Norfleet
Moderator
- Joined
- Jun 3, 2005
- Messages
- 12,250
I don't think what matters is so much that whether or not the player character is powerful or not, compared to any given NPC, even the villain, so much that the player character does not become so ridiculously overpowered that he is essentially a god. It is not a question of whether or not the player character is more powerful than his antagonist. It is a question of whether the player character is more powerful than the antagonist, the city guard, and the entire orcish nation all at once. The ability to singlehandedly overpower the villain is insignificant compared to the ability to lay waste to entire nations. It doesn't even matter if the villain is even MORE powerful: The point at which you singlehandedly capable of laying waste to entire armies and destroying nations at whim is the point at which the game has sort of lost any real sense of connection.
There's also the paradigm of the "boss fight" that is overdone. Every single villain is defeated ultimately by some form of punching him in the face. This means that every single villain must personally be some sort of badass, even if it's a "you, me, and MY GUARDS" scenario. Why must the player character resolve every single issue through stabbing someone in the face? This is typically accompanied by an antagonist that appears to be in it purely For The Evulz, with no sense of what constitutes a meaningful or purposeful goal other than destruction for its own sake. This is somehow the case even when your villain is the head of state of some opposing nation, and you can simply resolve everything by assassinating him, and this doesn't result in simply making the problem worse or anything by either enabling a vengeful successor to arise or throwing the country into anarchy as it collapses into factional infighting and warlordism, resulting in the deaths of more people than the player saved by doing so. The villain is never defeated by something such as, say, losing the next election when his scandalous deeds are exposed.
There's also the paradigm of the "boss fight" that is overdone. Every single villain is defeated ultimately by some form of punching him in the face. This means that every single villain must personally be some sort of badass, even if it's a "you, me, and MY GUARDS" scenario. Why must the player character resolve every single issue through stabbing someone in the face? This is typically accompanied by an antagonist that appears to be in it purely For The Evulz, with no sense of what constitutes a meaningful or purposeful goal other than destruction for its own sake. This is somehow the case even when your villain is the head of state of some opposing nation, and you can simply resolve everything by assassinating him, and this doesn't result in simply making the problem worse or anything by either enabling a vengeful successor to arise or throwing the country into anarchy as it collapses into factional infighting and warlordism, resulting in the deaths of more people than the player saved by doing so. The villain is never defeated by something such as, say, losing the next election when his scandalous deeds are exposed.