Introdeker
Novice
- Joined
- Apr 8, 2009
- Messages
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In this post I’ll argue that allowing the player to decide the development of his characters stats and tactical moves is actually useless. I go through some lengths to ground my arguments in two popular games, which those unfamiliar with these games might want to skip. I tried to keep it brief so some weak points appeared in the Disclaimer and Summary, but I’ll be happy to reinforce if thought necessary.
Disclaimer
By character development I mean the choice of stats, skills, traits, etc, and not the setting of psychological factors and backgrounds (which are woefully underdeveloped in video games anyway – and for good reasons). I understand some people can’t keep the two aspects separate, for instance choosing not to use a hammer even when it’d be the most effective because it’s a barbaric weapon beneath their noble status. But if this is not represented in the game by having characters with the nobility trait actually unable to wield hammers (just like clerics have always been forbidden to use slashing weapons) then can only explain that character’s behavior by thinking of him as an eccentric, perhaps a neurotic causing himself unnecessary disadvantages in his chosen profession. Most people who go about the world risking their lives for whatever reason would do well to always use the most effective and least dangerous option made available to them. With that I brush aside the self imposed role-playing house rules; I only want to analyze the rules of the game as the developers made them.
So, what’s the point of having character development in a game?
At first I was struck by the arguments of mondblut and others like him that the point of an rpg is what I call long term strategy (c development) and short term tactical choices. But the more I thought about games I had actually played the least convincing this became. In most games which really give you options of development you have a scenario in which half the skills are completely useless, and of the remaining some are only useful in a few contexts while others are so much better than everything else they usually feel exploitive. I’ll briefly analyze as examples Fallout and Might & Magic VI.
Fallout
In Fallout you only have two character types which can be played throughout the game: the warrior and the diplomat. Everything else (i.e. the gambler, the doctor, the hunter, the stealthy thief, etc) will either prove to be essentially poorer versions of those two types or will only use their skills on one or two quests, if they refuse to use skills from the essential types. Instead it’s better to think of the perks and skills which would be primary to these alternative types as secondary skills which the warrior or the diplomat can acquire. What I’m calling diplomat might perhaps be better described as pacifist, and this character will only really need to increase his intelligence and charisma (pretend it’s not bugged) for his stats, focusing on the Speech skill as his bread earner. He’ll talk everyone into doing what he wants and recruit many allies for the few people which can’t be reasoned with – but that’s it! The character doesn’t NEED anything else, all the other skills, traits and perks are completely optional, you might miss on a quest or two for not meeting a specific criterion but you’ll finish the game just fine. For pacifists the Speech skills and the Intelligence stat are completely overpowered, you’d do very poorly if you didn’t want to fight and prioritized something else. The Warrior type is a little more complex since you can choose from three basic skills and these open a lot more combo possibilities for you trait and perk picks (for the sake of simplicity I’ll ignore melee combat). But here too we stumble upon difficulties, for these three basic skills are very uneven in effectiveness. Small guns is much better in the beginning of the game but starts to become progressively worse as you start to actually find laser and plasma weapons. These are undoubtedly the better ranged weapons in the game, much better than the “big guns”, which also have strength requirements, further drawing your resources in a direction which effectively don’t help a gunslinger. So an Energy Weapons specialist which had a brief experience with Small Guns will have a very easy time through the game, especially if combined with traits and perks which improve your critical hits. Compared with such a character a muscular big gun wielder which fires more often in burst mode and does extra damage per bullet pales – there’s just no real comparison here. The game is very easy and you can finish it either way, or using far less effective builds, but that’s not the point. Which is: why do they give us so many options in building our Warrior if some of these options are so much better than the others? And the Warrior, as we’ve seen, is only one of the possible build choices you could have in the game – one of the two useful ones and in reality less useful than the diplomat who will see more of the world and have an easier time in his travels. (Just to make it perfectly clear: I know in f1 you don’t have to stick to a character type. My warrior will have first aid, speech and science, perhaps also outdoorsman. His only required skill however is a ranged weapon specialty = this would be sorely missed in a warrior, the others wouldn’t.)
