Decline Top 10 best ways to murder an RPG

[Bohrain]

Chrono Trigger had an above average plot for a JRPG though. RPG's tend to have pretty banal collect macguffin and kill the enroaching evil creature plots. I don't really think that the average level of writing has gone down, the problems that plague it have just mostly changed shape. Becoming an industry is one of the new problems since titles with closer to garage project budgets didn't have suits demanding to put a monkey in it.

 

[North Gibraltarian Dog]

What if I told you, that there are a few people here on the Codex that believe both gameplay *and* story are equally important? And what if I told you that there are people here that can adapt to both any sort of gameplay, and way to tell a story, provided it's not pandering, stupid or a blunt cash-grab attempt?

I love RPGs. I went through pretty much every genre of videogames, and I decided I love RPGs, in all its forms. You make whatever you wish out of that.

"Gameplay" and "story" are not equally important at all, not only in regard crpgs but in video games in general, because those are defined by interactivity first and foremost. Therefore, diminish mechanics and interactive world design in favour of any sort of fixed narrative, the expression of a main idea or protected world simulationism in which the player act mostly as reader/spectator supposes renounce to what truly distinguish video games and to waste the additional potential that they could offer over other contexts as literature or cinema.

For example, Planescape, despite his master combination of an excellent writing, good story design and interesting and detailed worldbuilding it's not a good example of what crpgs or videogames can offer, but mostly a good adaptation (the best) of the old tools and design used by cinema, comics or fantasy literature, with vey limited use of the specific language (mechanics/interactive world) than video games and specifically crpgs, could offer.

The thing with that is that the gameplay is also limited by the writing. It affects where you go and what you fight, if the writing only takes you through same-y forests and empty fields, the gameplay is also going to suffer by virtue of being repetitive and the player not receiving any other kind of visual input.

In what games? "Writing" (I suppose you mean story/narrative) only affects heavily the experience in a minoritary set of crpgs. There are many crpgs in which despite the existence of a strong narrative, the player has a lot of agency to build its own experience, others include a main narrative only as a background to dungeon crawling or tactical combat, finally there are some open worlds and other free-experience crpgs in which the player can have a experience mostly devoid of an pre-fixed "main" story.

On the other hand, the repetitiveness or uniqueness of a game has nothing to do with story or writing and much with actual interactive content and mechanics diversity. Many story-driven crpgs are 100 times more repetitive than others with no main story at all.

 

[Beastro]

What if I told you, that there are a few people here on the Codex that believe both gameplay *and* story are equally important?

I would tell you those people are deluded.
Take away the gameplay you no longer have a game.
Gameplay is what defines games not story.
A game with shit/mediocre gameplay but great story is still a shit/mediocre game. A game with good gameplay and abysmal story is a good game.
Hell there are whole genres of games with little to no story but you'll be hard pressed to find a handful of decent games where the story is of equal, if not higher, importance than gameplay

As someone who likes a good story in a game, I agree.

Many games today I'd say are hampered by their stories and would benefit from the good old 80s style intro plot that's discarded once the game starts up and gives full room for the gameplay to shine.

 

[HarveyBirdman]

Killing an RPG implies it was once alive, or good.
A good RPG begins with a developer having a coherent vision for something interesting. Therefore, losing sight of that vision will always kill the RPG.

Developers compromise their visions by sacrificing what they think is cool to please somebody else. Parent companies ruin games (EA -> BioWare), fans ruin games (Tides of Numenera), SJWs ruin games (take your pick), etc.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Deviating from established rulesets

It's only a bad thing when you don't know what you're doing, Wizardry did it and look how it turned out.
Anyone mastering a ruleset should aim to improve it, everyone else shouldn't.

 

[Dorateen]

Deviating from established rulesets

It's only a bad thing when you don't know what you're doing, Wizardry did it and look how it turned out.
Anyone mastering a ruleset should aim to improve it, everyone else shouldn't.

The way I see it, Wizardry borrowed concepts from D&D, like negative AC and THAC0, but they were not an official Dungeons & Dragons game, so they could do their own thing. The comment I made was referring to those developers tasked with making a D&D computer role-playing game yet veering off into bizarre design directions.

 

[Sykar]

The guys who voted for lack of romance and waifus must be joking

Iron Bull loves you too!

 

[RNGsus]

Having a story.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Making a remake.
Meaning: transforming the original RPG in a third person shooter.

