RPGs with no progression

[tuluse]

Tbh you only notice the story in SotC is tragic because as the giants fall down, a sad music plays (indicating you have done a Bad Thing; if an heroic fanfare played, you wouldn't give a shit about them). And at the ending you get a long custcene explaining what the fuck is going on. The gameplay itself consists of killing huge enemies, which is pretty fun.

Games that don't care about being "fun" can be interesting as experiments, but they won't be fondly remembered because ultimately the point of games is to have fun. Last one of its kind I played was Thirty Flights of Loving, a story about a bank robbery gone awry told through disjointed flashbacks and hallucinations (you spend some time doing banal stuff like peeling an orange and drinking at a bar, before suddenly being transported to the aftermath of the robbery next to your wounded partner who is pointing a gun at you, then you're sent back to the warehouse where preparations were being made). I actually liked it, but I'm not gonna reinstall it anytime soon. Why? Because it wasn't fun, FFS.

Like this little Let's Play I did a while ago.

One "2deep" game that I think succeeded at being fun as well is The Majesty of Colors, a little flash game that lasts a few minutes. You're this deep (lol) sea abomination who is curious about the surface world. Then you meet some humans, and can approach them in various ways.

You'll notice that story in Romeo and Juliet is only tragic because they both die at the end. The play itself consists of young people falling in love, high action sword fights, and plotting, which is pretty fun.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

 

[Desktop Commander]

So today I learned that an F2PMMO-dev neither likes nor understands RPGs. Needless to say, I was left speech- and breathless by this shocking and completely unexpected revelation.

On a serious note, though: Progress based carrot-on-a-stick gameplay is the one defining feature of the whole Might & Magic series. The roots where there even in the very first one and got further refined in later installments (Found some Gold - Yay, more levels!; Found Gems - Yay, I can cast my more powerful spells more often!; Found equipment - Yay, I am now more powerful or can sell them for more Gold (which is never obsolete in M&M); Stat boosts, and so on).
Even though the games changed rather drastically from 2 to 3 and 5 to 6, NWC knew how to make that dangling carrot look oh so delicious and - while continually iterating the formula - never strayed from that because it made their games work and they knew that. So yes, it can be done right and NWC did do just that numerous times.

 

[Kane]

I never quite got what exactly is bad about the famous carrot on a stick.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

 

[No Great Name]

Tbh you only notice the story in SotC is tragic because as the giants fall down, a sad music plays (indicating you have done a Bad Thing; if an heroic fanfare played, you wouldn't give a shit about them). And at the ending you get a long custcene explaining what the fuck is going on. The gameplay itself consists of killing huge enemies, which is pretty fun.

The music is only a part of what makes it tragic. The soundtrack (or in some cases lack of) does not dictate the main theme but rather reinforces it, like in movies.

Another game that does tragedy fairly well (although this one is done more through cutscenes and dialogue rather than gameplay) is Mother 3 which is also pretty fun to play for the most part.

I never quite got what exactly is bad about the famous carrot on a stick.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

There's nothing inherently wrong with conditioning if that is what you're suggesting. It all depends on how it is used and what it is used for.

 

[Kane]

I never quite got what exactly is bad about the famous carrot on a stick.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

There's nothing inherently wrong with conditioning if that is what you're suggesting. It all depends on how it is used and what it is used for.

That is an interesting way to put it. MMORPG design generally employs conditioning as a means to empty your pockets for trivial entertainment. Just read this: http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470936266.html and you too can create your army of zombie humans willfully fueling your pockets.

Generally you need four things for a succesful skinner box:

• A reward system that slows down over time.
• An end goal that eventually gets replaces by another end goal a.i.
• A reason to be addictive (money)
• Grind

Modern RPGs and MMORPGs in particular put you into a skinner box where you get nicely conditioned as a money dispenser. OP ain't a faggot and his superior intellect allows him to see that. Hence the post. Furthermore, I consider that World of Warcraft must be destroyed.

However, primitive conditioning is not neccessary, not even in games: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology

 

[No Great Name]

That is an interesting way to put it. MMORPG design generally employs conditioning as a means to empty your pockets for trivial entertainment. Just read this: http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470936266.html and you too can create your army of zombie humans willfully fueling your pockets.