Might & Magic VI
But couldn’t these be the faults of Fallout alone, a game whose focus is not on the traditional mondblutian values but on allowing the player to interfere deeply in the world and “plot”, even granting multiple endings? To avoid that objection we must look in what was perhaps the most popular game in a series which is the staple of traditional rpgs: MMVI. Here there’s no plot, no character interaction and the only non-combat related choice you make, your alignment, turns out to be the most important choice for you tanks in human form, limiting their choices for their ultimate abilities. But here we already have problems from the get-go, for only two (wizard and cleric) of the six classes have access to these ultimate abilities; while the others have no real compensation for this loss. It gets worse: the knight has no mp so can’t cast any spell at all while even the normal magic schools, accessible to the other five classes, are usually much more effective than melee attacks. But it’s even worse: the dagger, which everyone (including the all powerful mages) but the clerics can wield actually does more damage than any other melee weapon! And what do the poor knights get in return, but heavy armor and more hit points? These might have been fine if only you were allowed to place the knight in the front so he could tank all the damage, but as it is if your extra ac and hp ever make themselves noted you’ll have three dead characters and one knight with ¾ of his hp which can’t kill anything. Rigged from the very beginning, your choices in the game become whether you want to work double time for the same end or build a party with only mages and clerics. Which brings us to another point: of the four schools of magic of each type, one is definitely useless (earth and mind). The other three tend to settle in a primary (fire and body if I’m not mistaken) and secondary scheme. And even within these useful schools some spells are so much better than the others! So even in the game which gives you hundreds of level-ups and whose very core is character development something seems seem to be amiss. (I know you can have indirect interference with the plot and the world in mmvi, by not completing certain quests for instance; but essentially the world is a huge a dungeon with trainers and guild hall. MMVII is virtually the same game with some of the same problems though slightly – only slightly - better balanced. While World of Xeen has no character development as I defined it.)
Summarizing
In real games, thanks to their complete lack of balance, allowing choices in your character development could only be justified by one argument, that of surprise. Everything may be terribly unbalanced but when you start playing you won’t know it. In fact if you avoid reading guides and only play the game once you won’t ever find that out. So you may increase your Science rating to 200% thinking all the while you may be getting useful dialogue choices and hacking into computers you otherwise wouldn’t have been able thanks to that, while in truth you only got to hack two extra non-essential systems towards the end of the game, and only needed about 100% Science for these. Or you may have thought your super mini-gun in point blank range spelled the second coming. You made your choice and the only way you’ll find out how good it was is either through replaying or reading guides. If you’re not bothered with that, if the choice is irrelevant for you, then there’s yet only one other reason why you might want character development in your games – see my action figure argument below. For those who like me want to think that rpgs involve thinking and planning (character development as long-term strategy) choosing the best option is the only point of having a choice. But, and this is the key to the whole post, if there’s always one best choice and you don’t even get to find out which it was for 20 play hours or more, what’s the point of the whole thing? Why allow me to choose between hammer and sword if the sword is always better? Any professional warrior would already know that, and always use a sword – in fact, war hammers wouldn’t be an option for professionals, they wouldn’t even think about it. Thus I fail to see what’s the point in making a choice which, if the game mechanics are hidden (as usual), is done blindly or if not has always one best answer that once discovered (through simple calculation) has but to be followed.
We could conceive of an ideal game in which every skill has its use and none is better than the others. So the fire mage will have an easy time in the Icy Mountains and suffer terribly to get through the Volcano, while the ice mage faces the opposite situation. Yet this is even more pointless – the choice makes no difference, either way you’ll have to go through one difficult and one easy area, or only go through the easy one.
So the only last argument I can think in favor of character development = and it’s unfortunate because it limits the appeal of this aspect of rpgs to children alone – is what I have called the action figure argument. Some children like the big muscular green figure; others prefer the ninja, while others yet will choose the sword wielding tiger-man. I don’t know what they find so fun about that, but they do have their personal preferences and might not want to take part in the exact same playing session if forced to forfeit such preference. So in the end character development would be just another cosmetic feature allowing for different tastes, very much like the 3d models (and there were 2d options for oldies as well) we get to pick in the beginning.
P.S. I may yet follow up on the briefer part about the uselessness of tactical decisions during battles, but the reasoning is the same. You get to choose but your choice is either irrelevant (if all are the same in end) or a stupid waste of time (it it’s all about finding which is the right choice by playing the game a lot and perhaps even taking notes from your results). If the game mechanics are FULLY documented (never heard of such a thing) then it’s even sillier, coming down to simple arithmetic. I have hunch that what’s fun about video games as whole is the middle options (hidden rules forcing the player to figure them out) in which they’re doubly confirmed as absolute wastes of time.
