RPG Mechanics Made Pointless By Game Features

[V_K]

As usual, weak willed people are trying to spoil the fun for everyone else.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

As usual, weak willed people are trying to spoil the fun for everyone else.

The flesh is weak.

 

[luj1]

Numenera

you can use Effort resource and companions to pass every skill check

 

[rusty_shackleford]

From the Fallout 1 manual:

Save Often
You have ten save game slots. Use them well. Before you get to
a new location, save your game. Before entering a dangerous looking
building, save your game. Before talking to an important looking
NPC, save your game. And use all of your save game slots. Don’t
keep saving over slot 1. If something goes drastically wrong, it’s better
to be able to move a couple of saved games back and restore from
there instead of having to start over from the very beginning.

RPGs want you to savescum.

Funny enough, one of the few cRPGs I'm aware of that tells the player to not savescum to improve their experience is Daggerfall.

Being able to save & load at will is a game mechanic and a willful design decision on the part of the developers and I'm tired of people pretending it's not.

No, "j-j-just don't use it!" isn't a valid argument for the same reason an RPG giving you the best equipment right at the start and then saying "well, just don't use it!" isn't a valid argument.

 

[Zombra]

"Press this button to succeed at the game"
"Press that button to succeed at the game"
"But whatever you do, don't press THAT OTHER button to succeed at the game, you're not supposed to!"

 

[SumDrunkGuy]

I'd love to see something like Metro, where money are useful limited resource (like crafting material or magic catalyst).

The Sinking City did the same thing, used bullets as currency. It was still easy to break. Item chests refill every time you leave the area and Frogware never thought it was worth fixing.

Stealth, lockpicking, and pickpocketing basically trivialize everything. In Weird West I had a key to every building and unlimited access to all supplies. Fucking stupid. Atleast make the NPCs aware of the fact that I'm selling them their own stolen goods.

 

[gurugeorge]

You're never going to get away from the "meta" problem, it's perennial. Yes, not saving is the most immersive way to play, but we all have real lives that occasionally call at awkward moments. The best compromise is to have a rolling autosave (with say 5 slots in case of accidents and bugs) with at the very least autosave on exit as well as autosave after resting at sensible specific in-world spots (inns, campfires). Autosave after combats and important skill checks should also be mandatory, I think. With that combination, you still have the benefit of the player not having to think about saving at all.

The benefit of a manual save/quicksave system is really just to be able to try out alternative responses to see what happens, but some people love that (and of course reviewers and people making guides desperately need it). So you should have both, and the player can then just forget about saves (and let the autosave system do its thing) or use the manual save system, with an option to turn the manual save system off.

Then you can have checks made on percentage chance, which is the proper simulationist way to do it (higher skill stat-wise increasing the chance of success but never totally guaranteeing it - just like in real life).

Quicksaving is very abusable

There are pros and cons to it - if the system doesn't have frequent enough saves after points of interests, I find it absolutely abhorrent to go back and re-do sections. It goes completely against the sense of having forward momentum in immersion. e.g. I would rather limp on having botched the thing just before, but so long as I've survived I want my progress up to that point to be saved (e.g. autosave after combat), I absolutely hate, hate, HATE the idea of having to go back and do a section over again. But since games don't seem to do that very often, the next best thing is quicksave, which becomes an automatic enough habit that it's almost "invisible" mentally. But I would still rather not have to think about saving at all.

There seem to be these two things at absolute loggerheads:-

1) Forward momentum and immersion.
2) The older idea of "re-doing something until you beat it" (and the comcomitant idea of failure as a teacher).

Frankly I think the latter is outdated, as it's just a mechanism that arose because of limitations in computing power, and people got used to it. On the other hand, "failure as a teacher" is a good thing (the rush of eventual victory and all that); but again, it clashes with immersion, so for me it's less important. You should be learning as you go, building up your skills one block on top of another, and there should be contextual clues as to how to handle a novel situation.

