Respecialization, or respeccing as the youth call it, is a
commonplace affair in most RPGs, or RPG analogs. It’s a simple concept: the RPG structure
hinges on the gradual expansion of an available pool of skills, often through
the application of a point-buy system (in its most direct and straightforward formulations). This system usually revolves around a set of
unfolding paths: you navigate that network of paths based on cumulative choices
you make, with some choices working to ease the challenge of certain aspects
of play, and some choices working to facilitate interesting gameplay developments. But these choices are made in the fog of war,
as the systems of the game are still unfolding, and after the dust of progress
has settled, after players have become more acquainted with the gameplay
systems that they’re navigating, they’ll often regret the decisions they’ve
made along the way. Perhaps that skill
that increased the rate of fire on submachine guns turned out to harm more than
help, or that plus-one to damage with axes doesn’t see a lot of use since your
dope ultimate primary weapon is actually a sword. Player tastes can change and shift over time,
players can come to better understand poorly articulated gameplay systems, or
the needs of a player in a particular situation can change.
There are two ways to address this.
The old school, unforgiving way, as illustrated by its
presence in such laudable bastions of tradition as Wasteland 2 and Fallout: New
Vegas, is to just tell players to suck a proverbial dick and start up a new
play-through if they don’t like how they developed their skills. It’s an especially effective methodology in
games that encourage multiple playthroughs, since it permits players to reflect
on the experiences they’ve had, and test out new choices as they navigate
familiar narrative spaces.
The new way is to allow players to adjust their skills, for
a nominal fee.
This mechanic has its roots in World of Warcraft, wherein shifting feat trees with conditionally applications
dominated the game, and respecialization to fit a specific role for fellow
players, or to adapt to adjustments made by a patch, became necessary. Shadow Spec was a must for a PvP focused priest,
but in an early UBRS run or, worse, an undergeared MC run? That built was suicide! You had to respec that shit! WoW
featured a sliding scale fee system, wherein players who respecced frequently
paid increasingly large sums of in-game currency until their payments capped
out. This framework, revolutionary in
the shifting magma plains of the early 2000s, is now pretty common. Most MMOs have adopted some version of it,
and many non-MMO games have done the same.
Dragon Age: Inquisition even
features a “respec” item, one that allows you to dramatically restructure your
character as you unlock new features and game areas – Dragon Age: Inquisition, the most old-school main-stream hit of the
last half decade! And that infiltration
is minimal compared to the manner in which specialization and re-specialization
have become features in the FPS genre, prominently manifesting themselves in
titles like Far Cry 3 and PAYDAY 2.
PAYDAY 2 features
a set of especially elaborate and specific skill trees, skill trees that
fundamentally recompose the manner in which the game plays. A Mastermind, a Ghost, an Enforcer, and a
Technician will all have very, very different experiences heist-to-heist. It’s not just that certain trees can do
certain jobs better; certain trees are the only ones capable of doing certain
things. Want to crack safes by hand? You’ll need to get up to the penultimate tier
of the Ghost tree. Want to blast the
hinges off that armored car? You’ll be putting your points into Technician. Puzzle solutions, special abilities, and
stat-tweaks alike all emerge from PAYDAY
2’s immersive skill-trees, and players who want to test out certain specializations
will often have to respecialize some or all of their skill trees in order to
unlock new game-changing abilities. PAYDAY 2 isn’t so unforgiving – it
doesn’t charge you to reset your skill points, and it even gives you some of
the money you spent back (around 60%), but it does make you pay for each new
allocation you make after the fact, adding a de-facto cost to the decision to
respec.
This is an odd thing for an FPS to do. While Role Playing Games are normally
oriented around occupying a narrative space and generating a character who can
inhabit that space in parallel with an unfolding narrative, First Person
Shooters are usually more concerned with notions of “play.” As such, the idea of “playing a role” usually
takes a back seat to unlocking new toys, especially in a game like PAYDAY 2, where the variety of heists
present you with a perpetually shifting set of potential solutions that fit the
challenges you’ll be encountering. But
this skill system, with all its associated costs, actively discourages that
kind of experimentation by encouraging dedicated specializations in most trees;
the most useful abilities on the Ghost and Technician trees, the ones I
mentioned earlier, are buried so deep that they require abandoning most other
skill trees completely, at least until you near the level cap. And making any changes to your skill tree,
whether you make them for the sake of experimentation or for the sake of
correcting a mistake you made somewhere along the way, represent a considerable
commitment of resources. The respec is a
nuclear option in PAYDAY 2, the same
way it is in most games: it completely eradicates all the work you’ve done in a
particular tree, and requires you to spend all the money you’ve earned to reallocate
your freshly liberated points. That
means one errantly spent skill point, selected early in your career, will haunt
you forever unless you’re effectively willing to pay a nominal fee.
It’s a counter-intuitive frame, one that most games have
become acclimated to at this point.
We’re so used to the idea that respeccing is an expensive and
inconvenient process that theoretical skill point arrays have become a feature
of many games. Borderlands 2 went so far as to release a first party
feat-specialization simulator, to keep players from having to waste their hard
earned Borderbucks on respecializing mid-game.
But the whole point of these specialization trees, at their best at
least, is to open up new avenues of play, to give players new and engaging
tools to solve problems with. By gating
this behind a fee structure, which, even at its most merciful in games like PAYDAY 2 requires a substantial reinvestment
of time, developers discourage experimentation.
Players are effectively pulled in two directions at once: they’re being
shown all these neat toys they can play with, but they’re being told they’ll
need to put in extra time and effort if they want to test out these different
ways to play, and that they’ll have to spend time and money to get their
current set of hard earned skills back, an especially infuriating experience if
they discover that they don’t enjoy the new skill set that they’ve selected.
Removing this fee structure, however, still isn’t ideal:
player mistakes should have consequences, and most progression frameworks work
best when they reward specialization.
That’s what adds weight to these choices; even in the olden days,
Blizzard knew that they needed to make priests pay to switch between PvP and
PvE specialized branches, lest they bandy about, willy-nilly, shifting their
specializations daily, not just for the obtuse sake of balance, but for the
sake of adding weight to each player selection. By making it difficult to
change paths, those decisions become meaningful. That’s an important part of making choices
rewarding: it isn’t enough to give us nice toys, we have to understand that our
ability to effectively use those toys is impacted by our ability to make
responsible choices, and our ability to act with foresight. Adding consequence and cost to those
frameworks insures that players carefully measure each choice they make, lest
they waste their precious time and effort.
But even that is an imperfect system. Ideally players would be able to test out
play styles before making decisions, but such firmaments can easily promote
metagaming. Instead we’re left with a
kind of queer, accidental compromise that emerges every once in a great while:
the noble “forced respecialization.”
While this almost always follows a full-game overhaul of some sort, it
carries with it an invitation to explore, to reinvent oneself in-game and try
out new approaches that you might not have considered before. Unexpected, sure, and often in service of
reinvigorating player interest by allowing easy experimentation with new toys
and tools, these events can initiate referendums on approaches to play.
Ideally.
PAYDAY 2 recent
had two massive gameplay shifts, within weeks of one another, each of which
came with a forced respecialization, a full point refund. I rebuilt my skill tree, brick for brick,
each time. I didn’t want to put myself outside my own comfort zone. After all, why bother heisting at all if you
can’t blow the hinges off a safe?
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