1eyedking Top 10 things that RPGs don't do anymore

[IncendiaryDevice]

What was your point? Not trying to be funny, but I don't think you made it very clear.

What are you talking about?

 

[Wayward Son]

I'm not sure if it's been mentioned yet, but something I've noticed about older RPGs is that they let you (at least in skill systems) pick exactly what ability /skill to use. (A la Wasteland) Also, something these games would do is have more than one skill work on the same thing(one memorable case in Wadteland is either using lockpicking, safe crack, demolition with TNT, or Strength+crowbar to open a safe), rather than there only being one option. Nowadays, any RPG released will either have only one skill work for the item, or they will automatically pick the skill.

 

[Goral]

"no one in his right mind" is a game play style, aka 1INT in fallouts.

Why do you think I've stated it like this? Fallout allows for various playthroughs and you can use 150 days however you like. The time limit is long enough to explore and waste time, although for the first time you don't know it and that's what's great about it.

(...) You got anything else apart from Fallout examples? Or are you going to continue to ignore my point and just wank over Fallout like its the only RPG you ever played.

There are more games of course but Fallout 1 is the only one (I know) that did that right. Still, most casuals dislike the time limit and prefer Bethesda style. Even Mass Effect had time limits (same goes for Wasteland 2). I also mentioned Tranny in my first post here.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

There are more games of course but Fallout 1 is the only one (I know) that did that right. Still, most casuals dislike the time limit and prefer Bethesda style. Even Mass Effect had time limits (same goes for Wasteland 2). I also mentioned Tranny in my first post here.

Wow, what a vast array of prestigious games you're familiar with, you really must the big expert to listen to on the topic.

 

[Murk]

I didn't mind the semi-optional time limit imposed on the player by Mask of the Betrayer. I didn't mind the one in Fallout either.

As long as it's clear, I don't think it's an issue. The BS that pops up on you in BG1 when you first visit the eponymous city is a different story.

 

[markec]

There are two things I loved about Battlespire that I wish more games had.

Ability to talk with every enemy in the game, allowing you to get information, persuade them to help you, intimidate them or just call them names.

No information on magical items. To know what any magical effect does you need to either use the item or locate a book/scroll containing the information.


Games like Arx Fatalis and Anvil of Dawn have really cool magical system that makes you write symbols in air to cast spells.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Number one: bieng good.

 

[Siobhan]

I think flavor text hasn't been mentioned yet. Not so much item text or books but rather descriptions of rooms and characters you encounter, similar to what a DM may read to you during a PnP session. Or inconsequential minor events like the least nimble character in your party slipping on the remnants of a broken potion. Modern tech has made this completely impossible, you can't have a detailed, pseudo-realistic 3d world and then use text instead of graphics/voice acting. But at the same time you can't have scripted scenes for all these minor events, either, it would ruin the pacing. So instead they're completely gone.

 

[DraQ]

Problem is, while that all works well in first-person view, the omnipresent 3rd-person "behind the back" camera makes most of those tricks impossible - you can't seamlessly teleport a player in a game like The Witcher or Dark Souls without him noticing.

It has been done flawlessly in modern 3D FPP in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat and there is no difference between FPP and TPP other than the offset of the camera - in both cases you'd need closely matching environments and just teleport without any visible effects.

 

[shihonage]

I think flavor text hasn't been mentioned yet. Not so much item text or books but rather descriptions of rooms and characters you encounter, similar to what a DM may read to you during a PnP session. Or inconsequential minor events like the least nimble character in your party slipping on the remnants of a broken potion. Modern tech has made this completely impossible, you can't have a detailed, pseudo-realistic 3d world and then use text instead of graphics/voice acting. But at the same time you can't have scripted scenes for all these minor events, either, it would ruin the pacing. So instead they're completely gone.

Part of flavor text thing is NPC blurbs. Fallout had a lot of those appear above their heads, and they were mostly context-appropriate, which made the world feel more alive. From hobos greeting you, and reacting to some world events, to traders in random encounter bemoaning how you could've just solved this peacefully...

It really did a lot for the immersion.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

There's a bit in Morrowind where you can get to talk to one of those dagoth monsters in a specific location in one of those Sixth House fortresses. The reature attacks you normally, but there's a tiny window of time where you can engage in conversation and the creature will give you dagoth brandy, which only had negative effects.

