My suggestion is that enemies should grow more powerful through killing players. Simple alien animals might increase in size, attack damage, and health but hostile intelligent beings could gain new abilities/weapons. Upon killing an enemy, it would display an icon overhead or other way of marking it as having killed an enemy before. It might add a nice flair to dungeons, seeing the enemy that killed you last time and thinking "Oh, I remember you." before engaging, and hopefully killing, the menace. If a regular animal killed you, it would gain a 15% bonus to it's healthpool and damage. If an enemy from a playable race killed you, it might gain a new weapon in addition to the 15% bonus to healthpool and damage. The enemy could gain multiple levels from killing a player, and grow stronger and stronger. For example, a standard creature with a base healthpool of 100 would have a healthpool of 115 after killing a player. After killing a player again (or a second player) it would go up to 132. A third would take it to 152, then a fourth to 174, etc. This would not apply to bosses, due to the fact a boss could grow unstoppable and hinder a players progression permanently. Thanks for looking over my idea, and if you have any feedback/critiques they would be appreciated, thanks! (Sorry if this belongs in the NPCs and creatures forum, wasn't 100% sure where this belonged.)
this could become very annoying due to loosing your equipment when playing on a harder difficulty and dying constantly and instead of the monsters then despawning they become more harder to avoid and get your stuff back.
It could be balanced by giving a certain amount of ore for the planets tier, or an increased amount of pixels. It could also be optional.
The way I see it, this would be bad, no matter how it is balanced. If monsters become powerful in one level, obviously it would be annoying. If they don't, then this mechanic would barely be noticed. If they give too valuable rewards, people are going to exploit the crap out of it. If they don't, well, we're back at annoying monsters. There are reasons why no RPG ever had this mechanic.
I heard Shadow of Mordor had a nemesis system, but I haven't played the game myself. Okay, so I just googled it and yes, Shadow of Mordor would make a certain enemy more powerful if he killed you. The enemy would grow more powerful, and become much harder to kill (unless the enemy in question was beheaded, it could respawn and be even more powerful). You mean like how player who aren't as good lose pixels (or items) on death and have to make there way back to where they were from their ship? It could be an option so the players who die too often can toggle it off.
It's not exactly as simple as that. For one, there's a level cap for enemies, a rather low one. Also, even though they become more powerful, it's by a very small amount. On top of it all, you can VERY easily avoid them, since the game is open-world. You can't avoid monsters in starbound, and if a similar form of enemy leveling was implemented into Starbound you wouldn't really notice it (all of the enemy's lethality in Shadow of Mordor comes from their traits, not their level).
There's a difference in losing pixels vs leveling enemies. One involves losing items and the other involves increased difficulty done by punishing the player for bad luck/skill. With pixels, that's an easy thing to fix if you lose some, you can always go find more. Enemy leveling on the other hand, not really much way of avoiding it. Given that monsters tend to be randomly generated on terrain, you'd have to level the entirety of that species on the planet, thereby making the planet itself more difficult and increasing its threat level. I don't remember any enemies that level up. Care to refresh my memory?
The Goliaths could level up by killing things. Once you shot off their helmet, they became berserk and started killing everything around them. However, this is nothing at all like the suggested enemy leveling system, since the Goliaths leveled up by killing NPCs, not you.