This I can agree with being not a good thing. That wasn't the issue I was discussing though. I'm taking your universal statement and turning it into a specific statement, saying that while your example is a bad use of conditioning, there are some good uses for it as well.

 

[Kane]

That is an interesting way to put it. MMORPG design generally employs conditioning as a means to empty your pockets for trivial entertainment. Just read this: http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470936266.html and you too can create your army of zombie humans willfully fueling your pockets.

This I can agree with being not a good thing. That wasn't the issue I was discussing though. I'm taking your universal statement and turning it into a specific statement, saying that while your example is a bad use of conditioning, there are some good uses for it as well.

Maybe, but not in games.

 

[mondblut]

A single-province nowheristan becoming a continent-spanning empire two decades later is ridiculous.

Sup?

In two decades he merely united Mongolia and began his first chinese conquests (which spanned for 2 decades more).

 

[Akratus]

So. RPGs that aren't RPGs? Just because you worked on some garbage facebook game that caters to the worst aspects of progression in order to monetize it and make it as addictive as possible, does not mean the very concepts are shit.

Correct.

The concepts are shit whether there is anyone there to realize they're shit or not.

 

[set]

Games are not an artistic form; nor have they ever been; nor will they ever be.

"FILM IS NOT ART, movies can never be art, filmakers cannot make art" ~Ralph Block 1927

Forward thinker detected.

zapping the reward center in your brain for dopamine

Looks like someone has been looking at the Fallout 4 design docs...

Any good game is fun. I can't name a good game that isn't fun. If art comes about on its own, who am I to stop it, but fun itself is the paramount quality of a game. Pathologic is a neat little game, but it's not fun. If it were fun, I'd say it was a masterful work of art and wouldn't consider it a negative quality. But to say Pathologic is art and nothing else belies its flaws.

The same company that did Pathologic did The Void. The Void is much much more a game than Pathologic and remains almost as artful, or as I would put it, more artful. I wouldn't play it again either, but I enjoyed it much more.

A game needs to be fun, is my point. But without fun, a game is not really artful, because to me art only comes about from a mastery of a skill. You wouldn't say an amateur's pot is a work of art, even if it expressed an interesting idea; an amateur by definition does not yet have the skill to produce something of mastery. You can say it's in the vein of art, and a work in the lifetime of a developing artist, but I wouldn't say it's art. Art as a concept is, "skill", and skillless art is not much to behold, even if you nannies might try to say everyone is an "artist" and that the shit you put in a toilet can be called art; in which case, who is the one reinventing the definition of art? Not I.

Someone who is a master of their trade... and let's say that trade is making video games? Well, they better make a goddamn masterful game. Then I'll call them an artist. But most game designers, like most artists, are hacks, and ergo, what they produce can scarcely be called art.

I want games to be fun because I derive entertainment from them. Once developers can produce games that are consistently fun, then they can consider ways to make them artful -- though usually, the act of making a fun game makes it art in and of itself. Go is an artful game, but really only by coincidence. And Go is fun -- otherwise nobody would play it. If Go weren't fun, it'd be people putting colored stones on a board pointlessly. Nobody wants to waste their precious time marvelling black and white stones on a board, despite what pretentious hipsters might try to tell you.

The last thing we need in the industry right now is more poetic, cinematic, gameless twats, who think they can spend 95% of the budget on marketing, graphics, art direction, story and voice acting and expect a product worth my $60 buckaroos (or more, as the case is becoming).

 

[Clockwork Knight]

If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to hear the sound, what is a RPG?

"merely united Mongolia"?


edit:

A game needs to be fun, is my point. But without fun, a game is not really artful, because to me art only comes about from a mastery of a skill. You wouldn't say an amateur's pot is a work of art, even if it expressed an interesting idea; an amateur by definition does not yet have the skill to produce something of mastery. You can say it's in the vein of art, and a work in the lifetime of a developing artist, but I wouldn't say it's art. Art as a concept is, "skill", and skillless art is not much to behold, even if you nannies might try to say everyone is an "artist" and that the shit you put in a toilet can be called art; in which case, who is the one reinventing the definition of art? Not I.

