Do you believe in the concept of "system bloat" in RPGs?

[Zombra]

This is why I also agree with luj that games should be simpler. To have a clear core gameplay loop that appeals to a certain audience. Why have a game that is an RPG and a base builder?

I think there's room in the world for a lot of different types of games. Hell, I liked Skyrim and got a lot of mileage out of it (but I would never say it was lean and mean!) And hybrid games can be super fuckin' excellent when they're put together with intention and innovation. I keep wanting to mention Rimworld, a base builder game that is also a kickass RPG-lite. Great base building, important character stats with growth and consequences for skill failures. You wouldn't have stuff like that if all games only aspired to "stay in their lane". At the same time games that know what they are and do one thing brilliantly are great too.

 

[Zombra]

To concretize the "bunch of toys" example, consider Tabletop Simulator. This essentially simulates playing card and board games over the net. For a game like that there is a real sense in which more is better - a wider variety of playable games in the simulator is better than fewer, and adding a new game isn't experienced as bloat. In this case the simulator itself doesn't really have a core gameplay loop. The way systems bloat could happen there would be through the addition of unnecessary systems to the simulation layer (e.g. player avatars, a musical score, etc.)

Well yeah ... bear in mind that Tabletop Simulator isn't a game - it's a platform for playing games.

 

[Vic]

This is why I also agree with luj that games should be simpler. To have a clear core gameplay loop that appeals to a certain audience. Why have a game that is an RPG and a base builder?

I think there's room in the world for a lot of different types of games. Hell, I liked Skyrim and got a lot of mileage out of it (but I would never say it was lean and mean!) And hybrid games can be super fuckin' excellent when they're put together with intention and innovation. I keep wanting to mention Rimworld, a base builder game that is also a kickass RPG-lite. Great base building, important character stats with growth and consequences for skill failures. You wouldn't have stuff like that if all games only aspired to "stay in their lane". At the same time games that know what they are and do one thing brilliantly are great too.

Sure, Rimworld is a survival colony sim. So that's its schtick. The core gameplay is to build and protect your colony so it can survive the bullshit the game throws at you, especially at random difficulty. Heavily inspired by Dwarf Fortress, by the way. You have the same type of gameplay consistently, I believe.

On the other hand, if you had large gameplay segments where you had to take your colonists and go into dungeons with them, and then a significant amount of dev time would be spent on what is basically RPG gameplay, well that would just water down the experience for people who want to play a colony sim.

 

[good fucking shit happen]

System bloat is when thirsty ass niggas implement a romance system when you gotta take party members out to waffle house to get laid. Anything that isn't directly related to fucking combat is bloat. Like when that faggot Josh Sawyer thought it'd be funny to do some basic bitch retarded sailing CYOA just cuz you were meant to have a ship. Vendetta handled that shit rite, letting you shoot at ships and all that good shit. Persuasion and that shit is also bloat, remove the charisma stat already mane.

 

[Darkozric]

Immersion my ass, anyone who needs endless "real life" fantasy useless systems/subsystems is a faggot and he will die as a faggot. Real men can be immersed by the atmosphere alone, which means art direction,music, sound.

 

[Darkozric]

System bloat is when thirsty ass niggas implement a romance system when you gotta take party members out to waffle house to get laid. Anything that isn't directly related to fucking combat is bloat. Like when that faggot Josh Sawyer thought it'd be funny to do some basic bitch retarded sailing CYOA just cuz you were meant to have a ship. Vendetta handled that shit rite, letting you shoot at ships and all that good shit. Persuasion and that shit is also bloat, remove the charisma stat already mane.

As I always say, a good Soyer is a beheaded Soyer. Tho I'll have to disagree with your charisma take my edgy brothuh, because I love bards. Unless we replace charisma with an already existing stat. After all musicianship requires intelligence.
What can I say, I love the jack of all trades shit.

 

[luj1]

... bloat usually is a marketing descision as the company wants to appeal to a wider userbase.

That may be one of the reasons. But overall I see several causes of feature bloat:

1. Poor design decisions by devs who lack vision.
2. Stretch goals. It's not a coincidence that most crowdfunded games end up having a ton of feature bloat.
3. Nowdays most consumers (and marketing departments) love buzzwords such as "base building", "crafting", "mounted combat", "minigame", etc.
4. Cheap trick to prolong gameplay hours artificially.
5. Cutting down on development time. For example, it takes less time and energy to script automated events via Kingdom management, than come up with a traditional quest structure.