 

[Metronome]

If the devs just add extra stuff for the sake of having extra stuff, then yes that extra piece of content/gameplay is a waste of time and a detriment for the experience.
But if you set out to make a game of a genre that revolves around the idea of multiple playstyles like RPG's, then you must have game systems and content to support those various choices.

I don't think it's always a waste of time. Because what counts as "extra stuff" is subjective. And what the developer thinks when people say "Don't add extra stuff" could be anything. To combatfags anything that isn't combat related is extra stuff for example. They would rather you spend your time giving them more choices in the context of combat, which still adds to the number of choices total you have in the game. It's true the perfect RPG would validate any path you take. In practice though there are resource limitations. Adding a new system entirely costs time and maybe money. And if you bite off more than you can chew, like many old rpg developers did, you get those janky skills that don't do anything or are only useful maybe once or twice. You start removing those skills and people complain about streamlining the game.

Like you said to someone else: Quantity < Quality. What some people want are a few quality playstyles rather than a quantity of playstyles they wont bother with anyway. They will always be using the combat system, so they want a lot of polish there. But like you also said: RPG's are a genre that revolves around the idea of multiple playstyles. The dilemma is that adding systems instead of polishing existing ones is putting quantity over quality. But not adding those systems prevents the player from exploring alternative approaches to the game's various tasks.

 

[Zombra]

What counts as "extra stuff" is subjective. And what the developer thinks when people say "Don't add extra stuff" could be anything.

This attitude presupposes that developers are sloppy and impressionable, and that they don't really know what they want to make. Which to be fair is often the case, particularly with high-budget studios who are generally there to sell units, not fulfill a vision.

But to a developer that actually has an idea what their game is going to be, "Don't add extra stuff" is a very objective mandate.

In my opinion, every game should be developed with a strong vision of what the gameplay loop is: how the player is going to be spending their time, and why that is fun or interesting. If there are multiple activities (and there usually should be - even the best core gameplay can get repetitive if not dynamically paced), those activities should be thought out and contrasted against one another, to create an intended experience with highs and lows; and in an RPG, choices about how to approach things. Even a straight up combat only RPG gives you a million choices how to build your party, and different builds should have distinctive gameplay; if they don't, or if a single "optimal" build is required to succeed, the game has failed.

Usually RPGs have a straightforward triangle of activities: exploration (tension building), combat (tension release), and going back to town ("cooling off"). In a well-designed game, each of these is thought out and done with intention to maintain an entertaining cadence. If you throw in a racing minigame as a weird 4th activity, that cadence is thrown off ... again, unless it's done with intention when building the foundation.

When you have an idea to build a 3-legged stool, you should build a 3-legged stool - it's pretty clear what people would mean by saying "don't add more legs".
If you didn't know what you wanted to build in the first place, and you're just letting people suggest 100 different legs to put on your chair, you're already a weak designer and imo you shouldn't be doing it at all.

 

[Metronome]

You see this manner of RPG:
exploration (tension building) -> combat (tension release) -> town ("cooling off")
Relies on the combat system for the "tension release" portion. But lets say instead of combat, you allow for another approach here. So the player's character is not good at combat. They picked out a non-combat focused character as they were allowed to.

Now you have a piece of the puzzle missing:
exploration (tension building) -> ??? (tension release) -> town ("cooling off")
What does the character do rather than engage in combat? Lets say there is a stealth system in the game. So now you have this going on:
exploration (tension building) -> stealth (tension release) -> town ("cooling off")

Which means the developer has to program in both of these systems and balance them to some degree:
exploration (tension building) -> combat (tension release) -> town ("cooling off")
exploration (tension building) -> stealth (tension release) -> town ("cooling off")

But that's usually not all. Lets say you can be a hacker and use that to bypass combat or maybe you can be a diplomat.
Or something like that. So now you have this going on:
exploration (tension building) -> combat (tension release) -> town ("cooling off")
exploration (tension building) -> stealth (tension release) -> town ("cooling off")
exploration (tension building) -> hacking (tension release) -> town ("cooling off")
exploration (tension building) -> diplomacy (tension release) -> town ("cooling off")

And that would be a better game than to have just the one approach. But... Now have to now divide your time equally to all of these systems. So now the combat gameplay is not as good as it could be, and the stealth gameplay is not as good as it could be. But you have more options. Was it worth it? Who knows?