Yes you. If you accept the idea of "skilless art", then trying to determine the moment where it becomes "true art" is pointless. When does the pot making guy become a "real artist"? When someone looks at one of his pots and goes "whoa"?

 

[set]

Dude anyone could become 1% of the world's genetic makeup if they really tried.

 

[Modron]

Dude anyone could become 1% of the world's genetic makeup if they really tried.

Would link to that thread here where a swedish/norwegian sperm bank shipped a retarded SE asian's sperm to several different countries claiming he was a tall blond male doctor so some shit but that would require me to delve into the madness that is GD.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

A game needs to be fun, is my point. But without fun, a game is not really artful, because to me art only comes about from a mastery of a skill.

Kids play jacks and have (used to anyway) fun doing it. Jacks is fun. Jacks is a game. By your definition, jacks is art. Solitaire is fun and a game so Solitaire is art. :/

A game does not need to be fun to be art any more than a painting needs to be fun to be art. Surely you see that? Unless you think Whistler's Mother is just colossal amounts of fun and that's where this definition of yours is coming from...

Skill also has nothing to do with art. Case and point: children's macaroni art. It's art. It sucks, but it's art by definition.

I want games to be fun because I derive entertainment from them.

Ah, "entertainment". The word this discussion should have been using instead of "fun". Good word.

Anyway, art can be entertaining too, just in a different sort of way from "zapping the reward center of your brain" like most fun-focused games do. Not saying there is no place for fun-focused games, just that I'd rather not see a focus on developing such games completely preclude art-focused games in general.

 

[Telengard]

Bullshit. People with views like yours are about as harmful to videogames as xbox bros

Just reporting the results of a little thing called focus grouping. Publishers would never listen to those things, now would they?

 

[TedNugent]

The reality is that progression systems do not have to be eliminated entirely, but something has to be done to mitigate the explosion of progression systems in non-RPGs and to constrain grinding or any other type of lizard brain/gambling exploitation in video games.

Progression systems could be interesting if they were based on success-reward models or trial and error, but they tend to be a matter of increasing an experience bar by doing a bunch of repetitive and increasingly uninteresting tasks. The problem in my view is not so much the existence of progression systems as the cheapening of them into behavioral systems in subscription-based systems.

This is a serious problem, some people are literally dying in gaming cafes in South Korea because they are trapped in these little skinner boxes.

 

[Midair]

I would see this psychological phenomenon as like the alcohol content in wine, toxic in isolation but essential.
Progression is what leads to choices in how the player develops their character. Even if it's more horizontal than the pib-squeak-to-super-hero cliche, you need something like the progression mechanic in order flesh out a character.

 

[Bruma Hobo]

I would see this psychological phenomenon as like the alcohol content in wine, toxic in isolation but essential.
Progression is what leads to choices in how the player develops their character. Even if it's more horizontal than the pib-squeak-to-super-hero cliche, you need something like the progression mechanic in order flesh out a character.

A character creation screen could be enough. That kind of character progression, while not necessarily an evil to be fought, is not the defining characteristic of the genre and I would like to play more games without it.

 

[Midair]

So you want to create a character, but only at the very beginning of the game? That would not leave much to do during the rest of the game except for gameplay like combat or puzzles that is common to other genres. Maybe alignment of factional changes?

 

[baturinsky]

Hexen lets you choose character in the beginning. Is it a "RPG without progression" now?

 

[Excidium]

Hexen lets you choose character in the beginning. Is it a "RPG without progression" now?

Yes, like Street Fighter

 

[almondblight]

So you want to create a character, but only at the very beginning of the game? That would not leave much to do during the rest of the game except for gameplay

The horror.

 

[set]

Zelda is a rpg because you play the role of link, duh.

 

[chestburster]

Zelda is a rpg because you play the role of link, duh.

VtMB is an FPS because you play it in first person.

Nobunaga's Ambition is an RPG but not a 4X game because you play the role of Nobunaga and it has stat progression.

COD is an RPG because you play the role of (whoever the grunt you play as) and it has stat progression.

Dawn of War 2 is an RPG just like Balder's Gate but not an RTS because you play the role of Force Commander and control your party of squad.

Spoiler

But what's the point in using these arbitrary and non-mutually-exclusive genre demarcations?