I dunno, it's always been a tricky thing for me, as I can see value in both approaches.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

You're never going to get away from the "meta" problem, it's perennial. Yes, not saving is the most immersive way to play, but we all have real lives that occasionally call at awkward moments. The best compromise is to have a rolling autosave (with say 5 slots in case of accidents and bugs) with at the very least autosave on exit as well as autosave after resting at sensible specific in-world spots (inns, campfires). Autosave after combats and important skill checks should also be mandatory, I think. With that combination, you still have the benefit of the player not having to think about saving at all.

The benefit of a manual save/quicksave system is really just to be able to try out alternative responses to see what happens, but some people love that (and of course reviewers and people making guides desperately need it). So you should have both, and the player can then just forget about saves (and let the autosave system do its thing) or use the manual save system, with an option to turn the manual save system off.

Then you can have checks made on percentage chance, which is the proper simulationist way to do it (higher skill stat-wise increasing the chance of success but never totally guaranteeing it - just like in real life).

Quicksaving is very abusable

There are pros and cons to it - if the system doesn't have frequent enough saves after points of interests, I find it absolutely abhorrent to go back and re-do sections. It goes completely against the sense of having forward momentum in immersion. e.g. I would rather limp on having botched the thing just before, but so long as I've survived I want my progress up to that point to be saved (e.g. autosave after combat), I absolutely hate, hate, HATE the idea of having to go back and do a section over again. But since games don't seem to do that very often, the next best thing is quicksave, which becomes an automatic enough habit that it's almost "invisible" mentally. But I would still rather not have to think about saving at all.

Yeah. This is why, right at the top of my tier list, are user-controlled but limited or risky save systems, like the one in Alien Isolation. That way, if you get sent back and lose 2 hours of progress, it's your fault rather than an oversight by the developers.

There seem to be these two things at absolute loggerheads:-

1) Forward momentum and immersion.
2) The older idea of "re-doing something until you beat it" (and the comcomitant idea of failure as a teacher).

Frankly I think the latter is outdated, as it's just a mechanism that arose because of limitations in computing power, and people got used to it. On the other hand, "failure as a teacher" is a good thing (the rush of eventual victory and all that); but again, it clashes with immersion, so for me it's less important. You should be learning as you go, building up your skills one block on top of another, and there should be contextual clues as to how to handle a novel situation.

Saving and reloading is definitely not immersive, but it's more about challenge and making choices meaningful, than it is about failure as a teacher or wasting the players time as punishment.

For example, if I fail to hack a chest, most games will usually punish me by forfeiting some resources or damaging me or whatever. This is rendered completely meaningless if, after a string of failures on one chest, I can simply reload and undo my mistakes. Chance-based mechanics especially go right out the window, as all dice rolls can effectively be guaranteed if you can just quickload repeatedly until it rolls the number you want.

Choice and consequence is largely meaningless in a game if choices can be easily undone. Obviously at the end of the day people make genuine mistakes or want to choose other options, and doing things like going back to a previous save after an ABYSMAL fight or a regretful plot decision makes sense, but for something like rerolling a chest for better loot or saving some wasted hacking resources, it's not worth it.

I tend to find that in games that allow saving anywhere (especially quicksaves), my health and ammo pools get largely bloated and end up much higher than the developers intended. This is because hard fights that are SUPPOSED to drain my health will usually be repeated again and again until I come out of them mostly okay, so having 3-4 health kits afterwards becomes pointless.

Free Saving actually completely undermines a lot of core aspects of game design because it essentially allows the player to undermine the challenge by being near-omnipotent - canonically hitting every shot, getting every hack right the first time, finding every rare item - since the failures are always quickly erased and replaced with successes.

I know a lot of this can be mitigated by simply not abusing saves - in many games I literally unbind the quicksave key and the game instantly improves by an order of magnitude - but the fact that it's there and that it's so easy makes it really tempting to use, and not having any mechanics other than "go back to an arbitrary checkpoint" is also pretty boring as a workaround, despite being what most games do. I would much rather more games realised the problems that free saving poses, and invent clever gameplay mechanics to wolve the issue, like Resident Evil's save rooms or Dark Souls bonfires.

