My Thoughts on Grinds

So, I've recently been playing a few games (well, one in particular: Castlvania: Harmony of Despair, but also with some WoW and Diablo 3 thrown in) that rely on grinding as one of their main ways to keep players interested. Naturally, not every game needs to have grinding as a part of its gameplay - but any game that wants to keep the players interest for a long period of time has some sort of "rewards over time" system to keep the player's motivated. Some, naturally, work better than others. So I'm just gonna throw down a few different examples here and see where I feel they go right and wrong.

First, as I mentioned, is Castlevania: Harmony of Despair. It's a very fun (and distressingly addictive) game in which you can play as one of several Castlevania heroes in typical 2-d platforming style over a number of levels and gain power for them via loot, spell collection, or just generally using the same sub-weapons over and over (and over) in order to raise their power (occasionally granting them new properties) as well as raise the overall power of your character. Characters in the game build power in different ways - all the characters have equipment (and a large selection of rare drops), though some are more dependent on equipment for their power than others. Many of the characters build power through using their secondary abilities. One character absorbs spells cast by enemies (9 times for each spell to hit max power).

Personally, one problem I have with this system is that several of the characters take a long time to be useful - or at least, to be *interesting,* which is just as important to me. Soma, who uses a lot of equipment but also absorbs souls from enemies to power him, starts with an incredibly generic weapon and a pitiful selection of souls. Moreover, any souls that he happens to be lucky enough to absorb will likely be quite low power, as it takes 9 absorptions for them to hit max power (which in turn scales with your gear quality). Until you get good equipment, Soma is obnoxiously generic. Alucard, who learns a few spells but mostly gains his power from gear, is in a similar situation. Charlotte has it bad too, especially if you want to play multiplayer - making other people wait for you to try to absorb a new spell (9 times per spell!) just doesn't work. And the game definitely encourages you to play multiplayer in other ways.

So, one lesson to be learned from this is that if you're going to have characters gain power solely through long grinds, don't make them start at absolutely nothing. Give them a decent amount of power at the beginning, and then build from there. Another - make sure that your grinds are compatible with the playstyle of your game. Never make an entire group wait for you - especially for something that takes an indeterminant amount of time, based on how often they cast something and how lucky you are with absorbs.

Also, don't make your grinds *obnoxiously* long. Of course, what qualifies as obnoxiously long varies from person to person, but it should not take hours of grinding in a very specific, relatively boring way to level up one specific ability when the real reward is for leveling up *all* of your abilities, including the ones that you never use otherwise. Another point here - don't make the player use abilities that they would never otherwise use in order to gain power on the things that they actually do use. At least, don't go overboard with it.

Another thing that HoD sometimes succeeds at and sometimes fails at is having regular, meaningful milestones along the grind. Sometime abilities change after x uses, sometimes they don't. When you'll want to level all of them up to gain your max power, then having checkpoints that feel like genuine boosts in power - and not just numerical ones - is quite nice.

Balance different grinding paths. Characters should not be extremely useless compared to other characters at any point in the grind. Soma falls victim to this at both ends - at the beginning of the game, he is extremely generic and not especially effective, though he's workable. But once you get the thing you need to grind him properly, and do some of that grinding, he gains a ridiculous number of options, many of which are quite powerful, largely because his unique weapons power him up as well as the souls he collects to give him more abilities. He is well known for being the game's most powerful character, and for good reason - though a few particularly out-of-balance pieces of equipment are largely to blame for that as well, the sheer variety of abilities he has already makes him very powerful. At any given point, no character (or general grinding option) should feel significantly superior or inferior to any other. Or at least, don't make those points long - it's okay to give someone a big boost of power at certain singular points in a grind, but whatever they gain shouldn't be *too* huge a boost as to invalidate other options, and things should align themselves again not too long after that boost, if nothing else in a similar boost to the other options of grind.

I kinda got off track here, and only really talked about Castlevania. I've been playing it a *lot* lately, so cut me a little slack. I may well do a second post about this. But here's the gist of things:

-Grinds should have regular, genuinely rewarding milestones.
-The end of a grind should always be visible, even if its in the horizon. Don't make it in such a way as to overwhelm the player - don't make them do 12 separate *long* grinds to make their characters gain their full power.
-Reward the player for things that they already do; don't make them change their playstyle significantly to accomodate a grind. As a corollary, make whatever the grind is be based on the part of the game that is the most fun. The grinding itself *must be fun to start with*, otherwise you're dead in the water.
-In the case of grinds that can be chosen, one or the other, for theoretically similar end results (character classes, ability trees, what have you), keep them as balanced as you can for all points in the grind. And as a corollary, make the grinds of as close to equal length as you can.