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nuCodexers talk about le trashmobs meme, but the real killer in RPGs are trash dialog mobs.

Grampy_Bone

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With 90+% of RPGs nowadays I can click through and skim the dialogue without missing anything and still complete the quest. That's because games are unwilling to force you to take notes or pay attention, dialogue options are mostly meaningless, and most skill checks are obvious so you don't need to actually listen to any talking. The Outer Worlds tripped me up and forced me to pay attention once or twice, but for the most part my click-skim-get to the fighting playstyle worked fine. That's pretty sad.

The fact is that RPG storytelling has become commodified to the point of oblivion, most writing is farmed out to z-grade writers who rely on cliche and TV Tropes, and none of it matters.
RPG dialogue started dying when the parser went away and the final nail in the coffin was voice acting. So I treat it with the attention it deserves: none.

Then when someone tries to make a deep storytelling game it's an anti-combat non-rpg like disco rapefugees. Even the most brain-dead click fest popamole combat like Diablo 3 will still have more depth than the deepest "pick three different ways to praise homos" dialogue wheel.
 

Alex

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(...snip)
TRASH DIALOG MOBS NEEDS TO GO!

DIALOG NPCs SHOULD ALL BE UNIQUE AND IMPORTANT! Less trash dialog and more gameplay, please!

So... what you are saying is that we should focus much more on making good dialogue, right?

[but, on a serious note, I think having non interactive dialogue that has no real challenge associated to be a huge missed opportunity. The dialogue parts should also be part of gameplay, not something besides it.]
 

Zeriel

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Then when someone tries to make a deep storytelling game it's an anti-combat non-rpg like disco rapefugees. Even the most brain-dead click fest popamole combat like Diablo 3 will still have more depth than the deepest "pick three different ways to praise homos" dialogue wheel.

This is a funny illustration of how things have changed. Dialogue trees were invented when the coolest thing RPG designers could imagine is having the game let you choose what you want to say and how you want to say it, to express yourself as a unique individual as far as they could imagine what options you might want. Then culture changed to the point that expressing yourself as an individual and not just as a consensus was considered evil.

Modern dialogue trees are like an artist's palette being used to hammer nails: a tool stripped of its purpose, banging uselessly away.
 

Tigranes

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With 90+% of RPGs nowadays I can click through and skim the dialogue without missing anything and still complete the quest. That's because games are unwilling to force you to take notes or pay attention, dialogue options are mostly meaningless, and most skill checks are obvious so you don't need to actually listen to any talking. The Outer Worlds tripped me up and forced me to pay attention once or twice, but for the most part my click-skim-get to the fighting playstyle worked fine. That's pretty sad.

The fact is that RPG storytelling has become commodified to the point of oblivion, most writing is farmed out to z-grade writers who rely on cliche and TV Tropes, and none of it matters.
RPG dialogue started dying when the parser went away and the final nail in the coffin was voice acting. So I treat it with the attention it deserves: none.

Then when someone tries to make a deep storytelling game it's an anti-combat non-rpg like disco rapefugees. Even the most brain-dead click fest popamole combat like Diablo 3 will still have more depth than the deepest "pick three different ways to praise homos" dialogue wheel.

My question to people who watch a lot of Hollywood films or popular TV is, is it any different/better there? There's not even any trash mobs left on those.
 

Ranarama

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than have to run around in some boring ass place talking to boring NPCs that are giving me badly-written dialog asking me for help doing something dumb.

You've convinced me, and so I'm leaving the codex.
 
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RNGsus

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Neither the gameplay or the dialog should be "trash". However trash mobs kill the fun of any game ten times faster than any dialog.
Any dialogue?

That's bold to claim in an era of writers who cannot write.
 

JarlFrank

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TRASH DIALOG MOBS NEEDS TO GO!

DIALOG NPCs SHOULD ALL BE UNIQUE AND IMPORTANT! Less trash dialog and more gameplay, please!

Yes, I entirely agree.

I apply the same standards to both dialogues and combat encounters: they should be interesting and worthwhile to go through instead of boring filler that isn't fun.

Pillars of Eternity is a great example of a game with lots and lots of trash dialogue. Overwritten exposition dumps nobody cares about, which slowly drain your willpower to continue with the game, just how Dragon Age's copypasted darkspawn combat encounters slowly drained your willpower to continue with the game.

All the content in your game should be good.

A fetch quest of "bring me 20 bear pelts" is a shitty filler trash quest. An NPC who only exists to infodump you with irrelevant information is a shitty filler trash NPC. Random encounters of weak, samey mobs are shitty filler trash encounters.

I think I discussed this issue with you before aweigh, where I said that encounter design is just as important as the core combat system itself. You agreed with me on that point: even a completely faithful D&D 3.5 conversion with all feats, skills, spells, special actions etc, like ToEE, would be boring if all combat encounters consisted of the same mob of 12 melee fighters who don't use spells or ranged attacks. You'd be playing the same fight over and over again and it would never present you with new tactical challenges. Lame and boring.

