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

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
If you've never slaughtered every living thing on Khorinis to harvest every last drop of XP

But by the end of the game I usually end up powerful enough to effortlessly defeat the dragons even without doing that.

Also my Wizardry 7 and 8 parties usually fared well enough without abusing the leveling system and grinding random encounters, too.

Have you had a doctor check you for OCD? Because your gameplay habits sound like OCD to me.
 

Max Damage

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Mar 1, 2017
Messages
657
I myself don't care about VNs much either, but I don't get how not wanting filler trash = storyfaggotry. If a game has too many low quality combat encounters, it cannot be a good representation of that aspect of adventuring by default. Game development time is finite (and expensive for any sizeable studios), but if you can't actually provide meaningfull engaging experience for major part of the game, then you probably shouldn't be making RPGs that feature lots of fighting. Just compare something like KotC to NWN2 or PoE, the difference is day and night.
 
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barghwata

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Sep 13, 2019
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If you've never slaughtered every living thing on Khorinis to harvest every last drop of XP

But by the end of the game I usually end up powerful enough to effortlessly defeat the dragons even without doing that.

Also my Wizardry 7 and 8 parties usually fared well enough without abusing the leveling system and grinding random encounters, too.

Have you had a doctor check you for OCD? Because your gameplay habits sound like OCD to me.

It might be just a matter of personal taste but i genuinley can't understand this sort of approach to playing RPGs, like... why try so hard to make the game easy? being overpowered might feel great for like ..... ten minutes; but then you quickly realise that the game isn't fun anymore because there's no challenge left, and what's worst is that by the time you get to the last combat encounters of the game which are supposed to be the most challenging and entertaining, you find yourself defeating enemies with no effort or tactics because you're just too overpowered for them.
 

Grampy_Bone

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It might be just a matter of personal taste but i genuinley can't understand this sort of approach to playing RPGs, like... why try so hard to make the game easy? being overpowered might feel great for like ..... ten minutes; but then you quickly realise that the game isn't fun anymore because there's no challenge left, and what's worst is that by the time you get to the last combat encounters of the game which are supposed to be the most challenging and entertaining, you find yourself defeating enemies with no effort or tactics because you're just too overpowered for them.

That's the point of self-balancing. If you want more challenge, rush ahead and don't grind. But most modern games don't give you the option.

The only thing that truly ruins my enjoyment of leveling is if there's a cap.
 

Trashos

Arcane
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Dec 28, 2015
Messages
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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.

Look, the sad truth is that the RPG world generally lacks people who can and are willing to design decent encounters. So they just give you a bunch of trash mobs to fuck around with, instead of doing serious work.

When you see a group of enemies on your 2nd playthrough, unless you say "oh, it's those guys", it is trash/filler combat.

Now, I understand the sentiment that storyfaggotry has been overwhelming RPGs, but I do not think that we will save combat by defending bad combat. Such an attitude will have the opposite effect, probably.
 

Darkzone

Arcane
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Sep 4, 2013
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I fear that to the question of the trashmobs (combat and dialog) there is no simple answer.
Let me address the dialog trashmobs:
If you only have really meaningful dialogues then there will be very few NPC around and the world will look lifeless. If you include nevertheless NPC that you cannot talk too then it will look like it half assed game and the developers just made shit for the sake of shit.
Also you will actually know that only the NPCs that are you can talk to are somehow important.
 

S.torch

Arbiter
Joined
Jan 4, 2019
Messages
937
Your mom is RPG of the year. Heavy bloat but excellent grinding.

Aside from praising popamole, always-online, clickfest, and micro-transaction festival that is Diablo 3 over a completly single-player RPG like Disco Elysium, you resort to insulting like a monkey.

And people say that combatards are not retards.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I fear that to the question of the trashmobs (combat and dialog) there is no simple answer.
Let me address the dialog trashmobs:
If you only have really meaningful dialogues then there will be very few NPC around and the world will look lifeless. If you include nevertheless NPC that you cannot talk too then it will look like it half assed game and the developers just made shit for the sake of shit.
Also you will actually know that only the NPCs that are you can talk to are somehow important.

