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?

Comments

Whiner

[mandelbr0t]

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".

Re:Whiner

[merreborn]

More or less my sentiments.

CRPGs have the leveling treadmill/grind, because people *like it*. I loved that shit from age 8 to 18. You're constantly rewarded, and it can give you a sense of accomplishment.

Now, that game mechanic bores me. So I don't play those games anymore.

I guess the real point to be made here is that there are really two subgenres of CRPGs:

Those that focus on the leveling grind, and those that actually focus on "role playing". Some people like one, some like the other. That's pretty much all there is to it.

Sounds like he's talking about Guild Wars PVP

[Sciros]

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).

Re:Sounds like he's talking about Guild Wars PVP

[FangVT]

[...] which becomes a vicious circle. (Can't play to gain rank because your rank isn't high enough.)

Just to be pedantic, that's not a vicious circle, that's a catch-22. A vicious circle would be if playing caused both the requirements to raise and your rank to raise but it raised the requirements faster. Now, because of the catch-22 you can't have that happen, but if the requirements started low enough that you could play, the vicious circle would eventually cause that to change. So in that sense, a vicious circle can lead to a catch-22.

ADHD?

[eviloverlordx]

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.

Guild Wars

[LoverOfJoy]

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.

Re:Guild Wars

[bhsx]

To be fair to Nightfall, you can gain all the "Sunspear" points just by remembering to talk to the priests etc whenever you do a quest and keep talking to them as you see new ones on the map. If you forget to do that, or didn't realize you should have been doing that than it can be a pain to go back and farm those points.
Guild Wars in general offers a lot of ways out of the grind, most noteworthy would be the PvP packs they sell for each campaign, for the same cost as the campaign. These unlock all skills from that campaign, including all elites and gives you PvP character slots. You can skip the PvE altogether if it's not your thing, and just get going in the many, many versions of PvP play Guild Wars offers.
For those who may not know, Guild Wars is a rather huge MMORPG with no monthly fees. It has a fairly low learning curve and, comes recomended by me. :)
They (ArenaNet, the devs) release a new campaign every so often and add new and interesting professions(all GW chars are human-based, there's no choosing "race") and game-play styles. They just added "Heroes" with the last campaign. They're like henchies you have greater control over, including choosing secondary profession and skills.
Go try it! There's a free demo that lets you play like 14 hours or something like that!

What's the point of playing then ?

[Ihlosi]

, 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.

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 ?

Re:What's the point of playing then ?

[Bastian]

I don't think that's exactly what the author is talking about. I think the point he was trying (and, admittedly, not really succeeding) to get across is the way pacing is done in most RPGs. It's the same system that has been happening on console RPGs since Dragon Warrior came out 20 years ago - the level grind.

The problem isn't the leveling, it's the grinding. In most CRPGs, the game play (as I see it) goes like so:
Walk into a maze whose primary purpose is to force you to do a lot of exploring (read: walking around aimlessly) so that you have to fight a whole lot of random encounters with puny little enemies. Fighting in these random encounters is more or less mindless, because they're puny and their real purpose isn't to present a challenge so much as to level your party up. This makes you powerful enough to go on to the next maze. . .

The problem with this mechanic is that it's tedious, repetetive, and boring; and that it isn't necessary. In most any CRPG, you could easily cut out all the random encounters, get rid of the mazes (which serve no purpose without the random encounters), and make the difficulty jump between bosses smaller (since we're not level grinding anymore) and have the exact same game except that it really does only take a few hours to complete instead of weeks of your life. The story (the core of an RPG like this) would be the same.

FFVII, which I spent months working through, could probably be cut down to a weekend's worth of playing with all the fluff cut out.

Contrast this with Fallout, which manages to change the whole feel of the game with only a little tweaking to the basic idea of the game. The mazes aren't nearly so large (barely even worth calling mazes, really), random encounters only happen on the map and there aren't nearly as many of them, battles are harder, and the whole battle system is more interesting since it takes actual thought rather than being something you handle by hitting the X button repeatedly while chugging a Mountain Dew and staring out the window. Yeah, you still have to level to get through the game, but leveling doesn't require grinding.

Personally, I'd like to see an RPG that trims the fat even more than Fallout did, but at least it's a start.

What is he talking about

[nsanders]

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!

Re:Baldur's Gate and NWN

[servognome]

They both were engrossing from the start

But they both still started you off as a loser. You spend hours fighting rats, getting lost books, and trying not to off noober. What the author points to is the KOTOR "dude where's my lightsaber" problem. Most RPGs start you off unimaginatively at the absolute lowest level, so you get a sense of progression.

Re:Baldur's Gate and NWN

[PFI_Optix]

Blame DnD for that. They're trying to compress into a single gameplay experience what DnD players may see across several campaigns. They follow the pattern of creating a character and pushing through the early levels so that the character has a more "natural" development. Rather than choosing all your high-end abilities right away, you start with less and discover new ones, integrating them into your gameplay.

Titan Quest used the storyline to facilitate this quite well. You kind of stumble into the action, and in doing a few small things to help people out you find yourself more and more involved in the plot. And that's just a Diablo clone ARPG.

