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Story is more important than combat in rpgs

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.

Yes, it's literally skippable.

There is literally a button you can press to skip through dialogue lines, and a button to skip cutscenes in most games.

Literally.

You can't skip events. You can ignore a story but you can't skip it.

What if the events are made up of gameplay and you can skip all the fluff around it?

Let's take an RTS game that tells its story in cutscenes, and the missions are focused on the strategy part, giving you scenarios that are might be based on the story but the player doesn't need to pay attention to the story in order to understand the scenarios.

You can skip all the between-mission briefings and cutscenes in Age of Empires 2 and Star Craft, for example.

You can skip all the mission briefings in Thief, for example.

Sure, the levels will still be part of the story, but the player can treat them just as pure gameplay scenarios. If he skips all the story bits he probably won't even know wtf is actually going on.

In some RPGs you can easily just go for whatever dialogue option says "yeah I'll do the quest", without paying attention to what is said other than the quest goal (go there, do X). That way you effectively skip the story.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.

Yes, it's literally skippable.

There is literally a button you can press to skip through dialogue lines, and a button to skip cutscenes in most games.

Literally.

You can't skip events. You can ignore a story but you can't skip it.

What if the events are made up of gameplay and you can skip all the fluff around it?

Let's take an RTS game that tells its story in cutscenes, and the missions are focused on the strategy part, giving you scenarios that are might be based on the story but the player doesn't need to pay attention to the story in order to understand the scenarios.

You can skip all the between-mission briefings and cutscenes in Age of Empires 2 and Star Craft, for example.

You can skip all the mission briefings in Thief, for example.

Sure, the levels will still be part of the story, but the player can treat them just as pure gameplay scenarios. If he skips all the story bits he probably won't even know wtf is actually going on.

In some RPGs you can easily just go for whatever dialogue option says "yeah I'll do the quest", without paying attention to what is said other than the quest goal (go there, do X). That way you effectively skip the story.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
He means you can skip cutscenes. You can't skip story unless you uninstall the game. Frank just has a low IQ which is why he likes such simple shit like Thief.

Says the guy who likes NWN, one of the mechanically worst RPGs in the history of computer games, while thinking Arcanum and Thief are shit :lol:
 

anvi

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Tell me about these 'mechanics' and why it makes it terrible? The only thing I like about NWN is the thing you haven't even played.
 

zwanzig_zwoelf

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Agreed.

I remember dragging my dead comrades from the depths of the dungeon in Wizardry 1 only to get ambushed by a tranny that proceeded to talk about about toxic masculinity, cisgendered scum and male fantasies for 30 minutes straight.

It scored a critical hit and my remaining party members killed themselves and I had to create a party of women to romance the priests and let them revive them at a discount.

10/10 gud story, would play again.
 
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Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath
Story is more important than combat in rpgs
08-11-Trump-Wrong.jpg
 

OldNorseSaga

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There's a 3D stealth adventure game called Ghost of a Tale which has no combat, yet it's awesome in gameplay.

You basically explore the dungeon prison where you need to sneak or distract guards or just plain outrun them, trick guards into thinking you're a guard, you can also trick two mices that you are a legendary thief. You have some quests, xp & can only save by talking to people, hiding (plently savespots) or sleeping. You collect xp by collecting items & completing various quests, as well as picking right dialogue options during "singing" times. Not to mention you do have health/stamina which is same.
There's only two timers in the whole game.


Yes, main thing in this game is story, but I love this game not because of story, which is awesome, but because of awesome game. After all, if I want good story, I would read a novel, not play a game.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Tell me about these 'mechanics' and why it makes it terrible? The only thing I like about NWN is the thing you haven't even played.

Because you apparently seem to have a bad memory:

NWN's systems are so terrible, even the best dungeon design doesn't manage to elevate it beyond "ok". I've played a couple of high quality user-made NWN mods, and even they are just "ok" becuase the underlying mechanics are so bad.

No control over your companions in a D&D 3E game, which isn't a good system for soloing. Combat is extremely slow and therefore tedious. Everything is extremely slow - resting isn't like in the Infinity Engine games where you click a button, screen goes black for half a second, 6 hours have passed. You need to stare at a progress bar for 10 seconds. Lockpicking and trap disarming is the same: look at a progress bar getting filled slowly. This makes any trap-filled dungeons a chore to go through since you'll do a lot of sitting there and waiting for bars to fill. Yawn.

