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Why Computer RPGs Waste Your Time
spidweb writes "RPGVault has an editorial about two particularly noxious qualities of computer role-playing games. Spiderweb Software's Jeff Vogel goes off on a tear, discussing how you work forever to earn the right to do anything exciting, and must 'prove yourself' by expending tons of your time. From the article: 'So now, thinking about playing an RPG just makes me tired. I'm tired of starting a new game and being a loser. I'm tired of running the same errands to prove myself. The next time I enter my fantasy world, I want it to not assume that I'm a jackass.'" I think Oblivion handled this well, scaling the world as you went and giving you really interesting things to do from the get-go. What other games dodge this bullet? Do you see this timesink as an inevitable part of the RPG genre?
They both were engrossing from the start. I'm going to venture a guess (without reading tfa) that the author is speaking more in terms of MMOs, which as I understand it put you through a lot of tedious crap before you get to the good parts of the game.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Oh, I'd say a few of us wasted quite a lot of time on Oblivion as much as any other RPG. Perhaps we just enjoyed it a little more.
If you don't like it don't play. As I'm sure you're aware, there's plenty of other ways to spend your free time. Don't try and foist your problems with RPG onto me. TFA lacked anything more than anecdotal "I played for too long and didn't have any fun".
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
What sweeping statements he's making! None of what he said would even sound vaguely familiar to me if not for the PVP aspects of MMORPGs, where people expect you to be at some sort of "honor level" or "rank" or whatever in order to play with you, which becomes a vicious circle. (Can't play to gain rank because your rank isn't high enough.)
But "computer RPGs" in general? And what would those be? Oblivion? Baldur's Gate? Dungeon Siege? Neverwinter Nights? KOTOR? I mean give me a break, those games do NOT treat you like a moron who has to grind in order to do anything fun. Those games give you ongoing, increasingly challenging excitement. There's no sense of "I played long enough so now I get to have fun" at all! I'm really confused by the sentiment.
Though I admit to not having read the article (blocked here).
I like basketball!!1!
http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/763/763050p1.html
Let's try and get people on the right page, shall we?
Both on Oblivion neatly dodging this negative classification and on the persistance of RPG idiot-sinkholes. The majority of the ones I've ever picked up made me feel like I wasted my money until I was introduced to Elder Scrolls IV.
"Courage is being afraid to do the Right Thing, and doing it anyway."
The author sounds like he's got attention span issues. If an RPG only took 10 hours to play, I'd feel ripped off. For games in general, I usually deem one hour per dollar spent a 'break-even' point in terms of ROI. 10 hours would be a total loss, unless it was a bargain bin game. Some of my favorites (Guild Wars, Half-Life 2, etc.) are well past the one hour per dollar level.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
Guild Wars was able to avoid the grind to some extent. You max out at level 20 and it doesn't take terribly long to get to that point. There's also not a whole lot of expensive and essential equipment. You can fairly quickly pick up what you need as monster drops along the way.
There's still specialty stuff that might cost a pretty penny or take a lot of random fighting until you get the drop you want, but that's totally unnecessary to being successful at the game. Unfortunately, they may have taken a step back in that regard. In their latest chapter, Nightfall, you have to earn points to gain in rank for certain quests. It's not too much of a grind but it's not quite as open as their original chapter was in that regard.
Call me old-fashioned, but isn't this the point of most computer games, not just RPGs ? If you want to defeat the boss, you have to play all the levels before it. Or use the cheat code. In CRPGs, the story is often a key point of the game. And in Japanese RPGs, you often start out doing exciting things - Final Fantasy 7/8/.., anyone.
And that's not just in computer games. If you read a novel, you'll have to start at the beginning and read all the pages until the end. If you want to climb a mountain and brag about it, you're not going to take the lift.
Geez, what is it about this young generation that feels entitled to instant gratification ?
What he is complaining about sounds more like an MMO then an RPG. I don't recall being given quests to kill 500 wolves in an RPG. In a lot of RPGs you just level with out noticing. It's not something you have to go and "do".
Also, this guy apparently established his own Game Design company making... RPGs! So why doesn't he just shut up and go make one the way he wants? He says he wants an RPG that can be finished in 10-12 hours instead of the 40+ most of them are.. Dude, that's what makes an RPG an RPG. It's long very detailed story!
For a guy who designs RPGs he seems like he doesn't understand what makes them great. If I'm not mistaken, he could just go play some of the new FPS's which have detailed story lines that only take about 10 hours to beat. They don't involve leveling and don't require you to quest..
So stop making RPGs and start playing FPS's!
Spiderweb Software is the name of Jeff's company (and links to his website), and I believe spidweb is his nickname on his forums. Did he submit his own article?
Well, first off, define "loser". Do you mean a character who is challenged by lesser encounters? Or do you mean a loser in the eyes of your peers (other players in an MMORPG)?
Seems to me a question of what you're looking to get out of an RPG. If you want to have uber-equipment and incredible spells/skills/whatever, sure, there's a grind. It's kind of like life -- it's rare to be rewarded for doing nothing.
For me, RPGs are all about the challenge. Since I don't have the time to play games for countless hours, what this leaves me with are games that are difficult in the early game (like Bard's Tale was). This still holds true for me -- once my character is powerful, I'll start a new character and handicap him. I'm one of those idiots who plays a vegetarian knight in Nethack, or an archer in Baldur's Gate (console) who refuses to use a bow.
Fundamentally, it's about what you want out of an RPG -- and if you want all the gravy, you should be prepared to work for it. (Or pay for it -- there are plenty of services out there that will do so for you). What's the point of all the cool stuff if you never have to work for it?
One other note -- if you define your character by how others perceive it, and identify with the character to the point that you're upset that others are more powerful, or have access to "cooler stuff", maybe you should be thinking about how much you have emotionally invested in a videogame.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The problem with MMORPGs is the reward for the effort. This isn't just a few players in a D&D campaign: you've got huge populations. In order to reward people who do well in the game you HAVE to provide cool and unique places to play with cool and unique opponents that drop cool and unique items.
If you step back you notice all the novel and interesting things in these games happen at the top levels because, frankly, that's where they HAVE to be. If the game peaks midway through the level grind, why would anyone keep enduring it?
In the meantime, the game's value gets diluted where it's only the end game that is important. Instead of treating time investment as something to be rewarded with something to ooh and ahh over, or something reserved for the selected few, it's treated as a requirement to get your fill of the game. You have people paying $X per month. You could be paying $X for dull repetitive content or really exciting unique content... it all depends on how much work you put into it.
This simply doesn't happen with older RPG games. With few players at a time you can make sure everyone's having fun as a group. Together. The world bends to them. How many DM's out there have tweaked random encounters to fix challenge levels for their players? How many DM's roll their own quests specificly to have a good time? With the "MASSIVE" in MMORPGs, there cannot possibly be good attention paid to the up-and-coming players. You focus on the bottom so they get hooked and learn how to play the game, you focus on the top so nobody gets bored and leaves, and the middle? Well, screw them. Hurry up and get beefy.
On the aside, I've liked just about everything that ever came out of Spiderweb Software. Although, perhaps they could take a lesson from Oblivion and scaling opponents with the player's progress. Reward scaling is great in their games with side quests and little things to discover if you have the patience to crawl around, but the games usually stop being fun when I become a living God in the games and can decimate just about every enemy area without a sweat.
More Twoson than Cupertino
If this guy doesn't have fun starting from scratch in every RPG, then he needs to look into another style of game. Maybe one where you don't have to work hard to develop skills and gain useful items, which allow you to progress in the game. Oh, wait! That's exactly what an RPG is.
Personally, I don't think they're a waste of time at all. I have fun start from the very beginning each time. If you aren't enjoying yourself, then it's time to look for another game. Don't tell me that I'm wasting my time just because you don't like the games that I play. What a jackass.
Fun from the start.
That's the problem, poor gameplay value. It's not an instant gratification thing. It's that WoW is boring as hell to grind because it's all randomized BS with no value or significance that respawns regularly.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
You'd think that someone who spent 23 years of playing RPGs would understand the point is not to win the game, but to immerse yourself in the role and explore the game.
That being said, Jeff needs to pick up Planescape: Torment. Not that he'll enjoy it for the story or anything, but at least he can start out as a god.
It had enjoyable missions from start to finish. I appreciate his point: I'm no gamer, but I remember when playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the N64, traipsing around huge landscapes was astounding - the first time. Several years on, I still don't want to play it again (although the completing a game like the does feel relieving).
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
The author is actually speaking about "single-player" RPGs, though the points of the article seem more evident in MMORPGs.
Avernum and Geneforge. Eh? Wouldn't know those two games if Ray Muzyka and Richard Garriot smacked me over my head with those game boxes. Granted, sales numbers and popularity don't mean everything, but something tells me that the author is sick of RPGs because he's not getting the point of what makes some RPGs successful and good from start to finish. As if he's taking the character's tasks too literally. Immersion, smooth learning curve, is probably interpretted by him as busy-work prior to head bashing heroics. Sort of an ADD view on RPGs if you ask me (and you didn't).
I'm so glad we got rid of all these stupid casuals from my guild.
In the Olden Days you used to be able to (usually) copy your characters over to RPG sequels. I don't think they do that that much anymore.
But I have to say, while spending 60 hours on an RPG was great when I was younger, the older I get the more uncomfortable I am about spending too much time on a game.
First, let me say I can partially understand where he is coming from. Usually I run into this when I want to replay an RPG over again. As you go through the game you find bigger and better items (weapons, armor, magic, etc.) and when you start over again, you think, "If I could just get the *Light Sword* found at the end of the game, I could kick butt in the beginning of the game and get to the end that much quicker." I know some people who like to hack the game just to give their characters the coveted items early in the game.
Some games deal with this by having shortcuts that you find out after you already need them. The first time though, you go the long way building up experience and learning the shortcuts. If you go through again, you know the shortcuts so you don't spend a lot of time just building experience. The problem with that is that there is a trade off. Once one person knows the shortcut, EVERYBODY knows it. Why do the long way when someone else has found the shortcut for you?
After having said all that, I firmly believe that Role Playing Games are there for you to play a role. What fun is the game if your role is Urak the Unkillable? Do you really want a role where you start out as all powerful and the goal is to lose all your powers and get rid off all your cool stuff? (Maybe I will start a game with that as the premise.) If you don't like the role any more, don't play the game.
As for me, it is true that I don't play nearly as many RPG's as I used to. They do take a lot of time that I don't have any more. There are times that I don't like starting out so low and I want to start out with a bit more of a head start. But I still get a kick out of improving my character(s) and developing him/her/them the way I want. I tend to prefer games where I have lots of control how I build the character. Do I want a wizard or a warrior? A fighter that can do some magic, or a magic user that knows which end of a sword to hold? What are the benefits and drawbacks to a quest? I know that not everyone likes the same games I do, and not everyone likes the same character development. Furthermore, as time goes on, peoples tastes change. If you don't like spending that much time developing a character, perhaps it is time to either change game styles, or program one that better fits what you want.Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
What RPGs often do wrong is make the main XP source from killing targets, so a char that goes out and kills 500 wolves is innately better than one which killed only 5. When the game system rewards tediousness, many players will get tired and angry.
There are a few examples that I recall that alter the formula a bit. The Elder Scroll series do not derive leveling purely from killing, so your character can enjoy doing whatever he/she needs to. Chrono Cross levels all your characters when you beat the next boss; all the creatures in between is just practice. Deus Ex (the original) had an RPG-like system which rewarded the player skill points for completing objectives. All three basically having leveling objectives that don't include "killing X more creatures".
As a side note, I don't feel having to run-around-and-level in RPGs is nearly as bad and distracting as having to collect resources and redo all research in every scenario of a RTS.
I'm a long time gamer and i've been known to get sucked into FF11 and then the far superior WoW.
I had so much fun with WoW, but I ended up quitting and eventually feeling disdain towards the MMO genre as it currently exists.
I honestly can't find a nugget of story or novelesque quality at all in either of the MMOs I've mentioned. On top of that, the entire game structure is set around rewarding you for spending your time playing. I find that beyond superficial familiarity of your abilities and being observant in-general there's no real skill to be had in these titles. I can't believe I worked so hard to get a stupid mount in WoW...
In the time it took me to grow to level 45 with two seperate characters I could have beaten a number of games that had a MUCH higher engagement level than WoW. WoW is drawn out and slow, you have to play for an hour to complete a quest (you know what I'm talking about, don't nitpick me here). I've come to realize that I'd rather have a much more condensed gaming experience. I feel that for every 1 part of WoW i expended 3 parts time. Why bother when there's SO many great titles out with closer to 1:1 ratio?
I don't really have anything at all against the people who play the games.. But, for me (at least personally) I find them to be an extremely inefficient use of time.
Not necessarily considered RPGs, but JA seems like the ticket for this idiot. You don't have to start out as a "loser." One or two characters on your team (party) can be pretty major badasses from the get go. It doesn't make the game any easier, and you still get to experience the entire storyline.
I am talking about the RPG effect were the end or even the mid-level game is just one long hack&slash. Offcourse you might have a different opinion, maybe the descende into one long slaughter session is what you call the exitiing bit and you are glad to have gotten that boring talkie stuff.
Not even NWN2 succeeds here. Part of the problem is that the game gets too big. You go from a having a small party whose members are constantly in each others hair providing color, to a HUGE party who members you can barely get to know, whose interaction is extremely random because you have ZERO change of hitting the right combo of party members at the right moment/location.
But an ever worse game was a RPG set in our own medeival times but were magic was real. It started out as a good RPG but soon became nothing more then one long dungeon crawl with zero Rpg elements.
But back to bashing NWN2. If you have played it, you will have seen a loading screen message that tells you that you can interact with your party members enough to change them. What they don't say is that you can change ONE of them. The dwarf can become a monk. About half way through too and then that is it. Zero reaction from him.
Whoopee. Then again, the entire game is not to fleshed out. Only one romance option per gender. No same sex romance. If only they hadn't gone for a every single class as a party member approach and concentraded on a smaller group they could have avoided all that.
BUT I never really came across the need to 'grind' in a PC RPG. Yeah, in a way perhaps the whole bit in NWN2 were you got to do quest after quest to get access to the next area in your quest. Espcially since the "part of Neverwinter blocked of by the guards" bit is getting pretty old by now. Is that city ever not under lockdown?
Yet that is part of the gameplay, sure it is not the best story telling to do all these quests when you feel you should be rushing to get inside but that is the way bad stories work. It is like that eternal sex scene in action movies were the leads suddenly get naked for no reason when they really should be trying to solve the case.
As for ALWAYS playing a newbie. Well yeah, that can get old. Again NWN2 fails here a bit. Since you can create your own character you get the effect of being treated like a kid when your character is a 200 year old elf. Sure, they mature slower but still. Wel at least they were bright enough to make your forster father an elf as well.
As for starting at level 1. Okay, just try to imagine a game where you start at level 20. Problem? Well, if it is D&D beyond that you start to come close to godhood. Monk's are near invulnerable. Fighters slice and dice through anything, magic users don't have a single spell available anymore that does NOT wipe out the entire party (by accident, I SWEAR!) and healers can pull people back from death before they were born.
Sure a TRUE RPG could probably pull it off. In fact there is an other genre of games that already does. It is called an adventure. RPG without the combat. Because what does the combat mean if you are so fucking powerfull that nobody can stand against you. It would have to be an RPG with extreme story telling.
I want one, but in todays world were not a single RPG designer can resist skipping corners by just adding a few extra levels of nothing but boring nasties you already defeated dozen of times, I am not holding my breath.
Even the legendary Planescape Torment had them.