If I do something stupid in a game where I can't just quickload, I usually swallow it, grit my teeth, and move on, and effectively eat the wasted resources. In survival or limited-resource games like System Shock 2 or Prey this is especially important, because they built the games resource economy around you making mistakes and just scraping by on average, so a near omnipotent god character (which all players are when they reload to erase their mistakes) ends up with an overabundance of medkits, ammo, nanites, etc.

Here's a challenge for you: Go play System Shock 2 normally. You will find that, by the time you get to Ops or so, you have an overabundance of nanites, probably about 300-500 or so, while being mostly fully stocked on all your resources. Then replay the game, and do not manual save - instead, rely exclusively on autosaves at bulkheads, and respawning at QBR machines. You will find your nanites are MUCH lower, much closer to the developers intent, and you will be much closer to just scraping by. It will also be a lot more fun as a result. System Shock 2 still does have some pretty major resource distribution issues (which can be fixed with some excellent mods), so don't expect it to be a perfect experience with finely tuned resource balance and you always JUST have enough to get by, but it's much closer to that experience.

Unlimited Free Saving isn't just a matter of personal preference, it's bad game design.

 

[gurugeorge]

For example, if I fail to hack a chest, most games will usually punish me by forfeiting some resources or damaging me or whatever. This is rendered completely meaningless if, after a string of failures on one chest, I can simply reload and undo my mistakes. Chance-based mechanics especially go right out the window, as all dice rolls can effectively be guaranteed if you can just quickload repeatedly until it rolls the number you want.

Cant't they get around that by changing the "seed" on reload or something (I don't know what it means, exactly, something to do with changing the outcome of the RNG on reload, but I've seen it talked about, and it was an option in nuXCOM) - surely that obviates that problem?

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Every RPG mechanic in a single-player computer game is useless in trying to improve gameplay since RPGs are tabletop social games.

Yeah, and books are a stupid invention that fail to recreate the personal performance of campfire stories.

Thoughts, ERYFKRAD?

Campfire stories are a stupid invention that fail to recreate the experience of actually doing cool shit.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

For example, if I fail to hack a chest, most games will usually punish me by forfeiting some resources or damaging me or whatever. This is rendered completely meaningless if, after a string of failures on one chest, I can simply reload and undo my mistakes. Chance-based mechanics especially go right out the window, as all dice rolls can effectively be guaranteed if you can just quickload repeatedly until it rolls the number you want.

Cant't they get around that by changing the "seed" on reload or something (I don't know what it means, exactly, something to do with changing the outcome of the RNG on reload, but I've seen it talked about, and it was an option in nuXCOM) - surely that obviates that problem?

EDIT: Whoops, rewrote this because I misunderstood what you meant by changing the seed, and was thinking you were talking about rerolling chest loot

Oh, do you mean like, making the hacking rolls based on a seed set at the start of the game?
Yeah that's a decent solution that can work in some cases, for RNG based stuff, because no matter how many times you reload the outcome will be the same. This has a few problems still though. If I have a low lockpicking skill, waste 30 lockpicks on RNG trying to open a chest, while I can't reload to try again for a different outcome if the seed is preset, I can still reload to get my 30 lockpicks back to try another chest, so I still have ways to abuse the system.

Overall, while it does go some way to solving the problem, it's still problematic because you can still undo your mistakes or bad rolls, you just can't try again for good rolls.

In a game like Skyrim, for instance, this wouldn't work at all because lockpicking is based entirely on player skill, so if I break 15 picks, then reload, and pick the lock first go, there's nothing that any RNG mitigation mechanics can do to fix that issue, it's simply me as a player being better at lockpicking, without taking the resource cost that failing would normally entail.

This usually manifests itself in combat more than anything else. Preventing me from quickload spamming to open a chest with RNG is all well and good, but if I can play a fight terribly, go down to 1 HP, then reload and do the first again and not get hit and still be on 100 HP, then you have only partially solved the problem.

