Games where money matters

[thesecret1]

In my experience, it's usually not the biggest problem that you make money too fast, but rather that there's nothing worth spending the money on. Often, the best gear is found in dungeons, so you only go to shopkeeps for an occassional potion or more arrows or similar, as the shops have little of worth to offer. I'd love to see an RPG try tackling this issue – create a system where the player basically always has something he really wants in the shop, but needs more money

 

[deuxhero]

thesecret1
Kingmaker with crafting mod does that. You can upgrade your items and spend your money on BP.

Problem is you still run into a point where you just don't need anything more without just sticking niche crap on your gear for the hell of it, even when you disable the CL checks (which aren't pnp accurate in the mod). You'll have capped items and nothing left to build before you hit the final chapter there's so much money.

There's also games like Way of the Samurai series, Akiba's Trip and Dark Souls series where upgrading your equipment is more important than finding new stuff (or new stuff plain old doesn't exist). They show you need finite money/upgrade material (or at least so practically finite grinding more is just there so a player can't get themselves totally stuck) or the player is given too big an incentive to grind and there's poor pacing for when a player should get an upgrade. In Akiba's Trip and the sequel, only money prevents you from upgrading your weapons and clothes to +99 and there's no reason not to do it as soon as you've found a good grinding spot. In Way of the Samurai 1 and 4 there's no limit to how much you can improve a sword (though it's really tedious in 4 after hitting a soft cap), which creates the same issue (more so given the non-linear nature of the game). That's a step back from 2 and 3 where what 4 uses as the soft cap of a sword is the hard cap and to get a more powerful sword you have to find one with more potential (and swords on lower difficulty playthroughs have lower max potential) and build that up, which created some manner of gameplay pace (get a decent sword and upgrade it till you're strong enough to look for a better one). In Dark Souls each tier of upgrades needs new materials (titanite shard/chunk/slab, of a particular color in DS1), and you can grind out all but the last (and in many cases buy the first) if you find the ememy that drops them, but the pacing is terrible rewarding some builds over the other, especially without grinding out titanite (which puts us right back where we were).

Same is true for training in Morrowind: A character needs to be absurdly powerful before there's nothing trainers to spend money on, but even fairly non-abusive use of in-game economics (get valuable items from bandit caves, go to trainer that is also merchant, sell loot to get your money back) can get you absurdly powerful with no proper pace.

 

[thesecret1]

deuxhero
I of course thought of simply having an "upgrade your shit for XXX money" system, but that carries a lot of problems of its own, as you pointed out. I don't think that's a good venue to follow in terms of economy. No, the traditional approach where you go to shop to buy a new item seems to me to be the most promising one, its only problem being that after a while, you run out of interesting things to offer. This can be countered by various ways, the most obvious one being to stop giving the player everything he needs within a dungeon – at that moment, the shops become entirely redundant. Optimally, the player shouldn't get any gear from a dungeon dive at all, or maybe a single piece of gear if it's thematically appropriate. The shop needs to be the main source of equipment if the in-game economy is to have any chance at all. Of course, you do not want the game to turn into a loot treadmil like in D:OS2. I understood the attempt they made to crack this issue, but levelled gear is just massive cancer. Ideally, you would not change what the shop is offering. If bumpkintown only has three kinds of armour, then it should still have those same three armours at game end (thus avoiding loot treadmill). The second step to a functioning economy would then be to motivate the player to stop skipping tiers.

Imagine you are a fighter who seeks a new sword to replace his bronze one. The shop has an iron one, a steel one, and a mithril one on offer. In my experience, almost nobody will ever buy the iron one. They will go "well, I can just power through one more dungeon with this bronze sword, and then splurge out on the mithril or steel one". This behaviour, while perfectly logical from the financial side, is not something you want the player to do if you want a robust economy – a significant price gap between the tiers or limited availability (bumpkintown only has the iron sword, sorry, use your excess money to buy a better armour here or gear up your other partymembers) or a combination of both. Of course, there should be an appreciable difference in power between an iron sword and a steel one, so that the player really desires to upgrade his shit. Only when you have these systems set up, sure that the player should, at all times, have something to desire in the shop, should you focus on fine-tuning the availability of money. But that's very often the easy part, where you either nerf the sell prices or limit the availability of loot.

Sadly, I don't think I've seen a game fine tune its economy to the point where this would work throughout the entirety of the game. I saw some respectable attempts (modded Gothic 2 comes to mind) where they managed to keep it going for half the game, but sooner or later, the system breaks, either when the player finds a way to make way too much money way too quickly or when the shops stop having anything worth buying. Really, I consider a solid in-game economy of this kind to be the next milestone in game development, and I hope it'll be achieved soon.

 

[Fishy]

Star Citizen.