I think if I was making a game I would really strive to make it so every upgrade is meaningful and easily noticed.
I liked pillars of eternity, but I didn't like trying to think about if 3% more damage was even going to survive rounding.
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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Yeah, it's difficult, because:
- you don't want to overpower players too quickly, and
- making new artwork and animations for each upgrade is hard.
There's certainly ways you can optimize towards that, though. Vampire Survivors, Binding of Isaac etc. can achieve this, because they're 2D and have a really simple art style, which makes drawing and coding the new animation effects something you can do during downtime.
Well, and they're roguelikes. Doesn't matter if your player gets overpowered, if they're gonna be irreversably dead in a few minutes anyways. ¯\_(⊙_ʖ⊙)_/¯
I don't think the graphics are a big part of the problem. It's more the math.
Pillars of Eternity, for example, has it so every point of Might above 10 is 3% more damage. This is a little hard to reason about - my sword says it does 17-24 damage. So if I have 15 might, that's 15% more damage , so the sword is now... 19-27? I had to use a calculator because I'm kind of bad at math. If I take one more point of might, my max damage becomes...28? Does it round?
This is not very quick and easy.
Now imagine instead of every point of might was just +2 damage. Or +5 damage. Much easier to reason about. If you want might to matter more for some weapons, slap a double might bonus on them. You might (pun intended) just need to scale the rest of the system around this new range of values.
I accidentally swerved a little from "impactful stats only" to "easily understood stats", but they're kind of related.
It has nothing to do with 2D/3D, but everything to do with "the grind".
Big games optimise for player retention, smaller games optimise for fun.
And also that these upgrades are entirely optional, so no one will technically soft lock themselves by skipping out on "side content" entirely. This is especially important for speed runners, who usually skip them to further cut time.
Maybe you kill 100 enemies in one hit, so this is the image of 101th guy being obliterated
percentage based damage increases is where its at.
stackable % based damage increase
If your Ring of Ludicrous Fury just cancels out your Lance Modifier for Attack Opportunity, I’d rather just sell the ring
MULTIPLICATIVELY STACKABLE % BASED DAMAGE INCREASES
ON HIT
Risk of Rain hell yeah. I need to play that again.
Bingo
Depends if you're in a big numbers game or not. If your heavy hitting attack is doing 32 damage to the final boss, you're not really going to feel that 1%
That's the icon of a skill that gives a 1% stacking damage buff when you do something innocuous that people make builds around.
A +1% stacking upgrade with no stated limit gives me a boner
UPGRAYEDD