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Respeccing is a terrible mechanic
- Thread starter Sigourn
- Start date
Silverfish
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2019
- Messages
- 4,824
Respec is gay in games where you control a party, but okay if it's just one character.
Nowadays respeccing is seen as a basic quality of life feature that is almost demanded by the self diagnosed OCD crowd. Let's be real. It's just fear of missing out.
Same with the demand that you have to be able to experience everything a game has to offer within a single play-through. If a game doesn't provide these features, anxiety attacks, sleepless nights, angry Steam forum posts and calls for boycots follow.
Why things have turned out this way I couldn't tell you. It's just the way the cookie crumbles in [current year].
Same with the demand that you have to be able to experience everything a game has to offer within a single play-through. If a game doesn't provide these features, anxiety attacks, sleepless nights, angry Steam forum posts and calls for boycots follow.
Why things have turned out this way I couldn't tell you. It's just the way the cookie crumbles in [current year].
- Joined
- Jun 21, 2018
- Messages
- 4,411
Troubleshooter has respec at the foundation of its systems and it's excellent.
There's a conflict between two design philosophies on the question of respec. One philosophy is that you should live with your mistakes, and ideally the game should become more fun when you do. This philosophy usually extends to every part of gameplay, not just character building. In a game where you're expected to live with your build mistakes, you're expected to live with your choices in dialogues and quests as well. If a game wants you to do that, it is also obligated to provide interesting and satisfying situations for characters who have made suboptimal choices.
The other is min-maxing. A game that expects you to min-max your characters has to be pretty complex, and is usually less discriminate in what sort of challenges it throws at the player, provided that they're genuinely challenging, and challenging in the right way (which in RPGs always means combat). That sort of game can afford to throw some bullshit at the player, go "are you a bad enough motherfucker to get through this" and trust that the process of finding a way is enjoyable.
I think both approaches are fun, but when I play a game of the second type, with complex systems and challenging combat, I find that Troubleshooter has spoiled me and equivalent systems without respec feel outdated. In that game, the game of character building and the game of combat interact organically, whereas in other games it feels more like you're taking it in very discrete turns to play one or the other. Obviously you don't build your characters in Troubleshooter at the same time that you're fighting, but you're definitely thinking about the one while you're doing the other. In other games, you don't tend to react much build-wise to the specific enemies you're up against at any given moment. You're thinking more about the broader picture. Sometimes you'll restart the entire game if you find you've fucked up, and that's part of the process of accumulating enough information to be able to create one character that can get through all the challenges in the game. You don't tend to dip into a specific counter to the enemies you're facing at the specific point that you happen to be leveling up. If you are, that's usually a sign that the game is easy enough that you can afford to be less min-maxy. Sometimes you'll have all your levels planned out before you even start the game.
In Troubleshooter, however, you're always tinkering to face up against specific threats. When you're between missions you'll be thinking about how to build for the next mission, and when you're in the mission you'll be thinking about how the enemies are responding to your builds and how to make them even better for the mission that comes after this one. It's the process of "maybe I should restart and build differently" but on a micro scale. It lets you experiment without wasting time or running the risk of soft-locking your game, and it lets the enemies ask much more of the player, since you can actually respond on the fly without losing hours of progress. It's brilliant.
So in summary, it depends on the game. Respec is terrible in games that are all about living with your choices, but it's great in combat-heavy games with complex systems.
There's a conflict between two design philosophies on the question of respec. One philosophy is that you should live with your mistakes, and ideally the game should become more fun when you do. This philosophy usually extends to every part of gameplay, not just character building. In a game where you're expected to live with your build mistakes, you're expected to live with your choices in dialogues and quests as well. If a game wants you to do that, it is also obligated to provide interesting and satisfying situations for characters who have made suboptimal choices.
The other is min-maxing. A game that expects you to min-max your characters has to be pretty complex, and is usually less discriminate in what sort of challenges it throws at the player, provided that they're genuinely challenging, and challenging in the right way (which in RPGs always means combat). That sort of game can afford to throw some bullshit at the player, go "are you a bad enough motherfucker to get through this" and trust that the process of finding a way is enjoyable.