NWN just screwed up all the basics of gameplay, it's almost as if everything is intentionally designed to be as boring and tedious as possible.
 

DavidBVal

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Arcanum, PST, Fallout, Darklands have unsatisfying or somehow limited combat compared to truly glorious combat games like ToEE or Gold Box. Yet those games are (rightly) considered among the best. Is it because these games have a great story and story trumps all else?

That seems to be the OPs thesis, but I disagree.

It is not the story, it is the setting, the mechanics (including combat), the exploration and how those parts connect to each other. A great setting without connection to mechanics or exploration will result in loredump, for instance. In Arcanum, for over half of the game the "story" really lacks any significance; you witness someone being killed, you more or less linearly follow clues and some guys want to kill you, and for a long time it really takes you nowhere; yet the game grabs you from the start because of how the setting is interwoven with the mechanics and the characters and choices. the key here is, everything must be connected, when it isn't, it falls apart and it is much better to just go with a very simple story that doesn't get in the way.
 

anvi

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Tell me about these 'mechanics' and why it makes it terrible? The only thing I like about NWN is the thing you haven't even played.

Because you apparently seem to have a bad memory:

NWN's systems are so terrible, even the best dungeon design doesn't manage to elevate it beyond "ok". I've played a couple of high quality user-made NWN mods, and even they are just "ok" becuase the underlying mechanics are so bad.

No control over your companions in a D&D 3E game, which isn't a good system for soloing. Combat is extremely slow and therefore tedious. Everything is extremely slow - resting isn't like in the Infinity Engine games where you click a button, screen goes black for half a second, 6 hours have passed. You need to stare at a progress bar for 10 seconds. Lockpicking and trap disarming is the same: look at a progress bar getting filled slowly. This makes any trap-filled dungeons a chore to go through since you'll do a lot of sitting there and waiting for bars to fill. Yawn.

NWN just screwed up all the basics of gameplay, it's almost as if everything is intentionally designed to be as boring and tedious as possible.
You talk about 'mechanics' like you have some deep point of view when really all you have to say is you don't like waiting for stuff. I bet the main reason is that you rest after every fight because you are a dumb shit.
 

ultra loser

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When you have bad story but good combat, game is not good. But when you have good story and bad combat, game can be enjoyable. So having good story is paramount in making good rpg.

Having a good engaging story keep you interested in the game. What is the point of having good combat in lousy driven story? One can argue that in almost all rpgs stories are lousy so all that left is good combat. Those people identify themselves as combatfags.
All RPGs have shitty boring combat, if it was good like DMC or 2D Castlevanias they wouldn't be rpgs but action games.
So yes, story is the most important part of an RPG.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Tell me about these 'mechanics' and why it makes it terrible? The only thing I like about NWN is the thing you haven't even played.

Because you apparently seem to have a bad memory:

NWN's systems are so terrible, even the best dungeon design doesn't manage to elevate it beyond "ok". I've played a couple of high quality user-made NWN mods, and even they are just "ok" becuase the underlying mechanics are so bad.

No control over your companions in a D&D 3E game, which isn't a good system for soloing. Combat is extremely slow and therefore tedious. Everything is extremely slow - resting isn't like in the Infinity Engine games where you click a button, screen goes black for half a second, 6 hours have passed. You need to stare at a progress bar for 10 seconds. Lockpicking and trap disarming is the same: look at a progress bar getting filled slowly. This makes any trap-filled dungeons a chore to go through since you'll do a lot of sitting there and waiting for bars to fill. Yawn.

NWN just screwed up all the basics of gameplay, it's almost as if everything is intentionally designed to be as boring and tedious as possible.
You talk about 'mechanics' like you have some deep point of view when really all you have to say is you don't like waiting for stuff. I bet the main reason is that you rest after every fight because you are a dumb shit.

Resting isn't even the worst because there's a mod that makes it go almost instanty (why this has to be a mod though and not in the game from the start like, I dunno, the fucking Infinity Engine games Bioware made before that), but unlocking locked doors and disarming traps can get really tedious really quickly, and there's no mod to speed that up. Yes, speedhacks exists, but if you need to use mods and hacks to make a mechanic bearable, it's probably just shit design.