Disclaimer
By character development I mean the choice of stats, skills, traits, etc, and not the setting of psychological factors and backgrounds (which are woefully underdeveloped in video games anyway – and for good reasons). I understand some people can’t keep the two aspects separate, for instance choosing not to use a hammer even when it’d be the most effective because it’s a barbaric weapon beneath their noble status. But if this is not represented in the game by having characters with the nobility trait actually unable to wield hammers (just like clerics have always been forbidden to use slashing weapons) then can only explain that character’s behavior by thinking of him as an eccentric, perhaps a neurotic causing himself unnecessary disadvantages in his chosen profession. Most people who go about the world risking their lives for whatever reason would do well to always use the most effective and least dangerous option made available to them. With that I brush aside the self imposed role-playing house rules; I only want to analyze the rules of the game as the developers made them.
So, what’s the point of having character development in a game?
At first I was struck by the arguments of mondblut and others like him that the point of an rpg is what I call long term strategy (c development) and short term tactical choices. But the more I thought about games I had actually played the least convincing this became. In most games which really give you options of development you have a scenario in which half the skills are completely useless, and of the remaining some are only useful in a few contexts while others are so much better than everything else they usually feel exploitive. I’ll briefly analyze as examples Fallout and Might & Magic VI.
Fallout
In Fallout you only have two character types which can be played throughout the game: the warrior and the diplomat. Everything else (i.e. the gambler, the doctor, the hunter, the stealthy thief, etc) will either prove to be essentially poorer versions of those two types or will only use their skills on one or two quests, if they refuse to use skills from the essential types. Instead it’s better to think of the perks and skills which would be primary to these alternative types as secondary skills which the warrior or the diplomat can acquire. What I’m calling diplomat might perhaps be better described as pacifist, and this character will only really need to increase his intelligence and charisma (pretend it’s not bugged) for his stats, focusing on the Speech skill as his bread earner. He’ll talk everyone into doing what he wants and recruit many allies for the few people which can’t be reasoned with – but that’s it! The character doesn’t NEED anything else, all the other skills, traits and perks are completely optional, you might miss on a quest or two for not meeting a specific criterion but you’ll finish the game just fine. For pacifists the Speech skills and the Intelligence stat are completely overpowered, you’d do very poorly if you didn’t want to fight and prioritized something else. The Warrior type is a little more complex since you can choose from three basic skills and these open a lot more combo possibilities for you trait and perk picks (for the sake of simplicity I’ll ignore melee combat). But here too we stumble upon difficulties, for these three basic skills are very uneven in effectiveness. Small guns is much better in the beginning of the game but starts to become progressively worse as you start to actually find laser and plasma weapons. These are undoubtedly the better ranged weapons in the game, much better than the “big guns”, which also have strength requirements, further drawing your resources in a direction which effectively don’t help a gunslinger. So an Energy Weapons specialist which had a brief experience with Small Guns will have a very easy time through the game, especially if combined with traits and perks which improve your critical hits. Compared with such a character a muscular big gun wielder which fires more often in burst mode and does extra damage per bullet pales – there’s just no real comparison here. The game is very easy and you can finish it either way, or using far less effective builds, but that’s not the point. Which is: why do they give us so many options in building our Warrior if some of these options are so much better than the others? And the Warrior, as we’ve seen, is only one of the possible build choices you could have in the game – one of the two useful ones and in reality less useful than the diplomat who will see more of the world and have an easier time in his travels. (Just to make it perfectly clear: I know in f1 you don’t have to stick to a character type. My warrior will have first aid, speech and science, perhaps also outdoorsman. His only required skill however is a ranged weapon specialty = this would be sorely missed in a warrior, the others wouldn’t.)