But as for needing to grind up, he is playing the wrong games.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The concept of 'wasted time' is completely dependent on the person who is doing the activity. For some people, it's a fun and rewarding experience to start a character in a different world/time/setting and build that character up through experiences and quests. However, for some people, this is akin to pulling teeth: an agonizing trial that they believe separates them from the action at the endgame. In the latter category, I'd place the author.
I'm one of those people that likes the build a character from scratch and have them grow as I see fit. For this reasons, CRPGs are perfect for me, and don't feel like a waste of time at all. The fact that the author complains about 90 minutes of doing a quest when he could have used that time for something more 'exciting', like watching a movie, tells me one thing: he should definately get his entertainment elsewhere. He wants spontaneous action, he doesn't want to build the character but have it handed to him on a silver platter. There's nothing wrong about that, since there are plenty of games that do this, but CRPGs are not one of them.
It's not a matter of the CRPGs being at fault, it's just the author looking in the wrong place for his entertainment.
to take a look at my +5 sword of never getting laid and say thats a waste of time.
Some Japanese RPG's do have elements of leveling, in that to enter some new section you really do go back through some things a few times to level up enough to the point you can take on new sections.
Here one game I am thinking of is Disgea.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's worse in some cases where sequels are involved. Either you're playing a whole new character who has nothing to do with the previous story - or the writers find a way to magically strip you of all knowledge, weapons and phat lewt.
The last several Final Fantasy games, as well as Morrowind, entertained me for over 100 hours each. Now Oblivion is out and I feel drawn toward it. It's interesting this topic appeared on Slashdot today as I was just thinking about what a waste of time these games can be. Why do I play and waste so much time when the sense of accomplishment I experience isn't tangible? I have absolutely nothing to show for it, except a memory card or a save file on my hard drive, which could be obliterated at any time by a strong magnetic field. Why do I want to keep playing? Why do these games just get longer and more involved? I'm afraid to try World of Warcraft, I'm afraid to get sucked into it and end up strung out as so many others have. Still, if I had children, would I want them to be out on the street on drugs, or inside on the computer?
The endless quest to "upgrade".
These games are arguably the most addictive because of how well they synthesize much of what it is to be human - to be social, to be constantly engaged in furtherment of our experience. Most of them are quite fulfilling. Its only when we reach the limits of the game or see them being experienced by others that we start to question our participation.
My only complaint about games like WoW is they don't capture cut throat nature of real life. Thats what stopped me from playing it. Kind of like that bit in the (only decent and necessary) matrix where agent smith is discussing how the utopian matrix was rejected by humankind. Quite insightful that moment.
I've never played a MMORPG and hadn't bought an RPG since the Ultima Underworld series except for ES4:O. I enjoyed Ultima IV, V, VI, etc. and Underworld, maybe because I was a kid and the fantasy stuff was fun. I don't seem to recall, however, having to "grind" or "level-up". I do remember that if you killed someone who had better equipment, you could take it and get more powerful. However, I tried the RPGs again with ES4:O and it was fun for several quests, but then got repetitive - go into this dungeon and find this, go into that dungeon and find that, etc. Even Grand Theft Auto gets boring after awhile, especially after trying to increase my skill levels.
When I get home from work, I have very little actual "free time." I get really annoyed if all I can do in my "free time" is kill the same minor creature over and over again (or in the case of GTA:SA, swim/dive stationary into a wall to up my skills so I can complete a mission where I need to hold my breath) and never progress on with the game. Talk about sheer boredom. That's why I used trainers to automatically up my skills - I don't want to waste my precious free-time.
Now, I only play FPS and RTS games with a little TBS (Civ series). For FPS, I can immediately get into the game and make a difference, do something cool to advance the storyline, etc. I don't need to go do all these little tasks to build up skill points. That's why games like Far Cry & HL2 were so fun - there was an interesting storyline and you could "power-up" by getting better weapons. For RTS / TBS, it's about planning. The best one I played were the built-in campaigns in Age of Mythology.
Perhaps a majority of the problem is the ridiculously unrealistic gap between an experienced warrior and one with relatively less experience.
I think the entire problem would resolve itself if the difference between a level 1 character's fighting ability and a level 90 character's fighting ability was significantly less.
In an MMORPG environment, if 3 level 1 characters could gang up and take down someone who has reached the highest point you can reach, then I think the entire concept of the grind would take a back seat to interesting gameplay.
PlanetSide is an MMOFPS that takes this concept and deals with it quite well. You can spend your points each level to gain the ability to use new weapons or vehicles, with some abilities having pre-requisite abilities. If you want, you can trade the abilities back for the points you used to earn them, but you can only 'sell' one ability every 6 hours. Once you're level 8 or so, you have access to pretty much everything the game has to offer, and further levels only serve to expand the number of things you can do at once -- essentially expanding your flexibility. But by no means is a level 20 character STRONGER than a level 8 character, they simply have more venues of attack.
Granted, Oblivion is a game where instant immersion is truly possible, where you can literally choose how you want to explore the world. The quests in the game provide some structure, but you really can just pick a direction and start walking when you begin the game.
But the world scaling backfired, I think. Leveling your character a dozen times and then going back and pummelling that boss is a major part of the fun in an RPG. Getting trounced by the same adversary whether you are level 1 or level 12 is not very fun at all. But that is only part of the reason why I think Oblivion does not address the grind issue very well.
Ironically, the main reason that Oblivion doesn't address the grind is because the developers did too good of a job implementing magic in this world. Without putting out too many spoilers for people who haven't already figured it out, even level 1 characters can create spells that completely unbalance the game, no cheats, no console commands, no mods required. (If you are curious about these spells, checkout http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Useful_Spells) And I don't mean for just spellcasting classes -- magic in Oblivion is so open and customizable that it takes only a little bit of thought to create unstoppable characters of any class. Grinding your way battle after battle through adversaries to level up is boring, but so is blowing right through them.
That isn't why RPGS/MMOs waste our time. That's simply how they do it. So why do they?
Because you love them, darnit >:(
The expansions for Baldur's Gate and NWN start you off at higher than the 'looser' level. Granted, you can import your character from previous versions, but you can just buy the Diamond/Ultra edition of BG/NWN, and start off with the expansion, and skip the 'intro' part if you want.
The whole purpose of RPG's is to waste your time and money.
Thousands of hours, hundreds of dollars - disrupting your productivity from pro-social activities
(such as helping your community, volunteering, earning additional income, building up your family and personal wealth, etc).
The Purpose of RPG's is to bring you closer to poverty and death, nothing less.
If it wastes your time and you don't date and die childless - all the better, the game wins!
It it hurts your company and your social life - great, undermining society is the very goal of Fantasy worlds.
Are RPGs any worse than Alcoholism, Crack, promiscuity, gambling addiction, etc? Who knows?
But he just doesn't get it. If he wants value to his life, he should volunteer to help Habitat for Humanity,
the local animal shelter, his church or public library, or just help some relatives clean the yard or share a vacation.
While you waste away, behind a keyboard - other people enjoy profiting from you're folly - go buy speed boats and enjoy living at their 3rd vacation home near the beach.
RPG's waste your life time, when you die - for real - put on your tombstone - 'IF I COULD HAVE ONLY LEVELED UP!'
HOW ABOUT THAT.
HOW ABOUT THAT.
HOW ABOUT THAT.
HOW ABOUT THAT.
Pathetic excuse for a game. I can't believe I wasted so much time on it. And yes, I say wasted; that game starts great but unfortunately falls very very short. Most unfortunate is that the shortcomings are very well hidden under a thick coat of eye cand, disguised as a very nourishing substance which in the end is like that inflated rice diet thing.
But I suppose people need to get their sense of achievement from somewhere. If they can't get it from the real world, grinding at a RPG is the natural substitute. And offers quasi-immediate rewards. Powerful addictive combination.
I totally agree... I hate having to quest to get up, then quest to take a shower just to quest to drive to work and do more meaningless tasks so that I can just quest to pay my rent and eat food. I guess in the end i'm rewarded with sex, but then that just starts all the quests over again and I look like a ass hole agian!
In short, the problem is one of expectations, not of production. One poster here brings up Fallout, one of my favorite games of all time, and a perfect illustration of my point. The game is a straight-up roleplaying game. There is fighting, but the fighting system is a bit cumbersome. However, the system still gets the job done within the confines of the environment of this game. If someone plays this game expecting a fighting system that's fast-paced, exciting, and streamlined, they're in big trouble. By the same token, if I go to the next Jerry Bruckheimer movie expecting the next "American History X" or "Man on Fire" (2 of my favorites that happen to make commentaries on important social issues), I'm going to be sorely disappointed. Not neccessarily because it's a bad movie, but because my expectations were not met. I think it's the same with video games.
I don't normally play computer games. Before I tried COH/COV the last game I played was on the Apple ][. So, you see, this was a bit of a leap. I love RPG games, running mainly. I specific like superhero games, like Champions. I spent some 20 years playing with a large group of people and other gatherings like Dundracon. I also very much enjoyed the game V&V for it's simple system that allow people to get into the game quickly. With pen and paper RPGs it was important to make sure people had a good time. Most game system got-it. Some did not. And, before you go pointing out the problem with these systems, I and everyone else knows there is not perfect system. They all have flaws, but most are fun.
When I started COH/COV is was interesting for it's newness, to me. But after playing a while I found it's shortcomings quickly. You start as a complete idiot. You are basically a normal person who can't drive a car, motorcycle, or ride a buss. Your "powers" can only be described as a few lousy tricks, at the start. You only get real powers at around level 38. It's only then that you even start to have power that you might start with in the pen and paper system. So if you want to imagine yourself as a homeless person, unable to use normal human transportation, who can preform little tricks, then you gotta love this game.
There is little imagination to it also. All characters complete the exact same "missions" and they are never in public. The mission take place in an isolated bubble. The missions always come down to these simple goals or a combination.
1) Defeat everyone
2) Defeat so-and-so
3) Kidnap somebody
4) Click on glowing or translucent things
5) Beat up an object(s) and escape(like bank vault)
The only goal is to "level-up" and beyond that there is little going on. The only place where user content utilized, besides characters, is in base construction.
One day someone will tap into the imagination of the people who love these games, and create a system where people can contribute. This generic system will play host to a number of different genre. People will be able to create their own "mission" and "missions" for others.
Maybe I don't get it. But on COV I have a "mastermind" character. As a Mastermind I only end up taking orders from others.
Never mind. I've just thought of my next project.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
Playing computer RPG's wastes your time? Who knew?
What's a game if not a "waste of time".
I think the whole draw of an RPG, at least for me, is that I'm building a character. I like that sense of progress. I want to see my character's strength grow enabling him to slaughter foes who he initially had no hope of defeating. I like being able to explore, not have everything open to me within the first 30 minutes of gameplay but rather having a new region to explore made safer because of that character's progress.
Essentially, if I didn't want that sort of experience I wouldn't be playing an RPG. I'd be playing any one of a number of other games where my character remains unchanged from start to finish. I see an RPG, at it's essence to be a facsimile of real life. Obviously, it's not a literal depiction; it's not a simulation. However, such games are designed around character growth and evolution. An individual in real life doesn't reach a given and and find him or herself suddenly endowed with everything they will ever need to know. They aren't going to land the perfect job immediately out of college, earning untold fortunes. It may happen for someone, but that's the exception to the rule. Life is about growth, change and improvement, the basic elements found in most RPGs.
Perhaps too often these games devolve into a treadmill. But then developers are limited by how much variety they can put into a game. And regardless, life is essentially a treadmill: go to work, earn money, buy some stuff, earn experience, get a better job, buy better stuff. One could argue that they play games to escape from reality, but then that's a completely different debate.
MMOs are another story. In that case the developer has chosen to make the treadmill more tedious for a simple reason: to earn as much money as possible. That's the thing about subscription-based games. The trick there is to keep the carrot dangled just out of reach; keep the player interested enough that they keep playing. The thing is that people want a goal to reach for. Everyone is focused on the destination even though the journey is probably even more important. The thing is, without the end goal the journey becomes pointless. That's the problem with MMOs. It's an exercise in frustration because the game is based around making a player feel inadequate regardless of what level they are. There's no point at which a player can say they've made it. So the treadmill becomes painfully obvious.
I don't think Oblivion's system helps in any way. I don't like the idea that my enemies scale with me. I expect that as my character grows lower level enemies become insignificant. High level enemies pose a challenge because they are so powerful. The idea should be that the stakes are higher and greater forces are at play; battles become increasingly epic. If I get defeated at level 50 it's because I faced something truly powerful, not because of some unnatural mechanism. I don't want my level 2 foe to continue to be a challenge in the end game.
Reading the article I'm left with the impression the guy shouldn't be playing or developing RPGs.
Buy a Lego Mindstorms system and explore robotics. Contribute to an OSS project. Learn to flyfish, knit, frisbee,...
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I've noticed those Japanese style RPGs there's not much of a level grind. Zelda is one that comes to mind, and the original Final Fantasy.
Zelda does this by combining the elements of a puzzle game with a little bit of FPS thrown in. There are no levels, you just get dramatically better because you get powerups and better equipment. However, how well you do is primarily based on your skill with the moves and the controller.
Final fantasy did this by basically pacing you through the areas of the game so that if you ran through each area straight through without stopping to "level grind" the game would in general level you to sufficient power. No "you must be this level to take this guy on." The natural course of the game gave you the power you needed.
In Spiderweb's games, there's very little need, or even ability, to grind. However, the one thing that both it's strength and weakness is that you need to switch tracks every now and then. It's nice to be able to feel like you can control where you go and organize how you tackle multiple quests, but sometimes I've run into situations where I'm simply not strong enough to tackle a question and I have to go do something else, which is mildly annoying.
The RPG grind back in the 80s wasn't that bad. The real problem with the grind is when you compare it to other people in MMORPGs. In the 80s, I played wizardry and bards tale. The grind was part of the game, but I loved it because I could track my progress, level, and move on. It was on my own terms and I felt good because it was the game challenging me and I pushed myself to do my best.
In MMORPGs, I can push to do my best, and then some asshole comes up to me and says "You aren't level 99 yet? You don't have a sword of +50 pwnz j00r azz yet? Where's your orb of ultimate sexiness? You suXX0rs d00d." MMORPGs are in general scaled to try to satisfy the most people in order to make the most money, and make you make an investment of time to get anywhere. And that's the problem. Jeff's right that MMORPGs are about time invested, and the reward is a measurable level of power or amount of gold or equipment. MMORPGs have become places where your penis size is measured by the number of levels you have, and can bring out the worst in people.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
in a FPS you start off with a knife or a pistol, then about 40 million levels later you have the super mega ultra special cannon in a driving game, you start off of 3 crappy cars, and you have to get the better ones, infact in some of these driving ones you have to earn your driving license?! I think that's pointless but someone likes it. Then after driving 800 tracks a million times you can get flames on your car or whatever in a RTS you start off with "moron who throws stones" later you get ultra tank shooting lightning
"Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it? Singapore's airport, the Changi Airtropolis, seemed to possess no more resolution than some early VPL world. There was no dirt whatsoever; no muss, no furred fractal edge to things. Outside, the organic, florid as ever in the tropics, had been gardened into brilliant green, and all-too-perfect examples of itself. Only the clouds were feathered with chaos - weird columnar structures towering above the Strait of China." -William Gibson
One of the strongest qualities of the original Star Wars universe (Episodes IV-VI) was the dirt around the edges. Spielberg's banged-up, worn out world breathed life into an otherwise unbelivable story. It's pretty obvious that 1st-person shooters are a literal testbed for the neat-and-tidy=fake hypothesis. Virtual worlds would look a heck of a lot better with a little grunge. But what about other dirt; grit in an RPG's algorithmic cogs?