Also combat is utterly shit, not just because of its slowness (has to be one of the slowest RtwP games I ever played), but also because you have no control over your party members beyond giving some basic orders, and even then they usually act like idiots and get themselves killed, removing any tactics the game could have had. There's just nothing fun at all about the way the basic dungeon crawling mechanics work: combat and dealing with locks and traps.

It's the worst D&D cRPG ever made. Gold Box, ToEE, Dark Sun, PST, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, even NWN2 are better than NWN in every way.
 

anvi

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Sounds like you just made bad class choices. As a wizzy my pet could trigger all the traps, and I could unlock everything with a spell, and the high level combat was awesome. I bet you didn't even get that far. And you also didn't play the expansion which was about 100 times better.

If you play RPGs as a melee, you are a dumb shit. No wonder you like Thief, you get to bonk stuff on the head with no depth or challenge. That's about your level.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I played several user-made modules, even, yet still the shit way the game handled and the lack of party control made it a chore to play through, even in well-designed dungeons.

When the core gameplay feels more like an annoying obstacle than a fun challenge, the game is shit.
 

mfkndggrfll

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Yes, it's literally skippable.

There is literally a button you can press to skip through dialogue lines, and a button to skip cutscenes in most games.

Literally.

You can't skip events. You can ignore a story but you can't skip it.

In some RPGs you can easily just go for whatever dialogue option says "yeah I'll do the quest", without paying attention to what is said other than the quest goal (go there, do X). That way you effectively skip the story.

In bottom tier RPGs sure.
Arcanum, PST, Fallout, Darklands have unsatisfying or somehow limited combat compared to truly glorious combat games like ToEE or Gold Box. Yet those games are (rightly) considered among the best. Is it because these games have a great story and story trumps all else?

That seems to be the OPs thesis, but I disagree.

It is not the story, it is the setting, the mechanics (including combat), the exploration and how those parts connect to each other. A great setting without connection to mechanics or exploration will result in loredump, for instance. In Arcanum, for over half of the game the "story" really lacks any significance; you witness someone being killed, you more or less linearly follow clues and some guys want to kill you, and for a long time it really takes you nowhere; yet the game grabs you from the start because of how the setting is interwoven with the mechanics and the characters and choices. the key here is, everything must be connected, when it isn't, it falls apart and it is much better to just go with a very simple story that doesn't get in the way.

Fallout's combat is actually good compared to these other examples...
 

anvi

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I played several user-made modules, even, yet still the shit way the game handled and the lack of party control made it a chore to play through, even in well-designed dungeons.

When the core gameplay feels more like an annoying obstacle than a fun challenge, the game is shit.
"even"? You didn't play the one good thing about that game, the expansion.
 

DeepOcean

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This gameplay vs story is a pointless debate as if a game would be worse if it had good combat or if it had a good story, I prefer a game that is good at both. You know, people many times claim they prefer story over gameplay, what they actually mean, they find the non-interactive part of a game with poor interaction good enough to justify the lack of good interaction. Well, if you enjoyed the non-interactive story, there is no problem in that but in terms of videogame storytelling, interaction will ALWAYS make a story better so there isn't this clear pretty cut between gameplay and story as one can be born from the other and one make the other stronger.

I like interaction, and interaction can assume the form of you using the skin of a bear spirit to create an abomination from an evil forge with thousand souls or a ton of goblins for you to fight or you forging an amulet with the souls of all you betrayed or a big ass dragon for you to beat. I think non-interaction is a failure on videogames, a TV series will have the budget to get an awesome actor, good professional writers and a game will hardly beat it, if you have poor interaction, your selling point, your strength, you are actually squandering it.

Telltale figured that out, many people prefered watching Netflix than watching their barely interactive game filled with bullshit QTE, bad face capture and low poly models with wooden animations. If you are going for videogame srtorytelling, please make the interactivity part good too, not a fan of wasting time walking with my character doing fuck all or QTEs and other similar excuse for gameplay developers sometime come up with.

Yes, sure, you can enjoy a good non-interactive storytelling on videogames but it will always be better with player agency on it.
 

Tigranes

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The Codex Law of Conservation dictates that every thread be occupied by one flaming illiterate moron

I am glad that anvi has taken one for the team
 

anvi

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The Codex Law of Conservation dictates that every thread be occupied by one flaming illiterate moron

I am glad that anvi has taken one for the team
What would make you think I am illiterate? I am the one that recommended reading books instead of trying to impose your shitty elf stories on games.
 

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