Decline Shit in RPGs that piss you off

[Gangrelrumbler]

Another thing I hate: lazy writing. Like when there's an order and it's called The Order. Or anytime the enemy is an Ancient Evil that has no personality or motivation and is just mindlessly destroying shit for no reason. How is it that there's all these programmers and artists putting real effort into the game for months on end, while the writers just scribble some shit on a napkin and call it a day?

Very much this. I just hate it when a game has no good idea or anything creative about it. This is my mine gripe about Original Sin, everything is so painfully generic, bland and uninteresting that I have no desire to replay it despite the great combat system. Can't they at least fucking try? Western RPG devs are even lazier than harem manga, and VN authors. They usually try to makes sure that there's at least one thing that makes their garbage stand-out from the crowd.

 

[gaussgunner]

Very much this. I just hate it when a game has no good idea or anything creative about it. This is my mine gripe about Original Sin, everything is so painfully generic, bland and uninteresting that I have no desire to replay it despite the great combat system. Can't they at least fucking try? Western RPG devs are even lazier than harem manga, and VN authors. They usually try to makes sure that there's at least one thing that makes their garbage stand-out from the crowd.

Worse, they recycled a lot of bad writing and concepts straight out of Divine Divinity. They just took Zombie Jake and transplanted him from a forest village in DD to the coastal city of Cyseal decades earlier, same exact story, slightly extended.

They recycled some really dumb shit, like those puzzles where you have to find a book conveniently located nearby, memorize 5 pages of bullshit (like paraphrased biblical parables, not even lore dumps), and pass a quiz on it.

I wonder if they re-recycled the lyrics from "Land of Confusion". I didn't finish D:OS so I can't definitively say they didn't.

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

Very much this. I just hate it when a game has no good idea or anything creative about it. This is my mine gripe about Original Sin, everything is so painfully generic, bland and uninteresting that I have no desire to replay it despite the great combat system. Can't they at least fucking try? Western RPG devs are even lazier than harem manga, and VN authors. They usually try to makes sure that there's at least one thing that makes their garbage stand-out from the crowd.

Worse, they recycled a lot of bad writing and concepts straight out of Divine Divinity. They just took Zombie Jake and transplanted him from a forest village in DD to the coastal city of Cyseal decades earlier, same exact story, slightly extended.

They recycled some really dumb shit, like those puzzles where you have to find a book conveniently located nearby, memorize 5 pages of bullshit (like paraphrased biblical parables, not even lore dumps), and pass a quiz on it.

I wonder if they re-recycled the lyrics from "Land of Confusion". I didn't finish D:OS so I can't definitively say they didn't.

Zombie Jack wasn't bad since he was at least somewhat memorable. It's not like Larian lacks talent or means to do so. Dragon Commander had much better setting and a slightly interesting take on fantasy races. Then instead of building-up upon this Larian devolved back to Divine Divinity levels.

 

[Blappole]

I honestly don't get the hate about crafting, it's not like I enjoy getting my inventory cluttered with all kinds of items that are only useable in crafting and whatnot, but I do enjoy the actual making of items, potions and food.

 

[Zombra]

I honestly don't get the hate about crafting, it's not like I enjoy getting my inventory cluttered with all kinds of items that are only useable in crafting and whatnot, but I do enjoy the actual making of items, potions and food.

Can you have one without the other?

 

[undecaf]

Can you have one without the other?

Design (and probably setting) dependent, but yes you can. The parts/ingredients don't necessarily need to be collected by hand from random boxes and ground or stored in your pockets.

 

[Delterius]

I honestly don't get the hate about crafting, it's not like I enjoy getting my inventory cluttered with all kinds of items that are only useable in crafting and whatnot, but I do enjoy the actual making of items, potions and food.

Most RPGs add Crafting as something completely distinct from the character system. Nobody complains about Crafting in Arcanum, for an example, since its the game that allows you to be a mad scientist who steampunks his way to the end.

 

[Jarmaro]

I don't get Codex hate on crafting, the problem is bad implementation, not crafting itself. I don't remember anyone telling that Gothic 2 would be better without runes, smithing and alchemy

 

[Iznaliu]

I honestly don't get the hate about crafting, it's not like I enjoy getting my inventory cluttered with all kinds of items that are only useable in crafting and whatnot, but I do enjoy the actual making of items, potions and food.

