Editorial Gamasutra: Eric Schwarz on the pitfalls of CRPG economies

[Carrion]

fnv is a fps not an rpg

Without getting into a further debate, that's completely irrelevant in this case since the exact same mechanics could be applied to almost any RPG.

and what happens if you are in the middle of a long far away mission and you run out of guns? pain in the arse system..

That would be awesome if it actually happened in the game. As it is, you can always easily find a spare gun or two in case your favorite weapon gets in a bad condition. The mods that decrease the base carry weight and add other levels of resource management usually just make the game better. I guess some people just like pain in the arse systems.

 

[EruDaan]

Mhm, I liked the MM-Series for it's "economy"... you only get money through looting treasures and killing monsters. Both which don't respawn at all. And almost all the money is spend so you can train your characters. The only other expenses are spells for clerics and sorcerers. Sure with clever playing you'll never get broke or any kind of money related problems but I think I could live with it.

Sure its simple as hell and maybe some hardcore gamers would prefer real life economics with expenses everywhere and job rewards that rarely make a profit for the gamer/characters but... is it fun? Is it neccesary? Instead of auto-leveling just put in some dojos / training halls and make money in the game finite by monsters and treasures that don't respawn. Over abundance of loot which sells for a fortune a piece? No problem with expensive trainers and finite sources where this loot is coming from.

 

[Manjuice Nutella]

What you really want is a system where there is stable equilibrium at the bottom of the curve, guaranteeing that the player will be able to recover and survive the worst economical crisis, but climbing up requires increasing continuous effort to merely stay in place. For example to keep functioning as a dirt poor lvl1 (or high level 'fallen' character), you'd need relatively little effort, maybe a self-made shitty bow to bag some game for eating and maybe selling hides to gain funds for basic equipment and essential consumables, but shitty self made bow, some animal hides and maybe some limited form of healing won't be nearly enough to take on pretty much anything in game. To tackle truly powerful challenges you may require top of the line gear requiring expensive maintenance or spells requiring rare and expensive components, you might be forced to pay off numerous henchmen, some of them qualified, and even just find a way to maintain and operate your raw wealth - you won't be tugging around a wagon with several million GP.
For that you'd require to regularly tackle serious challenges because only those would generate income required to overcome the costs.

To put it short - wealth and power should be costly to upkeep. As long as you don't force player to run to remain in the same place, you won't tackle economy breakage in an RPG with any sort of economy.

You mean like Fallout Online 2238?

In a way, it was an interesting system (which could be polished and balanced for a much more predictable single-player experience), but somehow, I can't see developers letting that slide in a game that aims for a wider audience that make up for a majority of the market.

 

[sea]

Of course. if you are making a mainstream-oriented game then progress cannot be a function of player skill and ingenuity, period. It pretty much has to be a function of time spent with the game instead, because mainstream audiences expect the game to evolve, change and throw new stuff at them even if they do nothing of the sort. They don't want to work for their entertainment, and in a way it does make a certain kind of sense (even if it does make for a much less fulfilling game). But I think that when it comes to game design, making something "for dummies" is always going to lead to poorer gameplay, so it kinda goes without saying.

 

[JarlFrank]

sea
The strange thing is that for me, games that reward you for being a good player and for being creative feel a lot more like entertainment and less like work than games that just require you to play them a long time. If I want to spend long hours of unchallenging time in order to make progress and be rewarded, I'd apply for a shitty repetitive office job where I sit on a desk and do paperwork 8 hours a day and get promoted after spending enough time doing the same unchallenging repetitive shit over and over again. When I play games, I actually want to be entertained.

 

[Mrowak]

sea
The strange thing is that for me, games that reward you for being a good player and for being creative feel a lot more like entertainment and less like work than games that just require you to play them a long time. If I want to spend long hours of unchallenging time in order to make progress and be rewarded, I'd apply for a shitty repetitive office job where I sit on a desk and do paperwork 8 hours a day and get promoted after spending enough time doing the same unchallenging repetitive shit over and over again. When I play games, I actually want to be entertained.

You are right of course, but look how virtually all MMOs work. It's exactly how sea described it. It's just repetition, doing slave's work, and yet people get invested in this stuff, because it requires virtually no intellectual effort.

Doing something with the prospect of a large reward later on isn't very appealing for the masses. Instant gratification and all that.