The algorithms that govern character growth and power-potential in an RPG universe could use a little virtual "dirt". These algorithms are very often linear and dull dull dull! There's no real uncertainty in the system--uncertainty that would allow a very low level character to find a disproportionately powerful weapon (for example) very early on in the game. There is also no potential to be a very unlucky player who's character takes a very long time before going anywhere. These are two qualities that make life interesting. The potential for failure lends an exhilarating edge to success while certainty makes success dull.
Game designers are so terrified of alienating players that they design games which no one with an IQ over 90 could possibly lose.
The thing I hate the most is when this happens. You are starting a game, being sent as part of an elite strike force or something. And then the king gives you enough gold for a couple potions and a wooden or copper sword. Then, 3/4 of the way through the game you come across the same king, and he gives you a totally badass sword. It's like "Dude, if my success was so important why didn't you start me out with that badass sword?" This killed some of the dragon warrior and final fantasy games by completely breaking immersion.
It isn't the grind. Sure, the grinding wastes time to turn five hours of content (much of which these days is cut-scenes) into 50 hours of game. My pet peeve is the forced grind caused by random encounters that come out of nowhere. Walk 30 seconds, fight five minutes, repeat. That gets really annoying when you're just wandering around trying to figure out where the hell you are.
Now I admit that back in the old days ('80s) it was simply easier to write the code to work that way. Having random monsters show on the map might not even be feasible depending on the sprite limitations of the video hardware.
But that was two decades ago, and you'd think that by now that the "walk 30 seconds, fight five minutes, repeat" paradigm would be as dead as a hobgoblin killed by a 60th level GrindMaster.
And even some of the new metaphors aren't all that great. A friend of mine figured how to set up FFXII to quite literally play itself. He rigged up the auto-combat so that a particular battle would esentially last forever (with a monster that kept spawning minions), started the battle, then walked away. When he got back, he just had to interrupt the auto-combat and kill the main monster manually.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)
V O T E F O R M O G
If you're playing an RPG which feels like you have to do heaps of grinding in order to be able to progress, then it's not a sign of some deep malaise affecting the whole genre, it's a sign that you're playing a game which has not been tuned correctly. Fighting enemies in an area while completing your current task list should level you up to the point that you're powerful enough to complete all the plot points in that area. In other words, there shouldn't be any extra work to follow the core storyline. You should find it challenging, but not incredibly difficult. If you want to do sidequests, then those should require some extra preparation.
Vogel is bitching about FF12 here, which is a good example of bad tuning. You literally have to go out and grind for hours at the beginning of the game if you don't want to be stomped repeatedly a few hours into it. Compare it against, for example, Namco's Tales of... games (avoiding the tired comparison against Oblivion, you can't fairly compare a linear JRPG against a sandbox RPG like Oblivion) which are perfectly tuned such that if you fight the bulk of the enemies you encounter in an area while you're collecting the various bits of loot scattered about, by the time you reach the area's boss you will generally find your characters are at just the right level to make it a challenge without being a frustration. You also will have just the right amount of gold that the next time you're in a new town, you can afford to upgrade everyone's gear.
There are hundreds of open source projects that are starved for people to contribute,
and you squander your time bickering over which form of entertainment is best.
You will never amount to anything.
I play Fallen Sword merely to waste time...
It's about the most fun I have had with a browser based MMORPG...
FallenSword
I always thought the Diablo Series did a good job of this. I guess the only problem is Diablo lacks alot of RPG elements. But you don't start off as a loser.
Now I've seen Everything
Myst Online : Uru Live
Its a role playing game that is unlike any other I have played. There is no levelling, the bad guys are archaeologists and there's a fantastic community behind it. The premise of the game is simple, you felt called to a underground cavern where a group of archaeologists are working to restore a ancient civilisation they've discovered, you take the time to explore really quite beautiful ages, you get rewards for completing ages (but can choose to ignore them if you wish), there are puzzles aplenty (which if you get stuck on come and ask someone in the community) and we can actually effect the storyline. I like it, everyone starts out the same (Uru stands for You Are You) the only difference is if you have completed one age or anouther and what side you have allied yourself with. Its not a grinding style of game, I've completed all the ages and gained all the current Relto pages but I only have 7 on because they are the seven which make my starting point look best to me. If your tired of leveling then give it a go it launched today and the first month is only 99 cents.
I only mention it because there are alternative to level grinding RPG and this is one of them
I'll keep this brief. My least favorite thing about the RPG genre is the waste of time that is leveling. 'Endgame' is my most favorite part. Not because I'm big and powerful and can 'pwn' everyone, but because there's no dungeon I can't go to and no player I can't pick a fight with in pvp ... winning or losing aside.
I don't like being a 'lowbie' and having to prove myself through hours of mindless, useless, tedious, repetative quests. Grinding out level after level until finally I'm worthy to do the same thing without an xp bar to fill.
I play WoW and so that's my point of reference. If I could just create a character and do dungeons, play in pvp earn gear and have a good time in groups I'd be a happy camper. Leveling really holds no joy for me.
I realize eventually I'll get to max level and can do what I want but it really puts a damper on me experimenting with other classes, races, factions etc. because there's always the dreaded task of leveling looming over any new character I create.
I want a game that looks great and is balanced like I feel WoW is, allows me to have fun in groups in dungeons and in pvp and earn equipment, items etc. Leveling != fun
-asleep
A lot of people seem to think the guy who wrote the article is an idiot.
He makes his living off of writing RPG games.
I won't argue on the look of his games. They have very obviously dated graphics.
But his games are not about graphics.
I've personally purchased 9 of his games over the years.
They have good story lines, long play times, multiple endings and have a bit of replay value.
He does make good games for those looking for a game with depth and story to them.
Hes also very sarcastic.
Take a look at what he wrote about his daughter.
As is site is aptly named - Irony Central - The irony is hes an RPG writer who happens to make a decent living off RPGs, and can write off every game he plays as research.
Seeing what he wrote though, I'm more curious what his next game is going to look like.
As he wrote about starting you off as a loser, thats exactly how his games start you as well.
Grinds in RPGs aren't bad when the story distracts you. Grinds in MMOs aren't bad when player-to-player interaction is easy to come by and pleasant. Grinds in both aren't bad in either when you have interesting side quests, things to customize your character, and a clear path to where you want to go.
So to sum up: the more work a developer puts into a game to enrich the experience, the less you notice the work you have to do.
Now that I think of it, I have an improtant message for EverQuest: Go to Hell and die. Go straight to hell. Go. Now.
I play shooters, and have for a long time. netrek was my first online multiplayer internet game. I never got into the whole MUD thing, for the same reason I don't like RPGs today. The game isn't about skill, but rather how much shit you collect.
I've played Doom, RTCW, Call of Duty, BF2, etc. The reason I like the shooter games is because you get better not because of the shit you've collected, but because of your skill moving the mouse and whacknig the keyboard, learning the map. Along with your ability to work together as a team, to predict what might happen and counter it, etc.
So I can understand that point. When i switch from one shooter to another, it doesn't take me months to get good. I need to learn the interface, and maybe some new rules. But I already know how to work as a team, to communicate, and all that stuff. So I have a chance, to be competitive against the guy who has been playing for months in just a matter of weeks... I don't have to run around collecting shit to become a 49th level super ninja with dynamite punch.
What is disappointing is that this difference has become lost on many of the shooter game makers. BF2 tried to make it so as you played you got access to more weapons. War Rock appears to be something similar. And so on. I guess they do this to try to drag you and keep you playing the game longer. But what it does is make the game more frustrating up front, and as such one is less likely to switch to playing the new game from something old.
But because of this changing the game to a form of collecting shit... while you can take the skills to another game, you can't take the shit.
It's essentially a form of vendor lock-in.
And that's why they do it.
I read peoples' comments on my article with great interest. Though they didn't, by and large, seem very useful.
My main point is that most RPGs are unnecessarily long. They pad out their length with busywork. They start you as a nobody instead of a hero, and force you to earn the right to do interesting things with menial and repetetive tasks. And you know something? It's still a valid point.
I'm not being a whiner. Sheesh. If computer games are worth playing, they're worth examining, breaking down, criticizing (if necessary), and improving.
People repeatedly told me to play other types of games. Guess what? I do. But I think it's worthwhile to say why.
There have been a few RPGs that trimmed the fat and the busywork and gave experiences with constant variety and excitement. KOTOR I-II. Baldur's Gate I-II. Planescape: Torment. Fallout 1-2. (So, what? Ten in 10 years?) These should be held up and applauded. But there are a lot of games beyond the top tier that padded out their length with filler and the constant chopping up of trash monsters. Heck, practically all MMORPGs are nothing but this.
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is an interesting case. It's very popular and a lot of people like it. But I spent most of my time wandering down interchangable corridors killing interchangable monsters. I don't think this game refutes my point.
When I look for a game now, I look for a game that wows me with 10-15 hours of kick ass A-list material and then lets me go. (God of War and Shadows of the COlossus are great examples). But the RPG genre seems to have grinding and filler in its DNA, so I'm staying away. Seems reasonable.
- Jeff Vogel
Spiderweb Software
Fantasy RPGs for Mac and Windows.
http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com
Try giving Wizardry 8 a shot. Excellent phased combat system. I, like you, truly enjoy the phased aspect of an RPG. It allows for much more strategy and a lot less "I luckily clicked my hot button just before you did" style play.
Wizardry 8 also uses a party system, so your 4+ character requirement is happily satisfied. Characters start off fairly weak, allowing you to build them up. Another nice element is the ability to change professions, similar to FF Tactics. While you won't be superb at your new class immediately, you still have much improved base statistics to build off of. Obviously, this allows you to change a party member's class without requiring you to go back to the beginning area simply to have them live.
Wizardry has been an excellent RPG series, and 8 built upon that to create the modernized old-school RPG you are searching for. Here is a link to an overall review and summary for the game.
One thing to note though is that this is a 1-player game. I don't think you can really expect phased combat to ever enter the MMORPG arena. Most people don't have the patience to wait for others to setup turns continuously. This is the same problem Civilization has had with multiplayer.
I found the Kingdom of Loathing to be engrossing from the very beginning. When the content for low-level characters is both fun and interesting, start-up and achieving comfort in the new interface is far less of a grind. KoL accomplishes this by being funny and clever throughout the gameplay.
He either comes off as a real interesting guy with encyclopedic knowledge,or a pathological liar with an ax to grind
Alright, they aren't really traditional RPGs, but I think I'll mention a few here. SPOILER WARNING if you care.
First, Zelda: Ocarina of Time. This is actually the weakest example: You start out as a weakling, learn the controls, and gain skills and heart pieces and such. However, when you first draw the Master Sword, you're completely thrown off guard. Alright, Link is bigger and stronger, but he also has lost a few abilities. No more slingshot, no more boomerang, and no more hiding under the Hylian Shield like a turtle going into his shell.
Not to mention, the new dungeons and new creatures are a LOT harder.
So, there's progression, but about halfway through the game, you get thrown completely off balance. You're no longer the leveled-up badass, you're now probably the weakest you've been through the entire game. Eventually, you gain all those abilities back (and more), but for that period of time, you're stuck with an entirely different set of abilities than you're used to. So it's not even a set-back, it's like you're playing a different game.
This isn't the only time they do something like this, by the way. Fight against the final boss, and he knocks away your Master Sword -- which is probably your default sword, and which easily deals the most damage to him. You have to fight an entire stage of him without that weapon.
Next exhibit: Half-Life. Definitely NOT an RPG, but definitely has some things which could be emulated. Moving through the original game, you tend to amass an arsenal -- basically, if you're not conscious of your ammo usage, you end up with nothing, but if you give it even the slightest thought, you'll always be collecting more guns.
However, at a certain point -- immediately after your first brush with the ninjas (which are probably the most difficult enemies you've had to deal with so far) -- you are captured. No way to avoid it, and this is the closest thing the game has to a cinematic, after which you are dumped unceremoniously into a trash compactor, without even your crowbar. And Gordon Freeman does not know kung-fu.
Toward the end of the game, it changes again, with Xen. Either you love it or you hate it, but it's definitely different. The most obvious thing is the gravity -- most places in Xen have extremely low gravity, and you have a long jump, both of which have never happened before in the game. Technically, it makes you more powerful, but it's tricky as hell.
And in Half-Life 2, the same kind of thing happens -- at the end of the game, you lose all weapons, but get a supercharged gravity gun. Progression, but variety.
Final Fantasy X: Via Purifico, and others. More than once, your team is split up, and you have to play as only one or two of your characters, looking for the rest. You may have leveled that character into an uber-badass -- or maybe not. Often, certain abilities are completely removed -- for instance, at least two bosses (one of them recurring) can one-hit your Aeons (summons), rendering them mostly useless.
(Of course, Final Fantasy X can also be seen as the antithesis of this -- depending on how you level up, the final bosses might be tough, but often, Omega Weapon is just too easy. My roommate one-hit him by accident, because before then, he'd "killed the same wolf 50 times to get stronger".)
The list could go on and on, but I think there's one more of these that is really worth mentioning: Halo.
The original. Halo 2 was cool, but really, you are an absolute badass in Halo already -- and this is one of the very rare games that actually bothers to have a backstory to support why you kick so much more ass than the marines backing you up. Halo 2 had bosses, but Halo really didn't.
No, what Halo had was mostly the same damned enemies, but new situations. There is no final boss, and you're fighting the same creatures, nothing really new, gameplay-wise, but there IS a final scenario that is as challenging as any boss fight, and much more realistic when you think ab
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It should have just said 'RPGs - Complete and utter waste of time'. end of story, no comment section just a big flashing GIF for the headline. I loathe RPG's. I'd rather have a heroin addiction.
I have ridden the mighty moon worm!
Oblivion was not a good game from an RPG point of view:
It did not reward effort put in. And by effort I do not mean doing chores like the OP (Jeff Vogel) suggests. By effort i mean playing intelligently/well. For example:
You are level 1. You start your character so that you are a really good thief (khajit thief). You get your lock picking up a fair bit, and you find a really wealthy looking house in the capital city. You case it, you find when/where the occupants of the house go. You go in during the day to see if they have guards inside and stuff like that. You role-play a perfect thief.
At night, you make your move, you pick an extremely difficult lock, possibly with the help of a potion that increases your thieving skills. You make a really difficult stealth journey through the house, hurrying because the owner is due to come back any second and the other occupant is still asleep.
You find their main bedroom and approach the locked chest! You gulp down another potion to help you with this extraordinarily difficult task and because the gods are smiling on you, you pick the lock and greedily reach for you loot...
RUSTY FSCKIGN DAGGER and 1 gold.
gg.
No seriously, what pretty much describes the much-touted (primarily by marketdroids) scaling in Oblivion.
Mind you, if you grinded some levels, and you were level 20, and you performed the above inside the same chest you'd have found 2 daedric sets of armour and a grand soul gem.
There are many examples of how the scaling in oblivion doesn't work. Just go give one more example: lowly peasants at level 1 are carrying rusty iron swords but at level 15 or so, you attack one and he pulls out a glass long sword. Then he has the gall to tell you he can only spare 100gold for your reward cause he's poor.
One of the more popular oblivion mods was Curios Oblivion Overhaul i think (at work so can't get exact name+link). It drastically reduced the scaling and increased the loot in difficult areas. Also increased the difficult+rewards of mob s as you go deeper in a dungeon. Made the gamer harder, but more fun.
Many people play RPGs for the progression - you start as a lowly son of a peasant at level 1 but eventually, through trails and adventures, you grow to be the supreme slayer of dragons everywhere. If you see that as a chore and CBF, go back to playing Counterstrike: you start as a leet d00d and you finish as a leet d00d.
Some of my favorite RPG-playing memories are of when you first start out and are nearly powerless.
There's something really cool about knowing that there is a whole pretend world of weapons, powers and monsters out there that my guy is only seeing like 1% of. You imagine all the neat things you'll be able to see and explore once you finally get out of the sewers under the tavern or whatever. Then when you actually get powerful, a lot of times it's like eh, is that all there is?
