually being built around using player skill rather than calculations based on your statistics.

Regarding my game I'm intending to have a story mode but I'm actually more interested in procedural generation of dungeons, so its the kind of game that you will jump into a dungeon and work your way through till you come up against a boss, then perhaps pick it up again later that day to do another dungeon, this you would do with a team of up to 4 players. The idea of procedural puzzles is something that's occurred to me because of what Thr111 mentioned regarding Zelda and I'm interested in seeing if this has been attempted before, if so I have a bit of reading to do . I feel that puzzles would be a nice change of pace to just grinding enemies down and making it easy for yourself.