 

[Zombra]

It's not really a question of managing development resources. "We only have 6 months to release the game and 8 programmers working 50 hours a week so we must spend those 6x4x50x8=9600 development hours on the correct parts of the game!"

I mean, yes project management is important, but that's not what people are talking about when they say don't add a bunch of extra shit.

It's about knowing how tight to keep your design. Too tight and it's a one-note, repetitive game. But not tight enough is bad also. Even if you have a billion hours to build the game, throwing in everything just because you can leads to open world shit with a million activities, which can be fun if the whole point is there's no focus and it's a big playground, but this is not some kind of holy grail that every game should aspire to.

Focus, cadence, tension, intention. You shouldn't be scripting out every second of player action, but leaving everything wide open like a barn door with a broken latch just leaves it banging in the wind, all the animals escaped a long time ago, it's meaningless.

At its core, what is this game supposed to be? What is necessary to add for it to be that? What can be trimmed without losing that? Brevity is wit.

 

[Metronome]

but this is not some kind of holy grail that every game should aspire to.

I agree with this, but I would also say that there is no inherent value to the middle ground either. If it's "too tight" it could be a better game, but less of an RPG. If it's "too loose" then the game is more of an RPG, but the gameplay suffers from trying to do too much at once.

The middle ground is just that. You have a game that's not tight or loose. You aren't penalized or rewarded for either approach. You can make any game better if you are competent in that particular approach. You could make the assumption that one approach is superior from that experience. But actually judging tight against loose is a zero sum game. You can't please all of the people all of the time.

Compare two opposites in the roguelike scene: DCSS and Cataclysm.
People play both religiously even though they are on different ends of the spectrum.

 

[Zombra]

There is no inherent value to the middle ground either.

Completely disagree. "Too restricted" and "too open" are both bad. "Just right" is ... just right. Of course where that point falls is different for every design.

You can't please all of the people all of the time.

Zero people are suggesting that that is the goal.

Compare two opposites in the roguelike scene: DCSS and Cataclysm.
People play both religiously even though they are on different ends of the spectrum.

Sure. Sometimes a game does one thing really well, other times a greater variety can lead to a dynamic and fascinating experience. But I bet both games you mentioned had strong concepts where they didn't throw in a dentistry minigame just because they could.

 

[Metronome]

Sure. Sometimes a game does one thing really well, other times a greater variety can lead to a dynamic and fascinating experience. But I bet both games you mentioned had strong concepts where they didn't throw in a dentistry minigame just because they could.

The combat itself is a tactical "minigame" which could be cut down into a simple dice roll. This is the way non-combat is handled in most games. If we added dentistry to a game, then it would either be a roll or a minigame of some sort. If it had a whole minigame dedicated to it (like stealth often does when implemented) then it would take away time that could have been spent on improving the combat mechanics.

Imagine if instead of leaving town and fighting orcs, you could fix their teeth for EXP instead. Imagine if there were statistics for a character which indicate how good they are at various dental procedures. It doesn't make sense from a story perspective, but from a gameplay perspective you are doing the same thing as combat. Someone could then say dentistry is stupid and they just want to fight, and you are wasting your time implementing a silly mechanic.

That's the issue with non-combat mechanics in RPGs.

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

Voice acting 100000000000000000000%

Voice acting is a totally unnecessary expense that not only restricts writing, but is also super expensive and means they have less resources to spend on other infinitely more important aspects of the game, resulting in all of the other problems your poll lists (lazy quests/writing/bad character dev/etc...)

 

[Darth Canoli]

Imagine if instead of leaving town and fighting orcs, you could fix their teeth for EXP instead. Imagine if there were statistics for a character which indicate how good they are at various dental procedures. It doesn't make sense from a story perspective, but from a gameplay perspective you are doing the same thing as combat. Someone could then say dentistry is stupid and they just want to fight, and you are wasting your time implementing a silly mechanic.

There's probably a Japanese game where you do just that and if not a game yet, a tv show.

 

[Risewild]

Imagine if instead of leaving town and fighting orcs, you could fix their teeth for EXP instead. Imagine if there were statistics for a character which indicate how good they are at various dental procedures. It doesn't make sense from a story perspective, but from a gameplay perspective you are doing the same thing as combat. Someone could then say dentistry is stupid and they just want to fight, and you are wasting your time implementing a silly mechanic.

There's probably a Japanese game where you do just that and if not a game yet, a tv show.

https://myanimelist.net/anime/34549/Ryuu_no_Haisha