A lot of games have a ingredients filter.

 

[Smashing Axe]

Reaching an ending where you ascend to something greater and not being given an opportunity to play it out before the credits. Every RPG I can think of does this, with the exception of one of the endings of NWN2's campaign, Mysteries of Westgate. In it you become a vampire and need to wipe-out an opposing faction utilising your new vampiric abilities. It's really nice to have an expanded powerset and scripted scenes that account for your newly acquired weaknesses and plays very differently to the rest of the game prior. It drives home that you're a vampire now and makes the ending much better for an otherwise fairly mediocre game.

 

[Serious_Business]

Rpgs are shitty games with bad systems most of the time. That's what pisses me off about them. What makes them so bad is that they usually are not tight tactically or strategically at all. Rpgs are easy games, they never require you to optimize your play. You can optimize, but it's usually overkill - not necessary at all to win the game. All it will do for you is usually save you time in shitty trash encounters. Rpgs are about "progression", but this progression is not there to allow you to face greater and greater tactical challenges - it's just there to give you a feeling of progression in itself. But this doesn't mean anything. All the options you unlock mean nothing if you don't need them, and desperately so.

I'm saying all this on the assumption that rpgs are essentially war games - which they usually are in the end. Getting old and jaded, so the idea of builds for rp doesn't mean anything to me anymore. AoD tried it, it was interesting, but it failed. And Fallout - well no, Fallout has too many empty skills to allow "role-playing". This all doesn't mean anything because roleplay is about human interaction in the end, not systems interaction. And if you're going to have systems interaction, you need it to be complex, stimulating ; it needs to provide meaningful option, rules to master, challenges to overcome. Rpgs just fail to do that. The biggest proof the failure is the narrative presentation that they adopt - it's all there to make you forget that you're playing an immersive shitty game. But the shit is still there. I would know, I ate so much of it

 

[anvi]

Rpgs are shitty games with bad systems most of the time. That's what pisses me off about them. What makes them so bad is that they usually are not tight tactically or strategically at all. Rpgs are easy games, they never require you to optimize your play.

I agree. That's why I play EverQuest, the only one where optimizing what you do really matters.

 

[SwiftCrack]

Pointless NPCs. If the NPC isn't memorable in any way or form, then it isn't even needed or it isn't written properly.

It's also why merchants are some of the NPCs I hate the most. They have no personality at all for the most part, and even those who do show some modicum of personality still revert to generic lines when trading.

Planescape: Torment got rid of this completely.

Never even thought about this but damn is it true.

At least some Baldur's Gate merchants had a minor slice of personality. (Ribald, Thalantyr, etc.)

 

[miles teg]

I hate when games with more than a town give you the possibility to go back and visit a previous "cleared" city but gives you no incentive to do so. In the worst case scenario NPCs don't even get dialogue updates regarding the plotline, so they still tell you "watch out, the next town has a big villain", even when you have already killed him.

One of the reason I loved the first witcher is that once you get to the noble part of vizima, some quest still bring you to old vizima and npcs there have a new schedule and updated dialogs. Too bad this was done more due to necessity (low budget) rather than design...

 

[miles teg]

And I also hate games where you have 50 skills to choose from, but 40 are useless, 2 are op and allow you to break the game and the other 8 are only picked if you haven't read a guide that tells you which of the skills are op.

 

[Gepeu]

I hate flavor filler background content that has no relevancy whatsoever or cannot be interacted with in any way. Eg. Witcher 3.

 

[Beastro]

I agree. That's why I play EverQuest, the only one where optimizing what you do really matters.

As much this site could demonize it for being an MMO, there was a very clear effect originally playing a class and finding that you dumped your spendable points into the wrong stats. It came to the point where people were looked on as very very weird for picking human pure caster given the very clear benefits other races had over them even if it simply came to the fact that humans started out with as much as 20-30 less intelligence as others which was a massive margin once got level 40 or higher.

I think a big problem with the game is that they never expected to be so big and so never properly planned out the power arches characters would undergo, so by the second expansion stats exploded so much they did things like kill most PvP on PvP servers as resists reached levels of being far too high (and the developers damns given about PvP servers ran out).