Obviously feature bloat offers certain advantages to the devs. But at the same time it's bad design and means worse games for us.

 

[luj1]

Infinitron next thread?

 

[Sunsetspawn]

System/mechanics bloat is absolutely a thing and can ruin otherwise good games. I see it generally from three sources:

1. Passionate, but somewhat inexperienced devs with big ideas
2. Experienced devs working on 10+ year personal projects, and who don't give a fuck
3. Assholes who want to shove more things in a game so they have more options for monetization, leading to 17 different currencies

What are Everspace 2, Star Citizen, and Elite: Dangerous?

Devs who have the balls to keep you r money hostage.

Is Everspace 2 really in the same league as the other two though? Only played the first.

When I saw the list I immediately figured it was obvious that Star Citizen was number 2, but then realized quickly that Elite Dangerous fit 3 quite nicely with its FPS that nobody wanted, all the various materials, special commodities, faction rankings, powerplay rankings, engineer rankings, guardian grind, Elite rankings, ARX currency, regular credits, (what have I missed). Though maybe it's hyperbole because as far as I know pulling out your credit card is never actually going to give you a gameplay advantage (pay-to-win). And rounding out my space-theme I slotted Everspace 2 as number 1 because I'm assuming they're fumbling the ball: if they had struck while the iron was hot and kept out the bloat-creep they would've hit a grand-slam.

I just explained a joke.

 

[Tyranicon]

I just explained a joke.

Oh, I completely misunderstood your original reply.

Was thinking about getting Everspace 2. But it has level scaling. Hmmmm.

 

[Radiane]

a few people don't realize that the word "bloat" is inherently negative, like this retard:

you may want a bit of system bloat because the game gets too stale if you don't, otoh too much of it just confuses the standard gamer

If it's a game for a combatfag, you can't have enough combat centric systems, just look at the success of Paradox games.

While it's true that the term "system bloat" conveys a more negative connonation in general, I was willing to assume it being used in this context as a more generic (and more neutral) term for the sake of this conversation, because otherwise this whole thread would barely make any sense. But... I will just let you have your way

 

[fantadomat]

This is nothing to "believe in", only accept or reject.

The worst offender are Owlcat games for their automated barebone managerial systems (such as Kingdom management with its associated card game) that are violently inserted in place of traditional quest structure.

A game that wants to do everything, will be mediocre in all aspects.

Let me just add that there is a slight difference between feature bloat, system/ruleset bloat and class bloat. Owlcat amazingly the master of all three.

Furthering the discussion: But if you're a hardcore gamer, shouldn't you want to engage with more systems? Isn't it cool to have more knobs and dials to adjust? You're playing a genre that's all about developing character builds, so why is it so objectionable to also develop kingdom builds, or develop item builds (crafting)?

lUJI is an old fag that whines a lot and plays nothing,like most kodexers this days. That said....it all depends on the quality of the parts. More complexity in a game is good,but many times those things are superficial and pointless,like crafting or survival mechanics that make you right click on some food in your inventory every hour or so. Kingmaker system was mediocre,would have been better if expanded and refined with more consequences for choices in events and such. But pretty ok overall. People that bitch about it are just butthurt useless old faggots that don't like anything really.

 

[gurugeorge]

This is nothing to "believe in", only accept or reject.

The worst offender are Owlcat games for their automated barebone managerial systems (such as Kingdom management with its associated card game) that are violently inserted in place of traditional quest structure.

A game that wants to do everything, will be mediocre in all aspects.

Let me just add that there is a slight difference between feature bloat, system/ruleset bloat and class bloat. Owlcat amazingly the master of all three.

Furthering the discussion: But if you're a hardcore gamer, shouldn't you want to engage with more systems? Isn't it cool to have more knobs and dials to adjust? You're playing a genre that's all about developing character builds, so why is it so objectionable to also develop kingdom builds, or develop item builds (crafting)?

I addressed that in my first comment above: I think there's a sweet spot for complexity vs. instant gameplay flow - somewhere between the one extreme of sitting there all day considering your next move because there are a bazillion interlocking systems to consider and the other extreme of an "iWin button." And that sweet spot is going to be different for normies vs. spergs, but even spergs will have limits.

