Elemental system is a key system for PvE RPGs

Warning ☢️ Heavy Game Design post ahead 😁

Elemental/ Faction system is a key system for PvE RPGs, yet a lot of games struggle with building it properly, which usually leads to broken progression & game economy. How does it work and what are the most common mistakes that designers do?

This system can go from pretty straightforward to very complex as you see on the comparison in the images. But complexity doesn’t equal better performance or revenue. The first two games that ever did $1 Bil. 💰 in mobile revenue were Puzzle & Dragons and Monster Strike from Japan, which used exactly this baseline system of 3+2 elements, which was also adapted by Zynga’s Empires & Puzzles. The secret sauce lies not only in your hero lineup but mainly within the dungeons & bosses 👹 that the game challenges you with, where you actually use those heroes.

The main rule is that there needs to be incentives to have all of the best heroes from each element. In fire 🔥 dungeon you need water 🌊 heroes. In water dungeon, you need leaf 🍀 heroes. On this boss, you need a fire tank. In this raid, you need a hero with this specific ability. You create problem A which needs to be solved with lineup A and then problem B etc. Here you start to see that ethe lemental system is just the surface layer of character progression and we go much deeper with team roles, abilities, synergies, etc.

Characters that are universal break this system, which is a common mistake. Another one is that the scenarios are not that demanding, so switching elements is not needed. Basically brute forcing a water boss with a fire team 😅. There also needs to be interesting choices for different build strategies, otherwise everybody is running the same boring setup 😴. The worst that can happen, is that these games usually run on gacha system, and if you don’t roll it constantly and chase characters, the main monetization of the game is basically over. That’s why it is so content-intensive, as it always adds new content, which can be challenged only by the latest characters. The counterpart for this in PvP games is the counter meta system, which I will cover in another post 😁.