The REAL overlooked sin in RPGs: disconnect between narrative and mechanics

[Harthwain]

and a game like Prototype which portrays the protagonist as some abused soul, meanwhile in the actual game you are a ball of bloody mayhem wreaking havoc on innocents everywhere. It's just stupid.

In Prototype the initial confusion does make sense, especially considering that you start with some superhuman powers and are actively being hunted by the military. Beyond that Mercer had no problems with killing people or wrecking meyhem, so I am not sure where you got that from. Or are you talking about Prototype 2 (which I didn't play)?

 

[sser]

and a game like Prototype which portrays the protagonist as some abused soul, meanwhile in the actual game you are a ball of bloody mayhem wreaking havoc on innocents everywhere. It's just stupid.

In Prototype the initial confusion does make sense, especially considering that you start with some superhuman powers and are actively being hunted by the military. Beyond that Mercer had no problems with killing people or wrecking meyhem, so I am not sure where you got that from. Or are you talking about Prototype 2 (which I didn't play)?

It's been years, but the way I remember it was that in the cutscenes the main guy all "woe is me" full on victim but in the gameplay you're just killing everyone in sight.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

The more I think of it, the more I am amazed... In Nier Automata, story and gameplay are so tightly entangled that you cannot really say where one ends and the other begins. Everything is tightly connected and it is part of a whole. Even the fucking installation procedure is part of the game/story.
I recognize that this game is an absolute exception in the desolate landscape of cRPGs or video games in general. Its tricks cannot be repeated in other games. (Maybe another example of good resonance could be Undertale, but I haven't played it.)

 

[Harthwain]

It's been years, but the way I remember it was that in the cutscenes the main guy all "woe is me" full on victim but in the gameplay you're just killing everyone in sight.

This is true in the beginning. Later in the game it goes away. I really liked Mercer's quote in the intro (not the one you can see on YouTube): "I'm the reason for all of this. They call me a killer, a monster, a terrorist. I'm all of these things". Overall I think the game had good enough story for what it was (sandbox action game) and characters (and their reactions) were believable for the most part.

cRPGs are easy to master because they are hard to learn. Once you master the systems, you become invincible. This is not my decision. It’s the nature of the beast.

You speak like a person who never saw any lethal RPG system. You can master them, but you won't become invincible in them. That's part of the reason why I like Warhammer so much - each encounter has the potential to kill you, which keeps the stakes high and discourages players from throwing themselves into combat without thinking about the consequences.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

You speak like a person who never saw any lethal RPG system. You can master them, but you won't become invincible in them. That's part of the reason why I like Warhammer so much - each encounter has the potential to kill you, which keeps the stakes high and discourages players from throwing themselves into combat without thinking about the consequences.

Ok, but this also have its disadvantages, e.g.,players rage quitting and complaining that the game is a RNG inferno.

You still need to consider the role of loot, character progression, etc. There is a reason why cRPGs tend to be unbalanced and broken. I don’t like it, but it is not easy to fix and make things challenging until the end.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

So please explain to me how can players know a character system from inside out and the game still be challenging. Never mind that you still need character progression, loot, etc.

You need at least 2 difficulty levels, one for learning the systems and one for being challenged after you learn the systems.

After you learn the systems, you make optimal broken builds that get insanely powerful as the game progresses.

 

[Trashos]

you make optimal broken builds that get insanely powerful as the game progresses.

That is the problem, then. Such builds should not exist on highest difficulty. Still, nothing intrinsic about it, just bad design.

 

[Cryomancer]

I decided to play Skyrim. Don't get me wrong, this vampire lord stuff is cool BUT one thing that i hated is : Too much skills on cooldowns. Why they din't created a blood pool secondary system and in order to become in mistform you need to spend this resource? And need to feed or kill on melee or drain power to refill? And allowed powers such as Gargoyle summoning, mistform, etc in human form? And the worst. Why i can take fall damage while i an in a levitating winged beast form???? It makes zero sense. Also, why blood magic is obtained in a different way than traditional spells? Eg, to summon a Frost Atronach, i need a book to teach me the spell. Vampire lord learns how to summon gargoyles, become mist, etc on the fly with no explanation. They also should made the dawnguard far more deadly; because i don't fear then. They should used crossbowman in formation, armored trolls in frontlines and clerics capable of turning undead to heal companions and try to turn/damage you with some type of holy flame that is deadly vs vampires. In lore, both forces compete. In game, i never feared then. And the crossbowman should use explosive/incendiary bolts vs you because the lore established that vampires are weak to fire and by this reason, vampire hunters would exploit this weakness.