I don't think starting from the bottom is a bad thing. It forces a player to learn to use all the aspects of a character than that just powering through with high-level abilities.

A good way to adjust for this is to allow the player to modify their character somewhat during the creation process. Put a "level up" button right there, and every time it's clicked have them select abilities and attributes like they normally would. Want to start as a level 10? Just click through nine levels and start.

Re:Ultima Underworld

[twistedsymphony]

I don't think it would be beyond the realm of possibility to have an RPG start your off with some complex task requiring some familiarity, if you succeed you can proceed from there, if you fail you get knocked into some scenario where you have to build yourself up from the dumb dumb status.

Think of Oblivion... maybe you were half way through the ranks in the thieves guild when you start and you get a decent mission, if you fail (get caught) you're thrown in jail and the game starts with you killing rats (training). But if you succeed you keep playing from that point on... and the main quest would kick off in some other scenario. I'm sure you could apply the same thing to any number of other games.

Re:Baldur's Gate and NWN

[Kjella]

But they both still started you off as a loser. You spend hours fighting rats, getting lost books, and trying not to off noober. What the author points to is the KOTOR "dude where's my lightsaber" problem. Most RPGs start you off unimaginatively at the absolute lowest level, so you get a sense of progression.

Well, if you start out killing übermonsters, what's the end game like? Oh yeah, another zombie... except now it's a SUPERzombie. Besides if you take a game like NWN, how long is it until you shoot missiles of magic, shoot flames from your hand and such? What do you expect, some kind of doomsday spell at lvl1? It's an RPG, it's not supposed to be a FPS skill game so you're "supposed to" win the battles. That means you need story and progression. If I'm swinging the same damn sword just like I did when the game started, that's boring as all hell.

Re:Baldur's Gate and NWN

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

Most RPGs start you off unimaginatively at the absolute lowest level, so you get a sense of progression. Isn't that kind of the point though? Much of the fun of an RPG is the progression and the ability to choose how you progress. If you started off as a level 100 uber-arch-mage with a +50 staff of insta-death and just spent most of the game trampling on underlings and occasionally fighting a main enemy who puts up a fight it wouldn't really be appealing to what most people want from an RPG. Sure, it could be an OK game if done right, but it would lack much of what people want from an RPG. A lot of the fun comes from building up from nothing into a self-made super-powerful being of your design and improving your inventory as you go. While the start of the game might not have the fun of being able to put up a good fight you instead get a decent storyline (hopefully) that keeps things interesting and makes you want to keep going. That's why BG and games like it work - you might be a piss-ant at the start but you get a good story from beginning to end.

Re:Oblivion

[beavis88]

Or enjoyed it a little less, as the case may be. What's the point of advancement if everything else advances at the exact same rate?

Wait, that's not right...

[alisson]

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 >:(

Re:Oblivion

[WiPEOUT]

People enjoyed it so much less that the most popular mods for the game are those like Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul, which at it's core is about making it so the Level 1 newbie can't realistically expect to face off against the mightiest beings in the world and expect to live for longer than a second. It brings back the sense of awe and underlying fear that make the world seem more alive, as well as the sense of accomplishment when you finally do gain enough experience for your hero to hand that boss it's arse on a platter.

Re:Baldur's Gate and NWN

[krotkruton]

I can see how a lot of people might not like that, but I think that is exactly why people who enjoy RPGs play them. That's why I play them at least. If I find a flash game online that lets me build levels and get stronger (remember Odell Down Under? where you're a fish that grows bigger?), I'll play for a couple hours. I enjoy that kind of thing. I think that they put franchise mode in sports games for people like me. We like the progression. I think the more important points of the article were the ones talking about the tedium of how to progress. His FFXII example was right on the mark. I played FFXII for 127 hours before I finally gave up trying to complete it and just beat it. I bet that the majority of that time was spent walking. A little bit of walking is fine, but when it takes 30 minutes to get somewhere (because it just takes that long to move, not because it's a challenge), that's pretty damn frustrating. I do agree with you about the "getting lost books" part, because it seems like so many quests in games, especially MMORPGs, are just "go here, kill this, pick up item, return".

As for the "Most RPGs start you off unimaginatively at the absolute lowest level" statement, that's really not fair, and I don't think it's true. One reason, assuming that a game involves gaining levels, you have to start at some level. Regardless of what that level is, it's the absolute lowest level. I mean, you can't start at a higher level or else that would be the new absolute lowest level. Another reason looks at it from a different perspective in that if you take any game, its reasonable to say that the character could have started off weaker. By that I mean that given any first character with some starting abilities and statistics, you can always make those abilities weaker, even if you have to go into negative values, so you never start at the absolute lowest level. From those reasons, I think that either every game must start at the absolute lowest level, so the absolute lowest level is meaningless, or you can always start at a lower level, so there is no absolute lowest level.

Re:Baldur's Gate and NWN

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the point is that the end game might be about puzzles or role playing or story or character interaction instead of hack and slash. "Progression" doesn't have to mean "better weapons and spells".