All seven of the Ash Vampires have unique dialogue, though two of them just tell you to shut up and fight. Since they attack on sight, they require either sneaking or use of a calm spell in order to entire dialogue mode, unless you're fast enough to activate dialogue mode before they can enter their combat mode.

 

[Mozg]

I do miss riddles. I think fight -> 'splore -> riddle -> 'splore -> repeat is a much better game loop than just fight -> 'splore

I miss disposable party NPCs that die or just leave of their own accord pretty fast. Everyone expects NPCs to be a serious chunk of the content now.

I think the time limit in FO and the pseudo-time-limit in MotB helped both games immensely, but I think it's part of an integrated design.

Translatable Languages:

Pool of Radiance comes to mind. While it was as simple as taking out the DRM-wheel and translating some runic symbols, the process involved added to the experience. Another example being The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, where you don't immediately know how to translate Daedric symbols, but start to piece it together, and quickly realize that the game allows you to learn a lot of information earlier than you're perhaps supposed to, if you translate the right messages.

I feel like I see substitution cipher "languages" in too many games. It's cute... once.

This is a pretty abstract example and not even really an RPG, but one of my favorite games as a kid was Ogre Battle 64. The game had a number of elements that you don't see very often anymore, but the particular one I want to highlight is the way the game used the in-game calendar as a way to create secrets.

I've always disliked those because I've only ever seen it in games where time is completely meaningless, and those quests about showing up on day of the week X at time Y make it so you can't ignore how meaningless time is. Oh, it's 6 days from now - guess I'll sleep in the inn 6 days in a row doing jack shit during this "save the entire universe" plot.

I've played Ogre Battle 64 but I can't remember it at all so I'm only assuming it's typical, but maybe it was

 

[Azrael the cat]

On the flipside, the thread isn't complete without including these moments of greatness as the flipside of guaranteed mediocrity:

1. Ultima VIII: Corrupting Windows, requiring a full hard disk wipe. Twice before I learnt my lesson, because I just didn't want to believe it the first time, despite borrowing my old man's business computer techie

Spoiler

(one of the rare ones who knew his shit - worked for one of those crappy 'hire a computer techie to come over and tell you to the computer off and on again' places, but had his own very successful cash-in-hand side business from the clients who were computer-literate enough to realise that the guy knows his shit and can do a better job of custom-designing your small business's IT systems than his employer - we'd still pay his employer their standard fee, but then pay the guy additional cash to do 'real work', kept the arrangement going after the guy's own pharmaceutical software business took off, basically doing the same stuff he did as cash jobs for us - i.e. custom designing your retail inventory/ordering/security so it could merge with tracking the controlled drugs, identifying when there's suspicious amounts of pseudoephedrine being sold or other things that could get you into trouble with the pharmacy board if you don't pick up on it, swaps from ultra easy UI to ultra detailed so you can work out which one of your employee pharmacists has gone rogue, etc. In the 90s you had to hold on to those guys, as there wasn't the industry-specific mass software available, and the guys that could create it for you were still young and working crappy tech jobs while building their real business on the side)

, with him pointing it out to me, opening up the system logs to show that he wasn't just guessing, and all but saying 'look, I know you're going to ignore me, so when you fuck up your computer again by re-installing 5 minutes after I've left, just do a full wipe and format because you don't need me here for that. Oh, I've also taken the liberty of copying all your important stuff onto a backup drive. Something tells me you're going to need it'.

2. Pools of Radiance remake (or simlar, forget which one, but definitely one that had previously been done during the Gold Box series) - deleting your critical system files as a side-effect of uninstalling

3. Several, forgotten which specific ones - literally melting your graphics card, despite not overclocking. Yes, I know it still happens (I think SC2 was the most recent offender), but these days it only happens to overclockers, where you're voluntarily choosing to take the risk. Some of the old games just considered themselves too strong to cater for your pansy-ass graphics card, aka 'My good sir, you really must upgrade your graphics card to enjoy the true splendour of what I have to offer.' 'Nah, I think I'll wait another 6 months til prices come down'. 'Sir, you misunderstand me. You really must upgrade your graphics card. Why yes, that is the smell of smoke coming from your computer'.