 

[sea]

sea
The strange thing is that for me, games that reward you for being a good player and for being creative feel a lot more like entertainment and less like work than games that just require you to play them a long time. If I want to spend long hours of unchallenging time in order to make progress and be rewarded, I'd apply for a shitty repetitive office job where I sit on a desk and do paperwork 8 hours a day and get promoted after spending enough time doing the same unchallenging repetitive shit over and over again. When I play games, I actually want to be entertained.

I have been thinking about that quite a bit over the last year or so, and I have a theory as to why this is. Broad, possibly offensive and butt-hurting generalizations incoming.

The PlayStation generation was the first point in gaming history where we had both widely-available graphical horsepower that was able to reproduce 3D scenes, as well as a company that realized marketing their product to an older demographic with low/nonexistent standards for games was a good idea. Of course, I'm talking about the sudden quest for "realism" in games and the dramatic shift in visual and gameplay styles/themes that appeared when the PlayStation took control of the gaming market.

It was responsible for creating an entirely new audience of people who maybe used to be attracted to the idea of gaming, but never had the technical know-how to get involved in computer gaming, nor did they want to try out prior console games for fear of losing their manhoods (the "kiddie games, eww" crowd). Now, games could look identifiable like action movies - and to many of those people, this represented progress, just as to many, it is progress for a painter to stretch ever towards perfect duplication of the real world.

The result of this was that you now had an entire generation of gamers which were not actually raised in the tradition of gaming which was responsible for some of our own favorite games. Even if you got into RPGs later on, like me (late 90s), those games were still heavily rooted in earlier titles. Modern games, by and large, only tend to share the more superficial elements. And those people who grew up playing games during the PlayStation era, they are the types who started out with and still maintain that idea that videogames are equivalent to film: it's about witnessing/experiencing cool stuff, usually of a visual or storytelling nature.

Flash forward 20 years later, you currently have a huge number of people who expect games to entertain them without them actually putting real effort into the experience, because they have never really known much else. And since they make up the majority, you need to work with them to make any significant amount of money (if your goal is to run a large, successful studio anyway).

Those who actually appreciate gaming for its mechanics and systems over presentation tend to be of an older generation, and, at risk of sounding like a pompous ass, a more intelligent one overall (because there were far more barriers to getting into gaming back then than there are now). Interestingly, many of the people who are currently making games these days tend to still be from that generation, but the actual number of big-budget games available that cater to them is increasingly dwindling, and these days it's pretty much entirely confined to indie scenes.

 

[JarlFrank]

But the weird thing is, MMOs always feel like work to me, because it takes a lot of effort to do - repetitive grinding without any challenge or much variation, just doing the same thing over and over and over again until you level up. I've started many MMOs, but usually quit them in less than a month because it became to repetitive and boring to me. It's the exact opposite of instant gratification, in fact, as it just takes such a long time until you get your reward. On the other hand, a super-difficult game that requires me to re-do a particularly hard instance tens of times is instantly gratifying - even if I fail three times in a row, if I made it farther the third time than the first two times, I get a sense of accomplishment. In a game where I have to spend a long time, but little actual skilled effort, to get rewarded, I feel no gratification at all because I didn't do anything to deserve it.

But yeah, that's probably because my mindset is different to that of the mainstream gaming audience. I would much rather spend a large intellectual or physical (twitch-gaming) effort than to just go on doing unchallenging and repetitive things. I guess for some people it's just the opposite.

 

[Infinitron]

marketing their product to an older demographic with low/nonexistent standards for games was a good idea

Those who actually appreciate gaming for its mechanics and systems over presentation tend to be of an older generation

Is this a mistake, or am I not getting something?

 

[Infinitron]

But the weird thing is, MMOs always feel like work to me, because it takes a lot of effort to do - repetitive grinding without any challenge or much variation, just doing the same thing over and over and over again until you level up. I've started many MMOs, but usually quit them in less than a month because it became to repetitive and boring to me. It's the exact opposite of instant gratification, in fact, as it just takes such a long time until you get your reward. On the other hand, a super-difficult game that requires me to re-do a particularly hard instance tens of times is instantly gratifying - even if I fail three times in a row, if I made it farther the third time than the first two times, I get a sense of accomplishment. In a game where I have to spend a long time, but little actual skilled effort, to get rewarded, I feel no gratification at all because I didn't do anything to deserve it.

But yeah, that's probably because my mindset is different to that of the mainstream gaming audience. I would much rather spend a large intellectual or physical (twitch-gaming) effort than to just go on doing unchallenging and repetitive things. I guess for some people it's just the opposite.

I think you and sea may be talking about different things.