My personal favorite: clearing out the slums next to New Phlan in the old Pool of Radiance. Compared to the sheer anxiety of trying to survive with a party that could get wiped out by 4 kobolds, the next few games when your characters are high-level were boring.
I'm into escapism. Since a young child I've always enjoyed projecting my imagination into situations. I was one of those kids with an imaginary friend. RPG's to me are escapist. If I like the basic elements of an RPG enough, I will project my own imagination into the situation. Perhaps for me this helps reduce the impact of repetition. I can take such games quite seriously. I find most FPS games quite boring. I just don't get off on being some "elite special forces op" dude going around fragging bad guys. While I do have occasional ventures with such games as Half Life 2- ultimately I find them boring. In Half Life 2 I was more interested about the story (and perhaps environments) than I was about fragging bad guys. So of course I was very disappointed with the ending of Half Life 2- it had no proper conclusion. Obviously its all a matter of personality and preferences. RPG's are for me, FPS's are for others, some people like both. I thought oblivion was outstanding. But yes I was disappointed with automatic scaling of enemy difficulty. I like to feel some enemies are really "tough" and "powerful". I like to walk into places and feel certain of my doom. I like go back later and feel elite and powerful as my character slays previously unbeatable monsters. Most of all I like the escapist fantasy element. Its the closest I am ever going to get to being Thomas Covenant and being whisked off to an alternate world. Some of my most happy times have been spent playing RPG's and reading fantasy novels. In a way I wonder if my reading of slashdot is to a degree escapist. I know I should be paying attention to other issues at the moment, so I think I will.
Get rid of leveling altogether.
Imagine for a second that in this Role Playing Game, you define your character through your choices and consequences. The character grows not by getting +2 strength at fifth level, or by attaining +3 Vorpal Telekinesis of the Ethers at seventh, but by making choices that effect him and other characters in the world.
The focus is taken away from making some kind of uber character that can defeat bosses, to a character who does what he does because of the choices he has made. This is, what I feel, almost every RPG on the PC or Console has completely missed.
At the gaming table, when you're surrounded by friends, it's easy to tell a story. The DM can come up with quick rational, and random things to the choices a player has made. Player A is trying to get it on with the barmaid? "Okay, you succeed, the barmaid is all yours. You two get it on. Now please make a fortitude save against disease."
This is where cRPG's tend to fail - The vast majority don't convey any sort of story or consequence for your actions, they just serve up monsters for you to kill, so you can level up and kill more different monsters. Their concept of "Choices and Consequences" can pretty much be summed up as "Do this quest or do not do this quest - the choice is yours!"
Generally the cRPG market looks pretty bleak on this. There's a ray of hope with the indies though: Age of Decadence by Iron Tower Studio, http://www.irontowerstudio.com/ sounds like it might be what I, and others, have been wishing for.
First, I was replaying NWN recently, trying to go trough the whole story and build an uber-character, as intended. The problem with that was, when I had to make decisions such as how to level up from 4 to 5 or so, I couldn't know which ones were right... and I could discover I wasted those skill points or whatever only 25 hours of gameplay later. Oops, no way to go back! Even if I did keep periodic savegames, I don't want to get through the same 25 hours again. So I would really like an RPG that either 1) allowed you to be come an uber-character quickly enough as to not regret it if your character is not that cool the first time, OR 2) even better, allowed you to reconsider all those choices each time you level up... so you can go back and reassign points for previous levels as well. Does such a game exist?
Second, and this is more of a question: Since I've got behind on the gaming scene (old hardware), can anyone recommend a good cross between an RPG and an FPS? FPS with levelling, if you will. I tried a couple, but they were obscure and technically very buggy. Is there a good and popular one? Bonus points if it runs on Linux.
I think the problem started when time became a selling point. RPGs started advertising "50+ hours of gameplay", and short games were criticized for being a bad value. Total nonsense. The first Final Fantasy can be thoroughly beaten in less than 20 hours. That's a good amount of time. The Lunar games, which are arguably worth the extended time, take 30-40 hours. Grandia, which is a beast, basically takes 50 hours, however a lot of that extra time is spent in dungeons, specifically one massive optional dungeon.
Not every game is good enough to justify 50 hours of my time. In fact, very few are, and I would prefer to choose whether to spend that time or not (for example, by getting Medusa swords and pink tails) for a game I happen to like. Long games have less replay value, not more.
I regretfully stopped playing Final Fantasy games after FF8, which I couldn't be bothered to finish. The optional side quests in FF7-9 were mostly absurd and stupid affairs. I do not want to breed chocobos for a few hours just to get to some damn island and get a summon. Nor do I want to jump rope, or master some other idiotic game in every town just to get a unique item. It makes me think there should be an option to massacre those idiot NPCs and take their items, which is one of the features I like in Bethesda's games.
The optional feature that seems to be most lacking is opportunities for simple exploration. In most games there were times where you could veer off and find neat things, or get to a later town and talk to people before events happen and maybe buy a more powerful weapon or piece of armor. Simple things that are interesting and take 5-20 minutes to do, and have a simple reward or even no reward that you won't miss if you forget or if you decide not to do it. Later games seemed to forget this mechanic, and for every optional thing there had to be some sort of unique item or benefit just to justify doing it. This made the games feel tedious, especially when you did not have the option to go back and get the items later.
Finally, I think the jump to 3D hurt the genre. Hey you kids - get off my lawn! It took me a long time to realize why I prefer 2D games (except for FPS games, obviously). Two dimensional representations are inherently artistic. You have to draw something, and that takes skill. Having a computer animate a 3 dimensional model lowers the bar dramatically. It becomes harder to appreciate artistic skill, and making a more detailed model and adding lighting effects obscure the artwork, for better or for worse. I want to see art, not technical effects. It is interesting that the opposite happens with 2D graphics, higher resolution makes bad artwork all the more apparent.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
U7:Black Gate had it's definite limitations, but it was one of the first RPGs I played where leveling up and progressing was completely fluid and non-burdensome. Once you got out of the first town, you could go where you wanted and you really had to search hard to find enemies that would kill you right away. For the most part, you would naturally level up as you killed roving monsters...and levelling up wasn't as important as assembling an 8-person party, which you could do by just following the storyline. Of course, leveling up and saving up cash was made irrelevant once you figured out how to sack the Mint and rob the castle.
I would agree with the article, most RPGs have a completely screwed up Risk / Reward ratio. You spend so much time for so little reward -- usually the only motivation is to advance the story, so the better "PHAT" loot can drop.
You know, What my wife and I find really fun is leveling up a new toon to level 10 (WoW, EQ2, D2) -- after that, these games become a grind fest. Anything past that, takes something really fun, and STRETCHES it out to a point where it is almost pointless.
Why is destruction (killing mobs) usually the only way to "level" up your character?
Why not creation (crafting)?
Even better, make them orthogonal! i.e. Level 50 Weaponsmith, Lev 20 Figher.
Its time for RPGs games to grow up. Get rid of the exponential XP for crying out loud. A DYNAMIC environment, would be a great start, but I'm not holding my breath for that. And lastly, How many cleavage shots do we need to put up with?? The juvenile humor shows that you don't care about making a good game.
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Why do I need to WAIT 20 mins for in game travel time, when I'm PAYING for the game??!!
The very existance of an 'end-game' is an admission that 99% of the preceding gameplay experience was tedious crap designed to waste your time. The end-game is the game that you would've gotten, if it wasn't acceptable to force tedium upon the user.
As you said: you're supposed to win.
You're going to get to level eight-million and face down the Big Bad(tm).
So what's with all the damn rats?
What the hell is that doing aside from wasting time?
We don't need to see a bunch of numbers increment to move a story along.
We don't need to gain 'levels' to get a cool new sword or cool new spell.
We don't need to kill rats then goblins then orcs then ogres, ad nauseum, to feel like we're getting closer to the Big Bad(tm).
It's OK to start off doing heroic crap.
We're going to get there anyway.
So let's just skip to the part where we can't get more levels to make the next challenge easier, and focus on the fun stuff.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
I agree with some people that the whole basics of RPG's have not changed. Most Online games no mater if it's Guild war, EQ, or D&D online-you still have to do some quests. They can be fetching something or killing something but you still have to do quests. And after a little while that get boring-you can sugar coat it with different graphics and sounds but it is still the same pattern. There are some games that are open ended like EVE-online and Entropia Universe but they have a big flaw too. That being the older player will forever have an advantage over the new player. Since their leveling is more effected by time those whole start early will have an advantage. In the end even those games have the same faults or should I say the same routines kill this, mine that, repeat.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
I think my disinterest in RPGs stems from the day my Tamagotchi died, I invested so much time keeping that little shit alive and he still crapped out on me.
Dungeon Keeper was an interesting take on this problem. I had a lot of fun finally being able to play a game where my job was to squash the pesky adventurers.
Granted, it was more of an RTS than RPG. But even in that regard it was a lot different than other RTS games currently on the market, because you were creating the maze as the game progressed.
Too bad the game was somewhat buggy.
He's lost his sense of play. That is, the minute you look at an RPG as something you need to finish, you've lost. Ironically, such players are those often trying to "win" a game that has no pretty finishing sequence of screens for them.
If, instead, you play a game for the purpose of experiencing it, and let the flow of gaining power in the environment come as it will, you'll have fun as you go, regardless of what milestone you've reached.
because you are a loser.
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
This was the reason i dropped wow after only 3.5 weeks of play.
.. but the promise is still there so they abandon their friends, their work, etc for the epics they so obsess over.
the grinding is so mind numbing i lost track of day and night, not because i was absorbed in the game, but because i was "present but not in the room" so to speak.. a meat robot pushing buttons.
One of the worst offenses on that grinding aspect is the mounts.. you have to spend all your time grinding to get a high enough level to get a mount.. then they make gold so scarce that even if you save all of it through those 40 levels AND play the markets you still wont have enough.
The entire concept of grinding is PERFECT though for feeding people's OCD.. obsesssive compulsives like one of my friends can sit there for hours grinding and grinding and never reach the big rewards..
things should progress more naturally than that, should require a brain without being overly complex, and should dedicate MUCH more to the story than at least WoW does.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
RPG's have been timesinks for a long time... i'm thinking at least twenty years.
accurately define good according to a criteria and seek it out.
... Why Slashdot wastes your time. This and more at 6.
His point is not that the progression is what makes the RPG so annoying, it's the grind. Im with him, I hate the grind. I hate having to kill the exact same thing over and over and over again.
Oblivion, did do it right. I could go up in levels by practicing, or using my skills outside of combat.
And learning new abilities wasn't based on level, it was based on learning. Could I find a book with the spell, or pay to have someone teach it to me? That makes for much more enthralling gameplay than learning a new spell by killing x amount of wolves.
This is a huge flaw(IMO) with WoW.
Crafting skill should never depend on my actual level.
Many people like to just do crafting. Granted, they would need to buy goods that come from high level areas, but that's part of crafting.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Two comments: - I thought this was going to be about how people are playing mmo's for 40+ hours a week. (and I'm an ex- EQ raider, so I know). If you're playing a computer game for 40 hours a week, in the grand scheme of things, does it really matter whether you're farming hides or killing boss mobs? - "I'm tired of doing the same repetitive tasks for hours on end ... ". And this is different from most people's real life jobs how ?
Remember Ultima 7? You started off as a hero, with several companions, and the game was about exploring the world and discovering the story by interacting with characters, not about "powering up". Sure, you could find better items (several of them unique, which is a lot more interesting than going from a "+5 sword" to a "+6 sword"), but most of the progress came from discovering new areas, talking to characters, carving your place in the game world (in other words, role-playing), etc., not "powering up".
It's been downhill ever since (ok, the Underworld games were also good, but less ambitious), and I feel kind of sad for people who think that games like Baldur's Gate, Oblivion or Diablo are good representatives of the RPG genre.
The problem with Baldur's Gate (and its descendants) is that it relies on simplified rules, designed for pen and paper RPGs. But pen and paper RPGs work due to the imagination of their players, and how they build a complex world around those simple rules. In a computer, it simply doesn't make sense. The games feel static (characters always standing in the same place, etc.), and the interface ends up getting in the way of the story (which is still a lot about "powering up"). The games have some good bits, and plenty of humour, but they just don't feel "alive", like Ultima 7 did).
Diablo I won't even comment on. It's a hack'n'slash game with power-ups. Calling that a RPG is like calling Space Invaders a "space simulator".
Oblivion held a lot of promise. Its authors specifically mentioned Ultima 7's "living word" atmosphere and promised "amazing AI". But in the end it feels deader than Morrowind (despite the great graphics and improved interface). The characters feel like automata, and the world is completely unrealistic. The "automatic level scaling" is an action game feature, completely out of place in an RPG. What sense does it make for the exact same dungeon to have different monsters based on your character's "level"? There should be easy areas (near cities and roads) and hard areas (wilderness, caves, etc.), and it should be up to the player to decide which areas he or she wants to explore. The result of Oblivion's "automatic level scaling" is that every fight feels the same. The enemies are always hard enough to take some of your time, but always easy enough to be beatable. And then there are the endless scripting and "world consistency" bugs, that just make the game feel fake. It's as if they spent 4 years developing the game engine and models, 6 months working on the story, and 2 hours testing it.
The result is basically Diablo in 3D with some poorly "tacked-on" story elements that really just get in the way of the (moderately fun) fighting.
A long time ago I read an interview with Gabe Newell (of Valve Software) where he said their first project (before Half-Life) had been an "open ended RPG, a sort of world simulator", but they realised the technology of the time didn't allow them to do what they wanted. I hope that now, with faster processors and the Source engine, they decide to revisit that idea (preferably with help from some members of the Ultima 7 team, and maybe Warren Spector). Valve is one of the few companies that understands the importance of playtesting a game from the start (that, more than anything, is the reason why Half-Life was so far above the competition).
With Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights, I've pretty much lost all faith in Bethesda and Bioware. They're decent games, but they're not real RPGs.
You need gameplay to fill the "X hours of gameplay" quota that seems to be imposed on all RPGs now. However you can't spend 50 hours or whatever X is doing cool stuff because if you do cool stuff for 50 hours at some point it becomes not-so-cool.
As long as people have the mentality that a 10 hour game somehow isn't 'worth it' even if it does everything to perfection, you'll always need some stuff to fill in the obligatory gameplay quota. Whether this is done by starting out as a loser, mazes, fetch quests, mini games, or all of the above is a matter of game design.
Why would a RPG that works like say, the intro part of Lufia 1 where you start out at level 90 with all the best equipment in the game ready to own the last boss be bad? When I played Lufia 2 which is supposed to explain how those awesome ultra-powerful guys came from via the standard X hours of gameplay, I didn't feel any more attached to my party of 4 than just playing the intro. In fact I think it actually managed to dispel the mystique that first you thought you had these great guys that have stats that actually fit the description of a hero, and then you find out in Lufia 2 that they're just your average RPG losers who managed to got to level 90 after going in a circle leveling up for 50 hours.
Why would it be bad if you play a RPG that has a format like say, Street Fighter 2? You would start as Ryu, level 90 martial artist ready to join the tournament, fight the 7 particpants in a RPG system, and then the last 4 bosses? It didn't add anything to Street Fighter 2 if you knew Ryu was hitting a punchbag for 20 hours before he learned how to use the Shoryuken, so why is it a necessity in a RPG?
So now, thinking about playing an RPG just makes me tired. I'm tired of starting a new game and being a loser. I'm tired of running the same errands to prove myself.