To not say that i an only criticizing modern games, on Gothic 3, when Xardas destroyed the rune magic, looks like it only affected fire mages. Druids, water mages, orc shammans and even undead casters(that use scrolls and runes on previous Gothic games) seens unaffected by it. On VtMB there are a minor inconvenience. Tremere, the blood sorcerers have a strict "police" of protecting their secrets BUT your charname can reach five dot thaumaturgy BEFORE Maximillian Strauss accepts you into the chantry.

 

[DraQ]

But you still need some kind of representation, be it a symbol, a sound cue, something. Pure gameplay would be so abstract, you wouldn't be able to even relate to it in any form whatsoever.

Let 0 be empty square, let 1 be black pawn, let 2 be white pawn, let 3 be black bishop...
Or is bare math too storyfaggy for you? Too graphics-whory?

This isn't a story, it's just a bunch of events. The story is not only "what" is happening, but also "how" it's happening.

Yeah, so? Watching a movie or reading a book you get that despite the medium, obviously, not having any gameplay.

The fact that they think it's even possible is already a sign that they don't understand their own medium.

They don't. But maybe a single digit number of people in the entire game industry understands their medium. The rest mostly iterates over cargo cults. Even most of the better ones.

I agree that the gameplay must tell the same story, but you can start with just one and weave the other around it, or back and forth, or converge and succeed. What fails (or succeeds purely by accident or despite its flaws) is when those two components never come together or clash violently.

 

[DraQ]

Politician
You seem to be awfully confused about, well, most things.

You mistake obtuse design and what effectively amounts to a bad interface for legitimate difficulty, you mistake bad, broken design for some sort of sacred tradition, you think this same broken design becomes good when hidden by obtuse interface, etc.

I don't even know where or how to begin knocking over what cannot even stand on its own so I won't.
Look up "not even wrong".

 

[Tim the Bore]

Let 0 be empty square, let 1 be black pawn, let 2 be white pawn, let 3 be black bishop...
Or is bare math too storyfaggy for you? Too graphics-whory?

What are you talking about? I said that every single game possess some kind of narrative, even chess. That there is no such thing as "pure gameplay" - that it always requires some kind of graphical representation and story, even a very basic one. And you came to the conclussion that pure math is too storyfaggy to me? How?

Yeah, so? Watching a movie or reading a book you get that despite the medium, obviously, not having any gameplay.

Obviously only in games the story requires gameplay. Books and movies don't require gameplay. Do I really have to say that?
But the presentation of the events matters just the same, regardless of what kind of medium you chose. Events themselves don't make a story, regardles of the medium. Reading developer's notes is not the same thing as experiencing the story the way it was intended. If you'd sing a song, then the sound of your voice would matter just as much - if not more - as the lyrics.

They don't. But maybe a single digit number of people in the entire game industry understands their medium. The rest mostly iterates over cargo cults. Even most of the better ones.

That's true. If we knew everything about this genre, there would be nothing else to do with it. But there are things we do know (by making more games).

I agree that the gameplay must tell the same story (...)

We couldn't disagree more right now - as I said, for me the gameplay and the story are the same. The gameplay cannot tell the same story, because it already is the story. They are both parts of something bigger.

(...)but you can start with just one and weave the other around it, or back and forth, or converge and succeed.

You can't, these things don't exists in a void. If you have an idea for the gameplay, it's because it came from something bigger, something that you already thought of - and it's contain the story already (however small or big it may be).

 

[RK47]

Witcher 3 bothers me with the gear mechanics.
The game keeps limiting it by level, you level up at a slower pace than finding higher level sword recipes.
So picture level 1 Geralt taking 20+ slashes just to kill a level 6 bear. Even at the LOWEST difficulty.
5 Levels later with a new sword, he massacres the bear in 2 swings. Not because he's really skilled, it's because his sword is way sharper.

 

[RNGsus]

When cavalier class doesn't ride a horse. That's a sin.

 

[JarlFrank]

NWN2 also suffers from "you can kill revived party members with Raise Dead except if they died in a cutscene BS" that i particularly hate. NWN2 is a amazing game but has this huge flaw...

ALL RPGs suffer from this. The moment you gain the ability to raise the fucking dead, any plot point revolving around people DYING is immediately null and void, but the writers don't ever think through the implications of this system. Even fucking Princess Bride put more thought into this, by giving "all dead" vs. "mostly dead". It's not an NWN2 thing. Every fucking RPG featuring the death of a character when where we have previously gained, or will shortly gain, the ability to raise people who are dead, suffers from this.

