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Decline Why are RPG fans so uncommonly inept?

Do you think people are more hostile to...

  • both complexity and difficulty in RPGs than in other genres

    Votes: 20 23.8%
  • difficulty, but not complexity

    Votes: 6 7.1%
  • complexity, but not difficulty

    Votes: 12 14.3%
  • neither complexity nor difficulty - but some other related factor

    Votes: 3 3.6%
  • neither complexity nor difficulty, demands to RPGs are nothing special

    Votes: 4 4.8%
  • neither complexity nor difficulty, people are *less* hostile to these in RPGs

    Votes: 5 6.0%
  • König Kamerad

    Votes: 34 40.5%

  • Total voters
    84

octavius

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Probably because such CRPG players never played pen and paper RPGs.

I never played pen and paper RPGs before playing games like Curse of the Azure Bonds, Might&Magic 2, Dungeon Master, and Bard's Tale, and very little afterwards.
So it's not like it's a requisite.

I think the overwhelming selection of games and other entertainment today creates more of an instant gratification attitude. And people in general have less attention span, are less literate (especially boys nowadays read less), and generally have less time to devote to one single game.
 

Jamma

Novice
Joined
Jul 10, 2018
Messages
30
Difficulty in games is a measurement of how familiar the player has to be with the game mechanics. But most games don't have any real difficulty settings, they only have a setting for how long it takes to finish the game. So there's an option to increase the number of enemies and their HP, but the player doesn't have to be get better at utilizing the game mechanics, like dodging and itemization, they just have to right click for a longer amount of time as they kill the enemy.
This is something games across al genres suffer from - the redefinition of busy work as difficulty, instead of time wasting.

Most RPGs have the following difficulties:
Easy - story mode, regular mode.
Normal
Hard - Same as Normal, but it takes longer to finish the game because enemies have more hp

What RPGs should have:
Easy - you only need to know the controls to enjoy the story
Normal - you need to understand how itemization works
Hard - you also need to understand enemy weakness and how to utilize them.
Really hard - enemies also use debuffs

So each higher difficulty settings introduces new mechanics to master. If possible, it should be easy to switch between those so players wouldn't be punished for picking the wrong one for them. Sadly, almost all games in both categories fail to describe what each difficulty settings mean, so you can't tell ahead of time what kind of game you are going to play.

As an example here's Mass Effect's difficulty settings:
Mass Effect said:
  • Casual - All enemies, including bosses, are scaled down relative to the player's level. Most enemies have no special protection or immunities.
  • Normal - Bosses scaled up based on the player's level. Some enemies have special protection.
  • Veteran - Bosses and sub-bosses scaled up based on player level. Most enemies have special protection.
Naturally players who learn from those games the wrong definition of difficulty won't be able to handle difficult games.
 