Perhaps its time you considered another genre then. That's the point of RPGs, starting your character out as a loser and building and developing them as you would yourself in your character's situation. Granted, some games provide a better experience than others and today's RPG's time to complete are in the magnitude of a few weeks as opposed to afternoon, but like I said, if all of your statements above are true, it doesn't really sound like you're looking for an RPG at all.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
Avoiding anything like this in RPGs is pretty simple; don't use a levelling system. There's no reason for roleplaying to demand characters who constantly increase in combat ability and power. Indeed there's no reason for roleplaying to demand combat at all. It's just traditional, because that's what D&D did.
This guy would be a prime candidate for some power-leveling services.
I still remember when I first got a hold on the first fallout game and went to play it at a friends house. You start out a total weakling with no clue about the world, and there are no second lives either, if you die without having saved for a while, well then you die without having saved for a while - though luck. Not only that, you have to struggle on your way through the world, and if you take a stroll down the wrong alley or mess with the wrong people before you've progressed enough to handle it, then you get murdered. And I remember how much I loved exploring that game from the moment I stepped out of the door in vault 13. Fallout is just one example, but I don't excatly mind having been weak in the whole bioware/blackisle line of games - and kotor even featured some of the best storytelling I've seen in an rpg despite you having to work your way through the first part of the game as another clueless weakling. The key is storytelling of course, fallout wasn't as strick as kotor, but it still had alot of interesting stories to tell as you went freely around on your own personal bombed out playground. This is where this guy Jeff Vogel goes wrong in my opinion, because being weak from the beginning is only a problem if your journey sucks. I can see why the journey from weakling to hero would suck in Doom, which is likely why we didn't see such journeys in FPS games untill much later, for example in deus ex that again had a great storyline. If the story is weak in a rpg, then it's because the developer failed, and I think that is something Jeff Vogel should be alot more concerned about than finding ways to skip character development entirely. And that is what he is suggesting, unless he wants to make games insanely easy, because if you start out as a hero with a big gun, but then get better at murdering with an even bigger gun along the line, well then you've changed absolutely nothing. I have to say that it's no surprise to me that I havn't heard about Spiderweb Software before reading this article, and now I kind of wish I had never heard of Spiderweb Software to begin with - because this guy Jeff Vogel has certainly wated my time. :P
I think that's a great point. I remember playing the old "Wizardry" games where the objective was exclusively just that.
1) Create a bunch of characters. (And only keeping the ones with freakish initial attribute values).
2) Get your party together to go down into the dungeon and whoop some ass.
3) Get out of the dungeon bloodied and battered, but with some XP and, with any luck, some unique magical booty.
4) Level up and heal.
5) Rinse and repeat going into deeper and more dangerous depths every time.
But I tell you what. I played the hell out of that game and loved it. It was only just a level up grind, but I appreciated leveling up, gaining spells and new equipment and then testing out the new and improved me against the next set of baddies.
It was a sad day when I finally defeated Werdna and really had nothing left to do, but wait for the next installment.
What was interesting about Wizardry is that the goal of the game was purely the grind and the feeling of accomplishment. I think the satisfaction that I felt was because my expectations were totally aligned with the objective of the game.
Now, if the game makes you feel like you are trying to solve a puzzle (e.g. How do I open the door to this damn castle?), and you end up feeling like you are forced to endure a grind in order to accomplish that, then I can definitely see that being a pain.
Maybe the problem with some RPG's is that they are setting one set of expectations and delivering something different. The old, Satisfaction = Expectations - Reality equation.
Any thoughts?
The point, IMHO, of RPGs and any game in which you are supposed to progress and grow your character will require starting at some point and progressively going through more difficult tasks and quests. If you don't like that premise then you are playing the wrong type of game and should play something else. What I hear when people complain like this are just munchkins. If you have top of the line powers from the beginning of the game, what is the point of playing the game? Now, some games handle this progression better than others (MMORPGS are notoriously bad at this), but complaining about the objective of the game as being too difficult, or taking too long, is no more than a childish complaint.
Clones are people two.
The Japanese Ys series is one of the best series of RPGs ever, in my opinion. It's hardly time-wasting nonsense.
But anyways...slashing hordes of monsters to get skill points and levels is an absurd concept to me, but if that's what people want to do who am I to judge? I bet they'd tear me apart for being an FPS Battlefiend. I do really enjoy that Battlefield 2142 stuff, though, and the unlocks/ranks system is enough Role Playing for me :D
So yeah, I agree. Compared to the richness of real social life, RPG are frighteningly one-dimensional.
Well, most people seem assume that Jeff Vogel is just another "I'm president of a software company, so I know what I'm talking about" guy. Wrong. This guy is also the main programmer of the Spiderwebsoftware. The company only has four people or so (do pet-taranulas count?). In any case, Jeff writes some excellent games - the Exile series (and the facelifted re-write the Avernum series) and the Geneforge series (to some extent) is pure crack for any old-school RPG addict.
If you have anything important to do, don't go download their trial versions - even the 1/3 of the game you can play before you have to register for the full version will cost you many, many, many, many hours. Personally, if you are not picky in the graphics sector, I'd reccommend you go for the Exile series first.
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
"I think Oblivion handled this well, scaling the world as you went and giving you really interesting things to do from the get-go. What other games dodge this bullet? Do you see this timesink as an inevitable part of the RPG genre?" Oblivion kept the world the same no matter how far you went. If you didn't keep your combat skills up it got to difficult, if you did or if you were a mage, it was too easy. It's always the same. There's never anything interesting BECAUSE everything is scaled to you. You know what to expect in any given area. You will always find equipment for your "level" because the enemies are scaled to have that armour. Caves in Oblivion seem crafted quite well yet they are filled with nothing particularly useful. You will always find the same stuff in the caves until you level up a few times. One of the best parts about an RPG is exploring and finding areas that are too hard for you but might hold a great reward. Or even finding an area with some easy enemies you can thrash to take a break fro mthe real action. Oblivion totally devastates that with it's scaling system.
I totally agree with this guy and have had a similar recent epiphany. I am (was?) a huge Final Fantasy fan and I've played and beaten all of them since FFIII. I put 25 hours into FFXII before it dawned on me. The story is really cool, and it's nice to look at, but they forgot to make the game fun. I ended up wishing the game was a movie so I could just find out what happened to the characters and then move on with my life. I got really tired of having to level for 3 hours just to get to the next boss. I stopped playing FFXII because I bought a wii and of course I had to play Zelda. Zelda, on the other hand, is ridiculously fun to play and not tedious at all (even though both games are superficially similar in terms of story and subject matter). Now that I'm done with Zelda i'm trying to get back into FFXII, but my heart isn't in it anymore. I think i might just read a walkthrough to find out what happens.
People in bamboo houses shouldn't throw pandas...Jesus said that! -Ninja
Seriously.
I spent lots of time playing DnD in the 80's. Most of the time, we continued on with existing mid- or high-level characters. On the rare occurrence we wanted to start off new, we still started in the level 7 to 11 range. No one wanted to play a total noob and get killed when a weak enemy made one good roll.
Besides, whoever was being Dungeon Master knew they couldn't get away with killing off a bunch of player characters quickly, no matter what the dice said, or they would quickly find themselves very much alone.
DnD isn't responsible for gaming systems that require people to start from scratch and grind through low levels. Unimaginative people who never had friends to play with are the ones to blame for such things.
i concur 100% with what i read in tfa. i basically don't play much anymore where my opponent isn't face to face. beyond what it said, i'll add i have an aversion to the statistical-based dnd-dice system that's the foundation of them all. i prefer skill over statistics. i'm waiting for the technology to support a combat system something akin to an arcade fighter like street fighter or mortal kombat. they've already approached it with simpler button-patterns, but not the intricacies, balance, and thematic move-schemes of a fighter.
/anyone remember dragon force? that was the last rpgish game i remember liking... damn cliffhangers keep you playing on
i could envision one set in feudal china with competing schools of kungfu, where one must choose and train moves from a vast selection.. perhaps the number of assignable moves could be a levelable benefit.. but a skilled player on a new character should still be able to chop down a n00b on a souped up character. it'd be a sweet accomplishment no doubt; most 3d fighters are still largely planar with minimal exceptions. soul calibur's move-scheme-duality of horiz and vertical attacks would translate well, but truly multiplayer 3dimensional combat on a balanced combat system is still a daunting prospect. good hit detection + bandwidth + distributed coordination = not there yet.
Take the original Deus Ex. You were suppose to play a bad ass nanotech-enhanced agent with superior skills and superhuman capabilities, and yet from the moment you start your skills with firearms is barely above that of a drunken sailor. Doing various actions and solving objectives would give you the XP points to increase those skills, but it didn't fit common sense. Plus, despite being attached to a supposedly well-funded organization such as UNATCO, you were still dolled out minuscule amounts of ammo or weapons, with the occasional augmentation canister. Now don't get me wrong, I loved Deus Ex, I think it's one of the finest games ever made, but it's true that you did start off as a bit of a loser agent despite the years of training you're supposed to have had.
The sequel DID try to get around this somewhat. You did have improved firearms and combat skills and even with the "realistic" difficult you could absorb a lot more damage. You were strong initially, even before you got any bio-canisters to provide new functionality. The problem with this is it made the game boring, and it made the evolution of your character boring too. It'd certainly be a design challenge to make a game where your character was tough to begin with, and yet still be challenging and interesting.
Sorry, but I've played WoW -- this is a very safe assumption to make on the game's part.
Time wasted has value in the fact that it is not time well spent.
if this guy really just cares about the story I have a simple solution to his problem: Buy a gameshark! Then you can set yourself to start at whatever stats you want, sure it's cheating but if it makes you enjoy it to blast through the game cheating with a jacked up character, more power to you.
Many RPGs have different spells, items, and game mechanics to learn. Starting off powerful would make a game less approachable to the user.
This does not ring true for driving games. I am sick of driving games that require me to earn licenses. Gran Turismo started this tradition and others have followed it. Most driving games have a certain feel, but usually it's easy to figure out--get to the finish line before everyone else.
I earned my license in Gran Turismo 1. I earned it in GT2. And GT3. I didn't play GT4, but I hear they fixed this problem by letting you use your GT3 game save. Still, for those who may have erased it or people who didn't play GT3, this stuff should be entirely optional.
One of the main problems I have with level grind is that it focuses the game very heavily on fighting - stealth characters like theives, for example, still end up spending a lot of time fighting monsters they ought to be able to sneak past because they need the XP. Etc etc. In short, everybody is just a different type of warrior, regardless of which character class they chose. NWN is a good example of this, despite being a good game.
:) Just give your spare one to your friend and you're ready to rock. Or if you really can't spare any, you can venture into a difficult area appropriate for your level, find a few items, and then return and give them to your friend.
Another big problem is that you can't transfer XP. Suppose you've played for hours and built up a cool character. You decide you'd like to try a new character class, but you just can't be bothered to re-play the game from scratch to level up your new character. Or perhaps a friend joins the game, but is a lower level than yourself - it can be difficult to play together, because any creature that won't instantly kill him is no threat to you, so you both get bored quickly. Sometimes you can "drag him up a few levels", but many games distribute XP points within a party in such a way as to prevent this (eg. if you do most of the hits you get most of the XP, or the XP you get is relative to your current level, or whatever). NWN and Diablo are both bad for this. You can be play with friends, but if your character misses just one session, or one of your friends plays by himself for an hour or two, then your characters quickly get "out of sync" and one or more are far enough behind / ahead that it's no fun to play together.
So, here we go - my solution to both:
Abolish XP. Tie the strength of a character purely to the items he/she has. Think about it for a minute...
If a new character joins, you have simply to give them a few of your spare items and they're strong enough to fight alongside you right away. Hands up all those who carry around more than one decent weapon? Thought so
And think now about other character classes. Our theif, for instance. He could be a real Bilbo Baggins, wouldn't have to fight at all. He'd be a good theif due to owning good theiving items - think cloaks, rings, etc. He could then sneak past that really huge monster that his warrior friend just can't kill in order to steal items from the treasure room somewhere behind said monster. Because it's items that are important, not XP, he gets just as much benefit from that as his warrior friend would have from killing the monster in order to get there. You see?
Certain areas/dungeons/caves/etc could be well known for having items lying around that are particularly useful to certain classes. An area with impossibly strong monsters but lots of nice hiding places might have lots of cool theif items lying around. An area with tough-but-killable monsters, but bright lighting and almost no good hiding places, might have lots of handy warrior items to be discovered.
Starting a new character / changing your class could even be as simple as changing your items (you'd have to change all of them of course - have some rule about items conflicting / working in combination with each other - no mix 'n' matching). When you play the game as a new character you'll be interested in exploring different areas (which will all have their own play style - use your imagination), so you won't be re-playing the same game again.
And if you have a really strong character of one class, you'd be strong/skilled enough to get at least some distance inside the areas suited to the other classes (a really strong warrior might fight his way into the first few levels of the theif area, a really good theif might manage to sneak his way through the first few levels of the brightly lit warrior area, etc)... that's where some creativity comes in. By using your skills in ways / areas not originally intended you can give yourself a leg-up in a new area. If your theif can
Want to really waste some time.... Augh. It's almost like the game creator/developer really hates the users. 90% of the game is "harvesting". Watching your character sit there doing absolutely nothing while a little number scrolls up and mother nature/bees/teleport annoy you.
Shame, free, large world, and a lot of nice people.
I agree that most RPGs start out making you preform idiotic and repetitive tasks, unfortunately this has been passed on to their cousin, the MMORPG. Thankfully, from what I have seen and read of Warhammer Online, we're finally headed in a different direction. Let's hope this catches on in RPG and MMORPG games.
...why not? He really doesn't have anything to lose.
I enjoyed Geneforge 1 and 2, written by Jeff and published by Spiderweb Software.
Still, as Jeff said in the article, even his games make you grind. Why? Because the games wouldn't sell as well if they didn't.
I gather his games don't sell as well as he wishes they did. If writing articles and submitting them to sites like Slashdot helps him make more games of the sort I like, so be it. I wish him well.
Not to be blunt, but the "whiner" argument still stands. As others have pointed out, there are many people (myself among them) who enjoy that length, the drawing-out of the story. Everyone has their own limits; for example, I like exploring the game environment, and I don't mind occasionally fighting "interchangeable monsters" as I'm doing so, while I don't like being forced to fight such monsters for the sole purpose of strengthening my characters. But the corollary to that is, not all games appeal to everyone--and while you're perfectly entitled to dislike RPGs because they take too much of your time, claiming that that makes RPGs "bad" in some objective sense is going too far.
Out of curiosity, would you also think that the Lord of the Rings trilogy should have been a single short novel, eliminating the "unnecessary" detours through which Tolkien described the world of Middle-Earth?
Lets go kill Catuar until I learn how to stop being retarded.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Being a worthless newbie makes it feel like the world is alive?
No, being a worthless newbie makes it feel like you're an infant, and the world is ridiculous. Look, here's the real world. A level 1 marine can take down Saddam in his hidey hole, as long as he looks in the right place. He doesn't have to level up first so Saddam doesn't take him out with one hit. Unpredictability is a feature of living worlds, and steady 1-70 level advancement takes away that unpredictability--that ability for just freakin ANYONE to do something important, given the right opportunity.
RPGs have been like this for so long that we've completely forgotten that there's any other basis for gameplay--but there is. Taking down the enemy leader is still fun! If you got to be there, what difference does it make whether you were level 2 or 70? It's still *hard*, which is why you get a sense of accomplishment.
The basis for gameplay is achieving a goal through luck or skill: your own skill, not your character's.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Doh! You're totally right. My brainfart. I meant Lucas. Durrr!
