-
Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.
"This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.
Grampy_Bone
Arcane
"grinding = bad" is an argument for level-scaling.
Whether the game goes whole-hog Todd Howard and scales dynamically, or fixes all encounters along a largely linear story with precisely determined amounts of XP doled out across the game, the result is the same: progression and reward are out of the player's hands.
Drop me into the game and let me determine how to progress. Make the game hard, fix the enemy levels, don't make it easy to grind past the curve--but no matter what, give me the choice.
Grinding allows player-determined, dynamic difficulty. Without it, you either have to 'balance' the game (which usually means erring on being too easy) or allow *shudder* difficulty sliders, which are an abomination in RPGs.
Whether the game goes whole-hog Todd Howard and scales dynamically, or fixes all encounters along a largely linear story with precisely determined amounts of XP doled out across the game, the result is the same: progression and reward are out of the player's hands.
Drop me into the game and let me determine how to progress. Make the game hard, fix the enemy levels, don't make it easy to grind past the curve--but no matter what, give me the choice.
Grinding allows player-determined, dynamic difficulty. Without it, you either have to 'balance' the game (which usually means erring on being too easy) or allow *shudder* difficulty sliders, which are an abomination in RPGs.
If you have enough unique content in the game you don't need either grinding or level scaling.
Dark Souls 1 did grinding both good and bad. If you play Dark Souls 1 normally and have gitten at least a modicum of gud you don't have to stop and grind out the same dudes over and over again, but you can totally do it if you want to. Once you reach Andre the Blacksmith you can explore the nearby areas and beat enemies down for their souls, then use said souls to purchase upgrade materials for your weapons and armor. But you don't NEED to do that: you can also play normally and use the souls gained that way to improve your character. Without grinding you get to pick between your stats and your gear, but if you choose to grind you get to choose both. Once you hit Anor Londo you can grind out over a quarter of a million souls to BECOME UNSTOPPABLE thanks to the Giant Set and upgrading it with twinkling titanite (8k a pop). But that's very expensive and slow to obtain. So here you have a choice: get some of the best armor in the game by grinding a massive amount of souls, or will you progress as normal?
Now, Dark Souls also fucks this up by having certain things only be random drops. One of them is the Channeler's Trident, a weapon that despite its so-so moveset features a special attack where you do a funny dance to boost your damage output. Such a unique weapon is not a secret or a late-game reward, except it's found as a 1% drop chance on the Channelers of which there are only a few found in the game, the first two of which don't respawn.
So my point is, grinding should be a choice but it should NEVER be mandatory.
Now, Dark Souls also fucks this up by having certain things only be random drops. One of them is the Channeler's Trident, a weapon that despite its so-so moveset features a special attack where you do a funny dance to boost your damage output. Such a unique weapon is not a secret or a late-game reward, except it's found as a 1% drop chance on the Channelers of which there are only a few found in the game, the first two of which don't respawn.
So my point is, grinding should be a choice but it should NEVER be mandatory.
DraQ
Arcane
Some real philosopher kings ITT.
Seriously, it's teeming with them.
The only benefit of grind is that it makes for a clearly identifiable symptom of the underlying rot.
Other than that it only serves to undermine whatever design was put into in-game challenges and makes the game tedious.
^ The problem with that is, fighting games. How many fights have you had as E Honda or whatever your pick is? For most people that is 1000s but it was never called grindy. There are also gaming elephants in the room like Mario, Tetris, Portal, Minecraft, etc... Most of those are 1000x simpler and more repetitive than EQ, but they never got called grindy! So we need a philosopher king cuz 'grind' is too hard to identify. This is worse than what is an rpg!
- Joined
- Mar 28, 2014
- Messages
- 4,198
There's a reason why grinding is so hated an Mario is not.
-It's often doing the same things over and over again. Often using the same strategy, making the same characters do the same moves. In worst cases it devolves to pressing "confirm" for half an hour and sometimes healing in between.
-There is no challenge. You can fuck-up a jump in Mario, grinding is almost impossible to mess up once you clear that encounter a few times.
-Grinding is not why people play the game, it's what's keeping them from things they play the game for. Either levels and gold or actual content.
-There are limited ways of making it faster. You can rush through a level in Mario if you know it well. The ways to speed-up the grind once you find a good spot are limited. If you can beat everyone in 2 turns in some Final Fantasy there is not much you can do.
-There are not memorable in any way, shape or form. There are fun individual levels (or parts of levels) in Mario. There are no fund individual grinding encounters.
This applies to actual grinding in other words going around in the same area fighting the same random encounters over and over again as well as things that are equivalent to grinding. By which I mean high encounter rates in games with random encounters and copy-pasted fights with games without them. Because of that they could be entirely removed from the game or drastically reduced without hurting it in any way. Let's take Kingmaker for example. Did I enjoy the game? Sure I did. Would I enjoy it more if the number of random encounters and trashmob fights was reduced by half. Hell yeah. If most traditional jRPGs reduced encounter rates by half and increased XP gain by half I'd also enjoy them more.
This doesn't apply to Mario. Slashing half of the levels wouldn't make my playthrough more enjoyable, just shorter.
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2019
- Messages
- 2,959
Try grinding with a combination of reputation.
Where you play a long game with tongs of grinding, but you don't know that when you kill some specific monsters that give you a ton of gold and xp, they lower your reputation. So you basically brick your ability to win the game, because you lost so much reputation you cannot progress without inhumane amounts of grinding.
i am talking about Miracle Warriors, and the life lessons from that game.