Now shake it up a little, add in a wizard or a cleric occasionally, make half of the enemies rangers using bows, exchange two of the humans with faster but weaker attack dogs, etc, and you'll end up with fun combat encounters because each one is different and offers its own challenges.

Combat can only be its own reward if the actual encounters are fun to go through. If all you do is grind through ever the same random mobs, at some point it stops being fun.

Some games can get away with having mostly samey encounter compositions, like Jagged Alliance 2 or Silent Storm, where 90% of encounters are against soldiers wielding various types of guns. But these games are still fun because the enemy is operating on the same rules and with the same abilities as you (this is one big reason why people love BG2's mage duels so much: you face enemies who can cast the same spells your wizards can and it's a fight on equal footing), and because the games offer different maps to fight on. City streets, small towns, open wilderness etc. And each type of map offers its own tactical approaches. That's where the variety comes from.

Knights of the Chalice is a good example of a well-designed game. I just played through the Steam version recently (but am stuck at that buttraping final fight holy shit what the gigantic everloving FUCK is this anal rape brigade) and enjoyed pretty much every battle, although some fights in the giant forts were somewhat trashy (several encounters of mid-level gnolls who barely pose a threat to your party at that point, meh). It's not a long game but that plays to its favor, almost every encounter is thoughtfully designed and a joy to go through. And I'd rather have a 20 hour game where every fight is a joy, than a 100 hour game where I get bored halfway through because of all the repetition.
 

JarlFrank

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Always remember that there is no such thing as a "trash mob", only a game with bad combat.

Right, as I understand it you consider encounter design to be part of the combat system? Which may lead to some confusion because most people would think of "combat system" as just the rules that define how combat works.

As I said in my previous post, if you take a game with the most perfect combat system, but then fill it with boring samey encounters, it would be shit. But that's an issue of the encounters, not the combat system.

Therefore it would be a game with a good combat system that is ruined by trash mobs.
 

JarlFrank

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It's called story mode.

No. This is a proper autoresolve mode:
Screenshot_9-1-1280x720.png


It's a great way to skip the boring fights you would win effortlessly anyway.
 

DJOGamer PT

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Sure, because if a game has "trashmobs" then that means it has bad gameplay. Who wants to play a game with bad gameplay?

Gameplay goes far beyond combat mechanics and encounters. A lot of games (specially RPG's) have bad combat but still posses great gameplay.
Combat is not the foundation of the RPG genre, in fact the only genres that live and die by the quality of their combat are figthing games, hack 'n' slashes and shooters - well... plus jRPG's and games like Battle Brothers.
 
Last edited:

Max Damage

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Yeah, no. Skipping through crappy dialogue takes nowhere near as much time as trying to skip through filler combat. It doesn't matter how good your system/options are, padding will always be padding. It's alright having encounters with low stakes time to time, but when most of the game is nothing but filler, you failed as developer. If you didn't bother to try, why should I?
 
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aweigh

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Right, as I understand it you consider encounter design to be part of the combat system? Which may lead to some confusion because most people would think of "combat system" as just the rules that define how combat works.

As I said in my previous post, if you take a game with the most perfect combat system, but then fill it with boring samey encounters, it would be shit. But that's an issue of the encounters, not the combat system.

Therefore it would be a game with a good combat system that is ruined by trash mobs.

Yes. I already addressed that my current problem is with the trash mobs label itself. It's useless and doesn't communicate anything, and in fact it's rather disrespectful to the games themselves.

You simply cannot reduce something as complex as the combat in an RPG to a binary state of "trash" or "not trash". It is one of the most retarded nuCodex things to happen in a long time. At least the "c&c" meme has some nuance to it and is somewhat related to RPG design (even though it is a complete meme), and you can kind of tell what it is people are talking about when they use it; but this trash mobs meme is just completely disrespectful to both the games themselves AND to the people being forced to participate in the discussion.
 

JarlFrank

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Right, as I understand it you consider encounter design to be part of the combat system? Which may lead to some confusion because most people would think of "combat system" as just the rules that define how combat works.

As I said in my previous post, if you take a game with the most perfect combat system, but then fill it with boring samey encounters, it would be shit. But that's an issue of the encounters, not the combat system.

Therefore it would be a game with a good combat system that is ruined by trash mobs.

Yes. I already addressed that my current problem is with the trash mobs label itself. It's useless and doesn't communicate anything, and in fact it's rather disrespectful to the games themselves.

You simply cannot reduce something as complex as the combat in an RPG to a binary state of "trash" or "not trash". It is one of the most retarded nuCodex things to happen in a long time. At least the "c&c" meme has some nuance to it and is somewhat related to RPG design (even though it is a complete meme), and you can kind of tell what it is people are talking about when they use it; but this trash mobs meme is just completely disrespectful to both the games themselves AND to the people being forced to participate in the discussion.