I'll have to admit my computer RPG experience has been limited strictly to World of Warcraft lately, but here is my take on this. While I find some things can be a bit tedious and I try to steer clear of grinding whenever possible, boring or mundane tasks are things that happen often in life. Yes, a game is supposed to be fun, but RPGs aren't just ordinary games due to the roleplaying part. You're trying to get into the environment to help set the tone of the game. If you want to just jump into something that will test your game playing reflexes, a good game of Galaga will do. It also offers a spin on real life, since both RL and the RPG have mundane task...The unfortunate thing is in real life the really cool tasks sometimes don't come up and it's just the regular grind, while with the RPGs you know you'll have something cool to do eventually.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
Zelda is a good example about how an RPG should be, especially the most recent one "Twilight Princess"
In Zelda you don't have any "experience" nor "levels" to gain.
There are no strength, dexterity, or wisdom attributes for which you can boost with equipment.
You don't have to loot corpses for marginal equipment upgrades and you don't have time-sink kill quests to kill the same monsters over and over and over again.
You don't have 10 slots for armor and magical jewelery and it doesn't take 2 minutes to kill a group of monsters.
You do start out weak in Zelda but it has the same kind of progression as a first person shooter, weapons. You get new weapons and as soon as you do, *gasp*, you can use them! In traditional RPGs you pick up a sword and then you have to "learn" how to use it, slowly raising your skill; or you find weapons that you can't even use for one reason or another.
The "fun" of traditional RPGs is had by way of achievements. You look at how far you have come and how much gear and attribute points you have to show for it.
The fun of Zelda is figuring out the puzzles.
Games like Battle Mines, that are personally maintained by geniuses and force you to slow down and play at a certain rate kick ass for intelligent players with a sense of community!
Hi
... who notices this:
[snip]
"Finding the shadestones and charging the sunstone took 90 minutes. I could have watched a good movie in that time. It was a completely nonsensical activity[.]"
[snip]
How much more sense does it make to watch a movie in these 90 minutes? It is basically like watching a movie anyways, but with interaction!
<rant>
How about getting some friends or - who knows - maybe even a girlfriend? Spend some time with them! Or do sports (you now, that's when you actually spend some time doing nonsensical activities that are good for your body and your mind).
I think Jeff is pretty pathetic. If you don't like games - don't play them! And don't tell me that you have to because it is your job. Get a different job then.
Get a life.
</rant>
Pen and Paper RPGs are the only way to go. Tell the GM you want to power game or just grab a copy of Amber :-)
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
To me this article smacks of two things -
The first, is a symptom of today's "I want it NOW" culture. The author just sounds like he's not willing to put in any work into his gaming, he just wants the Grand Sword of Doom +6000 vs all right from the start, and to leap right in to killing ubervillans. That's where he thinks he should be, so that's what he wants, right now.
The second thing, is that it sounds from a few comments as though the author completely misses a lot of the point of RP. Talking about how quickly he was able to complete a game shows this. Of course, if you power-play your way through a game, you can finish it quickly. But where's the point in that? The idea of RPG is to immerse yourself in the story and the world. The point is to take time, not to zoom as quickly as possible through to the end of the game.
I'm playing strategy games too, so I see your point. Yes, there is a certain similarity in play styles that I like.
But what I want in an RPG, primarily, is, well, to be told a good story. And preferrably not just a quick update while the next combat map loads. Call it an interactive novel, if you will. So switching to strategy games is not exactly an apples-to-apples substitute there. Having solid strategy/tactical mechanics in combat is very much appreciated and important to me, don't get me wrong, but in an RPG they're the means not the end.
To go on a tangent of an example: It's sorta like having nice weapons in a FPS, if you will: those weapons are tools to an end, not the end itself. It's nice (maybe even expected and essential nowadays) to have good, well balanced ones, but it's not the whole purpose of the game. But when I play a FPS, I expect FPS gameplay, not just a list of guns. Similarly when I play RPG, I primarily expect an RPG, not just the tactics part.
And therein lies a double disappointment for me these days:
1. A lot of "RPGs" _are_ dumbed down to having even less story than a strategy game. Sure, that's not the case with some top titles like Oblivion or NWN2, but there's a whole army of hack-and-slash and Diablo clones which only have at most a few one-liners between battle maps as the whole story. Not only they're mindless click-fests _in_ combat, they're made for the masses of illiterates who are proud that they don't read any more. (You know, the "if I wanted to read a story I'd read a book" kind, except he's never actually read a book since the school either.) There's very little story to be found in them, beyond the most minimalistic half-baked excuse to go shoot up (or slice up) the next map too.
2. It doesn't help that Turn-Based Strategy is an endangered species either. Even if I wanted to give up on RPG and go full-time strategy, how much choice do I have there? Sure, there's DIsgaea and a few others, but the keyword is: "few".
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I don't recall playing anything in Baldurs Gate or Morrowind that felt quite that annoying.
Maybe the trauma blocked them out of my mind, but both PnP Rpgs and well written PC RPG's seem, to me, to be better than what he plays.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Nah, D&D isn't the culprit. Look, it's not about starting with a nuke spell and a vorpal sword, it's about starting doing boring, stupid, mundane, unimporting things like catching flies for your sister's collection or returning books to the library. There's nothing in D&D to enforce that. You could start a level 1 with a kitchen knife in D&D and still be right in the middle of something extremely important, if your GM had imagination.
The real culprit is the thrice-accursed Monomyth a.k.a. The Hero's Journey script that we got in video games via Hollywood. (Yes, if you thought 90% of what Hollywood produces is the exact same script with different props and details, you'd be right: it _is_ the same rehashed script.)
That script requires certain steps. You must start with an everyman character (Joe Average, basically) doing mundane things, that the viewer can empathise with. You don't even give him his goal until the middle of the story. Etc.
Now that by itself gets boring when I have seen the exact same script 100 times before in a movie, or in a game. But in a game the problems are just starting:
1. Who's doing it? In a movie I'm leaning back and just watching the hero do those mundane things for a while, and that's ok. In a game I'm required to actually do them. It's a bigger turn off. Sorry, that's not what I bought a game for. If I wanted to experience my barbarian's life as a peasant before the big life-changing events, I'd go back to playing Harvest Moon.
Now I'm not saying there should be only combat, far from it, but spare me the meaningless "see, as you start as an average joe" chores. Make it important. If it's just the "you started as a peasant" intro, then make it the FMV intro to the game and let me at the controls when I have something finally important to achieve. I'm not saying it should be the final goal from the start either. Just _something_ important.
FF7 for example got this right: you start as a mercenary in the middle of a mission to blow up a power plant. It's not the final goal, so it doesnt spoil story progression. But it's not boring, mundane and uninteresting either. You're someone, you're (supposedly) the trained professional these guys hired, and you're doing something fitting your (supposed) qualification and worth your fee. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
2. Time involved? In a 90 minute movie, the mundane intro parts are maybe 15 minutes. In an 18 hour game that would proportionally be 3 hours. Thankfully nowadays most game designers do drastically shorten it too, but there _are_ clueless attempts at applying the monomyth to the letter. Even if it means 3 hours worth of running around returning library books and lost puppies. Frankly, if 15 minutes are enough to introduce the characters in a movie, they're enough in a game too. There's no need to scale everything equally.
3. Does it even serve the same purpose? A movie is watched mostly in one go. A game isn't. Even _if_ that intro part served some purpose in a movie, for the transition between mundane and the movie world, that is lost in a game as soon as I save now and reload the next day. The next day I start directly in the middle of it without any such transition.
And frankly, by now we have plenty of evidence that it actually works perfectly without such transitions. There is no massive problem suspending disbelief when you reload directly in the middle of the plot. So why do we need it in the beginning anyway?
4. Scaling and time again. The monomyth taken literally is ok for a 3 hour story, but not for a 30 hour game. Building up linearly to the climax in 20 hours and coming down in 10 is boring. Even novels use multiple interwoven plots to keep it interesting over long periods of time.
There was this unsavoury comparing a good video game plot to multiple female orgasms, with plateaus and peaks all over the plac
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
In most paper RPGs, you start off moderately powerful and gain additional power only very slowely.. and often mostly through money and items.. its more fun. And obviously you won't have boring games if your advancment is mostly coming from finding items since you won't need two of most items.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Well, see, the funny thing is that _the_ most successful MMORPG (it has RPG in the name at least) is exactly what you describe as "non-fun". And funnily it has over 90% of the MMO market. So most people actually find that fun, eh?
The thing is, in WoW, you may be level 1, but you start massively "uber" compared to similar level enemies. The wolves and kobolds in Northshire do 1 hp per attack, ffs. Not 1d6 or anything. Just 1 to 1. You have massive hp for your level, you hit several _times_ harder than any enemy, your hp regens right back in no time (which is why so few people appreciate a Paladin or Priest early), travel times are short, your equipment is perfectly adequate without any grinding or farming, etc. The only way to die even if you wanted to is to herd a small army of enemies or jump off Teldrassil if you're an elf. _Totally_ uber.
You'll even get your first non-soloable boss at all at level 10 or so. (Hogger, if you're a human, different ones for the others.) Until then, you're _the_ uber-soldier that can mow down NPCs left and right with impunity.
You're in some ways more uber than you'll be at level 70. You'll need damn good equipment to be uber at level 70, while at level 1 you're uber even naked. In some ways your whole progression through WoW is struggling to hold onto that level 1 god-like power as the enemies grow faster than your base stats do. You even end up letting go of some of that power in some domains, to better hang on to it in other domains. (The choice of talent trees, for example.)
Guess what? It's fun if done right.
Look, level and equipment progressions are good and motivating, but there's no reason to be dumb about it. Which is what a lot of game designers are.
Yes, you grow up in levels/spells/equipment, but so do the enemies. _That_ is the motivator in gaining levels. But against equal level enemies you can do well from day 1 and it _will_ be fun. Starting level 1 does _not_ mean you have to start an unsurvivable peasant against level 1 enemies. It just means you won't kill any level 20s for now, but against level 1 enemies you can still be as powerful as you want to.
I'm not saying I should start level 100 with a nuke. But my level 1 mage should still be perfectly able to kill a level 1 rat or kobold or whatever your game is all about. My level 1 modern soldier should be able to draw that pistol or M-16 he's been trained to use, and actually shoot a level 1 enemy. My level 1 padawan in a SW setting should be perfectly able to kill a level 1 Greedo, if he picks on me instead of Han. Etc. There is simply no bloody reason why, at _any_ point in the game, I shouldn't be able to put up a good fight against an _equal_ level enemy.
It also doesn't mean you have to start doing boring mundane stuff like rescuing kittens from trees and picking apples in the garden.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I was trying to think of the difference between a fps or rts progression (go to the next area, get a new weapon/unit) vs an rpg (level up). And I realized that the major difference is that in most FPS's, while you start out with a pistol, there is no such thing as a "pistol +2". Every progression makes your character more powerful by adding new abilities and options, not by just giving you the same thing but doing more damage because you killed 10 beasts. While RPG's give you new abilities occasionally, the majority of the difference in character power is just that a level 20 wizard-thief does 2x the damage or more of a level 10 wizard-thief.
Zelda is kind of a good example of this progression in the realm of action/rpgs.
Personally I think you get enough of the "total loser" sense at the start of a game just from being a noob at the game. You have limited abilities, you only have a vague grasp of combat strategies... I think in most games you grow enough as a player as you progress that having a character with 20x the base hp seems unnecessary.
But the real problem with rpg's isn't that you have to level up... it's that you level up by killing billions of the same fodder over and over, without any AI, without any needed strategy. In DND you normally see only a couple combats a session, and get a lot of your XP from either bosses or quest experience. I would love to see an RPG that made more of the combat meaningful and challenging, and levelled me up for saving the princess, not for turning in 100 wolves hides.
The whole point of RPGs is to start out as a whimp and become a hero. And the point of the game is that journey not the end game. This is like real life. Have any of you (who claim that the problem is that RPGs are tedious) ever spent time to get good at something? I have. I play classical guitar and just becoming a competent guitarist can be quite tedious. Christopher Parkening claims that he won't consider a passage mastered until he can play it 7 times in a row at concert tempo. This is tedious and time consuming, my friends. In highschool I played basketball and I spent hours every day working on my jump shot. Shooting 200 shots a day can be tedious and very time consuming. But the rewards are big. Nailing a 3 pointer in some one's face to win a game is a wonderful reward. Being able to play Capricho Arabe on guitar flawlessly with passion and feeling is a wonderful thing. But I also enjoy the work that it takes to become good at things. I like RPGs because I feel like the tediousness of becoming a hero is realistic and rewarding (in Morrowind, anyway; not so much in Oblivion). If you don't like putting forth the effort to become good at something and want to start out as a hero then you'll probably never appreciate RPGs. And that's not surprising. But changing RPGs so that they aren't time consuming changes them into something that's not an RPG.
DDO is a very different game than the "EQ clones". Most of the things that force you to waste your time have been removed, and true adventures are available from the time you create your character. Now, it must be noted that DDO being a different sort of game means that many of the things that waste your time in other games are also "missing". There is no crafting system, and at the moment there are fairly few areas designed just for exploration, though this number is growing.
As with just about any MMO out there, a free trial is available for you to try. The game also has updates just about every month that really have expanded the game and unlike many games, the new content tends to be even higher in quality than the adventures that were released when the game first launched.
Since DDO launched, the level cap has been raised once(from 10 to 12), an in-game mail system added, the patron system was implemented(which is similar to a faction system but with rewards), over 40 new adventures, and more, all which came as a part of the regular subscription fee. No paid expansion was required for players to get these extras, and more is in the works.
On Feb 28th, an overhaul of the enhancement system is set to launch, with module 4 planned for mid March(exact details on what will come with module 4 have not been released yet, but there have been hints).
If you have played but quit due to a lack of content after only a few months, the game really has grown a LOT, so you may want to take a look at the changes.
If you never checked out the game because you dislike the design of the other games out there, you should check it out, because it really IS different. The gameplay is not the sort where you just turn on an attack button and walk away from the keyboard until what you are fighting is dead, it's more involved than that. Sitting in one "camp" while mobs respawn is NOT a part of DDO, which really helps.
How about Planescape: Torment? you started as the "uber-dude" there only you had amnesia. far as i remember it that was given game of the year for the year of its release.
I have a life. I'm married and I do contract work and I help friends move and participate in charities. I don't have time to sit around killing wolves on a screen or even working through the levels of most FPS games.
This sort of monotony is the primary reason I don't play most games and I'm not interested in practicing to get good at one. I may have an hour or so a week to kill. This isn't enough time to really learn anything. All I want is some good gameplay that's not too hard to get.
And that's why I'm getting a Wii. The gameplay is intuitive and compelling, and I don't have to learn how to do stuff or look up cheats online to keep having fun when I get to a certain point.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Yes, RPG's do take up a lot of your time... and you can trace it right back to Lord Of The Rings.
When a game gets you to wander around a wasteland, grinding for hours, it's to give you that 'epic' feeling, the feeling that what you've achieved was actually difficult. Just like reading through those endless chapters where Frodo & Sam walk to the Crack Of Doom... Tolkien wanted to really make it seem like they had to work hard to get there, not just go for a little hike across the woods - so we have 300+ pages of walking walking crawling and you KNOW that it was hard. *
Translate that to the RPG genre, and game developers don't want you to just think 'Yep, my character just spent 3 weeks searching the land for XXXXX', they want you to really experience it!
* Although the film version of LOTR didn't spend ages following Frodo & Sam across middle earth, it compensated by playing most of the film in slow motion with a choir singing in the background...
This guy is a moron. Period. Award winning games? I could tell by reading the first paragraph that this is a joke.
Take a look at the screenshots of some of his games. Looks like something straight out of the $1 bin.
I've seen better games on the Commodore-64 (a lot better, actually).
You're the only one that thinks level scaling is a good thing. Not many Oblivion players like this change in the RPG system. I know I didn't. Any real RPG player that doesn't spend most of his time on a Wii playing Tennis or gets his kicks playing old style Pacman likes the way the traditional RPG system works. It's fun starting off as a loser, that is what makes it interesting.
If you want to be a God from the start, turn on God-mode and STFU.