I think both approaches are fun, but when I play a game of the second type, with complex systems and challenging combat, I find that Troubleshooter has spoiled me and equivalent systems without respec feel outdated. In that game, the game of character building and the game of combat interact organically, whereas in other games it feels more like you're taking it in very discrete turns to play one or the other. Obviously you don't build your characters in Troubleshooter at the same time that you're fighting, but you're definitely thinking about the one while you're doing the other. In other games, you don't tend to react much build-wise to the specific enemies you're up against at any given moment. You're thinking more about the broader picture. Sometimes you'll restart the entire game if you find you've fucked up, and that's part of the process of accumulating enough information to be able to create one character that can get through all the challenges in the game. You don't tend to dip into a specific counter to the enemies you're facing at the specific point that you happen to be leveling up. If you are, that's usually a sign that the game is easy enough that you can afford to be less min-maxy. Sometimes you'll have all your levels planned out before you even start the game.
In Troubleshooter, however, you're always tinkering to face up against specific threats. When you're between missions you'll be thinking about how to build for the next mission, and when you're in the mission you'll be thinking about how the enemies are responding to your builds and how to make them even better for the mission that comes after this one. It's the process of "maybe I should restart and build differently" but on a micro scale. It lets you experiment without wasting time or running the risk of soft-locking your game, and it lets the enemies ask much more of the player, since you can actually respond on the fly without losing hours of progress. It's brilliant.
So in summary, it depends on the game. Respec is terrible in games that are all about living with your choices, but it's great in combat-heavy games with complex systems.
lvl 2 Blue Slime
Learned
Yeah, it ruins the central conceit of RPGs, ie that getting XP and levelling up is the character learning from experience and becoming more skilled. If you can just forget everything and learn some completely different skills, it destroys the immersion.
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VelothianWanderer
Literate
- Joined
- Dec 19, 2024
- Messages
- 31
lmao, yeah it's totally more fun to spend an extra 100 hours to try out a new build. I'm a working adult. I don't have time for that.
Puukko
Arcane
Make respeccing a valuable, possibly limited resource and/or something you have to do extra work towards to unlock.
Limited number of respecs is fine. Games don't always make it clear how stats work non-theoretically, and I don't play with walkthroughs or buildfag videos (or obsessively play the same game over and over again).
NecroLord
Dumbfuck!
- Joined
- Sep 6, 2022
- Messages
- 18,551
I never approved of this.
Furthermore, it would seem players now want everything handed to them on a silver platter.
Any self respecting RPG has replay value.
Even action-rpgs like Deus Ex or VTMB have so much replayability.
But to answer Sigourn's question, yeah, I do not really like respeccing, just pick a class and stick with it or go for a prestige one later on, if at all possible.
MadMaxHellfire
Arcane
a good system doesn't need respec. it exists exactly for this reason: the system sucks, so in order to pull players out of underpowered choices there is respec. it freed devs from the cage of making good games.
Grampy_Bone
Arcane
Mostly yes.
There's a few options with RPG design in terms of builds and difficulty:
1. Make the game beatable with any build (generally by making it very easy)
2. Make the game beatable only with good builds (potentially forcing the player to restart)
3. Allow respec
People who want respec generally use point 1 as the counter argument. Without respec the game ends up too easy, or the player has to drop the difficulty slider, which feels lame. If any build can beat a game then build doesn't matter, but if some builds are non-viable then players can get screwed just for experimenting.
That's why there's secret option number four:
4. ALLOW GRINDING
Games with grinding don't need respec, because you can just grind your problems away. This also upsets people who want games to be hard but it's much more satisfying to grind than it is to adjust a slider or re allocate your points. A well designed RPG will make grinding optional but helpful, creating self-balancing difficulty.