I guess it's a matter of definition then. "Trash mobs" as a term refers to a very specific case of encounter design that usually hits you mid-game to late-game and turns combat into a boring slog, at least when I use it. Then again, some people apply the term more broadly to mean every fight that isn't a boss fight. But I still think the term is useful as shorthand for "shitty encounter design based on barely challenging mobs thrown at the player en masse, which serve no long-term gameplay purpose".

A think I noticed about trash mobs is that they mostly become a problem later in the game. There's no trash mob problem when your party is level 1 or 2. Every encounter is a challenge there and slaying your way through a horde of goblins after expending all your spell slots and barely having enough HP left to not keel over is satisfying. But once you reach the higher levels and encounter design keeps throwing hordes of middling enemies at you that aren't a real threat to your party, and you have frequent enough opportunities to rest and restore your resources so attrition does not become a factor, it is legitimate to call those encounters "trash". They are not well thought out and not tailored to the player character's/party's power progression.

Of course, the trash mob problem runs deeper than just "lol this encounter sucks". It's a mix of:
- the encounter itself being lacklustre
- there being too many copypasted/so similar they might as well be copypasted encounters in the game to the point it becomes repetitive
- a lack of consequences for encounters (rest everywhere, full HP and mana recuperation after combat, being able to carry so many cheaply priced healing potions you can heal up after every fight, etc)
- a disregard for the player's power curve in encounter design, as in: endgame encounters being designed exactly the same as early game encounters
- general lack of variety in enemy types as well as player options in combat, so every combat ends up playing out the same without any variation in tactics required
 

Lambach

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Dragon Age II addressed the trash dialogue problem by removing introductory text on fetch quests; instead you find an object in a world, are told where to deliver it via quest compass/handy exclamation mark, then you're thanked by the character. :M

DA 2 has also addressed the trash combat problem by introducing the universally beloved BUTTON -> AWESOME mechanic.
 
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aweigh

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"shitty encounter design based on barely challenging mobs thrown at the player en masse, which serve no long-term gameplay purpose"

This is the fault of the game mechanics and not necessarily of the game design, nor of the genre nor of combat itself. If you're intentionally seeking out lower-challenge enemies in order to get some quick XP or perhaps seek a specific item that they may drop or that you can steal, or to trap a specific enemy in order to use them as a Summon, then they are most definitely serving a great gameplay purpose.

I'm sensitive to anything that remotely smacks of anti-combat sentiment. Increasing anti-combat fetishization will be the death of our beloved RPG genre. We must be on guard against our games turning into visual novels.
 

JarlFrank

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"shitty encounter design based on barely challenging mobs thrown at the player en masse, which serve no long-term gameplay purpose"

This is the fault of the game mechanics and not necessarily of the game design, nor of the genre nor of combat itself. If you're intentionally seeking out lower-challenge enemies in order to get some quick XP or perhaps seek a specific item that they may drop or that you can steal, or to trap a specific enemy in order to use them as a Summon, then they are most definitely serving a great gameplay purpose.

I'm sensitive to anything that remotely smacks of anti-combat sentiment. Increasing anti-combat fetishization will be the death of our beloved RPG genre. We must be on guard against our games turning into visual novels.

I'm the kind of guy who enjoys both low to no combat games (Disco Elysium is great), as well as high combat tactical RPGs (ToEE, KotC, JA2, gimme dat good stuff). I'm in no way arguing against combat, just against bad combat.

I want the combat I'm playing through to be of high quality, not low quality. Low quality mindless repetitive and rote grind is the opposite of fun to me. Give me variety in my combat encounters, different enemy types with different abilities, cool special attacks and spells for my characters, various enemy combinations that work well in a team (a mage protected by shieldbearers locked in formation, for example), environmental factors on the battle maps, etc.

Intentionally seeking out lower level enemies for quick XP sounds like grind to me. Not something I enjoy. I'd rather use all the tools at my disposal to overcome a harder encounter, than mopping up low level encounters for cheap XP. There being low level encounters you can seek out isn't a problem - the game forcing you to seek them out in order to level up enough to face the next-higher challenge is, though.

Purposefully seeking out a lower level enemy to trap him and later use him as a summon is a cool idea, yes, and something that adds spice to the combat system in the form of a new mechanic you can use and an incentive to seek out otherwise uninteresting encounters.
But here, too, you seeking out the low level mobs is optional, something you do out of your own choosing.

The problems arise when the game forces you to fight through hordes of samey mobs. Nobody complains about optional encounters. But if the game makes you go through them whether you want to or not, it's bad design.
 

Grampy_Bone

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excellent grinding.

Now there's two words that don't fit together at all.

What a thing to say. There are few games which provide the elegant combination of power progression and self-balancing gameplay as RPGs.

https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=221

If you've never slaughtered every living thing on Khorinis to harvest every last drop of XP, if you've never played one more random map to collect enough JP to unlock the next job in FF Tactics, if you've never pushed your multi-class characters in Wizardry over the prior class level threshold to end up with an unstoppable team of killing machines, well my friend, you are missing out.
 

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