RPG Mechanics Made Pointless By Game Features

[cvv]

people would whine any less?

who cares

Everyone except us? That was my point - we can't have nice things because 90% of gamerdom, including many gentlemen from this here prestigious RPG forum, would throw a hissy fit.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

people would whine any less?

who cares

Everyone except us? That was my point - we can't have nice things because 90% of gamerdom, including many gentlemen from this here prestigious RPG forum, would throw a hissy fit.

KCD sold well though.
The problem is thinking that the tiny minority of groaners and whiners make up the majority of customers and pandering to them.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[JarlFrank]

Random chest contents is cancer anyway, hand-placed loot or bust.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

A potential solution for things like this scenario

But consider Wasteland 2 - there's a locked door with some mysterious content behind it. You have 60% of success, 20% of a critical failure. You try - BLAM, a critical failure. The lock is jammed ever forever. You'll never learn what is behind that door - maybe a weapon, maybe a piece of lore, maybe a great quest or a companion NPC.

are what are commonly known as "fate points" or similar in tabletop RPGs(I think the only cRPG that has ever used them is Arcanum?)
A rare meta-currency that lets you succeed at some otherwise impossible task. Not the best solution for it, but it's one that I'd like to see tried out more. Arcanum arguably handed them out way too frequently(mostly in the later part of the game)

 

[Eirinjas]

In Tyranny you have to rest to heal injuries, but resting requires camping supplies, of which there are a limited number in the world (scary, amirite?). Actually, there are other ways to heal injuries, including ignoring them entirely like I did because the game will just auto heal you at story transitions and level ups anyway.

So resting is pointless and the limited camping supplies that's meant to add tension to the game is doubly pointless.

 

[cvv]

A mix of percentage chances and saving anytime will always be toxic. Any turn-based game where you can save at any point during the fight is by default a complete shitshow (can't recall if those even exist).

 

[Poseidon00]

Random chest contents is cancer anyway, hand-placed loot or bust.

Not gonna lie, I like randomized loot when it's done well. Icewind Dale comes to mind. It's not totally random, but there's enough uniqueness per playthrough to make it interesting. Better than planning for a handful of powerful weapons you know you will find anyway.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The problem isn't random loot, the problem is "ultra mega legendary random pants of ORANGE legendary colored text" with 27 different random stats on it

 

[DraQ]

Yeah, I'm hearing that all the time. It's technically true.

But consider Wasteland 2 - there's a locked door with some mysterious content behind it. You have 60% of success, 20% of a critical failure. You try - BLAM, a critical failure. The lock is jammed ever forever. You'll never learn what is behind that door - maybe a weapon, maybe a piece of lore, maybe a great quest or a companion NPC.

How many people will just accept it and move on and how many will opt for that super-easy, super-fast solution: F9?

But what if you knew that if you reloaded, some other doors displaying 60% success and 20% critical failure would actually covertly switch to 100% critical failure?

Although doors are a shitty example as they should be destructible.

I agree but do you really think if they included the Bard's Tale 4 style of a save-on-exit feature from the start (you can save on exit but when you load up again the save is automatically deleted, something they originally considered) people would whine any less? Nah, people are addicted to their F5/F9.

And then power outage or crash happens...

 

[Trashos]

Random chest contents is cancer anyway, hand-placed loot or bust.

What random-loot designers want us to think:
"I am going to make loot random, and it is still going to be as good as if I had carefully placed it myself. What a great designer I am!"

What is actually going on:
"I am so bad at designing, that there is no improvement by hand-placing the loot. I might as well make it random."

 

[Jaedar]

In a separate note: Stealing

Most game make game too easy with stealing thanks to savescumming. Thus players can have access to many things with that action.

Risen (and the gothics in general) avoid this by having a skill requirement to the pickpocket action, and if you meet that you always succeed (but can only pickpocket each person once).

It's still made pointless by the game(s) featuring less friendlies and more hostiles as the game goes on, but at least they tried.

 

[octavius]

Random loot is what makes all those random encounters worth it.
If not you could as well have just have "hand placed" battles too.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Random loot is what makes all those random encounters worth it.
If not you could as well have just "hand placed" battles too.