4. Every C64 game that came on floppy disk instead of tape - automatically formating/wiping the disk because you inserted it before turning the computer on instead of after. Particularly annoying because my other computer as a kid was the Apple IIe, where you had to insert the disk before booting up the computer. Made that mistake so....many....fucking....times. Occasionally I'd realise in time and pull the plug before the disk was wiped. Other times I just facepalmed at realising that I'd just wiped a game I'd only just bought that day, despite being thoroughly aware of the issue but being too much into the 'must....get....another...Bards Tale....level....' hypnosis mindset to remember that I was using the C64 instead of the Apple IIe.

Incidentally, was that last one just some fucked up setting on my C64 that you could change, or did that shit happen to everyone? Always wanted to know that, because even as a kid, it seemed like such an obviously stupid mechanism that I felt like there had to be a way to turn it off, so you could put the disk in first like with the Apple IIe, but I never ended up finding out.

Spoiler

Yeah, idiocy I know, but I really wasn't that shit at computers as a kid either - it was just that I used the Apple IIe more because that's what I had the Wizardrys, Ultimas and Mobius on, and the Apple IIe came with 3 massive books on basic coding, while the C64 I got only had a basic instruction manual, with the commands for 'load X', 'save X', and the like. When I was 5 I used to get up once my folks were asleep, creep down to the office and work my way through the books that came with the Apple IIe, until the school told my folks that I kept falling asleep in class, and my old man waited up so he could catch me at it. Got to give the guy credit - he was obviously pre-computer generation, but he was well ahead of the curve in realising how important home computers were going to be, so instead of getting into trouble he agreed to not tell my mother so long as I stopped pulling all-nighters - instead he got me my first alarm clock, so I could set it early and get a couple of hours in on the computer each morning before Mum woke up. Forgot 95% of it within a few years, and the rest is long obsolete, but there's a basic literacy that it imparts that you can't really learn later in life - even if, like me, you know nothing about coding on modern computers, it just gives you that ability to tinker - e.g. cracking the protection on 'protected' Word and Adobe documents is nothing to boast about, you can google it easily, and there's software that does it automatically, but I've noticed that only the people whose parents encouraged that basic 'tinker around and work shit out' mentality even know that stuff exists, let alone that it doesn't need any coding skills to do. Everyone else just sees 'protected document, enter password' and assumes that you need to be some l33t h@xx0r to bypass it.

He passed away a few years ago, and it's one of those things where as a kid you just take it for granted, and it doesn't really dawn on you until 30 years later just how much of the skills and character traits that you thought that you developed were actually things that the old guy gave to you.

 

[vonAchdorf]

4. Every C64 game that came on floppy disk instead of tape - automatically formating/wiping the disk because you inserted it before turning the computer on instead of after. Particularly annoying because my other computer as a kid was the Apple IIe, where you had to insert the disk before booting up the computer. Made that mistake so....many....fucking....times. Occasionally I'd realise in time and pull the plug before the disk was wiped. Other times I just facepalmed at realising that I'd just wiped a game I'd only just bought that day, despite being thoroughly aware of the issue but being too much into the 'must....get....another...Bards Tale....level....' hypnosis mindset to remember that I was using the C64 instead of the Apple IIe.

Incidentally, was that last one just some fucked up setting on my C64 that you could change, or did that shit happen to everyone? Always wanted to know that, because even as a kid, it seemed like such an obviously stupid mechanism that I felt like there had to be a way to turn it off, so you could put the disk in first like with the Apple IIe, but I never ended up finding out.

My first (legit) copy of Pirates! came on a self-booting disk - you didn't boot into DOS, but the game had it's own system on the disk in addition to the game.

 

[Parsifarka]

Methinks the saddest loss is the ability to interact with the world in unorthodox ways; not necessarily "creative" or "unexpected" -most of the time it just means a scripted event- but overcoming obstacles in a logical way considering the tools at you disposal: namely, breaking down walls and doors, flying, walking over water, teleporting... Yes, I'm thinking in M&M. Technology evolves but the player is more and more constrained to preset paths, unable to use consistently the powers the characters are supposed to have.
Why can't we have spells which turn the party into rat-sized heroes in order to walk through cracks in dungeons avoiding monsters? To cheat without breaking the rules, not thanks to a flaw but to a design choice which gives freedom to the player, is something very rewarding in old RPGs. Fuck, flying is so awesome...