When resurrecting the dead becomes cheap and consequence-free enough, murder turns into this kind of macabre prank that friends play on each other for laughs. I mean, we all know that in the real world, the level of slapstick joke one is willing to pull on someone scales directly with their ability to withstand that without sustaining any permanent damage. Do you routinely punch and kick your beefier, more durable friends? Exactly. If someone can just press F to respawn with no lasting harm at all, murder becomes just one more joke you can pull.

That's why I absolutely hate resurrection mechanics. Character death should be permanent. A party member dies? Either reload a previous save or deal with it.

There are better ways to safeguard the player from losing a party member than allowing for resurrection. D&D actually has a nice safeguard in the pen and paper rules with 0 HP meaning you get knocked out and are dying, and only at -10 HP you die completely. But even most officially licensed D&D games using the official pen and paper rules don't implement this. If you reach 0 HP your char is dead in most of them.

Resurrection is a shit mechanic that shouldn't exist in any halfway consistent world.

 

[Viata]

Either reload a previous save

What is the point of not having resurrection mechanics if people are going to reload anyway? It's better to include punishment for the resurrected character, then.

 

[Butter]

Either reload a previous save

What is the point of not having resurrection mechanics if people are going to reload anyway? It's better to include punishment for the resurrected character, then.

Sounds like you don't want reload options at all. What is the point of allowing anything to go wrong if the player can reload? If you have to replay the last 15 minutes because a character died, that's a form of punishment for letting them die.

 

[JarlFrank]

Either reload a previous save

What is the point of not having resurrection mechanics if people are going to reload anyway?

Because resurrection mechanics, without exception, break the logic of the setting unless they are severely limited to the point that doing it is mostly not worth it.

 

[Viata]

That is why I'm against saving in games. If you can't finish the game in one go, they don't even play it.

Spoiler

Anyway, if you are going to make a game where there is no resurrection mechanics, it would be nice to include ways where characters die just by selecting the wrong option(not having the necessary skills and so on) in a dialogue. It's weird that we can decrease the number of enemies we are going to fight by selecting the right dialogue option, but the same doesn't happens for the opponents by selecting the wrong one.

 

[Roguey]

JF hates Planescape Torment

 

[JarlFrank]

In PS:T it actually makes sense narratively though, so it's fine. The entire game is designed around all of its weird gameplay mechanics being actually reflected upon in the writing.

In most games, however, resurrection just exists as a thing but in 99% of cases it's not considered in the plot. Someone murdered the king! Ok why not rez him? Someone murdered my wife! Ok why can't a cleric player just rez her? We have this extremely complicated murder case and need your help to solve it! Ok why not just rez the victim and ask him who did it? Etc etc.

 

[laclongquan]

Witcher 3 bothers me with the gear mechanics.
The game keeps limiting it by level, you level up at a slower pace than finding higher level sword recipes.
So picture level 1 Geralt taking 20+ slashes just to kill a level 6 bear. Even at the LOWEST difficulty.
5 Levels later with a new sword, he massacres the bear in 2 swings. Not because he's really skilled, it's because his sword is way sharper.

Real life hunting bother me with the gear mechanic.
This real life keeps limiting it by certificate, you get higher certs at a slower pace than finding bigger caliber gun shops.
So picture level 1 Crispy shooting 20 rounds .20LR to kill a brown bear. Even at lowest diff with the bear trapped in a hole. (If then.)
28 days later Crispy can shoot 2 rounds to kill a similar bear. Not because he's more skilled, but because his gun now is a type with much bigger bore, a .45 hunting rifle. because his certificate has passed inspection and he now can purchase and use that biggy~

 

[JarlFrank]

Witcher 3 bothers me with the gear mechanics.
The game keeps limiting it by level, you level up at a slower pace than finding higher level sword recipes.
So picture level 1 Geralt taking 20+ slashes just to kill a level 6 bear. Even at the LOWEST difficulty.
5 Levels later with a new sword, he massacres the bear in 2 swings. Not because he's really skilled, it's because his sword is way sharper.