There's no issue with having generic NPCs who give generic answers or tell you one or two tidbits about their lives if asked, without giving you any quests.

It becomes a "dialog trashmob" when random NPCs on the street dump paragraph after paragraph of text upon you, none of which is directly relevant to things you actually do and see in the game. ("You see, my daughter is a merchant, and she often sails to the spice islands, and the stories she told me about this place... proceeds to tell you stories about a faraway location you will never ever visit in the game, and probably not in the sequel either")

But if all you get is
PC: "Who are you?"
NPC: "I'm a farmer."
PC: "What do you do?"
NPC: "Farming. You know, tilling the ground, feeding the cows. Reaping the crops, slaughtering the cattle. Selling the grain and meat at the market."
PC: "Got any interesting stories to share?"
NPC: "No I'm just a farmer."
PC: "Ok bye."
then that's completely fine. This farmer NPC makes the world more believable by existing, but he doesn't steal your time by telling you paragraphs upon paragraphs of irrelevant crap.
 

Grampy_Bone

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Your mom is RPG of the year. Heavy bloat but excellent grinding.

Aside from praising popamole, always-online, clickfest, and micro-transaction festival that is Diablo 3 over a completly single-player RPG like Disco Elysium, you resort to insulting like a monkey.

And people say that combatards are not retards.

Come on dude, that's not how you respond to a roast.

serveimage
 
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Trash mobs are unavoidable and are a term that have spawned from MMORPGs, I believe. The direct ancestor to trash mobs was 1st Edition D&D's Wandering Monsters check and the differing Wandering Monsters table depending on the terrain you were currently in.
 

Zeriel

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Eh, it's a widely used term. It seems like "grinding" to me. The definition changes from person to person. To some people, it means only BAD encounters. To others, it means a necessary design element. I mostly side with the latter. I find games that have every encounter be at the same (high) level of difficulty a bit annoying. "Trash mobs" or whatever you want to call them serve a purpose as pacing. You have occasional difficult fights interspersed with more trivial ones. I understand there's a lot of hate for them in this thread, but I do think the purpose they serve is valid, and I think people are forgetting the tons of great games that use them.

What are most grid-based blobbers filled with except for "trash mobs"? Most monsters in Might & Magic are definitively trash mobs. There's also a wide range of reasons to want them aside from "the player needs to a break and to turn off their brain". Maybe they got a new skill and they want to use it on weaker enemies to test it out and get comfortable with it. Maybe they need extra XP. Maybe they just aren't doing so hot and need to beat up on something weaker for a while. There's a lot of design reasons to have weak enemies. The real problem if there is one is when your game consists mostly or even entirely of trash mobs. And this feeds into the modern game design space where they just want everyone to never run into any trouble, ever. But as they were used in 90's games I really don't have an issue with them at all and would miss their presence if they were gone.
 

Bah

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Northwest American Republic
I don't know the origin, but the first time I heard the term "trash mobs" used was in 2005 in MMORPGs as well. Whether it originated in MMORPGs or single player I can't say, but I suspect MMORPGs is pretty likely since the enemies would re-spawn in WoW raid-dungeons if you took too long to kill the boss.
 

Sigourn

uooh afficionado
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I'd rather engage in 100 turn-based random encounters that actually progress my characters and my party building and let me engage in many different gameplay elements 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.

No way fag.

I'd rather speak to NPCs and do quest than engage in 100 turn-based (nonetheless) random encounters. And if said random encounters are "trash", I doubt we will be seeing any of

let me engage in many different gameplay elements
 

Zeriel

Arcane
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Jun 17, 2012
Messages
13,379
That's probably a hold over from Everquest (since WoW was essentially designed to be a less-punishing Everquest by former Everquest players), Everquest had dungeons that were simply part of the world and not instanced everything in them had to respawn.
 

jungl

Augur
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Mar 30, 2016
Messages
1,420
Someone should make a rpg maybe pathfinder adventure where there is deity giving everyone unavoidable level drain and enemies scale to your level. That dragon you about to fight turns into a baby wyrm. Make for a interesting story.
 