 

[Master]

Rpgs are shitty games with bad systems most of the time. That's what pisses me off about them. What makes them so bad is that they usually are not tight tactically or strategically at all. Rpgs are easy games, they never require you to optimize your play.

Thats what mods are for. Rpgs - modders will fix them.

 

[V_K]

I honestly don't get the hate about crafting, it's not like I enjoy getting my inventory cluttered with all kinds of items that are only useable in crafting and whatnot, but I do enjoy the actual making of items, potions and food.

I think the problem is not with crafting per se (no one ever complains about alchemy systems in games) but specifically with crafting equipment. And the problem is that it makes looting much less rewarding - instead of an Awesome Artefact of Awesomeness, you get a pile of junk that may or may not be enough to make an Awesome Artefact of Awesomeness (and if not, you're forced to search every nook and cranny for the missing components). It doesn't really add anything gameplay-wise other than stretching the time by doing chores. And then there's the question of balance, because either you can't craft anything better than what you can buy or loot, and then crafting becomes pointless, or you can, and then crafting becomes a must.

 

[Beastro]

Rpgs are shitty games with bad systems most of the time. That's what pisses me off about them. What makes them so bad is that they usually are not tight tactically or strategically at all. Rpgs are easy games, they never require you to optimize your play.

Thats what mods are for. Rpgs - modders will fix them.

That is, at best, making the best of a bad situation.

At worst it's helping maintain one far beyond what should be allowed.

 

[Master]

I see what you mean but sometimes modders are usefull, like when the game is good in the first place. So you can have GMDX for DX or 1.13 for JA2. Yes they mod Bethesda too but thats just collateral damage.

 

[Beastro]

Yes they mod Bethesda too but thats just collateral damage.

Yup. CA and ETW is when that fact hit me.

 

[anvi]

I agree. That's why I play EverQuest, the only one where optimizing what you do really matters.

As much this site could demonize it for being an MMO, there was a very clear effect originally playing a class and finding that you dumped your spendable points into the wrong stats. It came to the point where people were looked on as very very weird for picking human pure caster given the very clear benefits other races had over them even if it simply came to the fact that humans started out with as much as 20-30 less intelligence as others which was a massive margin once got level 40 or higher.

I think a big problem with the game is that they never expected to be so big and so never properly planned out the power arches characters would undergo, so by the second expansion stats exploded so much they did things like kill most PvP on PvP servers as resists reached levels of being far too high (and the developers damns given about PvP servers ran out).

Yeah although I was mostly thinking about how tight mana was, and if you just nuke everything you run out of mana and don't have any left for something far more important, like a heal as a druid, or an evac as a wiz, or a snare as a necro, etc. I remember clerics getting shouted at for casting their fast heal on a big raid fight because it was not efficient mana usage.

 

[Beastro]

I agree. That's why I play EverQuest, the only one where optimizing what you do really matters.

As much this site could demonize it for being an MMO, there was a very clear effect originally playing a class and finding that you dumped your spendable points into the wrong stats. It came to the point where people were looked on as very very weird for picking human pure caster given the very clear benefits other races had over them even if it simply came to the fact that humans started out with as much as 20-30 less intelligence as others which was a massive margin once got level 40 or higher.

I think a big problem with the game is that they never expected to be so big and so never properly planned out the power arches characters would undergo, so by the second expansion stats exploded so much they did things like kill most PvP on PvP servers as resists reached levels of being far too high (and the developers damns given about PvP servers ran out).

Yeah although I was mostly thinking about how tight mana was, and if you just nuke everything you run out of mana and don't have any left for something far more important, like a heal as a druid, or an evac as a wiz, or a snare as a necro, etc. I remember clerics getting shouted at for casting their fast heal on a big raid fight because it was not efficient mana usage.

Even now there's stuff like that given the latest bug where the Necro pet heal doesn't work. A buddy of mine who solos stuff to sell to then sell PP for RL money is finding it a challenge trying to do some content with his limited means fo healing his pet without that spell and would have been impossible on Phinny had GoD not come out and brought with it the AA that allows pets to benefit from group buffs (so the group life leech dot heals it too).

 

[B0rt]

A buddy of mine who solos stuff to sell to then sell PP for RL money

maybe you shouldn't befriend people that are human garbage?