All the classic RPGs allowed grinding and generally aren't known for being easy. If you pick a bad party setup in Wizardry you can just class change everyone and keep going. No respec needed. The cancer of respec was born from the idea that RPGs should have finite amount of XP, encounters, or level caps.
There's a few options with RPG design in terms of builds and difficulty:
1. Make the game beatable with any build (generally by making it very easy)
2. Make the game beatable only with good builds (potentially forcing the player to restart)
3. Allow respec
People who want respec generally use point 1 as the counter argument. Without respec the game ends up too easy, or the player has to drop the difficulty slider, which feels lame. If any build can beat a game then build doesn't matter, but if some builds are non-viable then players can get screwed just for experimenting.
That's why there's secret option number four:
4. ALLOW GRINDING
Games with grinding don't need respec, because you can just grind your problems away. This also upsets people who want games to be hard but it's much more satisfying to grind than it is to adjust a slider or re allocate your points. A well designed RPG will make grinding optional but helpful, creating self-balancing difficulty.
All the classic RPGs allowed grinding and generally aren't known for being easy. If you pick a bad party setup in Wizardry you can just class change everyone and keep going. No respec needed. The cancer of respec was born from the idea that RPGs should have finite amount of XP, encounters, or level caps.
Iucounu
Liturgist
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2023
- Messages
- 1,529
It makes more sense if the game lets you switch between the characters in your party instead of respeccing a character.
Respeccing might still be a good thing if it's (an optional) part of the plot and comes with a penalty, say if playing as a transsexual or The Little Mermaid.
Respeccing might still be a good thing if it's (an optional) part of the plot and comes with a penalty, say if playing as a transsexual or The Little Mermaid.
Until there is a game design which doesn't have at least some shit-tier skills and abilities, or bs mechanics where the only way to beat an enemy or solve a puzzle is by having a skill that no sane person would take, the world will probably need some manner of respec. In all other instances, you suck up your bad choices and give it another shot the next time you level up, just like in life.
Great summary.
The first problem with the "living with your choices" idea is that it ostensibly makes sense from an in-game perspective, but yet it doesn't actually make sense from an in-game perspective when it comes to builds, only C&C story choices (where it very much makes sense, but the gamey problem there is saving, not respecs); the second problem is that it presupposes that the game is well made and has no "fake levers."
Like, if you were a knight in the virtual world, you would know the ins and outs of being a knight and in that sense any knight-choices you made, the responsibility would be on you and you alone. But from a meta parspective as someone rp-ing a knight, you don't necessarily know the depth of what being a knight in that world (as represented by the various numbers and abstractions and rules) is, and you have no idea what (as it were) gimcrack nonsense the developers have slapped together and called a "knight." So it's kind of stupid that you're expected to make blind choices in a way that nobody in that virtual world would make them because they wouldn't be blind, yet you're expected to think of that as rp-ing a character in that world.
It's fundamentally incoherent. The conceit is that you're rp-ing a choice in a virtual world, but the reality is that you're a videogame player making a choice out of a range of options that fallible developers are offering.
(UNLESS you have a big fat manual (like wot you used to have in games). In that case, with the system laid out in front of you so that you can ponder it in some depth before making your "cut" ("measure twice, cut once" as the old Rasta said in Neuromancer) - then yes, that rationale would make some sense. Otherwise, as a player you're always in a meta situation where you're "learning a system" so it makes no sense to expect you to make informed decisions about a system you know nothing about. However, all that said, there are some fairly common tropes - like, usually, a crit build will be viable, and it's fairly obvious what a tank is.)
The other thing that's dumb about that stance is that games are seldom so well made that everything works as advertized. There are usually quite a few "fake levers" (things you can use to no real effect) in videogames, especially new ones, and you only get to know what the fake levers are after you've played for a bit (or after the devs have fixed them).
I would say there's a healthy compromise where you can offer one or at most two free respecs to a new player, so that they can get a more hand-in-glove build for their first and most immersive character as they start to underestand the system, but keep the free respecs till someone's finished the game, and the story is more or less "done," in which case the virtual world illusion (the excitement of it feeling like a real world) is basically gone and any further investigation of the game is just playing around with builds.