MMOs and AAA akshun cinematic extravaganza single player games are two very different kinds of derp.

 

[sea]

marketing their product to an older demographic with low/nonexistent standards for games was a good idea

Those who actually appreciate gaming for its mechanics and systems over presentation tend to be of an older generation

Is this a mistake, or am I not getting something?

Sorry. By "older" at the time... well, for years, gaming was basically divided into two groups: kids who played on consoles (which were almost exclusively marketed towards them, as toys), and adults (who were usually programmers and played PC games because they had technical knowledge of how to do so). The PlayStation generation at the time was a group of teens/young adults who fell outside of the traditional "kiddie" demographic as well as the "programmer" demographic - in other words, "average Joes" for whom gaming was attractive less for mechanics reasons and more for aesthetics reasons (looks like the movies! popular! my friends are doing it!).

 

[Infinitron]

marketing their product to an older demographic with low/nonexistent standards for games was a good idea

Those who actually appreciate gaming for its mechanics and systems over presentation tend to be of an older generation

Is this a mistake, or am I not getting something?

Sorry. By "older" at the time... well, for years, gaming was basically divided into two groups: kids who played on consoles (which were almost exclusively marketed towards them, as toys), and adults (who were usually programmers and played PC games because they had technical knowledge of how to do so). The PlayStation generation at the time was a group of teens/young adults who fell outside of the traditional "kiddie" demographic as well as the "programmer" demographic - in other words, "average Joes" for whom gaming was attractive less for mechanics reasons and more for aesthetics reasons (looks like the movies! popular! my friends are doing it!).

Ah, I see. I think this description is true mainly for the United States/North America.

Of course, it didn't need to be true for anywhere else in order to change the landscape of gaming.

 

[RK47]

You can still break the economy if you put your mind to it, but it's still probably the best-balanced economy I've seen in an open-world RPG.

This isn't the sentence I would describe F:NV economy. Sorry, I wouldn't go into details, weapons repairs might be a worthwhile money sink, but is it even crucial? No. Money isn't hard.
Not a single time in F:NV was I really worried about managing funds to buy that 'REALLY GOOD' armor / weapon due to two reasons: Sneak Attack and Boone. What economy is there when a companion can just fire their weapons without running out of ammo?

Add Deus Ex: HR to the list of shit economics.

 

[DraQ]

Add Deus Ex: HR to the list of shit economics.

DX (any) had economics?

Sorry, haven't noticed.

 

[Infinitron]

I think Captain Shrek just jumped the shark

 

[Marsal]

 

[Norfleet]

You see, in reality we are literally forced to spend money ever single day - on our food.

Popular myth. I find food for free by the side of the road all the time. It's flatmeat, the unleavened roadside treat!

And there is no game i can think off where you actually have to eat three times a day, preferably something different, prepared in a good way.
In games food is a gimmick.

You bother to eat three times a day? If I did that, I'd have no time for anything but eating, not to mention bloating up like a gigantic whale. No wonder you people are fat. Who the hell has that much time to waste on EATING?

I remind you: Player characters in RPGs kill MONSTERS. Monsters are often made of MEAT. If we weren't meant to eat them, why are they made of meat?

No lodging is really required, no housing and therefore no expenses ever arise from maintaining your house or place of residence.
Yeah sometimes you pay for sleeping, but that is largely irrelevant due to many other problems sea numbered.

Player characters are inevitably vagabonds that live on the road, doing what I did when I was younger: Living out of the equivalent of a jeep.

How about a game where you actually damage an armor of the enemy when killing them? Damage it so much that you would have to pay more to get it fixed then what that armor is actually worth?

Dude, considering the resale values of armor relative to the actual costs of things in the game, you're pretty much selling this stuff at scrap value. Medieval armor was worth a fucking fortune, and when you resell this shit in CRPGs, it doesn't even cover the cost of stay at the inn. You have to haul back this stuff by the wagonload to make money at it...and we do.

Just a small example of one trick that could work to reduce the amount of money you get from lugging hundreds of armors back to traders in addition to prices of that same type dropping the more you sell until the trader refuses to buy anymore.

Are you kidding? That trader's making out like a bandit. Of course he's going to keep buying your shit. Medieval arms and armor was worth a shitton, and he's getting away with paying you less than scrap value because he knows you'll take it.

And the thing is, the amount of arms and armor in the world isn't even really increasing. That trader is repeatedly rebuying the same armor off you, only to pawn it off on some bandito, that you then kill, and then sell BACK to him. The cycle repeats itself, and each time that bastard gets richer. I know this cycle! I used to *DO* this in a MUD.