Humanophage

Arcane
Joined
Dec 20, 2005
Messages
5,032
Just look at this if you want a cringe-fest (more quotes like in the OP, all from different people):
There is this thing in both P&P RPG and Computer that is known as "scaling". What that term means is you SCALE encounters BASED on the LEVEL of the party. At 2nd level encountering a demi-lich? Really? Are you ♥♥♥♥ing people high??
...
4. Could there MAYBE be some SIGN that an area you are entering is to tough for your party? Pweese?
...
I started playing AD&D in 1981 - man the game has fallen a long way.
This game could be great but there's several design flaws that prevent me from continuing the game. Combat is horribly balanced and the kingdom management failure flags are awful. I'm at the point where the troll invasion is impossible to fix and my team is too weak to kill the source of the invasion so I basically have to starter over. That's not acceptable game design.
It feels like a DM designed the encounters wanting to kill their players (that is NOT the goal of a good DM, his role is to make fun). A great example is an early encounter of your lvl 2 party involves running into a spider swarm in a cave on a fetch quest. In Pathfinder rules, spider swarms can only be hit by splash weapons. If you don't have splash damage, you'll do a lot of 0 damage to the swarm with your swords or arrows and get killed. Most players will die fighting. You were given splash flasks, you probably didn't put them in your quick slots though. So, you'll have to reload after you get team killed. That kind of design simply is not fun. You don't save scum the tabletop game.
Combat is really badly balanced and noty interesting. I started in an harsh difficulty and your character pretty much miss 50 times in a row, but when they hit they just one shot the enemies. So it feels really random. The enemies suffer from the same, so you sometimes instantly lose a fight reload and instantly win it without any strategy involved The UI is not good at all and a lot of information to make decisions are missing. Some part on the game are voiced but not others.
This game is a faithful recreation of the Pathfinder TTRPG. This is an incredibly poor decision if you want to make an enjoyable CRPG. Bluntly speaking the pathfinder rule system is bad. It is a circuitous mess of trap decisions wherein one wrong decision in your build can lead to a nonfunctional character that is fated for death and irrelevance in your party make up. Kingmaker, in its bizarre set of priorities maintains authenticity to Paizo's ivory tower design decisions to the point that all of Pathfinder's awful flaws are maintained in pristine clarity in this game for anyone to look upon. This could perhaps be overlooked if you don't mind wasting hours creating poorly optimized characters but other atavisms of the tabletop ruleset are maintained like the 'swarm' mechanic. This is a mechanic wherein the player is menaced by a swarm of monsters that can only be taken out by splash damage...or a torch. I hope you enjoy killing swarms of rats or spiders with a torch because its the only option martial classes can reliably depend on. The game also pretenses to having a stash system, but places a weight limit on your stash forcing you to manage your inventory lest you become overloaded. Oh, and we must, of course, consider the fact that the Kingmaker Module for Pathfinder that this game is based on is known to be lethal and poorly balanced often forcing DMs who wish to run it to rebalance the whole module themselves.
The story is interesting (but then that may be more kudos to Paizo, the creators of Pathfinder) but the difficulty is god awfully all over the place. I feel like I spend half my time reloading because I didn't optimize a specific build and in a shocking twist I chose NPCs based on who I found interesting.
Your party literally missing every single attack. *Typically, It's considered unusual when you actually hit something and yet every enemy appears to be the greatest swordsmen around and of course they'll never miss an a attack.* **Yes, I had it on easy too because it was much worse on just normal for some reason.** ... 8.) Random encounters that literally just destroy your party forcing you to reload because, Hey randomly dying is fun...Sometimes? I guess?
the monsters are beefed up to much larger portions then the the xp they give. ive been playing hours now and still cant find quests my level to finish for xp and everything around me is level 4 while im still level 2. level 4 mobs have 27+ strength. This is just awful, pitiful and lazy. I got this on sale and it was a total waste....so bad.
The encounters are built for optimization with hilariously overbuffed stats; "Normal" has enemies running around with significantly inflated stats over the tabletop game, and the mechanics behind those don't help either.

Basically the game is designed to be played on Easy or lower if you play the game as an actual RPG. If you're a min-max enthusiast using a mod to respec the poorly-statted companion characters, then you'll be fine on Normal+. Normal is also doable with strong-but-not-full-cheese builds if you enjoy save scumming fights repeatedly.
The game says to play higher difficulty modes require experience with CRPGs.

"Experience with CRPGs" will somehow stop me from being spam AoO and Sneak Attacked in the ♥♥♥♥ing tutorial mission over and over? I need to savescum to play harder modes? How is any of this in the vein of D&D or Fallout?

I can't imagine many people being so shameless about their poor learning abilities on a CK2 review page.
 

Silentstorm

Learned
Joined
Apr 29, 2019
Messages
885
To be fair, Paradox grand strategy games are well known for being more complicated than the average game, even the simpler games have people outright telling you to read guides and watch hour long tutorials before playing just to learn the game.

The people that would be attracted to such a thing are likely to get said games or even buy them, you don't buy a grand strategy game unless you want to look at a lot of menus and text after all.
 

Deleted Member 16721

Guest
But honestly, as I've detailed in the past, RPG players do get pissed by difficulty and complexity for some reason. Especially RNG, too. It's a combination of factors including my own theorized Skyrim Syndrome, where people expect a game as accessible as Skyrim and if it requires any brain power outside of SEE ENEMY, KILL ENEMY, NO THOUGHT NEEDED, it will disrupt them and cause them issues. Often leading to a negative Steam review or what have you. For some reason RPGs get special treatment when it comes to complexity and difficulty, people generally don't like a hard RPG unless it's a once in a blue moon type like Dark Souls or something. You will see tons of reviews on Steam for games like ELEX, Lords of Xulima and others where players just flat out don't understand the game mechanics and think the game is broken. Skyrim Syndrome, Google me.
 

cretin

Magister
Douchebag!
Joined
Apr 20, 2019
Messages
1,347
why do you think this is just "RPG players" - they're the exact same players that whinge about the game not having a win button in every other genre. Sekiro was challenging yet by far the most accessible and least obnoxious "souls" game and people were still bitching about the difficulty endlessly (or my favorite, the closeted ones who pretend that it was just "boring" and not that they couldnt tolerate the difficulty)