That's one thing; the other argument going on here is between "fluff" and realism/simulation complexity vs. lean and mean build/combat complexity. My position on that is that you can have fluff complexity if it isn't fluff - if it's integrated into the gameplay (I gave the example of survival simulation being meaningful in a game world that's designed for it, with wide open spaces, animals to hunt, the need to hunt to survive, etc.).

And then of course the final thing is: is it well-made or not? You can have very complex systems that work if they're designed well (and in particular, if the UI that accesses all the complexity has been carefully thought through), on the other hand if you just pile system on top of system because it seems cool, and they're not really worked out and integrated well, and opaque or RSI-inducing in use, then that's just annoying.

 

[JarlFrank]

Sure, Rimworld is a survival colony sim. So that's its schtick. The core gameplay is to build and protect your colony so it can survive the bullshit the game throws at you, especially at random difficulty. Heavily inspired by Dwarf Fortress, by the way. You have the same type of gameplay consistently, I believe.

On the other hand, if you had large gameplay segments where you had to take your colonists and go into dungeons with them, and then a significant amount of dev time would be spent on what is basically RPG gameplay, well that would just water down the experience for people who want to play a colony sim.

You can send your colonists on expeditions to dungeon-like locations where you can recover resources and items

 

[Lhynn]

Execution is everything and there are no rpgs that are "Too complex".

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I can't think of a single crpg that even gets close to being moderately complex, it's the one area crpgs should excel in but yet nobody has actually tried.

 

[Victor1234]

You can send your colonists on expeditions to dungeon-like locations where you can recover resources and items

The dev really doesn't like the idea though and actively tried to discourage people from ever leaving their base for years, until he (slightly) gave in with the 2nd DLC. Even this 3rd DLC was speculated to finally be a vehicle one (crazy that they have spaceships and power armor but no cars or boats in this game!) and it was this pig people gene splicing one instead.

 

[Lhynn]

Most rpgs are made for children, if you are 12 and you find any rpg overwhelming in its mechanics for more than 5 minutes, then you should stop eating crayons.

That said there are some rpgs that are very complex:
- Troubleshooter being a prime example, its just that the complexity isnt apparent as new mechanics are slowly introduced, giving the player ample time to master them.
- Project Zomboid is another game with plenty of depth, where trial and error is expected. Some of the best roguelikes are like this, theres a lot going on
- A lot of chink rpgs have obscure, and fairly simulationist mechanics. Most of the complexity in these games runs deep, mastering these games can take a long time, it is almost expected that you will share your findings with other players online and benefit from their experience as well. ACS, Heluo studio games, etc.
- MMORPGs are a prime genre for complex systems, players are expected to engaged with it for hundreds if not thousands of hours, so a deep network of systems interacting with each other improves the experience.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

- MMORPGs are a prime genre for complex systems, players are expected to engaged with it for hundreds if not thousands of hours, so a deep network of systems interacting with each other improves the experience.

sadly they've mostly been casualized, but this was quite true for earlier ones.

 

[Norfleet]

On the other hand, if you had large gameplay segments where you had to take your colonists and go into dungeons with them, and then a significant amount of dev time would be spent on what is basically RPG gameplay, well that would just water down the experience for people who want to play a colony sim.

What, you mean quest sites and ancient ruins? Cuz yeah, we have that. And yeah, the two gameplay modes have kinda rough integration.

 

[Vic]

It's been a few years since I played Rimworld, but the most recent example is Wrathfinder, many people me included find the crusade a bore.

The "tactical" crusade battles are so badly implemented, I honestly hate them.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Because owlcat are shit developers, shocking.

 

[Sunsetspawn]

I just explained a joke.

Oh, I completely misunderstood your original reply.

Was thinking about getting Everspace 2. But it has level scaling. Hmmmm.

Does it? The only thing I know about it is that it's two years past its release date. Experience levels in a space-sim seem retarded, though I suppose if they were applied to things like ship-handling or language-translation, as opposed to shield/hull strength (health) and missile damage, it could work; but to then put level-scaling on top of that is, eh, phenomenally asinine.

Everything is shit.

 

[Sunsetspawn]

Immersion my ass, anyone who needs endless "real life" fantasy useless systems/subsystems is a faggot and he will die as a faggot. Real men can be immersed by the atmosphere alone, which means art direction,music, sound.

 

[Vic]

art direction,music, sound.

you can watch a movie only for so long before it gets boring. games are about doing things.