K. Thanks.
by only having about ten hours of gameplay. And it's all monster-killing and password- and secret-finding goodness.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
yes, the poster and Jeff Vogel, have hit the nail on the head of the main weakness of MMO. Many people do not really enjoy being a weakling at the start.
MMO use the beginning level as more recent single player games use a tutoral section, or a skippible tutoral section at the beginning of the game. I would really enjoy a one posters suggesting of the begining levels being skippable, for MMO's. Just let me start the start of the Mid Levels, with some minimal midlevel gear and an appropiate amount of money.
> I think Oblivion handled this well
I don't. It may be highly polished, but it's just another in a long line of games where you scour the world looking for stuff. After failing to rescue Captain Picard, I wandered out into the world and thought, wth, now what? Indeed, it's non-linear gameplay seemed a drawback at that point. Now what? I don't have the time sink to scour the entire world looking in every last nook and cranny for that one little dodad to power up.
I've been doing this going back to the original D&D gold box games and Might and Magic. I'm done with it. I prefer the technically open but much more linear games like KotoR or an RTS (not that there have been any good ones since Sacrifice five years ago...)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Playing games is a 95% waste of time. The 5% it's not is because he does have some good effects like sharping your thought processing skills. Especially, if you play a fast paced game. On the other hand, if you are spending several hours a week playing games; your are wasting your potential and your life. ...but some people prefer their life to only be virtually cool rather than actually cool.
As an Oblivion Modder (aka "Jumonji" on Tessource.com) I now have logged as many hours writing my companion mod as actually playing. (Oh, well over 200 hours of each, at least.) I have trialed at least 100 mods by others and kept about 20 that I currently use (with further customizations by me.)
I've started the game over from scratch several times, and each time I find I "cheat" less, because I just enjoy the experience of living and exploring in Tamerial (with my new companion, of course.)
However, my biggest thrill is finding new ways to "game the engine" and make my companion more alive with clever scripting using Bethesda's mod editor. I try to find the balance between a realistic charecter and a good helper in the game, and the more I play, the more I focus on the small stuff, like realistic pathing and dynamic, unpredictable tactical choices in my companion's AI.
So - to the point - Oblivion, at least, starts you with a great story line that makes sense. You can kill rats if you like, but you don't have to. You can save the empire instead with a great story arc, or you can mix and match as you see fit. I can't see any problems with this RPG that a gamer doesn't foist on themself by how they play it.
Best entertainment money I've ever spent - maybe 10 cents an hour? (Not counting the handbuilt pc, of course.)
Because an AI cannot actually role-play at this point. As a DM/GM the AI can only spit out a few pre-planned phrases and clues. So the computer games take on the aspects that are doable and ignore the ones that make the game really fun. What I would like to see is a multiplayer capable game that looked like Warcraft, that was set up so a GM could create and populate the maps and control some or all of the NPCs. Basically the game would simply be the tools that brought out the role-playing and work with the strengths of both systems.
This is coming from someone who really, really tried to like and play RPGs, and never could. Final Fantasy 7 was the only RPG I've ever found interesting and entertaining enough to finish through to completion (unless you count Zelda OoT). The article makes a good point about one of the many problems I have with RPGs. The beginning of them (including Elder Scrolls IV) is just so empty to me. I played for four or five hours and still only had a couple of rusty swords and nearly died every time a wolf attacked me. Other RPGs I've tried (Diablo II, World of Warcraft, etc) had the same problem. It took so long to get to any level that was worth playing, and even that wasn't all that fun to me.
The other big thing that turned me off RPGs (especially single player ones) was the learning curve. Yes, it's fascinating to be able to customize your character down to the width of his nose and the parabolic equation that defines one of his eyebrows. But that takes almost an hour in and of itself unless you want the ugly default they supply you. Once you start playing, every two minutes after you kill something or look at something there's a new item that has no meaning to you yet (chipped ruby, bonemeal, etc) and you're not sure if it's worth keeping on you or if you should dump it so you have enough capacity to carry another potion. That and the statistics. Strength, will, dexterity, erectile ability, come on! I get basics, but some games have 30 or more statistics graphs along with experience, health, manna, and level.
Don't get me wrong. RPGs usually have gorgeous graphics, enthralling story bases and immense replay value. It just makes me sick trying to play one through--the amount of time it consumes (from the mundane tasks the author rants about to learning the items, statistics, spells and all the other junk you have to figure out how works together that I whined about) and the headaches it gives and the number of times I die trying to slay the level one rat is just not worth it.
"Haha you n00b! U just sux0rz at RPGs!"
Yeah, I do. I suck at RPGs because I can't stand it long enough to play it and get good. I guess it's just personal taste. I like FPS and racing games a lot more.
No kidding. Oblivion is totally boring after a couple of hours. My jaw dropped when Zonk actually praised Oblivion's leveling, which gives mere bandits daedric armor and lets you be Arena champ at level 1. Oblivion was a terribly bland game with reduced skills and less factions that didn't even conflict with each other like in Morrowind. You could go be the head of the Mages Guild AND the Thieves Guild. Idiotic. The stupid press didn't care as long as "SpeedTree" looked pretty--and it did after the first 50 green hills you run across. After that, it's really old.
Oblivion represents the shiney console-itis that is plaguing RPGs today, especially at Bethesda where lead designer Todd Howard actually likes first-person shooters more than RPGs, which explains a lot about Oblivion. PC games today are dumbed-down Xbox ports rather than full-fledged PC games that take advantage of the depth you can have in PC games. The last "true" RPGs I played were Wizardry 8 and Morrowind, and some people still debate Morrowind.
"Sufferin' succotash."
We should just start off at max level and go through the same quests with no challenge?
You have to pretty much prove yourself in any game really, nobody ever starts out on top. You have to work to get all the best loot and weapons and such. When you play a game like GTA you dont start off with a bazooka or sniper rifle and a tank and helictoper, no you start out with your fists and beat your way to the top. Sounds like this guy really is tired of just starting the game as well.....a jackass.
Well yes, if you have levels you start at some level. But the level indicates to some extent your place in the world (Even though despite your being a level 99 badass that guard blocking the door still won't let you in until you talk to the king). If you start at level 1 you're a nobody. You have no power, and your job is likely going to be to play fetch for the ones who do have power. This is a good starting point for two reasons. You need to learn the story, rules and interface of the game. Throwing you into the deep end at the start is, at the very least, much harder to pull off successfully. And second, even in a non-linear game the story needs to be fairly constricted at the start. If your character has power, then a lot of the artificial roadblocks the game places in front of you are less believable.
There are a lot of interesting characters you run into in these worlds. It'd be nice to get to experience the story from some other perspective than the outcast loser. It might be harder to do, but it would be worth it.
Why do we have to keep using the EXP methods we've been using for years now. Technically any action performed in a game has a process assigned to it and can be given a mathematical value to increase or decrease a stat or skill on the fly. For example, taking a warrior character out into the woods and have them attack trees (or chopping), this can increase their fighting skills and strength just as good as a battle, but on the same note it won't increase the skill as much as an actual battle. So hypothetically attacking a tree will increase appropriate abilities 0.0001% where fighting a small monster will be different because successful or failed attack, defend, dodge or parry will have a different rating depending on what you are attacking or defending. Blocking an Ogre's club successfully on a low level will have a greater impact than blocking a dragon's breath on a high level with a magical shield.
As the attribute is not being used, it has a natural rate of decay. So while you're traveling between towns, standing around talking to other players, etc... your battle stats are slowly dwindling, which makes it possible that you can at one time be an expert archer, but not using your bow and arrows will result in loss of your ability. Nothing is absolute so there is no 100% or 0%, so even an expert archer will miss on occasion, but even an inexperienced lock pick might be able to open the box (but each failed attempt does increase that skill since you are using it).
Do away with the MP system completely. Magical ability should be determined by the wisdom, intelligence, and some sort of spell familiarity stat. In most RPGs, when I get a spell I'm suddenly 100% proficient with it...real world would be HELL NO! Lets take fire for example. At first I'd probably barely be able to light a candle, give it a while I'd be able to start a campfire, and even later throw fireballs, ignite weapons, or other things. The familiarity with the spell increases so I'd be able to do new things with it. At first I might even be a little unstable, where I'd intend to start a fireplace and end up blowing up the wall of the house. Which leads me to the next stat they should add, a stress (for lack of a better term) stat. When in the midst of a battle, you're extremely outnumbered, near death, no hope...somehow you pull off the miracle shot that ends up destroying all your enemies and saving your friends. Or the opposite you spend all the time learning a spell, and it could be a random non-critical moment, or that one point of the game it absolutely has to be cast...it fails. Maybe even a tiredness stat so that even when I'm a "fire master" I can't cast the most powerful spell all day, they'll slowly get weaker as I use them because it takes more out of the character as they use it. Stronger spells take energy faster than weak ones, but proficiency with the spell also reduces the rate it tires the character.
I'd also like to see spells evolve more rather than how in Final Fantasy series you get the Fire1, Fire2, Fire3 sudden proficiencies. The more you use a specific spell the stronger you get with it. The less you use a spell you lose proficiency with it, not forget just can't use them like you used to. So I'll use fire and lightning spells for an example. I'm using fire and can throw fireballs, ignite pretty much anything I want, etc...but learn lightning. Now that I'm summoning bolts from the sky, shooting bolts from my fingers, or whatever...my fireballs aren't as strong or can't go as far, fires aren't as strong as soon, etc...get my point?
I may be wrong but with some of these methods and changing the focus of RPGs from leveling to actually exploring and enjoying the story, we can get away from the lame missions such as collect 3 bugs for sister's collection. Some may work better than others, or they might not work at all, its just stuff that I've been thinking over the years of playing RPGs that I'm finally given the opportunity to put out there.
My lightbulb moment revealed this to me: I think the reason that we all get into these games is because we live in a world where rampant population growth and potential/current global crises (warming, Iraq war, Darfur, oil spills) can leave us feeling impotent as individual to affect any change. The gaming world (usually) gives us a situation where we do have the power to change the world by our actions, where there are clear set goals and clear steps towards how these goals can be achieved.
For those who work in IT, this is actually the kind of mindset we usually find comforting - where there is a clear road from A to B without having to deal with any of the crap in between (over-documentation, office politics, code-guru-set-in-ways, etc.).
Or maybe that's just me, and I think too much. One or the other.
Work smarter, not harder.
I didn't RTFA but i don't understand what he is talking about. I have played many and i mean MANY RPGS AND MMORPGS both consoles and computer, that is the purpose of them you need understand the whole storyline from the beginning if you start in the middle you are left hangin. It is like a movie who the hell wants to watch a movie from the middle of it wtf!! grrr i just don't understand that has been the purpose of rpg's for years. They aren't for everyone!! The lazy gamer would choose an rpg like world of warcraft so they can be spoonfed. Just my two cents on the ordeal :)
I agree with the sentiment of the author. It takes too much effort to log in to the slashdot interface, so I will just post this comment as an AC. Instead of advancing my own karma, I shall just let it go for any witty comments I can make, and be done with this post. Getting done with the post is the point right?
You're flat-out lying. Everything absolutely 100% does advance with you in Oblivion. It's so bad that most people rush and do Kvatch at level 1 because it's nothing but scamps at that level. Random bandits start getting complete sets of high-end armor before it even appears in merchant lists (which are also leveled). Loot is also leveled.
Well, now whether a game's story is also _good_, that's another story. Very few game designers are also, well, good novelists and playwrights. And if you want an _original_ story too, well, now that's gonna be a problem to even get a publisher for. The PC games world is _very_ risk-adverse lately, so anything non-standard has an uphill battle against the cliched stuff that's already known to sell.
So on the whole, I'll mostly say "amen" to all you've said there.
Still, if that's what's available, I'll take a mediocre cliched story insted of no story.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Once we had everyone (midlevel to high) suddenly drop one by one after weeks of successes. The big battle involved a mysterious demon lord that seem to have a blocking move for all of our favorites. The very last character left of our party engaged the creature and asked what did he want in order to survive. He asked to know the date and time. Of course it was about 1:15 a.m. (after work) April 1st. We nearly boiled the DM in oil. We did throw miscellaneous objects. And emptied our mugs.
If it were done when 'tis done, then t'were well it were done quickly... MacBeth
That RPGs really need to get off the hang up of repetitive cookie-cutter style quests that have little to do with the main story or provide game play tasks more suited to an automated program.
The real culprit here is the random generator/monster quests. The ultimate lack of creativity in creating 'mission objectives' if you will. These sorts of things tend to be created through the use of templated plans, and random generators that sift through an array of presets.
Slap down a randomly generated map, with a randomly generated list of monsters with a randomly generated item at the end for the reward.
That needs to be gotten rid of.
What needs to be done is the expansion of creative content and a well written story that incorporates this content. The Bioware series of games is a perfect example- most of the fights are linear planned events placed by conscious programmers for a certain purpose at a certain point in the story. Almost -every- fight, and seemingly random encounter has a point that doesn't just boil down to "Your Statistics Increase"
Does this require a large studio with plenty of writing talent? Yes. Is it -really- expensive. Yes. Does it take a buttload of time. YES. But look at all the games you've named as great RPGS, look at the development teams and look at the time in development, and you'll notice that they were all very expensive and took a very long time to create.
I've played Exile since 1994 and I know Jeff Vogel is a great game designer, and as he admitted, he's guilty of doing the same thing. Which is -exactly- why he posted the article. He was evaluating his own games and others to see what could be done better, and he hit the nail on the head.
A 10-12 hour long RPG is essentially what you have with alot of stock games with the fat cut out. In order to extend that you need to extend manpower or development time and with three people, Spiderweb software doesn't really have either of those resources. So the end result is a short, but good game.
I think the ultimate big budget solution is user expandable content. Everyone knows User Generated Content wins. It is in fact, the sole reason for the existence of the Internet. (Well, not originally, but you get the idea.)
You release tools so even if your game is short, your gamers can create derivative repetitive crappily laid out dungeons for you and you don't need to bother spitting out random generators. The principle is that people like crap sometimes. Slashing through a horde of generic monsters= Crap. Paying your programmer 100,000$ a year to generate crap is a waste of his time. So you leave the crap generation to the users so they are happy, and then you can create exclusive 'gold' content for money.
Essentially, you are selling the tools and the skills into a loyal self-sustaining community, a market the -you- hold control over. It is guaranteed money security.
Every game that has done this has benefitted tremendously. Shooters like Doom, HalfLife 1&2 have benefited from community mods, and we all know the famous RTS examples of TA, SC, and WCIII
So yes. We're tired of the grind because we've seen it so many times and any monkey with a random generator and an array can make a grind. In RPGs it's really the artistic and functional mechanical (Gameplay) elements that provide value to the game, and Jeff Vogel is advocating that constant repetition is NOT the best way to show the mechanical power of an RPG.
RPGs aren't for impatient people, and they never will be.
------RM
This is interesting topic. Major problem that i see is that over time people confused what RPG really means.
The fact that it's role playing is the most important. Playing role of someone you are not, and might never be (if we talking about sci-fi or fantasy settings, but there are plenty great setting that happens in today life) has nothing to do with leveling or combat.
Most of us are spoiled by the fantasy settings like D&D where combat is very important, but still it's not D&D fault.
Good table top roleplaying game with good master is not about leveling or gaining power. It is more interesting playing your character right. In some cases that might mean dying --- if you are paladin that swore to protect someone until death, you might actually have to do so and start new character --- but you might have a feeling of accomplishment still. Now i am not talking about casual player, because most of us want to be powerful. No i am not a saint and from time to time i want to do some powergaming as well. On the other hand we always try to skip most of the repetitive thing in the game. Yes i would expect to fight a lot of Orcs if i happens to be attacking their stronghold, but each battle would be a little bit different to keep player and dm entertained.