All these RNG-seed anti-abuse systems largely exist to work around the existing problems, but don't do a proper job and can't solve the whole problem. You're much better off fixing the problem at the source by fixing save abuse. This is why the "seed" setting is totally pointless in XCOM 2 - the ACTUAL solution is to play on Ironman mode where your choices actually matter, that way not just hacking, but all actions in the game including shot chances are effectively on a "seed" because you have ONE chance to do them.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

"Press this button to succeed at the game"
"Press that button to succeed at the game"
"But whatever you do, don't press THAT OTHER button to succeed at the game, you're not supposed to!"

Yes after all to play the game means you win by default.
Nigger now I know why the Scarecrow in Oz was looking for brains, you sure as hell didn't have any when you built that strawman.

 

[Cryomancer]

From the Fallout 1 manual:

Save Often
You have ten save game slots. Use them well. Before you get to
a new location, save your game. Before entering a dangerous looking
building, save your game. Before talking to an important looking
NPC, save your game. And use all of your save game slots. Don’t
keep saving over slot 1. If something goes drastically wrong, it’s better
to be able to move a couple of saved games back and restore from
there instead of having to start over from the very beginning.

RPGs want you to savescum.

Funny enough, one of the few cRPGs I'm aware of that tells the player to not savescum to improve their experience is Daggerfall.

Being able to save & load at will is a game mechanic and a willful design decision on the part of the developers and I'm tired of people pretending it's not.

No, "j-j-just don't use it!" isn't a valid argument for the same reason an RPG giving you the best equipment right at the start and then saying "well, just don't use it!" isn't a valid argument.

Well said. An example of it is Mount & Blade, I conquered an enemy city and but my king refused to give the land to me, I could just reload till he bestows that city to me, however, I decided that I would break free from his, abandoning my noble title and become a bandit, without my protection, the city quickly got captured by my king's enemies and then, I just easily conquered it and established my own kingdom. After few days of it, my previous king declared war upon me and the original city owner too, I had TWO powerful factions fighting against me in a two front war.

IF I din't had a huge army, including over 120 Rhodok Sharpshooters, armed with a powerful siege crossbow and a sniper accuracy, my city would have fallen. After months in game time in that situation. Capturing nobles, raiding villages, recruiting mercs and eventually defending villages since I din't had "right to rule", nobody saw me as an king, only as an criminal scum, the villages around my city was constantly raided and no commerce was possible thanks to this situation, after a very long time of it, the "previous enemies" of my king offered peace, I accepted and then, started to raid the villages of my previous king and eventually fought my previous king, defeated him and took him as a prisoner. Also took other nobles. The enemy of my previous kingdom(now under truce) started an massive war and conquered many pieces of land from my previous king while the king who denied my rightfully city was in a dungeon inside the city which he refused to give to me....

All of this adventure would't happen if I just had reloaded till I got the city.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

From the Fallout 1 manual:

Save Often
You have ten save game slots. Use them well. Before you get to
a new location, save your game. Before entering a dangerous looking
building, save your game. Before talking to an important looking
NPC, save your game. And use all of your save game slots. Don’t
keep saving over slot 1. If something goes drastically wrong, it’s better
to be able to move a couple of saved games back and restore from
there instead of having to start over from the very beginning.

RPGs want you to savescum.

Funny enough, one of the few cRPGs I'm aware of that tells the player to not savescum to improve their experience is Daggerfall.

Being able to save & load at will is a game mechanic and a willful design decision on the part of the developers and I'm tired of people pretending it's not.

No, "j-j-just don't use it!" isn't a valid argument for the same reason an RPG giving you the best equipment right at the start and then saying "well, just don't use it!" isn't a valid argument.

Well said. An example of it is Mount & Blade, I conquered an enemy city and but my king refused to give the land to me, I could just reload till he bestows that city to me, however, I decided that I would break free from his, abandoning my noble title and become a bandit, without my protection, the city quickly got captured by my king's enemies and then, I just easily conquered it and established my own kingdom. After few days of it, my previous king declared war upon me and the original city owner too, I had TWO powerful factions fighting against me in a two front war.

