#systems analysis

Rewards and incentive systems motivate action, and the experience system of a game will shape how the player plays that game. This much is obvious, but experience systems also shape the pacing of a game as they determine the pace at which players get stronger. UnderRail is an interesting case study because it is an isometric cRPG with 2 xp systems; Classic and Oddity.

Classic xp works like how most RPGs award experience; killing enemies and completing quests. Oddity xp is unique to UnderRail. You get oddity xp for collecting oddities. Oddities are weird items that you can find in containers or by killing enemies. Some examples are the maps of Core City, a rat-hound ear with an earring, or a human skull with 3 eye sockets (where is your god now). You can also only gain xp from an oddity a fixed amount of times, eg: you can only get xp from the rat-hound ear 3 times.

UnderRail allows the player to choose between oddity xp and classic xp when the player creates a new save file. This creates a very interesting scenario because it means that we can view how the same game works with 2 different xp systems, how the pacing and player motivation changes.

In terms of pacing, classic xp is far smoother. Since you’re constantly killing enemies and completing quests, you’re constantly getting xp. This is unlike oddity xp which is very feast or famine. Since you can only get xp from any given oddity a certain amount of times, when you enter a new area there’ll be a whole host of new oddities for you to collect. But pretty soon you’ll have collected most of them and now the only source of xp is completing quests. There are some areas that oddity xp awards experience smoothly; those are the early game (until the player collects the drill in Depot A), the late game (Deep Caverns), and the Expedition dlc (the Black Sea). So it’s clear that oddity xp can be smooth, but in UnderRail’s mid game, it is not.

So why is UnderRail’s oddity system smooth in some cases but feast or famine in others? And why is the classic system consistently smooth? I believe that the reason for this is a discrepancy between goals of the oddity xp system and the goals of the core gameplay loop. The goals of the oddity xp system are to encourage a more pacifist playstyle and to enable an immersive sim experience. However the core gameplay loop is based around combat. Half of the skills in the game are purely for combat, a further quarter indirectly improve the player’s combat abilities, while only a quarter have no combat utility. This mismatch is the cause of the oddity system’s flaws. While the player is always fighting enemies and doing quests, the player is not always exploring new areas. This means that the xp system which rewards fighting monsters is always granting xp which the system which rewards exploration is only granting xp some of the time.

This brings us onto the discussion of how xp systems impact player motivation. As I mentioned previously, the oddity xp system encourages a more diverse “immersive sim” playstyle while the classic xp system encourages a more combat oriented playstyle. For example, the skills hacking, lockpicking, and pickpocketing are very much optional skills under the classic system (especially pickpocketing, which only leads to a different way to complete a quest exactly once). However under the oddity system, they become practically mandatory to gain a decent amount of xp. Additionally, under the classic system, the player only has to kill enemies and complete quests to gain xp, while under the oddity system, the player also has to comb through the environment looking for loot. This demonstrates how a different xp system can encourage a different play style even in the same game.

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