Might & Magic VI
But couldn’t these be the faults of Fallout alone, a game whose focus is not on the traditional mondblutian values but on allowing the player to interfere deeply in the world and “plot”, even granting multiple endings? To avoid that objection we must look in what was perhaps the most popular game in a series which is the staple of traditional rpgs: MMVI. Here there’s no plot, no character interaction and the only non-combat related choice you make, your alignment, turns out to be the most important choice for you tanks in human form, limiting their choices for their ultimate abilities. But here we already have problems from the get-go, for only two (wizard and cleric) of the six classes have access to these ultimate abilities; while the others have no real compensation for this loss. It gets worse: the knight has no mp so can’t cast any spell at all while even the normal magic schools, accessible to the other five classes, are usually much more effective than melee attacks. But it’s even worse: the dagger, which everyone (including the all powerful mages) but the clerics can wield actually does more damage than any other melee weapon! And what do the poor knights get in return, but heavy armor and more hit points? These might have been fine if only you were allowed to place the knight in the front so he could tank all the damage, but as it is if your extra ac and hp ever make themselves noted you’ll have three dead characters and one knight with ¾ of his hp which can’t kill anything. Rigged from the very beginning, your choices in the game become whether you want to work double time for the same end or build a party with only mages and clerics. Which brings us to another point: of the four schools of magic of each type, one is definitely useless (earth and mind). The other three tend to settle in a primary (fire and body if I’m not mistaken) and secondary scheme. And even within these useful schools some spells are so much better than the others! So even in the game which gives you hundreds of level-ups and whose very core is character development something seems seem to be amiss. (I know you can have indirect interference with the plot and the world in mmvi, by not completing certain quests for instance; but essentially the world is a huge a dungeon with trainers and guild hall. MMVII is virtually the same game with some of the same problems though slightly – only slightly - better balanced. While World of Xeen has no character development as I defined it.)
Summarizing
In real games, thanks to their complete lack of balance, allowing choices in your character development could only be justified by one argument, that of surprise. Everything may be terribly unbalanced but when you start playing you won’t know it. In fact if you avoid reading guides and only play the game once you won’t ever find that out. So you may increase your Science rating to 200% thinking all the while you may be getting useful dialogue choices and hacking into computers you otherwise wouldn’t have been able thanks to that, while in truth you only got to hack two extra non-essential systems towards the end of the game, and only needed about 100% Science for these. Or you may have thought your super mini-gun in point blank range spelled the second coming. You made your choice and the only way you’ll find out how good it was is either through replaying or reading guides. If you’re not bothered with that, if the choice is irrelevant for you, then there’s yet only one other reason why you might want character development in your games – see my action figure argument below. For those who like me want to think that rpgs involve thinking and planning (character development as long-term strategy) choosing the best option is the only point of having a choice. But, and this is the key to the whole post, if there’s always one best choice and you don’t even get to find out which it was for 20 play hours or more, what’s the point of the whole thing? Why allow me to choose between hammer and sword if the sword is always better? Any professional warrior would already know that, and always use a sword – in fact, war hammers wouldn’t be an option for professionals, they wouldn’t even think about it. Thus I fail to see what’s the point in making a choice which, if the game mechanics are hidden (as usual), is done blindly or if not has always one best answer that once discovered (through simple calculation) has but to be followed.
We could conceive of an ideal game in which every skill has its use and none is better than the others. So the fire mage will have an easy time in the Icy Mountains and suffer terribly to get through the Volcano, while the ice mage faces the opposite situation. Yet this is even more pointless – the choice makes no difference, either way you’ll have to go through one difficult and one easy area, or only go through the easy one.
So the only last argument I can think in favor of character development = and it’s unfortunate because it limits the appeal of this aspect of rpgs to children alone – is what I have called the action figure argument. Some children like the big muscular green figure; others prefer the ninja, while others yet will choose the sword wielding tiger-man. I don’t know what they find so fun about that, but they do have their personal preferences and might not want to take part in the exact same playing session if forced to forfeit such preference. So in the end character development would be just another cosmetic feature allowing for different tastes, very much like the 3d models (and there were 2d options for oldies as well) we get to pick in the beginning.
P.S. I may yet follow up on the briefer part about the uselessness of tactical decisions during battles, but the reasoning is the same. You get to choose but your choice is either irrelevant (if all are the same in end) or a stupid waste of time (it it’s all about finding which is the right choice by playing the game a lot and perhaps even taking notes from your results). If the game mechanics are FULLY documented (never heard of such a thing) then it’s even sillier, coming down to simple arithmetic. I have hunch that what’s fun about video games as whole is the middle options (hidden rules forcing the player to figure them out) in which they’re doubly confirmed as absolute wastes of time.