Bethesda games do have randomly generated hand-crafted encounters. They're one of the genuinely good things their games have.

 

[DalekFlay]

Nah, people are addicted to their F5/F9.

I've had save and load anywhere in 90% of the games I've played since I was 14, so yes I guess I'm "addicted" to it. I also think it's more important than ever now that I'm a family man with much more limited time to play games. I think there are ways to offer disincentives to save scumming without removing that basic functionality PC RPGs and RPG-likes have (almost) always had.

 

[Serus]

Random chest contents is cancer anyway, hand-placed loot or bust.

You aren't into replayability, are you...
In crpgs many game aren't replayable by design so it's ok, i guess. I think good compromise was made in IWD1 or Wizardry 8. Placed loot combined with randomized loot one. Of curse there are crpgs to be replayed a lot of times, especially roguelikes where randomization is part of the fun.

 

[cvv]

Nah, people are addicted to their F5/F9.

I've had save and load anywhere in 90% of the games I've played since I was 14, so yes I guess I'm "addicted" to it. I also think it's more important than ever now that I'm a family man with much more limited time to play games.

That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Savescumming doesn't prevent you from wasting your time, it just give you the tool to manufacture exactly the result of a chance-based event that you want. It's a shitty design.

What you're talking about is games should have the save-on-quit feature plus they preferably shouldn't crash. And I agree.

 

[Machocruz]

Risen (and the gothics in general) avoid this by having a skill requirement to the pickpocket action, and if you meet that you always succeed (but can only pickpocket each person once)

For CRPGs, binary success/fail makes the most sense to me. Either you can or you can't, based on character skill, no percentage chance involved.

 

[DalekFlay]

That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Savescumming doesn't prevent you from wasting your time, it just give you the tool to manufacture exactly the result of a chance-based event that you want. It's a shitty design.

I'm not talking about save scumming, I'm very good at resisting that temptation. I'm talking about not redoing a ton of shit because of a death, or because I got caught trying to do ghost runs, or whatever else. I've never liked repeating shit I already did because PC games never made me. I don't want to start now at 40 years old with a wife and kid demanding my attention. We can offer counters to save scumming without getting rid of basic CRPG functionality. Not telling you that you failed a check, for example, as Rusty mentioned.

 

[JarlFrank]

Random chest contents is cancer anyway, hand-placed loot or bust.

You aren't into replayability, are you...
In crpgs many game aren't replayable by design so it's ok, i guess. I think good compromise was made in IWD1 or Wizardry 8. Placed loot combined with randomized loot one. Of curse there are crpgs to be replayed a lot of times, especially roguelikes where randomization is part of the fun.

How does randomized loot contribute to replayability?

I much prefer the hand-placed artifacts of Baldur's Gate 2 and Morrowind. I replayed both of those games plenty of times. Knowing where to find good artifacts doesn't make the games any less replayable.

EDIT:
In fact, I find good deliberately hand-made content way more replayable than randomized but flavorless content, which is why I tend to replay games with content I like more often than, say, roguelikes which rely entirely on randomization.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I also think it's more important than ever now that I'm a family man with much more limited time to play games.

Save and quit feature fixes this just fine.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[JarlFrank]

I also think it's more important than ever now that I'm a family man with much more limited time to play games.

Save and quit feature fixes this just fine.

Save and quit enforces permadeath.

Save and quit has only one save file, so save corruption can fuck you over.

Save and quit doesn't protect you from the game glitching out.

Manual hard saves back up your progress for all contingencies.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Save and quit enforces permadeath.

...no?
It saves when you quit so you can start off from where you stopped. This can easily be combined with some sort of checkpoint save system(e.g., sleeping in a bed)

 

[JarlFrank]

Save and quit enforces permadeath.

...no?
It saves when you quit so you can start off from where you stopped. This can easily be combined with some sort of checkpoint save system(e.g., sleeping in a bed)

If it only saves when you quit, and you just had an hour of non-stop playtime, and then you die, the last save was a full hour ago.