Where you play a long game with tongs of grinding, but you don't know that when you kill some specific monsters that give you a ton of gold and xp, they lower your reputation. So you basically brick your ability to win the game, because you lost so much reputation you cannot progress without inhumane amounts of grinding.
i am talking about Miracle Warriors, and the life lessons from that game.
thesecret1
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2019
- Messages
- 5,847
If your game "needs" grinding, then you failed at designing it – with properly designed difficulty, there is no reason for the player to grind. I reject the notion that being able to trivialize challenge through repetitive tedium is somehow a positive thing – if you're a shitter, that's what the easy difficulty is for. If you cannot beat even that, or if the game doesn't offer an easy difficulty, then you ought to simply git gud, rather than persist in degenerate behavior. Grinding is the inept designer's fallback tool – "Ah well, maybe I made this part too difficult, who cares, they can just grind to beat it lol".
I think there are 2 different topics now. Grinding as a means to get some levels and then any encounter is easy. And grind as means to pad the game out with tons of fighting or fedex or whatever.
purupuru
Learned
- Joined
- Nov 2, 2019
- Messages
- 414
The only difference between grinding and properly playing is the quality of content that is being consumed. So if consuming quality content gives more than enough character growth to progress the game and not bang your head against a brick wall, then that alone is enough to stop most players from grinding shitty content. On the other hand, if you go out of your way to discourage grinding through mechanics like level-scaling, you are dangerously close to discouraging consuming quality content as well.
So if a dev wants to get rid of grinding, do some real work and put in lots of good content, don't think there is some cute short cut mechanics that you can use to get away with relying on shitty content and magically make your game not a boring slog.
So if a dev wants to get rid of grinding, do some real work and put in lots of good content, don't think there is some cute short cut mechanics that you can use to get away with relying on shitty content and magically make your game not a boring slog.
Generic-Giant-Spider
Guest
Learning a match up in a fighting game is different than killing the same fucker over and over again waiting for the moon cycles to bless you with the item you need.
Enforced grinding by the game, or players choosing to grind? The former is bullshit, but I have absolutely no problem with grinding being a "solution" to potential problems that the player might face since it basically means that anybody can finish the game with enough patience.
My point is that in one game they are repeating spells to progress, and in one game they are repeating hadookens to progress. What makes one a grind and the other not?
Generic-Giant-Spider
Guest
One is mind-numbing and requires no strategy or thought process while the other is about becoming more knowledgeable in the match-up. The more you fight a character you have trouble with, the more you learn about them and become better acclimated to countering/knowing their strengths and weaknesses.
Metronome
Learned
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2020
- Messages
- 277
When I was younger I liked the process of slowly making my characters more powerful through the training. It was very satisfying. As an adult though it feels like a waste of my dwindling time. I may as well be "grinding" in real life. Though I often feel that way when playing video games these days regardless.
Reinhardt
Arcane
- Joined
- Sep 4, 2015
- Messages
- 29,726
I don't care. My trade empire is still best trade empire in battle brothers world.
It's acceptable in one game, Diablo.
Nothing else.
Nothing else.
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2019
- Messages
- 2,959
Grinding can be fun too.
Remember that not every game want to be 100% intense 100% of the time.
Many games have a few big and difficult challenges, with many small and not very hard challenges.
Imagine all the battles would be boss battles. Do you want every step of the game to be difficult? Or you want some of the tasks to be easier, while preparing for the big boss battle?
Grinding can be fine if there is enough monster variety and enough freedom to choose where you go.
But if it's the same 2 or 3 monster in the same area over and over again, then it's really boring.
I appreciate more "perfectly balanced games", but grinding games are also fun.
For instance, on Ys, you could grind, but they would lock how much you can level up before some bosses, so you cannot just increase your level too much so the boss will turn easy. That's a perfectly balanced game that design the game for you to have a certain challenge with no way to circumvent it.
So grinding can be fun too if done well. It's about balancing challenge/choice/variety and random encounter.
Remember that not every game want to be 100% intense 100% of the time.
Many games have a few big and difficult challenges, with many small and not very hard challenges.
Imagine all the battles would be boss battles. Do you want every step of the game to be difficult? Or you want some of the tasks to be easier, while preparing for the big boss battle?
Grinding can be fine if there is enough monster variety and enough freedom to choose where you go.
But if it's the same 2 or 3 monster in the same area over and over again, then it's really boring.
I appreciate more "perfectly balanced games", but grinding games are also fun.
For instance, on Ys, you could grind, but they would lock how much you can level up before some bosses, so you cannot just increase your level too much so the boss will turn easy. That's a perfectly balanced game that design the game for you to have a certain challenge with no way to circumvent it.
So grinding can be fun too if done well. It's about balancing challenge/choice/variety and random encounter.
Sarathiour
Cipher
- Joined
- Jun 7, 2020
- Messages
- 3,264
Obviously, if the game force you to grind at some point to progress, i can't describe it as anything else than horrible design, at best.
However, actively preventing grind usually come at the cost of other horror, such as level scaling.
So my answers is KC : don't force it on the player, just let it be.
However, actively preventing grind usually come at the cost of other horror, such as level scaling.
So my answers is KC : don't force it on the player, just let it be.
As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.