Real life hunting bother me with the gear mechanic.
This real life keeps limiting it by certificate, you get higher certs at a slower pace than finding bigger caliber gun shops.
So picture level 1 Crispy shooting 20 rounds .20LR to kill a brown bear. Even at lowest diff with the bear trapped in a hole. (If then.)
28 days later Crispy can shoot 2 rounds to kill a similar bear. Not because he's more skilled, but because his gun now is a type with much bigger bore, a .45 hunting rifle. because his certificate has passed inspection and he now can purchase and use that biggy~

But if you find a high calibre gun IRL before getting the license to use it, you can still use it if you really want to. Yeah, the cops will slap a fine on you if they catch you, but you are not physically incapable of taking the gun in your hands and squeezing the trigger just because you haven't reached the minimum required hunter level yet.

Terrible comparison.

 

[Sykar]

In PS:T it actually makes sense narratively though, so it's fine. The entire game is designed around all of its weird gameplay mechanics being actually reflected upon in the writing.

In most games, however, resurrection just exists as a thing but in 99% of cases it's not considered in the plot. Someone murdered the king! Ok why not rez him? Someone murdered my wife! Ok why can't a cleric player just rez her? We have this extremely complicated murder case and need your help to solve it! Ok why not just rez the victim and ask him who did it? Etc etc.

Baldurs Gate 1, they could have just rezzed Gorion.

 

[JarlFrank]

In PS:T it actually makes sense narratively though, so it's fine. The entire game is designed around all of its weird gameplay mechanics being actually reflected upon in the writing.

In most games, however, resurrection just exists as a thing but in 99% of cases it's not considered in the plot. Someone murdered the king! Ok why not rez him? Someone murdered my wife! Ok why can't a cleric player just rez her? We have this extremely complicated murder case and need your help to solve it! Ok why not just rez the victim and ask him who did it? Etc etc.

Baldurs Gate 1, they could have just rezzed Gorion.

Just pick up one of the chunky giblets he explodes into and bring it to a temple. Rules-wise, all you need of a corpse in D&D to resurrect it is a tiny bit of it, not even the whole thing. The sheer power of high level resurrection spells (that can all be purchased at the temples of major cities) is what makes it so logic-breaking in D&D. Nobody's death should ever be a major plot point because it is so easily reversed.

What was intended as a feature to make player deaths more bearable in pen and paper is utterly atrocious in worldbuilding terms. Yeah, I get that a player who invested 2 years into playing his character will want to have him back if he dies, even if his corpse ends up incinerated and turned to a pile of ashes, but if the players can easily get resurrected with only minor consequences (losing a level or losing a point of CON permanently isn't that big an issue - definitely not big enough of an issue that highly ranked and wealthy characters would reverse every single assassination targeted against their family by bringing their dead relative to the temple).

And if you then introduce methods of killing that prevent resurrection, like powerful disintegration spells or special poisons that prevent the soul from returning to the body, or whatever... then you could just as well re-balance the game so death happens less often and instead you get knocked out and receive permanent injuries (either minor or major depending on how many injuries you already got). Mechanically you would achieve roughly the same result, but the gameworld logic will be a lot more robust. There isn't much of a mechanical difference between "you died, got resurrected, and lost 1 CON permanently" and "you passed out when the enemy stabbed you one time too many, that last stab pierced your lung, due to the pierced lung you now have -1 CON because it makes it harder to breathe". D&D could easily solve this issue by increasing the amount of negative HP you can go into. Don't just make it -10, scale it with the actual hitpoints so a level 8 fighter with 100 HP can go down to -30 HP or something rather than -10 before he dies, and instead of rolling for stabilization each turn to determine if he loses another HP, have him roll for determining whether he'll be left with a permanent wound or not.

It's a much more elegant solution that just "lol you died but then got raised and because of how the magic works you now have 1 con less even though your body has been fully restored to the state it was in before the fight".

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

You mistake obtuse design and what effectively amounts to a bad interface for legitimate difficulty, you mistake bad, broken design for some sort of sacred tradition, you think this same broken design becomes good when hidden by obtuse interface, etc.

I don't even know where or how to begin knocking over what cannot even stand on its own so I won't.
Look up "not even wrong".

And you are confusing a facade of self-confidence with strength and being authoritative in the subject.

For anyone who stops and think one minute about this issue, it’s self-evident that it’s the other way around. The more competent, i.e., engrossing and complex, a combat system is, the more variables you need take into account and the more stuff "under the hood" you have to learn. This is just basic common sense.

Now, you can talk as if you had nothing to learn and things come automatically to you because you want to come across as the superior part in an internet discussion. This will give you some points in your own misguided view of things, but you will still be wrong.