Valky

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Bad dialogue is not a problem because dialogue is worthless and skippable. When the gameplay is bad though, this becomes a problem because gameplay is what video games live and die by.
 

Trashos

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2015
Messages
3,413
The legacy PS:T enjoys needs to burn. In the future, I may go on a crusade to devalue PS:T as much as is possible and fair.

PST dindu nuffing.

The best all combatfags can do is let the issue run its course, and at the end combatfaggotry and storyfaggotry will naturally go separate ways. The issue we are going to have THEN is whether we have good narrators for our combtfaggotry games. I suggest we treat good narrators with respect, so that they do not all migrate. I am not suggesting this for them, I am suggesting this for us.
 
Self-Ejected

Lilura

RPG Codex Dragon Lady
Joined
Feb 13, 2013
Messages
5,274
I suggest we treat good narrators with respect

I can think of barely any narrator-devs that I respect. Certainly I don't respect Black Isle for PS:T.

Fallout 2, IWD and IWD2 are their crowning achievements because they don't assault me with walls of text/trashtext.

And since I have zero interest in current gen RPGs, I don't care where narrator-devs go.

You don't have to worry about narrator-devs migrating to other genre, though, because storyfaggotry runs rampant in the current gen (see Disco popularity), and many of the narrator-devs are cucks with political agendas to fulfill.
 
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Trashos

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2015
Messages
3,413
IWD has some pretty good art and decent writing (for the weapon descriptions, eg), even if it is not the main focus. It is part of its atmosphere. Or what about those dialogues you like in JA2? What if the guys who wrote those dialogues had been laughed out of the building for wanting to spend some time writing it?

And since I have zero interest in current gen RPGs, I don't care where narrator-devs go.

You did give Underrail a try, even if you eventually rejected it. So you have not lost all hope, and you should not.

I am claiming that having a good narrative, and generally the things of secondary importance done well, is a plus. And, afaik, you agree. It is not always going to work, but afaic combatfags should not be fighting against such things.

It is very different to go to creators and tell them "combat in your games sucks!", and very different to say "we do not need anything other than combat!".
 

lobsterfrogman

Scholar
Joined
Feb 11, 2018
Messages
109
You need to be very careful with this line of thinking, because the moment when someone asked "What if we get rid of trash exploration mobs?" quest compass was born.
 

hexer

Guest
We give too much credit to PST, it's still a niche title with a small audience reach.
WotC axed Planescape and I honestly can't remember if I ever met a gamer in the last 20 years in RL that even knew what words "Planescape Torment" represent :lol:
 
Self-Ejected

Lilura

RPG Codex Dragon Lady
Joined
Feb 13, 2013
Messages
5,274
IWD has some pretty good art and decent writing (for the weapon descriptions, eg), even if it is not the main focus. It is part of its atmosphere. Or what about those dialogues you like in JA2? What if the guys who wrote those dialogues had been laughed out of the building for wanting to spend some time writing it?

There is a big difference between the concision found in IWD and JA2, and the waffle, wankery and wordiness found in PS:T.

You did give Underrail a try, even if you eventually rejected it.

That was before I refined my commentary to 1996-2010 only (which is still too broad and further refinements need to be made, lest I come off as a generalist).

I am claiming that having a good narrative, and generally the things of secondary importance done well, is a plus. And, afaik, you agree. It is not always going to work, but afaic combatfags should not be fighting against such things.

PS:T and games like it need to be purged from genre rankings. The 'Dex will never purge storyfaggotry, which is why I'll never go in lock, stock and barrel with the 'Dex, and why I have my own platform to express my views on.

If the 'Dex banned all storyfaggots and anyone who said PS:T was GOAT, I'd feel at home here. But that won't happen.

I've thought about leaving the 'Dex because of its storyfaggot propensities, but I don't always have time to blog so this is a good place to express my views, too. Plus, there are a few hardline/non-storyfag posters that I like here.

It is very different to go to creators and tell them "combat in your games sucks!", and very different to say "we do not need anything other than combat!".

I've never said writing itself needs to be purged from RPGs.
 
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