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Decline Top 10 best ways to murder an RPG

Which is the most effective way of killing off an RPG?

  • Character development that can easily be comprehended by a table fern

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    155

Metronome

Learned
Joined
Jan 2, 2020
Messages
277
No classes

Classes are for asses. The only class that actually exists is "adventurer" and anything else is just arbitrarily reducing your options for character development. If you want to be a better wizard, just increase the numbers a wizard would use. If you want to be a better druid, then get perks, traits, skills, whatever which would let you play as one. In a roguelike too classes only make the game more repetitive for no good reason. Races that do the same thing aren't much better.

The only time I've seen classes actually improve things is as character history, like in Darklands. They only exist during character creation. You spend 5 years being this or that, but once you start the game only what you learned or gained during those years carries over.

And hey, maybe somebody could find a way to do classes right but... as of now I've not seen a game with classes (that are not limited to character creation) which has benefited from them. Same problem as automatic point allocation. You are removing an entire dimension of character development for some arbitrary reason.

Besides if you want games with a heavy focus on combat you are better served with other game genres like action games or strategy games.
It's not an issue of genre I think. If you focus most of your attention on combat during development, then adding a "non-combat" route could seem like a waste of time. Someone might only experience 20% of the gameplay on an (actual) pacifist run or something like that. You have to wonder if the time you invested to make such an unpolished experience possible would have been better served improving what your game is designed around. I don't think there is a right answer to this, but that's probably why it's controversial.

Also, I don't remember Deus Ex very well, but wasn't the pascifist run in that game just knocking enemies out instead of killing them? It seemed like more of a roleplaying choice than a gameplay one. But it's still combat, you're just a wizard instead of a warrior. That kind of thing.
 

Daemongar

Arcane
Joined
Nov 21, 2010
Messages
4,706
Location
Wisconsin
Codex Year of the Donut
Eh, the refining of skills. Daggerfall -> Morrowind -> Oblvion -> Fallout3 -> Skyrim - > Each successive Elder Scrolls game became more of an arcade game, and thus, shittier. I can deal with a lot of things, gay romances, bad voice acting, unskippable cut scenes, but take away the games complexity and you've lost me.
 
Joined
May 6, 2009
Messages
1,875,967
Location
Glass Fields, Ruins of Old Iran
If you mean intentionally killing it in a "Springtime for Hitler" way, I guess I'd fill it with long stretches of gameplay where nothing really happens, so the second option. The other options all have people who love and hate them.
 

Falksi

Arcane
Joined
Feb 14, 2017
Messages
10,538
Location
Nottingham
Filler.

Lazyness is a killer, but filler is the Godzilla of killers, turning games from thrillers to chillers, and producing unplayable vanillas.
 

Necroscope

Arcane
Joined
Jul 21, 2012
Messages
1,985
Location
Polska
Codex 2014
LV scalling
Boring and shallow combat
Bad writing
Generic soundtrack
Generic art direction
Generic story
Boring loot
Non-existent challenge
Repetitive dungeons
No CQC
Radiant anything
Bad UI
Shallow and/or poorly balanced character progression
Annoying puzzles
Fucking mini-games
Filler combat
Quest markers for the most part
Dumb AI
Bugs if extreme

All that comes to my mind at the moment. It's basically 75/80% Oblivion - because of Jeremy Soule, no filler combat and passable UI by today's standards.
 

Molina

Savant
Joined
Apr 27, 2018
Messages
363
Diminishing the role of combat

This is actually a good thing.
RPG's whose only well designed and fun aspect is it's combat are boring and painfully flawed games.

Hardly. The hobby was invented about exploring dangerous environments and fighting monsters, birthed from rules driven wargaming. That is the foundation to build upon. Take well designed and fun combat away, and you've got something else entirely.
Since 1970, tabletop RPG have evolved...
 

Alienman

Retro-Fascist
Patron
Joined
Sep 10, 2014
Messages
17,042
Location
Mars
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Passionless corporate made games (usually franchises).

It kinda involves all of the above and what mondblut brought up - diversity quotas instead of talent.
 
Joined
Dec 24, 2018
Messages
1,783
Full voice acting. Big expense, doesn't improve the game much, and typically harms the game (reduces dialogue quantity, makes modding harder, makes it harder for devs to revise dialogue later in development, etc).
 

thesheeep

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 16, 2007
Messages
9,939
Location
Tampere, Finland
Codex 2012 Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Full voice acting. Big expense, doesn't improve the game much, and typically harms the game (reduces dialogue quantity, makes modding harder, makes it harder for devs to revise dialogue later in development, etc).
That's only true for bigger teams, though.
Smaller developers don't have the money for voice acting (often not even for marginal voice acting, like just the first line of each dialogue to get a "feeling" for the character). None of them would even try to go for it.
While almost any of the other factors in the voting are still very much "doable" for all developers.

Similarly, bad writing only matters to games that even have noticeable writing.
Many RPGs do fine without.

The worst offenders are definitely dumbed down mechanics and crappy quests/levels. They are at the core of every game, and when those are terrible, other factors are unlikely to save the experience.
 

Molina

Savant
Joined
Apr 27, 2018
Messages
363
In terms of business : Listening to RPG Codex.
In terms of my taste : A terrible Setting. e.g. I really like DOS 2 gameplay, I really do. But... What a terrible setting...Incoherent, bland, déjà vu... I never feel a call for adventure.
To quote a great president: Too bad.
 

DJOGamer PT

Arcane
Joined
Apr 8, 2015
Messages
7,350
Location
Lusitânia
As much as I dislike gameplay-oriented people here on the Codex

Then what would you say is the most important aspect of a game if not it's defining aspect?

If you focus most of your attention on combat during development, then adding a "non-combat" route could seem like a waste of time.

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.

Also, I don't remember Deus Ex very well, but wasn't the pascifist run in that game just knocking enemies out instead of killing them?

No since you can ghost Deus Ex. Also not killing people changes the rest of the campaign (even if sometimes it's to a small degree).

Eh, the refining of skills. Daggerfall -> Morrowind

Like the saying goes: Quantity < Quality
Daggerfall migth have a laundry list of skills and stats. But like a lot of older RPG's, most of them are virtually useless and some are gimmicks, just there to give off an ilusion of complexity while in truth they just make matters more aggravating then they actually need to be - or because their system is an adaptation of some PnP system.
Morrowind cuts down all that fat and tones up what remains.

Real-time with pause combat is missing from your poll.

That is included in the "Streamlining the hell out of meaningfully deep mechanics" option...
 

Risewild

Arbiter
Joined
Mar 23, 2018
Messages
491
Location
Australia
I see no difference between "Streamlining the hell out of meaningfully deep mechanics" and "Selling the IP to Bethesda, EA, Microsoft or your neighbourhood drug dealer"...
 

Chaosdwarft

Learned
Patron
Joined
Oct 8, 2019
Messages
272
Location
Old outpost in the middle of Iberia
In order of butthurt for me (1 being the highest and 10 being the lowest)

  1. Lazy fetch/kill quests. I don't mind the first few quest to be run of the mill tasks so you get familiar with the game, but don't ask me to clear an other fucking cave of whatever passes for giant rats mid game.
  2. Streamlining the hell out of meaningfully deep mechanics. This seems to be an endemic problem not just in RPGs.
  3. Selling the IP to Bethesda, EA, Microsoft or your neighbourhood drug dealer. Every franchise they touch turns into shit.
  4. Lvl scaling. Oblivion PTSD
  5. JRPG lvl of grinding or Diablo-esque loot. Why do I need to replay the game 10 times or just 1 lvl to get nice loot?
  6. Romances. If I want romance I can just read some novel. And if I need to fap I got the Internet.
  7. Binary C&C. Such an American view of the world, it's not even funny anymore.
  8. Useless items that you can keep in your inventory. I have enough junk in my life I don't need virtual one.
  9. Being forced to fight in the latter half of the game when previoulsy we had multiple options. Looking at you VTMB...
  10. Having no proper "encyclopedia". It's fine as long as there is way to access world information in the game.
 

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