I remember when i used to play arma 2 and 3 and people would go to lengths to write complete fiction, just made up nonsense, about the AI, whether it was "cheating" or just had "unrealistic accuracy" (meanwhile players do things like pull off 800m headshots but an AI unit lying prone popping you in the chest from 100m is a terminator machine or something, whatever) and some people had to perform recorded experiments just to show people that the AI in fact were not cheating and did not have superhuman abilities, in fact were quite sedated in many respects. Instead of "realistic" difficulty, what these crybabies wanted was to recreate scenes from black hawk down where they do all the tacticool guy stuff while the enemy bullets are just go all around them



point being, its not any particular genre. Its the average person playing video games these days in general; they simply have a really low tolerance for difficulty of any kind. Attention spans are markedly shorter too, so learning mechanics doesn't come gently, I'm not bragging, i have trouble myself with my attention span these days. If a game doesnt spell it out quickly and simply i'm unlikely to do anything but learn by the most stubborn methods possible.
 

Chippy

Arcane
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Joined
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Messages
6,037
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
IQ is dropping in the west. We now make significantly less notable inventions than we did 100 years ago. It's kinda like the bellcurve of the Game of Thrones series.
 

Silentstorm

Learned
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Apr 29, 2019
Messages
885
Oh yeah, it's not as if technology hasn't improved at an amazingly fast rate in the last few decades and all, oh, and it's not as if there aren't various studies showing that people still read books and that there is a reason why not every library is closing.

It's not that IQ is dropping, it's just that newbies are coming in to the genre and they are probably more used to simpler games with less menus and stats, or that have a much more defined and strict set of rules and thus they aren't used to all the freedom and impact that character creation can have in a CRPG, they are noob RPG players, whether it's because they are new to the genre, they just suck at games or they don't have the time to learn how to really play CRPG's doesn't really matter, at the end they are still noobs.
 

Chippy

Arcane
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Messages
6,037
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
IQ is dropping in the west. We now make significantly less notable inventions than we did 100 years ago. It's kinda like the bellcurve of the Game of Thrones series.

Experts have found that even with the technology that's available today, we were still inventing more 100 when we just had pencils, rulers, and paper. Just look at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris - propbably a handful of guys worldwide per 10,000 - 1000,000 that could replicate work like that. Let's see if Paris manages it. Or just whacks a glass roof on top.
 

SniperHF

Arcane
Joined
Aug 22, 2014
Messages
1,110
Bioware is to blame for courting the type of crowd that actually cares about romances and all that shit.

I was gonna type out something more detailed but it's basically this. And party banter/dialog more broadly.

I don't think your average RPG is more complicated/difficult than other games (besides walking sims and what not) it's the type of player who wants to play the game that changes the reaction.
 

jf8350143

Liturgist
Joined
Apr 14, 2018
Messages
1,277
Simply being hard does not equal to challenging. When you put a level 30 boss in a level 1 area it's not challenging, it's stupid. And that's pretty much what Kingmaker do at launch. The design encounter is a total mess.

A proper challenging side content should have nice build up, some hints that if you go there unprepared, you might get butchered.

Also that game does jackshit to tell you about any of the game mechanics, so don't blame people "don't want to learn".
 
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wyes gull

Savant
Joined
Apr 20, 2017
Messages
424
RPGs are for reading dialogues, combat is just mandatory padding so the game would be at least 30 hours so it shouldn't be challenging.
I dunno why everyone has a problem with this claim. It certainly seems to echo the motivation/expectation of people coming into rpgs and those not being met are likely the reason behind the complaints- and that's not even mentioning how the sentence seems to mirror the games themselves, at least when you compare them to their predecessors.
 

coldcrow

Prophet
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Joined
Mar 6, 2009
Messages
1,650
Because, mainstream has always preferred action/reflex oriented games. And the modern RPG audience is kind of retarded?
That is BS. I loved my Streetfighter on the SNES, too. Or whatever SHMUP was the craze back then. The problem is that players forgot they were playing games and get challenged. But that has been a process and is as much a sign of current educational and cultural issues as of a decline in game-crafting. Gfx whoredom did the rest.
 

octavius

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RPGs are for reading dialogues, combat is just mandatory padding so the game would be at least 30 hours so it shouldn't be challenging.
I dunno why everyone has a problem with this claim. It certainly seems to echo the motivation/expectation of people coming into rpgs and those not being met are likely the reason behind the complaints- and that's not even mentioning how the sentence seems to mirror the games themselves, at least when you compare them to their predecessors.

The idea of playing games for the dialogue is completely alien to me. If I want to read dialogue I read a book.
 