IF I din't had a huge army, including over 120 Rhodok Sharpshooters, armed with a powerful siege crossbow and a sniper accuracy, my city would have fallen. I spended months in game time in that situation. Capturing nobles, raiding villages, recruiting mercs and since I din't had "right to rule", nobody saw me as an king, only as an criminal scum, the villages around my city was constantly raided and no commerce was possible thanks to this situation, after a very long time of it, the "previous enemies" of my king offered peace, I accepted and then, started to raid the villages of my previous king and eventually fought my previous king, defeated him and took him as a prisoner. Also took other nobles. The enemy of my previous kingdom(now under truce) started an massive war and conquered many pieces of land from my previous king while the king who denied my rightfully city was in a dungeon inside the city which he refused to give to me....

All of this adventure would't happen if I just had reloaded till I got the city.

Open ended games are best.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

All of this adventure would't happen if I just had reloaded till I got the city.

EXTREMELY based.

save abuse is for nerds.

Funny enough, one of the few cRPGs I'm aware of that tells the player to not savescum to improve their experience is Daggerfall.

Wow, Bethesda used to be extremely based. What happened? Why did it become shit? Did Todd cause it?

 

[deuxhero]

The Add function in Battle Network 1-3. You discard a selection of chips (cards) and skip the ability to attack for a turn to get twice as many chips in your next hand. A lot of things kill this

1. You only get as many extra chips as you sacrificed added to your hand. You can only sacrifice chips if they all have the same code (or same name, but that's stupidly impractical)
2. You can still only ever play 5 cards per turn, no matter how big your hand
3. You only draw new cards if you use old ones (either normally or by add) so having more cards in hand isn't useful for anti-bricking since you have the same set of chips.
4. You are rated on how fast you defeat your foes. Losing a turn means you've already lost.
5. You can get more cards in your opening hand by equipping a Style, with the only cost being opportunity (You can only equip one style) and an elemental weakness (it's a relative minority of enemies have elemental attacks of any kind, every attack in this game can be dodged, there's loads of defensive options besides just dodging, and the extra hand size lets you kill enemies much quicker)

Even if Add was simply not being able to use chips for a turn to get more next turn, it would still be bad for any remotely decent deck and only see use in the very early game (but that's still more than nothing). Understandably, Add disappeared in all three future main games in the series and the two phone games that use the original battle system.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Wow, Bethesda used to be extremely based. What happened? Why did it become shit? Did Todd cause it

Probably Hines rather than Howard, I dunno.

 

[gurugeorge]

For example, if I fail to hack a chest, most games will usually punish me by forfeiting some resources or damaging me or whatever. This is rendered completely meaningless if, after a string of failures on one chest, I can simply reload and undo my mistakes. Chance-based mechanics especially go right out the window, as all dice rolls can effectively be guaranteed if you can just quickload repeatedly until it rolls the number you want.

Cant't they get around that by changing the "seed" on reload or something (I don't know what it means, exactly, something to do with changing the outcome of the RNG on reload, but I've seen it talked about, and it was an option in nuXCOM) - surely that obviates that problem?

EDIT: Whoops, rewrote this because I misunderstood what you meant by changing the seed, and was thinking you were talking about rerolling chest loot

Oh, do you mean like, making the hacking rolls based on a seed set at the start of the game?
Yeah that's a decent solution that can work in some cases, for RNG based stuff, because no matter how many times you reload the outcome will be the same. This has a few problems still though. If I have a low lockpicking skill, waste 30 lockpicks on RNG trying to open a chest, while I can't reload to try again for a different outcome if the seed is preset, I can still reload to get my 30 lockpicks back to try another chest, so I still have ways to abuse the system.

Overall, while it does go some way to solving the problem, it's still problematic because you can still undo your mistakes or bad rolls, you just can't try again for good rolls.

In a game like Skyrim, for instance, this wouldn't work at all because lockpicking is based entirely on player skill, so if I break 15 picks, then reload, and pick the lock first go, there's nothing that any RNG mitigation mechanics can do to fix that issue, it's simply me as a player being better at lockpicking, without taking the resource cost that failing would normally entail.