 

[vonAchdorf]

Methinks the saddest loss is the ability to interact with the world in unorthodox ways; not necessarily "creative" or "unexpected" -most of the time it just means a scripted event- but overcoming obstacles in a logical way considering the tools at you disposal: namely, breaking down walls and doors, flying, walking over water, teleporting... Yes, I'm thinking in M&M. Technology evolves but the player is more and more constrained to preset paths, unable to use consistently the powers the characters are supposed to have.
Why can't we have spells which turn the party into rat-sized heroes in order to walk through cracks in dungeons avoiding monsters? To cheat without breaking the rules, not thanks to a flaw but to a design choice which gives freedom to the player, is something very rewarding in old RPGs. Fuck, flying is so awesome...

Also see the history of teleport / levitate in the TES series.

 

[pippin]

Didn't Arena had a spell that allowed you to destroy walls?

 

[vonAchdorf]

Didn't Arena had a spell that allowed you to destroy walls?

Yes, and also floors. And you could create walls.

in RoA 1, you could use a spell to look through walls and then teleport there, in the sequels, teleport only worked if you had visited the tile before. So even back then, developers took the hammer to these (potentially) game breaking things.

 

[Lord Azlan]

Why can't we have spells which turn the party into rat-sized heroes in order to walk through cracks in dungeons avoiding monsters?

I think Risen had something like this and you could magic yourself into a mouse and get through some hard to reach places.

I thought AWESOME.

Then I realised that there wasn't that many opportunities to take advantage of this quite unique spell.

Finally I realised that no one else would ever do it as having locked doors, be they wooden or caged, is a 100% staple of RPG.

 

[Boleskine]

 

[pippin]

No more of that guy please

 

[agris]

Any suggestions? It's a fun discussion, and I'll credit any idea I end up using.

It's a variant of the 'no quest compass' but more expansive.

The use of quest compasses and player GPS/google maps has ruined the sense of discovery in RPGs. In older RPGs, quest givers had to provide specific details on how to arrive at a person/place/objective. Something like "two blocks north, across from the tree and next to the blue house". When presented that way, a quest forces you to navigate the world - to process it and analyze it in a way that is entirely absent from following a compass, where your eyes are locked on the UI element and not thinking about the construction of the world. If there was a quest journal, it needed a similar level of specificity to help you arrive at your goal.

This extra writing took work, and with the inclusion of a quest compass, is all but missing in the modern open world Fallrim/Skyout games. I don't hate a quest compass because it's "easy", I hate it because it robs players of a unique experience: to engage with the game world in a way that following an arrow to the next objective never will achieve.

There's no reason why modern games couldn't include this level of detail like the older games did. Except for money. It's easier to implement, and takes less man hours per quest, to point the player in the right direction and not think about how they're going to get there when they have always-on GPS. Because of this, games with quest compasses aren't really playable with them disabled. Take FNV for example. Look at this discussion about the removal of the quest compass.

I understand how you feel, however you need to keep in mind that this game, like Fallout 3, is 100% reliant on quest markers. You WILL NOT receive directions to specific locations, and will have to look at your map and see the map marker the quest added to know where you're going. But if you do that, it's not really much different than using quest markers.

It's sad, and one of the reasons why I keep going back to older RPGs. The first time I played them, I was invested in the world in a way that skinner-box reward mechanics and microtransactions can never create.

aside

I even recall a FNV mod that tried to rewrite all the quest log entries so that you could play with the compass removed, but I can't find it now. Does anyone know what it was called and if it was finished? I thought Lexx from NMA was responsible for it, but that was the 'hide attribute/skill checks from dialogue options' mod.

 

[laclongquan]

yeah I do remember some mentions about it but it peter out somehow~ I dont think it ever appear.

 

[Neanderthal]

Content for contents sake, only thing it added to were world building an atmosphere, click on your gold in Betrayal at Krondor an read how Owyn an Gorath bet on heads or tails, play a musical instrument or go to the fair outside Castle British in U7, talk to random interestin folk in Sigil an hear little stories, notice carved faces o Kresselack the Black Wolf watchin you as you plunder his tomb, All o grim misadventures you find evidence on in Glow.

 

[Ash]

1. Good game design
2. Good game design
3. Good game design
4. Good game design
5. Good game design
6. Good game design
7. Good game design
8. Good game design
9. Good game design
10. Good game design