TheGameSquid

Scholar
Joined
Aug 23, 2014
Messages
124
Specifically about Kingmaker, I am personally also rather annoyed about the amount of whining on display.

However, let me play devil's advocate for a second. I think we shouldn't ignore the reality here. The barrier to entry for Kingmaker isn't very low. Pathfinder can be a pretty daunting system, and while the game does grant you enough info on specific details, it's easy to get lost if you don't have a solid grasp of the basics of the system (which the game doesn't provide). So should players start by reading the core rulebooks first? That hardly seems like a good idea. There are many CRPGs where you start out, learn as you go, and wing it. But Kingmaker does require some strong insight into the game from the very first screen of character creation. It's very easy to create completely inept characters if you're not familiar with the basics. When I played Baldur's Gate for the first time, I just took that lovely manual that shipped with the game, read it diagonally, and I sort of understood the basic of BioWare's implementation of AD&D. But games don't ship with solid manuals anymore.

You can see a lot of people referring to Nerd Commando's videos (is he the same guy as Pope Amole btw?), but sitting through some of his videos can be a bit... challenging as well, and I can totally understand that people would rather start playing the game instead of watching random Youtube videos first.

I think the complaint about the swarm enemies is rather legit actually. Personally, I wasn't familiar with how swarms worked in Pathfinder, and this had me rather confused as well. Mind you, I wasn't angry or anything (hell, this is probably the smallest and least interesting "quest" in the entire game and completely optional), but it does beg the question: how is the player supposed to know how to beat these enemies? One could certainly make the case that the game simply doesn't provide you with enough information to overcome this "challenge".

Another complaint you see often is that in the first few hours it's not entirely clear how recovery, resting and camping work. I agree, it took me a few seconds to sort that out as well (the resting screen is a bit confusing the first time it opens). A very short hint, popup or in-universe explanation could have gone a long way in explaining to people how to get rid of certain stat penalties etc.

TL;DR: Yes people complain WAY too much on the various forums, but I think it IS true that we can do a better job at teaching people how the RPG systems work. Personally, I am absolutely not against accessibility as long as it doesn't compromise the actual gameplay (by streamlining etc.).
 

smaug

Secular Koranism with Israeli Characteristics
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Insert Title Here
Specifically about Kingmaker, I am personally also rather annoyed about the amount of whining on display.

However, let me play devil's advocate for a second. I think we shouldn't ignore the reality here. The barrier to entry for Kingmaker isn't very low. Pathfinder can be a pretty daunting system, and while the game does grant you enough info on specific details, it's easy to get lost if you don't have a solid grasp of the basics of the system (which the game doesn't provide). So should players start by reading the core rulebooks first? That hardly seems like a good idea. There are many CRPGs where you start out, learn as you go, and wing it. But Kingmaker does require some strong insight into the game from the very first screen of character creation. It's very easy to create completely inept characters if you're not familiar with the basics. When I played Baldur's Gate for the first time, I just took that lovely manual that shipped with the game, read it diagonally, and I sort of understood the basic of BioWare's implementation of AD&D. But games don't ship with solid manuals anymore.

You can see a lot of people referring to Nerd Commando's videos (is he the same guy as Pope Amole btw?), but sitting through some of his videos can be a bit... challenging as well, and I can totally understand that people would rather start playing the game instead of watching random Youtube videos first.

I think the complaint about the swarm enemies is rather legit actually. Personally, I wasn't familiar with how swarms worked in Pathfinder, and this had me rather confused as well. Mind you, I wasn't angry or anything (hell, this is probably the smallest and least interesting "quest" in the entire game and completely optional), but it does beg the question: how is the player supposed to know how to beat these enemies? One could certainly make the case that the game simply doesn't provide you with enough information to overcome this "challenge".

Another complaint you see often is that in the first few hours it's not entirely clear how recovery, resting and camping work. I agree, it took me a few seconds to sort that out as well (the resting screen is a bit confusing the first time it opens). A very short hint, popup or in-universe explanation could have gone a long way in explaining to people how to get rid of certain stat penalties etc.

TL;DR: Yes people complain WAY too much on the various forums, but I think it IS true that we can do a better job at teaching people how the RPG systems work. Personally, I am absolutely not against accessibility as long as it doesn't compromise the actual gameplay (by streamlining etc.).
I don't understand why someone would buy Kingmaker then complain it's to hard and complex. Do people not watch gameplay/video footage of the game there going to buy? Like I don't care if you hate Kingmaker but don't buy shit you know you aren't going to like/understand.
 

lukaszek

the determinator
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Joined
Jan 15, 2015
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12,620
deterministic system > RNG
 
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