This usually manifests itself in combat more than anything else. Preventing me from quickload spamming to open a chest with RNG is all well and good, but if I can play a fight terribly, go down to 1 HP, then reload and do the first again and not get hit and still be on 100 HP, then you have only partially solved the problem.

All these RNG-seed anti-abuse systems largely exist to work around the existing problems, but don't do a proper job and can't solve the whole problem. You're much better off fixing the problem at the source by fixing save abuse. This is why the "seed" setting is totally pointless in XCOM 2 - the ACTUAL solution is to play on Ironman mode where your choices actually matter, that way not just hacking, but all actions in the game including shot chances are effectively on a "seed" because you have ONE chance to do them.

Thinking about it some more, I've just realized that what I really want in single player games is exactly what you have in MMOs - where every ... single ... move ... you make ... is recorded .... as it occurs. That's the true way to forget all about this thing called "saving." That way you're totally committed to the forward momentum, but you're never worried at any point about lost time or having to tediously (and un-immersively) repeat anything.

And you can have a bit of "learning by repeating" in dungeons, just like in MMOs, just for contrast and flavour.

Why the hell can't they have that in single player games? It's the perfect system.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Wow, Bethesda used to be extremely based. What happened? Why did it become shit? Did Todd cause it

Probably Hines rather than Howard, I dunno.

I think Todd is more adventurous than people give him credit for. Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard might have been a financial flop, but you can trace a clear lineage from it to Morrowind in terms of lore/story/worldbuilding, much to the chagrin of many Todd hating mushroom tree lovers. The reason Morrowind gets most of the credit is quite simple: it reached a massively bigger audience than Redguard.

 

[Storyfag]

Thinking about it some more, I've just realized that what I really want in single player games is exactly what you have in MMOs - where every ... single ... move ... you make ... is recorded .... as it occurs. That's the true way to forget all about this thing called "saving." That way you're totally committed to the forward momentum, but you're never worried at any point about lost time or having to tediously (and un-immersively) repeat anything.

And you can have a bit of "learning by repeating" in dungeons, just like in MMOs, just for contrast and flavour.

Why the hell can't they have that in single player games? It's the perfect system.

Do you know what happens in most MMOs if you die?

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Thinking about it some more, I've just realized that what I really want in single player games is exactly what you have in MMOs - where every ... single ... move ... you make ... is recorded .... as it occurs. That's the true way to forget all about this thing called "saving." That way you're totally committed to the forward momentum, but you're never worried at any point about lost time or having to tediously (and un-immersively) repeat anything.

And you can have a bit of "learning by repeating" in dungeons, just like in MMOs, just for contrast and flavour.

Why the hell can't they have that in single player games? It's the perfect system.

Do you know what happens in most MMOs if you die?

Your account goes to your next of kin or whoever knows your password.

 

[Hag]

All side quests in M&M3 are basically unwanted after a couple hours since all you can expect from then is either more xp, that you don't need when the orbs of power make all your party level lightning fast, or objects you don't need since you find them literally under every rock. Plus the inventory system is so bad that most of the time picking up new objects means more time sorting and selling useless items, so going on a quest for maybe a couple good and forty shitty ones is masochism of a very boring kind.

 

[Cryomancer]

. Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard might have been a financial flop, but you can trace a clear lineage from it to Morrowind in terms of lore/story/worldbuilding

It forces you to play as an redguard warrior.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

Having finished Prey again recently, most of the "access areas" skills (hacking, repair, leverage, etc) are significantly less useful than they should be because of recycler grenades, mimic matter, and the gloo gun.

It's an example of how giving the player lots of choice can actually undermine game design sometimes. Player choice is good, but not when it makes other choices less meaningful.

This is ESPECIALLY true in the second half of the game, where there are a lot of plot-related areas that need to be accessible for all players, so they more often than not have to undermine their own gameplay systems so that everyone can progress.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

. Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard might have been a financial flop, but you can trace a clear lineage from it to Morrowind in terms of lore/story/worldbuilding

It forces you to play as an redguard warrior.

Still a warrior