 

[Azrael the cat]

sea
The strange thing is that for me, games that reward you for being a good player and for being creative feel a lot more like entertainment and less like work than games that just require you to play them a long time. If I want to spend long hours of unchallenging time in order to make progress and be rewarded, I'd apply for a shitty repetitive office job where I sit on a desk and do paperwork 8 hours a day and get promoted after spending enough time doing the same unchallenging repetitive shit over and over again. When I play games, I actually want to be entertained.

I have been thinking about that quite a bit over the last year or so, and I have a theory as to why this is. Broad, possibly offensive and butt-hurting generalizations incoming.

The PlayStation generation was the first point in gaming history where we had both widely-available graphical horsepower that was able to reproduce 3D scenes, as well as a company that realized marketing their product to an older demographic with low/nonexistent standards for games was a good idea. Of course, I'm talking about the sudden quest for "realism" in games and the dramatic shift in visual and gameplay styles/themes that appeared when the PlayStation took control of the gaming market.

It was responsible for creating an entirely new audience of people who maybe used to be attracted to the idea of gaming, but never had the technical know-how to get involved in computer gaming, nor did they want to try out prior console games for fear of losing their manhoods (the "kiddie games, eww" crowd). Now, games could look identifiable like action movies - and to many of those people, this represented progress, just as to many, it is progress for a painter to stretch ever towards perfect duplication of the real world.

The result of this was that you now had an entire generation of gamers which were not actually raised in the tradition of gaming which was responsible for some of our own favorite games. Even if you got into RPGs later on, like me (late 90s), those games were still heavily rooted in earlier titles. Modern games, by and large, only tend to share the more superficial elements. And those people who grew up playing games during the PlayStation era, they are the types who started out with and still maintain that idea that videogames are equivalent to film: it's about witnessing/experiencing cool stuff, usually of a visual or storytelling nature.

Flash forward 20 years later, you currently have a huge number of people who expect games to entertain them without them actually putting real effort into the experience, because they have never really known much else. And since they make up the majority, you need to work with them to make any significant amount of money (if your goal is to run a large, successful studio anyway).

Those who actually appreciate gaming for its mechanics and systems over presentation tend to be of an older generation, and, at risk of sounding like a pompous ass, a more intelligent one overall (because there were far more barriers to getting into gaming back then than there are now). Interestingly, many of the people who are currently making games these days tend to still be from that generation, but the actual number of big-budget games available that cater to them is increasingly dwindling, and these days it's pretty much entirely confined to indie scenes.

There were a lot of good games on both sides of the PC/console divide in those days, but with very separate gaming traditions which allowed the different platforms to broaden the game variety rather than narrowing it down to the lowest common denominator. From what I can gather, the Yahtzee's of the gaming world are as buthurt about the lack of a good console survival horror follow up to Silent Hill 2 as we are about the lack of games like Fallout and Torment.

 

[Harg Harfardarssen]

Are you kidding? That trader's making out like a bandit. Of course he's going to keep buying your shit. Medieval arms and armor was worth a shitton, and he's getting away with paying you less than scrap value because he knows you'll take it.

That was something that crossed my mind as well - full plate armor in particular had to be custom fitted, so it was hugely expensive and only owned by nobles. So it would be kind of funny if no one would buy it because selling full-plate armor basically meant you had murdered and looted a noble and they had no desire to join you on the chopping block. Or if his family got the sherriff to repossess it - after all they probably inherited title after you killed him.

 

[Gondolin]

That was something that crossed my mind as well - full plate armor in particular had to be custom fitted, so it was hugely expensive and only owned by nobles. So it would be kind of funny if no one would buy it because selling full-plate armor basically meant you had murdered and looted a noble and they had no desire to join you on the chopping block. Or if his family got the sherriff to repossess it - after all they probably inherited title after you killed him.

If I recall medieval history correctly, the arms of a noble whop had died in battle belonged to his victor, fair and square. Of course, this was a matter of honor between nobles, which the upstart peasants we usually play in RPGs did not have. Peasants were supposed to turn captured nobles and the gear of dead nobles in to their masters.

On the other hand, a jumped up peasant would not have raised eyebrows by trying to sell the patchwork armor looted off the bodies of routiers.

 

[Alex]

Man, those Dos and Don'ts read a lot like something Sawyer would write. Basically, killing the fun so people won't shoot themselves on their own feet.