Also i need to mention that i really enjoyed couple of rpg when you don't need to level at all and skill system also not that important. It's the way you do thing (you describe your action) with unlimited freedom of choice when we talking about table top game that is amazing for me. It is great feeling when you say to DM you doing something that smart and he didn't expect at all, and now he need to figure out how the world will react to it.
Now we are coming to the problem with usual Computer RPGs.
First of all we have a problem of event being scripted. You cannot give unlimited choice, computer cannot adapt (at this point at least) to something weird done by the player. Also there is not much talking --- i would not count dialog boxes in most of the games as talking. It doesn't matter how well you can speak or if you say something wrong by accident or find something out that dm didn't realise he is giving away. Only couple of games (Like Fallout) actually took you intelligence into account when forming dialogs and not being able to talk actually gave you quite a bit of disadvantage.
Same goes for social status and overall actions. Reputation systems in most of the games are either very simple or completely killed by the fact that you just can load game and always keep reputation that you want. If we talking about MMORPG that even more obvious that reputation doesn't matter because usually you don't really have choice of doing something completely wrong.
Chats and being out of character is usually not appreciated in most of the table top games. How many people play on rpg servers in WOW? The one that actually suppose to enforce being in character?
At this point anything that happends to have skill system and level progression is called rpg. If i can level up this is a game with rpg elements.
Level or Skill progression == RPG.... This is something that i cannot really agree upon.
This is a problem and it's not going to be fixed. This is the way now rpg is perceived.
Most of the people in MMORPG are never actually trying to play the role of their characters.
In game with good DM role playing paladin is very challenging task. Even harder to play someone like samurai.
Surprisingly hard to play assassin and stay alive and good party member.
None of those problems exists in most of the MMORPG.
Some computer RPG actually do pretty good job at handling most of those problems --- like Baldurs Gates, Fallout etc.
But overall most of the computer RPG are combat oriented and if you taking battle away game just seize to exist.
Couple of nice exceptions i would say are games like Eve online -- where trading and using skills without actually fighting can still lead you somewhere.
Also game with ins
A lot of errands. Actually most of the game.
So basically, in the end you just illustrate exactly what I was saying: in WoW you start more powerful (compared to equal level mobs) at level 1 than you'll be at level 70. Yes, you'll still be relatively uber for 20 levels, and then it will actually go slightly downwards. That was all the point I was making. (Funny the things you can discover if you have the attention span and mental agility to read more than 3 rows before jumping in to do your own ego masturbation and call people fanboys.)
There seems to be this mis-conception that "character progression" in an RPG must be the exact opposite of WoW. That you _must_ start too wimpy to even kill a level 1 kobold, and must progress to being a walking nuke at level 20 (or 60 or 100 or whatever) that can wipe out several armies of level equal level NPCs. That at level 1 you must be so wimpy that even a kitten can maul you, and you can't even do more than run petty erands for random villagers. That being useless and bored at level 1 is somehow a condition to feeling great later.
And that just isn't set in stone. The most successful MMO goes exactly the opposite way around. You start powerful, and, yes, as you did notice, it actually goes downhill. Compared to the equal level NPCs, at level 20 you're less tough than you were at level 1, at level 40 you're less tough than at level 20 (and now you have a horse, but spend even more time on the road than at level 20), and at level 60 you need 40 people to do anything.
That said,
If you got yourself into only mindlessly caring about levels and equipment, I can see how it got boring. A lot of people seem to have this... silly idea, that somehow it's some race against the clock to level 60, that they must work day and night and never care for more than getting one level closer to that precious deadline. In the process, they miss the whole actual game that is there between levels 1 and 59, because instead of playing it and taking the momentary rewards and achievements for what they are, they were grinding to reach 60.
As some friendly advice, either quit the game completely or try to stop and smell the roses. Enjoy the game for what it is right there and then. If you're level 21, enjoy being level 21 for now. Sure, maybe that new level 20 weapon won't last you more than until level 25. But enjoy it while it lasts. Take it for what it is now, not throught the shit-coloured goggles of "argh, must grind to the max level, and this won't last until level 60". Be glad you got it as it is. Take some time to explore. Take some time to make some friends.
Yes, WoW isn't perfect by any measure, and it does go downhill. But that's no reason to make your stay even shittier, if you decided to stay anyway.
The game doesn't start with the level 60 raids. That's what happened (before BC) after the game was already ended. They were an unholy grind for people who just didn't know when to quit. WoW didn't have them initially, so people reached level 60 and started whining that there's no more content. The game, as originally designed, had already ended. Finish. Curtain fell. End game. Some people just didn't accept that. The grind/raid instances were added to give them something to do, pointless and unrewarding as it was. But at any rate, that wasn't the meat of the game. The _real_ game was levels 1 to 59.
And that's what all those "argh, must grind to max level fast" people are missing: the whole actual game. There are a lot of smaller achievements between levels 1 and 59. Enjoy them for what they are. If you just play through the game with the
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
While I do agree with you about the hero tale getting over-used in entertainment, video games included, I think that grafting narrative theory onto the reasons for the grind is kinda over-thinking it a bit. Please excuse my own narrative, but I believe it will illustrate my thinking.
Three multiplayer videogames that I've played to a light level of expertise are Starcraft, Everquest, and Unreal Tournament 2004. In each of these cases, I had to "grind" in one way or another to "get good" at the game; endless matches, endless dungeon-running, endless target/movement practice, it all looks the same after awhile from a competitive perspective. In each of these games, most of my time was spent mastering the controls, mastering the maps (forwards and backwards, in the case of UT2004), keeping up with content updates, and getting a feel for how people generally play the game. Now, my efforts to improve would have been greatly hampered without some sort of "bozo filter" in place in each of these cases assuring that I was playing with quality folks. In all three games, that filter existed on two levels: social and structural. In Starcraft, I had a clan which offered me good players to practice with, saving me from monotonous, useless open games -- the social aspect. There was also a ladder system which helped to match me off against moderately skilled players -- a mechanical aspect. In Everquest, it was really similar: I had a guild full of people all attempting to expand our capabilites and a level/equipment system that allowed us to go to places where underleveled and unconnected folks could not go. In UT, it was probably less formalized than the others, but I again played with a clan to refine my talents, and the clan established a reputation (and a ranking on several ladders) which got us access to some pretty elite play channels and matches with even better players and teams. In all of these games, our victories led us to tougher opponents requiring better gameplay and tighter teamwork.
This is the thing that gets left out of some of these discussions about grinding: networking. I've played a lot of games, and I have never failed to find a social network willing to help me jump past the newbie crap one way or another. In action/RTS games, a week of play with a good clan can take you light-years further than a month of unguided practice. In "grind" games, any decent clan can have you up and running in a few days if you're willing to spend some time studying game mechanics to supplement your lack of in-game expertise. Sometimes, this even results in your being more knowledgeable about the game than some "veterans" who have made careers of rushing to adopt "best practices." And, there ARE other ways to advance; there are always clans that are short on logistics: people willing to set up or operate websites and message boards, people willing to drop a few dollars on server hosting fees or in-game currency, people who excel at both internal and external negotiation, mediation, and organization, or even those folks willing to engage in some extra-game skullduggery and social engineering; the paths are out there.
I guess I'm really trying to say two things here. One, whether it functions through player ranking systems, level/gear systems, or even tournaments, the system is mostly there to allow newbies to practice with a minimum of unfair molestation and veterans to play with their own ilk. Two, for a pragmatist, a combination of gaming skill, relevant real-life talents, and social networking abilities will always trump time spent just grinding. Like other regulations, game rules were made to be transcended.
Well, we can aggree pretty quickly about most of what you wrote there, since it's insightful and partially common sense.
But in that message I was talking about really the monomyth structure of the game's story, not about the grind. UT for example may have "grind", if that's how you choose to play it, but doesn't have a monomyth structure as far as I can tell. (Not having a story as such anyway, for a start.) You can "grind" Everquest or WOW, and certainly a lot of people do, but neither really has an actual monomyth story, or not in any major way. Especially if you just grind it, chances are you wouldn't notice even a vague resemblance.
What I'm talking about are games which are strongly story-based, and base that story on the hero's journey. In (real) CRPGs the story is a lot more central a point than in UT, and a lot of what you do in a game isn't just grind for better equipment, it's basically a device to give you the next bit of story. And you can notice when you do stuff for no other reason than to goad and herd you along the monomyth path. It's not even grinding anything (xp, rank, equipment, whatever), it's just being forced for example to do mundane stuff to show you that your character starts as an ordinary everyday Joe.
If you're familiar with UT, imagine first being forced to endure half an hour of running around doing the dishes and taking out the trash around the house, just to show you that your character was once a peaceful father in the suburbs, before becoming an arena champion. Imagine it's stuff that doesn't even help you with your grind or rankings. In fact, it happens before you can even get into the arena and get your first kill, to get you started on your way to playing with the champions. It's just there to force-feed you a superfluous prescribed step of the monomyth. You probably wouldn't put up with it in UT, would you? Well, we often have to put up with just that in some RPGs. (Some, not all. Others do use that time as a tutorial, though.) That's what I'm talking about.
And it's not retroactively applying narrative theory to it. Hollywood for example doesn't just accidentally rehash stories that just happen look like the hero's journey. Actually, they actively write their scripts to that recipe. At some point in the past someone, I forget who at this hour, circulated a study on the hero's journey around at Hollywood, and a group of producers bought it big time and made it the inofficial movie recipe. Base your script on this exact recipe or take a hike. And that was pretty much the moment any other kind of narrative died in North American cinematography.
Now I'm not sure if game designers/publishers actually have a requirement to follow the monomyth or take a hike. But it's hard not to notice when you're beat upside the head with it the 100'th time.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
On one hand they need some kind of progression / grind on the other hand they need a speedier process. For example, I both love and hate the grind in an MMO. In a MMO, if none of my friends happen to be online, I don't mind grinding some, pass the time, get some loot, level whatever But when friends are around and it's time for other stuff (pvp for example or large party quests) then being a higher level than what you slowly progress as, is much preferred. No one likes trying to pvp at level 5 when other people are lvl 50, 60 or a 100.
People often make the claim of "well those people put in the time, so should you." OR they say "Well if you want instant gratification in levels and progress this game isn't for you." They may be technically right on both accounts but I pose this question for you; What game is right for us? Can you point me out a pay-to-play MMORPG that basically let's you jump right into the fray max level, with decent gear and a fighting chance against those that may or may not have ground up their levels and gear? (GuildWars does not count, it is not a MMORPG and you are still gimped in PvP character creation). That's the thing, while most MMO's "aren't" for us since we want a jump in levels or progression, there also aren't any for us to really choose from. If you know a MMO that has a decent sized player base, costs money to help filter out froobies and young players that let's you jump ahead please feel free to point it out to me, I'd love to try it.
Aw Frell this
In the late 80's, a game was released called "Hero's Quest: So you want to be a Hero?" by Yosemite Enterainment; an extension of their "Quest" brand games (ie; King's/Space/Police). The game consisted primarily of figuring out how to handle each situation on a situational basis. Adventure gaming with items. However, you also had a large subset of statistics that changed through USAGE. There were no levels, there was how good your character was at something. In the first game, you could climb a tree next to the Healer's Hut. But be careful! If you weren't, and decided to try and snatch the birds nest in the tree, you could fall and land on your head. You could also die in this fashion... by being so inexperienced with your agility and dexterity as to be a bumbling moron. Oh, the ways which you could die were priceless and brought a wonderful touch of humor to the game. The descriptions for things helped too! I miss the erstwhile games of adventure... for I felt they more truly captured the feel of a P&P D&D game than most any other game I've played since. Betrayal at Krondor bears a mention as well, but then I always liked Midkemia. Perhaps what is needed is that more fantasy authors worth their salt started pushing their weight around? Food for thought.
I play RPG's and FPS, so I am aware that my views here might be fringe at best. But between the genres there are lessons that have been learned from eachother. The problem is that FPS has done most of the learning. Classic shooters for a long time had little plot (DOOM I'm looking at you) untill the WWII games and Half-Life came. Look at the Battlefield series and you see character development akin to RPGs. Classic RPGs IMO had, and still have, little play control. Back in the day Heritic was probablt more shooter than RPG, but damn if it wasn't fun. Even NetHack had good play control for it's time! Oblivion is moving that way.
A lot of my annoyance with grinding has to do with play control. I don't have much. Most RPG have the same UI the entire way through, choose your attack, point, click. You just switch out the weapons, but the controls are the same. There's not a huge difference between swinging my rusty knife and the +20 two handed sword I just got. Just click. Now I never tired of killing Imps in Doom, yet killing monsters becomes repetitive in WOW. Why? Well for one, when I miss in a FPS I know it's more my fault than the roll of the dice. (Although FPSs still take into account weapon accuracy.) Coversely in a RPG I often know before I attack the monster that I am going to be able to kill it. Battle durration is arbitary (the longer the worse), and unless I really try to screw up, I'm not going to lose. THAT's what sucks about grinding. I start wanting it to go by faster.
Why can't different attacks (Melee and Magical ones) be implemented differently within the same control scheme. It seems like more advanced moves should be harder to key in. I know not everyone would find this more entertaing, but I for one would. Is that too FPS for RPGs?
In a classic RPG you get the weapon and your CHARACTER either instantly has more attack value or he just has to swing it around a set number of times to become proficient. In a shooter nobody ever owns with a sniper right away. It's not easy to use! YOU the player must gain experience with it. Think of Link and his old Ornaca of Time. Once you had it you needed to learn songs to play on it. Take that a step further and I think you fix a lot of your problems with RPGs right now. What if the knowledge from your first time through carried over to your second time through. (LIke remebering how to play the songs so you don't have waist time learning them all over.) That way it's not that you're a lowbie that CAN'T do everything in the begining, it's that YOU the player are inexperienced and DON'T KNOW HOW to do a whirlwind attack or cast a magic missle. This would also make replay more valuable in that with each progressive character you build, YOU the player will have retained knowledge and REAL experience instead of just representing experience with numbers assigned to your didgital avatar.
Imagine a level ten newbie has bought an impossible to get level 70 sword. He should not know how to swing it, and I with my level 20 standing and knowledge could defeat him because I know how to fight. Kinda like in Halo when the guy misses you with both rockets because he can't aim, and you walk up to him and hit him in the back of the head while he's reloading. Unfortunatly in RPGS the guy with rockets usually wins. I know this was very cross-genre, but hopefully it makes a little sense.
Don't try and foist your problems with RPG onto me.
I am constantly amazed by high rated slashdot posts that complain about other people's complaining- not addressing the content of their message but that they brought it up at all. Typically they also imply that they as a helpless passive user of the internet were coerced or tricked into clicking on a link and by cruel magic their eyeballs were made to traverse across a few paragraphs, taking up precious minutes. Are you whining about the slashdot editor, the submitter of the story, the writer of the article, or the original site that hosted the article- or the vast conspiracy that brought them all together with the sinister aim of mildly annoying you?
i've just returned to playing fallout 2; yeah, you start off weak, but the storyline is completely open and being a munchkin isn't fun, or advisable. it just proves that there are games where the story is important, and it's the story YOU make.
it's amazing what can happen when a developer actually cares. too bad the author of the article didn't.
---- I was woken up this morning by a face full of fur. Damn cat thought my head made a good pillow.
Put the (first part of the) monomyth into an introduction movie. Make it skippable.
...and the game begins. Our hero, mistakenly left for dead by the villains, comes to and starts his quest for revenge. Or something like this.
Seriously, games had cinematics for years now. Why not use them for that purpose? So you have 10 or 15 minutes of introduction video. That little film shows how the hero lives a peaceful life as a farmer, except for the weekly militia training with his buddies. Then bandits raze the village...
C - the footgun of programming languages