(Btw, the idea of "paying" for respecs in some in-game way is quite frankly retarded. It's wholly a meta thing, to do with the player, not an in-game thing to do with the character the player is rp-ing. An in-game character might retrain something here or there (like learn to use bastard swords or something), but they remain fundamentally their class, which is a lifetime commitment, and respeccing out of it into a totaly different class can never really make any in-game sense at all.)
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The thing I'd say where "living with your choices" makes sense when it comes to build-related things is where your attributes are given from a random roll and you have to make the best of them. That I think is a great spirit for a videogame, but that's not "living with your choices" that's "living with what you (in the virtual world) ARE."
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Half the fun of playing an adventure game, an RPG, some sort of game in which your choices matter, is/are the consequences of those choices, including those made during chargen, for better or worse.
Is the developer "cheating" you by only including a single instance of being able to use that precious Master of Mushroom Sautee skill that you just had to have? Maybe. It's a matter of perspective. Is it possible to have some sort of foresight when creating your character in a new RPG (especially in a new system) to know what to *avoid* when creating a character? I think it is. One needs to read the skill's or the feat's description carefully and try to take in all the other factors regarding the game to predict whether or not that was a terrible choice. Plus, at least in a well-designed game, the risk/reward of taking a rather obscure-sounding skill (or quirky build, etc.) should be appropriately high.
But of more importance is the player's ability or willingness to literally roll with the choices he made. What's more fun, I ask you: that one moment when your potentially quirky character finally comes in to his own and shines, becoming the belle of the ball, prompting the oh-so-precious fist-pump that all nerds crave, or "beating" the game? This is an old, old question, and, again, one of perspective, but I say make me deal with how I made my character. Don't give me some easy way out to "fix" him by including some stupid Mirror of Instant Changing allowing a re-spec. I don't even like the concept of paying in-game to rebuild your character. I'd rather play blind, hoping beyond all hope that I didn't screw up, faced with the grim reality that my gimped character stands absolutely no chance against the Big Boss at the end because I didn't build the Ultimate Build. Fuck that.
LarryTyphoid
Arcane
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2021
- Messages
- 2,588
It's too bad that basically no games do this.
I don't mind playing a game from the beginning if the game is good. If a game can't be immediately fun from the very start, it probably sucks!
Depends on a game. But old rpgs taught to be clever about my character building. I used to start over if my character sucked in games like Fallout 2, sometimes more than once. I even started over because of bad party in Wasteland 2. It was a learning process.
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2019
- Messages
- 265
it's a matter of how frivolously the game treats its rpg elements
if it's a bunch of "5% more damage if this and then" perk shit that you can't really account for, absent attributes and no real rp aspects to the game, respeccing is a matter of QOL and I'd rather have it
if not, and it's heavy on rp, then it's not a matter of QOL, and I don't care
if it's a bunch of "5% more damage if this and then" perk shit that you can't really account for, absent attributes and no real rp aspects to the game, respeccing is a matter of QOL and I'd rather have it
if not, and it's heavy on rp, then it's not a matter of QOL, and I don't care
One thing I've never seen in a game is the idea of a partial respec. That is, you can respec your last 5 or 10 levels but no further, like an "undo" button. This gives you the freedom to correct a buildcrafting mistake but still restricts how much you can change. Has anyone seen that?
Also, we need to get rid of this awful zoomer abbreviated lingo like "Respec". Fuck that shit. The Outer Wilds gives you the option early on, but without ever putting the un-abbreviated word on-screen (so you can know it's an abbreviation and not an in-universe dystopian Newspeak term). I had no idea what the fuck they were talking about. Use English!
Also, we need to get rid of this awful zoomer abbreviated lingo like "Respec". Fuck that shit. The Outer Wilds gives you the option early on, but without ever putting the un-abbreviated word on-screen (so you can know it's an abbreviation and not an in-universe dystopian Newspeak term). I had no idea what the fuck they were talking about. Use English!
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