While I share your opinion regarding nature of (c)RPG's there is still point of regarding difficulty levels where you didn't answered. The thing is, I don't think I couldn't beaten all the games I have played if I had used hardest difficulty level. Some of them were most likely turned to either unbeatable or too tedious.The problem here, imo isn't necessarily bad mechanics, but filler combat or player decision favouring combat option.
These are player choices in character / party building and what kind of approach player decides to take. Without these I don't really know if game could be classified as RPG but action / adventure / dungeon crawler.
Choices in character creation are good, the problem is that with no option to back-down on bad decisions you can't really push the player character building skills to the limit, because no sane dev will force people with shitty builds to restart the game after clocking-in 20 hours. And since it's hard to make a good character without having much experience it means that encounters and challenge are catered to mediocre builds, which hurts the gameplay IMO. I'm not saying that the gameplay have to evolve but people who accept making a character once and going through 60+ hours game with it should stop complaining about shitty encounters and easy bossed.
In that regard I agree with Lurker King. If people don't want to compromise they should just shut the fuck up.
Regarding developers, I guess both, bottom and top 1% of players are groups which creates a problem with adjusting different difficulty levels. I certainly feel like today's 'normal' is what used to be 'medium' in the past. According to some statistic I read, Steam or something, only 30% of players ever complete their games, they are in difficult position considering making truly challenging games. Then I have heard lot of good things about Dark Souls, so perhaps it's just finding the right audience.
What I find myself sometimes pondering is evolution of cRPG's. While trying to solve problem with missing DM and competing with other games, cRPG's indeed borrowed elements from adventure games, shooters and strategy games. Maybe somewhere focus was lost?Nope, RPG's existed before any of those genres, though in P'n'P format.
Yes, these games are also very different from their computer counterparts. I was under impression that we are talking about computer RPGs. If we are talking about tabletop games, the let me please take back everyone what I've said. Every fault listed in this thread (and every other thread similar to this) can be fixed by having a competent DM who will simply alter his adventures to suit the current party. There is no game in existence with better gameplay, because what can beat creating a great story with a bunch of friends. Everything ever said here is stupid and useless, we should all just stop talking.
Would it really be that difficult to adjust difficulty levels so, that while novice player while exploring a cave encounters few Kobolds with short swords, hardcore player encounters Drow priestess accompanied with couple of Driders. Well, NPC's could be anything that fit the settings, but the two groups offer very different kind of challenge. First is low hp and low damage, which is melee, second can seriously fuck up explorers day with spells and ranged weapons and status effects (buffs and debuffs). The thing is, issues with combat and challege may be that it's too often tried to solve with 100 hp Kobolds, which makes combat just tedious, even there could be different kind of monsters, with different kind of tactical challenge, yet enemies wouldn't need to be bullet sponges.
Last edited: