RPG Mechanics Made Pointless By Game Features

[NJClaw]

Traps that damage you outside of combat when you have ways to infinitely replenish your health without spending resources. What's the point? This gets even worse when your health/shield replenishes automatically.

id blame that one on shifting scope during development

Maybe that's the reason most of the time, but I was specifically thinking about Divinity: Original Sin 2, where that can't work as an excuse because the health and healing systems are directly taken from his predecessor, so they knew from the beginning what they were doing. You can spam healing spells without problems so, at least for the first two acts, traps are only busy work: you walk on them, reach a safe place, regroup and heal. Maybe later chapters will have insta-kill traps (I'm sure Swen will drop lava on my head sooner or later), but that wouldn't excuse the time wasted on pointless time-consuming slowing traps throughout the game.

Maybe you can use them to cheat nearby encounters, but there already are enough ways to do that and sometimes you find said traps in places where you couldn't possibly bring your enemies.

 

[JarlFrank]

Maybe it's not the lack of FPC that people hate

It is, a party of 6 where you control only 1 is basically automatic combat which sucks regardless of the AI's ability.

Having your party on AI control turns combat into what dialogue is in JRPGs (automatic conversations where you have no input).

I'll never understand people who support "gameplay" features that reduce player input. It's a fucking game. You're supposed to play it, not watch it being played by the AI or watch cutscenes.

 

[NJClaw]

Maybe it's not the lack of FPC that people hate

It is, a party of 6 where you control only 1 is basically automatic combat which sucks regardless of the AI's ability.

Having your party on AI control turns combat into what dialogue is in JRPGs (automatic conversations where you have no input).

I'll never understand people who support "gameplay" features that reduce player input. It's a fucking game. You're supposed to play it, not watch it being played by the AI or watch cutscenes.

Hey, don't discriminate against videogame-cuckolds. They like watching other people (or AI) play their games for them.

 

[Harthwain]

Having your party on AI control turns combat into what dialogue is in JRPGs (automatic conversations where you have no input).

I'll never understand people who support "gameplay" features that reduce player input. It's a fucking game. You're supposed to play it, not watch it being played by the AI or watch cutscenes.

I can see a situation where you would want to automate the elements you find tedious or repetitive, but giving control over the companions exclusively to the AI sounds like a mistake, even if you could modify their behavior with scripts.

 

[JarlFrank]

Having your party on AI control turns combat into what dialogue is in JRPGs (automatic conversations where you have no input).

I'll never understand people who support "gameplay" features that reduce player input. It's a fucking game. You're supposed to play it, not watch it being played by the AI or watch cutscenes.

I can see a situation where you would want to automate the elements you find tedious or repetitive, but giving control over the companions exclusively to the AI sounds like a mistake, even if you could modify their behavior with scripts.

A great example of optional automatisation is the space 4X strategy Distant Worlds. You can assign all kinds of gameplay decisions to the AI, but you can always manually interfere or switch off AI actions. You can put the entire colonization and economy sectors under AI control and focus on warfare and diplomacy, or vice versa. Or leave AI off completely and do everything yourself.

That's a valid option for RPGs too. But sadly a lot of RPGs think that you should only control your own character and party members are hands-off AI companions: Fallout 1 and 2, Arcanum, Neverwinter Nights. Theoretically they have the perspective and interfaces for full party control to work, but they don't let you do that. So any combat situation involving companions is a game of luck where you have to pray your AI companion won't do something stupid and kill himself, accidentally kill you with splash damage, or accidentally pull a mob of enemies to you which you didn't want to engage yet. Worst case scenario is getting into an encounter you know you could win, but it's ruined by your companion acting dumb, and you have to reload the pre-encounter save and try again until the AI companion acts smart enough to not fuck it up. I've had that happen to me dozens of times in the otherwise excellent NWN module Swordflight: a spellcasting companion using up all his spells against enemies my fighter main could have wiped out with zero magical assistance, and the thief chick shooting her crossbow in melee which provoked so many melee AoOs that she effectively suicided.

 

[NJClaw]

Having your party on AI control turns combat into what dialogue is in JRPGs (automatic conversations where you have no input).

I'll never understand people who support "gameplay" features that reduce player input. It's a fucking game. You're supposed to play it, not watch it being played by the AI or watch cutscenes.

I can see a situation where you would want to automate the elements you find tedious or repetitive, but giving control over the companions exclusively to the AI sounds like a mistake, even if you could modify their behavior with scripts.

A great example of optional automatisation is the space 4X strategy Distant Worlds. You can assign all kinds of gameplay decisions to the AI, but you can always manually interfere or switch off AI actions. You can put the entire colonization and economy sectors under AI control and focus on warfare and diplomacy, or vice versa. Or leave AI off completely and do everything yourself.

That's a valid option for RPGs too. But sadly a lot of RPGs think that you should only control your own character and party members are hands-off AI companions: Fallout 1 and 2, Arcanum, Neverwinter Nights. Theoretically they have the perspective and interfaces for full party control to work, but they don't let you do that. So any combat situation involving companions is a game of luck where you have to pray your AI companion won't do something stupid and kill himself, accidentally kill you with splash damage, or accidentally pull a mob of enemies to you which you didn't want to engage yet. Worst case scenario is getting into an encounter you know you could win, but it's ruined by your companion acting dumb, and you have to reload the pre-encounter save and try again until the AI companion acts smart enough to not fuck it up. I've had that happen to me dozens of times in the otherwise excellent NWN module Swordflight: a spellcasting companion using up all his spells against enemies my fighter main could have wiped out with zero magical assistance, and the thief chick shooting her crossbow in melee which provoked so many melee AoOs that she effectively suicided.

AI controlled companions can be so shit that it can be unbearable even if you have to suffer through it only once in the entire game. In Divinity: Original Sin 2 there's this fucking moron that keeps running into inextinguishable fire every single round during the longest encounter I've faced up until now. The worst part is that fire damages you for every step you take and he REALLY doesn't seem to care about his life, because he won't stop running in circles for his entire turn. What a scumbag. The only way I found to deal with him is to freeze him in his place to prevent him from ever acting during the encounter.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[gurugeorge]

Maybe it's not the lack of FPC that people hate

It is, a party of 6 where you control only 1 is basically automatic combat which sucks regardless of the AI's ability.

I like it in DA:O and a few other games, where you have some fine control over the AI scripts and can imbue your companion AI with the personality you want as fighters. Then it is a form of gameplay - in fact it's a form of gameplay that I wish more developers would explore. (I call it "wind 'em up and watch 'em go." In essence, it's almost like a stretched-out version of turn-based gameplay, where you set some logic and see what happens; or again, one might say it's a step intermediary between creating a build for the character - which is a form of high level strategic gameplay - and controlling it directly.)

But if your companion AI is set by the game developers and you can neither fiddle with it nor control the characters yourself, then yeah, it is dumb.

 

[c2007]

I call it "wind 'em up and watch 'em go." In essence, it's almost like a stretched-out version of turn-based gameplay, where you set some logic and see what happens; or again, one might say it's a step intermediary between creating a build for the character - which is a form of high level strategic gameplay - and controlling it directly.

I like this analogy, the wind-up, and was one of the few things I enjoyed about DAO combat. You could see the results of your strategy tweaks in one encounter, and season to taste.

 

[JarlFrank]

I always switched off AI patterns in Dragon Age and manually controlled every move

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Maybe it's not the lack of FPC that people hate

It is, a party of 6 where you control only 1 is basically automatic combat which sucks regardless of the AI's ability.

Having your party on AI control turns combat into what dialogue is in JRPGs (automatic conversations where you have no input).

I'll never understand people who support "gameplay" features that reduce player input. It's a fucking game. You're supposed to play it, not watch it being played by the AI or watch cutscenes.

Because in non-turn based games I like to feel as if my companions are actively helping me rather than me controlling them.

 

[JarlFrank]

Maybe it's not the lack of FPC that people hate

It is, a party of 6 where you control only 1 is basically automatic combat which sucks regardless of the AI's ability.

Having your party on AI control turns combat into what dialogue is in JRPGs (automatic conversations where you have no input).

I'll never understand people who support "gameplay" features that reduce player input. It's a fucking game. You're supposed to play it, not watch it being played by the AI or watch cutscenes.

Because in non-turn based games I like to feel as if my companions are actively helping me rather than me controlling them.

When companions are AI-controlled, I feel as if they actively hinder me.

I never used companions in any Fallout game, either the originals or the Bethesda ones, because they just got in the way.

 

[NJClaw]

I always switched off AI patterns in Dragon Age and manually controlled every move

Yeah, I recently replayed it and the first thing I did for every single character was turning off their default tactics. Some companions even start with points invested in the skill tree that unlocks more tactics slot and I installed the respec mod just to get rid of that.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Maybe it's not the lack of FPC that people hate

It is, a party of 6 where you control only 1 is basically automatic combat which sucks regardless of the AI's ability.

Having your party on AI control turns combat into what dialogue is in JRPGs (automatic conversations where you have no input).

I'll never understand people who support "gameplay" features that reduce player input. It's a fucking game. You're supposed to play it, not watch it being played by the AI or watch cutscenes.

Because in non-turn based games I like to feel as if my companions are actively helping me rather than me controlling them.

When companions are AI-controlled, I feel as if they actively hinder me.

I never used companions in any Fallout game, either the originals or the Bethesda ones, because they just got in the way.

You just haven't discovered the power of F R I E N D S H I P yet

 

[NJClaw]

Maybe it's not the lack of FPC that people hate

It is, a party of 6 where you control only 1 is basically automatic combat which sucks regardless of the AI's ability.

Having your party on AI control turns combat into what dialogue is in JRPGs (automatic conversations where you have no input).

I'll never understand people who support "gameplay" features that reduce player input. It's a fucking game. You're supposed to play it, not watch it being played by the AI or watch cutscenes.

Because in non-turn based games I like to feel as if my companions are actively helping me rather than me controlling them.

When companions are AI-controlled, I feel as if they actively hinder me.

I never used companions in any Fallout game, either the originals or the Bethesda ones, because they just got in the way.

You just haven't discovered the power of F R I E N D S H I P yet

Is this a MOTHERFUCKING My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic reference?!

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[MRY]

The Spirit Hunger mechanic in MOTB is one of the great near-misses in RPG design. With a little more care, I think it would've been both extremely thematic and very mechanically interesting, as it would've served as a check on rest spamming as means of counteracting attrition/resource management (mechanically interesting) and forced the player to live with the horror of his condition (thematic) by compelling you to consume spirits in "evil" ways even if you are a good character. But it turns out that you can still do a goodie-goodie run without any real difficulty by suppressing hunger, doing that ability where you benignly consume enemy spirit creatures or whatever (I can't remember the exact concept), and using events/travel as the basis for resting. The mechanic then turns out to be basically just annoying, requiring you to engage in degenerate gameplay to suppress hunger and to minimize inter-zone travel to avoid hunger spikes. Per George, my understanding is that no one ended up enjoying it, and as a result he was averse to introducing a delay-consequence mechanic into TTON (where the Sorrow would attack causing narrative-/quest-relevant consequences in whatever zone you're dawdling in), which in turn meant that TTON suffered from rest/effort-spamming. So it goes.

 

[DalekFlay]

I like it in DA:O and a few other games, where you have some fine control over the AI scripts and can imbue your companion AI with the personality you want as fighters. Then it is a form of gameplay - in fact it's a form of gameplay that I wish more developers would explore. (I call it "wind 'em up and watch 'em go." In essence, it's almost like a stretched-out version of turn-based gameplay, where you set some logic and see what happens; or again, one might say it's a step intermediary between creating a build for the character - which is a form of high level strategic gameplay - and controlling it directly.)

But if your companion AI is set by the game developers and you can neither fiddle with it nor control the characters yourself, then yeah, it is dumb.

I get that some like this, and usually I'm a middle-ground kind of guy, but in this case I'd rather full party control or no party control honestly. In Dragon Age: Origins I turned the AI off except for basic attacking and did everything myself, because otherwise it felt like I wasn't playing and strategizing. However in a game like Dragon Age Inquisition or Mass Effect, where you have so little input on their actions, I'd rather not be bothered at all. Give me the full fat RtwP strategic experience or give me nothing, I guess.

 

[laclongquan]

The Spirit Hunger mechanic in MOTB is one of the great near-misses in RPG design. With a little more care, I think it would've been both extremely thematic and very mechanically interesting, as it would've served as a check on rest spamming as means of counteracting attrition/resource management (mechanically interesting) and forced the player to live with the horror of his condition (thematic) by compelling you to consume spirits in "evil" ways even if you are a good character. But it turns out that you can still do a goodie-goodie run without any real difficulty by suppressing hunger, doing that ability where you benignly consume enemy spirit creatures or whatever (I can't remember the exact concept), and using events/travel as the basis for resting. The mechanic then turns out to be basically just annoying, requiring you to engage in degenerate gameplay to suppress hunger and to minimize inter-zone travel to avoid hunger spikes. Per George, my understanding is that no one ended up enjoying it, and as a result he was averse to introducing a delay-consequence mechanic into TTON (where the Sorrow would attack causing narrative-/quest-relevant consequences in whatever zone you're dawdling in), which in turn meant that TTON suffered from rest/effort-spamming. So it goes.

Because we gamers are not passive watchers of movies and readers of books. we can actively avoid the horrors when we can.

Any enforced state of mind that devs want to foist on us will face a furious resistance~

 

[Cross]

The Spirit Hunger mechanic in MOTB is one of the great near-misses in RPG design. With a little more care, I think it would've been both extremely thematic and very mechanically interesting, as it would've served as a check on rest spamming as means of counteracting attrition/resource management (mechanically interesting) and forced the player to live with the horror of his condition (thematic) by compelling you to consume spirits in "evil" ways even if you are a good character. But it turns out that you can still do a goodie-goodie run without any real difficulty by suppressing hunger, doing that ability where you benignly consume enemy spirit creatures or whatever (I can't remember the exact concept), and using events/travel as the basis for resting. The mechanic then turns out to be basically just annoying, requiring you to engage in degenerate gameplay to suppress hunger and to minimize inter-zone travel to avoid hunger spikes. Per George, my understanding is that no one ended up enjoying it, and as a result he was averse to introducing a delay-consequence mechanic into TTON (where the Sorrow would attack causing narrative-/quest-relevant consequences in whatever zone you're dawdling in), which in turn meant that TTON suffered from rest/effort-spamming. So it goes.

That's not what happened. From what I remember from the interview where he talked about it, the response was negative not because people felt it was boring busywork, but because they actually believed the mechanic was unreasonably punishing and screwing them over from completing the game. Players, or maybe just a very vocal minority of them, despise time limits in any form, no matter how reasonable or even trivial they are (see also the negative response to Fallout 1's time limit).

Imagine what the response would have been like if the spirit hunger was a more significant threat.

 

[Karellen]

The Spirit Hunger mechanic in MOTB is one of the great near-misses in RPG design. With a little more care, I think it would've been both extremely thematic and very mechanically interesting, as it would've served as a check on rest spamming as means of counteracting attrition/resource management (mechanically interesting) and forced the player to live with the horror of his condition (thematic) by compelling you to consume spirits in "evil" ways even if you are a good character. But it turns out that you can still do a goodie-goodie run without any real difficulty by suppressing hunger, doing that ability where you benignly consume enemy spirit creatures or whatever (I can't remember the exact concept), and using events/travel as the basis for resting. The mechanic then turns out to be basically just annoying, requiring you to engage in degenerate gameplay to suppress hunger and to minimize inter-zone travel to avoid hunger spikes. Per George, my understanding is that no one ended up enjoying it, and as a result he was averse to introducing a delay-consequence mechanic into TTON (where the Sorrow would attack causing narrative-/quest-relevant consequences in whatever zone you're dawdling in), which in turn meant that TTON suffered from rest/effort-spamming. So it goes.

That's not what happened. From what I remember from the interview where he talked about it, the response was negative not because people felt it was boring busywork, but because they actually believed the mechanic was unreasonably punishing and screwing them over from completing the game. Players, or maybe just a very vocal minority of them, despise time limits in any form, no matter how reasonable or even trivial they are (see also the negative response to Fallout 1's time limit).

Imagine what the response would have been like if the spirit hunger was a more significant threat.

This might be true, but it's worth noting that people deal with time limits and urgency mechanics competently and without complaint in strategy games, board games and pen-and-paper RPGs, because the time limits are a core element of the game and dealing with them is a given. In comparison, in RPGs, time limits tend to be something that's been haphazardly bolted on top of a conventional RPG, to the effect that the time limit is relevant only inconsistently, and you don't have that much to work with when it comes to dealing with them. The Spirit Hunger mechanic can be broken to the effect that you can basically ignore it, but before that, it looks a lot more annoying than it really is, and it's not readily obvious how you can deal with it and how it interfaces with other things in the game; in similar vein, when you play Fallout for the first time, you don't really know where you're going, and you have no idea how long it will take to get there (and to return to the Vault), and anyway you can't really do much to travel faster if you needed to, so you can't really deal with the problem in any meaningful way except by hoping that you make it in time. Once you know where you're meant to go, the time limit ceases to be interesting and becomes irrelevant at best and a mild annoyance at worst.

Time limits would probably be a controversial mechanic no matter what in an RPG, but it seems to me that the way to make them work is to involve them in everything you do, and see to it that the strategic stakes of various decisions are both meaningful and fairly transparent. But that basically entails designing the entire game around them, which is certainly not an obvious thing to do.

 

[Lawntoilet]

Players, or maybe just a very vocal minority of them, despise time limits in any form, no matter how reasonable or even trivial they are (see also the negative response to Fallout 1's time limit).

Imagine what the response would have been like if the spirit hunger was a more significant threat.

Even on this site, where people are probably more likely than average to accept (or even appreciate) time limits, there's a fair bit of about Kingmaker having a time limit.

 

[Cross]

In comparison, in RPGs, time limits tend to be something that's been haphazardly bolted on top of a conventional RPG, to the effect that the time limit is relevant only inconsistently, and you don't have that much to work with when it comes to dealing with them.

Time limits would probably be a controversial mechanic no matter what in an RPG, but it seems to me that the way to make them work is to involve them in everything you do.

That's precisely what Mask of the Betrayer and Fallout do though. Instead of having some arbitrary system wherein some quests might be on a time limit and others aren't, they have a single, overarching mechanic that governs everything you do in the game.

it's not readily obvious how you can deal with it and how it interfaces with other things in the game

If you mouse over the spirit meter interface, it tells you exactly what the statistical effects are of having a spirit energy/hunger of 20, 40, 60, etc. even before you reach them. The abilities that affect your hunger also come with tooltips that tell you what they do.

when you play Fallout for the first time, you don't really know where you're going

Of course not. That would defeat the entire point of exploration.

and you have no idea how long it will take to get there (and to return to the Vault)

The world map shows you what the passage of time is when you travel between locations.

you can't really do much to travel faster if you needed to, so you can't really deal with the problem in any meaningful way except by hoping that you make it in time.

Obviously, the way to prevent needless commutes is to finish up all the quests in a particular area before moving on. And there's at least one perk that reduces travel time on the world map.

I find it hard to believe the hypothetical player you're imagining would be accepting of time limits if they were done right (whatever that entails), yet that same player somehow still complains about a lack of transparency in a game that comes with in-built tooltips on what happens at specific time intervals.

 

[MRY]

That's not what happened. From what I remember from the interview where he talked about it, the response was negative not because people felt it was boring busywork, but because they actually believed the mechanic was unreasonably punishing and screwing them over from completing the game. Players, or maybe just a very vocal minority of them, despise time limits in any form, no matter how reasonable or even trivial they are (see also the negative response to Fallout 1's time limit).

Imagine what the response would have been like if the spirit hunger was a more significant threat.

To be clear (since I obviously was sloppy in the prior post), my point wasn't that the reason the mechanic faced a backlash is because it was too easy to work around. You're right that (in certain kinds of games) players will object to anything resembling challenge a time limit. But those haters were going to hate the spirit hunger mechanic no matter what. But if the mechanic had actually been meaningful, I believe there might have been offsetting fans of the feature who might have counterbalanced the haters. After all, while people may grouse about the time limits in Star Control 2, Fallout, and Exile 3, people (e.g., me) also remember those features very fondly. I don't know anyone who remembers spirit hunger fondly.

Because we gamers are not passive watchers of movies and readers of books. we can actively avoid the horrors when we can.

Any enforced state of mind that devs want to foist on us will face a furious resistance~

That is of course true -- it's why so many players have trouble with AOD; it doesn't default to making you Superman who can do anything he wants, whenever he wants. "To me as an RPG player, there must be no limits. Any eforced limits will face a furious resistance." But I still think the best RPGs are the one that use their mechanics to emphasize their themes, rather than having story simply bolted onto generic mechanics. Thus, AOD's demanding combat is one of the ways it conveys the combustible, deadly nature of the setting. If the spirit hunger actually forced hard choices, then the game's mechanics would have conveyed why dealing with the spirit hunger mattered. But the game's mechanics made the player-character more like Magic Johnson -- sure he'd rather not have his sickness, which sounds horrific on paper, but it turns out that it causes no more than a nuisance in an otherwise totally over-powered life. Nothing in the mechanics of the game seriously suggested to me that my character couldn't have just indefinitely continued with the spirit hunger while running a highly successful chain of movie theaters and owning parts of storied sports franchises.

To me, terrible design has cutscenes or arbitrary rules in which the player has enforced constraints that make no sense in the setting. (E.g., a couple low-level enemies sneak up behind you in a cutscene and capture your companion from under your nose because LOL, it's a cutscene!) But great design has rules that make the player internalize the narrative through the gameplay. There will be some players who still try to break the rules, just like there are P&P players who want nothing more than to derail the campaign, which is fine. But for the ordinary player, I still think such a design adds immeasurably to the game.

 

[Harthwain]

On the subject of time limits - should the time limit be finite or infinite?

I think it's easier for people to accept infinite time limits (they are finite, but their durations can be extended). The major downside is that I can easily see it turning into a chore, since people have to go through extra steps just to make sure they keep playing. And they WILL go through them, even if they don't like these steps. Plus it does remove tension (unless the ability to extend the time limit is challenging enough in itself to make not guaranteed way of getting extra time)

Finite time limits encourage players to take more risks as the time goes on, because they can't afford to dally. On the flipside, it does punish any slip-ups (you're starting to run out of time and then you're even more behind than you were), which requires perfectionism. One way around that problem is giving the player the ability to make an estimated guess, if he failed to get all pieces of the puzzle. Or make the task expotentially harder, but not virtually impossible.

That is of course true -- it's why so many players have trouble with AOD; it doesn't default to making you Superman who can do anything he wants, whenever he wants.

I'd argue the problem with AOD wasn't that you couldn't do anything you wanted, whenever you wanted. The problem was that even if you put points into being good at something (but not enough to be good enough) there were still situations when you were screwed. Putting player in a position where he screws himself, because makes "suboptimal build" isn't going to be liked by the majority of people no matter what.