Re:Baldur's Gate and NWN

[JimDaGeek]

AMEN brother! I am a little older (34) than the typical gamer. However, I love me some good RPG. I personally hate how many RPG games have morphed into an action game to keep the kiddies happy.

I want a turn-based or phased combat RPG where I can plan my battles. I want at least 4 characters that I can build up from wimps to uber-fighters/mages/clerics/etc. I want to find and fight for tons of magical items and abilities. The last thing I want in an RPG is a click-feast. There is nothing worse in an RPG (IMO) than having to click like a freak to win a fight. I WANT TO PLAN MY COMBAT.

Sadly, I have not seen a good, modernized, old-school RPG in some time.

Some notes from the author.

[spidweb]

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.

Re:Baldur's Gate and NWN

[nuzak]

> it seems like so many quests in games, especially MMORPGs, are just "go here, kill this, pick up item, return".

Beowulf: Kill the end-boss.

The Iliad: Fetch Helen. Kill lots of Trojans first. Lots of long speech cutscenes.

The Labors of Hercules: Lots and lots of fetch quests.

The Ring Cycle: Fedex quest, total Lotr ripoff.

Wizardry 8

[thedoe]

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.

Re:Baldur's Gate and NWN

[MS-06FZ]

> it seems like so many quests in games, especially MMORPGs, are just "go here, kill this, pick up item, return".

Beowulf: Kill the end-boss.

The Iliad: Fetch Helen. Kill lots of Trojans first. Lots of long speech cutscenes.

The Labors of Hercules: Lots and lots of fetch quests.

The Ring Cycle: Fedex quest, total Lotr ripoff. The Hobbit: Go there and back again.

Re:Baldur's Gate and NWN

[patiodragon]

"I personally hate how many RPG games have morphed into an action game to keep the kiddies happy."

I'm no gamer, but what on earth would you expect from a Rocket Propelled Grenade game, anyways?

Re:Baldur's Gate and NWN

[joeljkp]

Games usually start out easy and get harder as they progress, right?

What about starting you out as an uber-warlock who can destroy everything, but with some strange illness that makes you weaker and weaker as the game goes on. At the end, you finish as a feeble level-1 equivalent who needs to use some wit to get by.

Re:Baldur's Gate and NWN

[amuro98]

What you want is a strategy game, not a straight up RPG.

Honestly, get a PS2 and track down a copy of Disgaea 1 or 2, perhaps the best strategy RPGs out there. You control Laharl, a demon prince whose father has just passed away. Now Laharl has to prove that he has what it takes to be the King of the underworld. Along with him is his childhood friend and servant, Etna, who controls an army of Prinnies - psychotic plushie penguins which will explode if you throw them (D00d!), and Flonne, an angel sent to the underworld to find out what happend to the demon king.

You have a couple of special characters, such as Laharl around which the story revolves, but you'll have to also create an army from wizards, clerics, fighters, etc. You can even capture enemy monsters, and later add them to your army! Each class has its own skills or spells that it can learn. Additional classes will become available as your characters progress. You can change classes as well, so if you want your lvl.10 fighter to start learning to be a cleric, so be it. He'll start off at lvl.1 but retain any skills he may have already learned. You can have something like 200 characters in your army, though you'll only be able to put 10-15 on the field at any time (memory's a bit fuzzy on the numbers.)

Combat is your standard square grid, with different types of terrain influencing attack/defense. You dispatch your army through a portal on the field where the various enemies are scattered. There's a lot of factors to be considered, and when you throw in the puzzle-like color-grid system, it can get pretty complicated.

In addition to the campaign scenarios you will need to win in order to move the story forward, you can venture inside any item or weapon in a series of random battlefields. Clearing these battles will increase the power of that item.

How many DnD campaigns started at level 1?

[scgops]

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.

Re:How many DnD campaigns started at level 1?

[feepness]

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.

One of my favorite campaigns I ever made up had me killing all the players one by one so they could be recruited by a demon in hell -- and of course "earn" their lives back with an appropriate task. I didn't even have anything written out for it. I just nailed them all for no good reason within the first fifteen minutes. ;)

God that was fun.

Re:How many DnD campaigns started at level 1?

[Fred_A]

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.

Every DM knows that the dice are only there to make noises. You pick numbers that make the game interesting, not numbers that are random. That's why there's a DM. Otherwise you might as well pick one of those multiple choice books.

Re:Baldur's Gate and NWN

[Lemmy Caution]

Much modern heroic fantasy acts as a compensatory adolescent power fantasy - particularly in video games. From dweeb to badass in 50 short hours of play is the payoff. That's fine and well for adolescents (whether chronologically or developmentally) but there are those of us who want something else - protagonists who have desires and goals within limitations. You'll notice how mature literature is really about typical, flawed limited people, not about prodigies and the super-powered.

The fact that there is so little real tragedy left in art of any kind - especially in games - is another problem. Shadow of the Colossus gets pretty close, but the tragic sense of life is generally dwindling, at least in American culture.

Nah, blame the monomyth

[Moraelin]

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