Poll: Who here actually wants RPGs to get easier?

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StylinBones

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I don't like games that are so difficult they stop being fun (demons souls), but there are people that love them. Most games give you the option to choose the difficulty, so the occasional Demons Souls is fine by me, I'll just stay away.
 

funcooker11811

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Who here actually wants RPGs to get easier?
Oh hey! A potentially interesting discussion dealing with the current trends in RPGs that focus more on streamlining their games, and the sacrifice of some of the most dearly-held DnD roots that helped bring an entire genre to video games, and what actually makes a game "hard" versus "takes longer to get through".

Poll: Is dumbing down good?
Oh. Alright then. Nevermind.


More on topic:

I'm not really a fan of nearly every current RPG. Maybe I was just too naive with my hopes in the early days of the NES. Even games like Dark Souls tend to make things too easy unless you use a very restrictive set of rules (i.e. no sorcery, no soul farming, pure roleplaying builds like my gentlemanly fencer), and even then, the amount of stuff you can actually do in games has felt, well, lackluster. Again, I may have been over-optimistic, but I always pictured games during this generation making players really, well, learn the game to do well in it. Something like Street Fighter-esque button combos to pull of skilled sword attacks, or higher level magic attacks, and enemies that were diverse enough that it would be impossible to tackle the game with 3-4 high dps skills to spam. It just doesn't feel like we've moved on from "higher difficulty = enemies have more health and do more damage", and I just feel like there was a missed chance to make using those shiny spells and awesome diving sword thrusts to take down a boss with a diverse ability set incredibly satisfying.

Mandal0re said:
For example anyone who complained about the removal of attributes in Skyrim? You're an idiot.
Really? Even acrobatics? There are some things in a game which may not add actual challenge, but i'll admit right now that there wasn't a SINGLE time in the entirety of Oblivion where the first thing I didn't do when I walked into a town was hop around every single goddamn rooftop for a solid 10-15 minutes. Replace acrobatics with air-walking and you have why I was slightly disappointed with Oblivion.


Draech said:
And yet people whine the game has been dumbed down. I can argue how that Skyrim wasn't dumbed down compared to oblivion. Yes I am aware there is no spell designer, but what about combat? In oblivion you are flailing like a madman while in skyrim you have to time, block, shieldbash small blow, heavy blow, ect. The dual wielding is evidence of this more than anything.
We must have played different games. The Skyrim that I played wasn't more complex than either A: attacking with you're highest damage spell while pouring magicka potions down your throat, or B: attacking with your best weapon while pouring health potions down your throat.
 

Vegosiux

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wooty said:
This is why I still prefer games like Zelda or Final Fantasy. They dont have difficulty settings, if your not good enough to beat the enemies/bosses then piss off, practice and earn it.
Wait, you were supposed to be "good" to beat them? That is news to me.

Callate said:
It depends. There's harder as in "more challenging, requiring greater thought and planning to overcome numerous fair and intriguing challenges" and then there's harder as in "This monster has a 33% chance of killing everyone in your party in any given battle" and there's harder as in "unless you spend twenty hours grinding mooks in the early areas you'll end up in a position where you cannot possibly win and fifty hours of your life will be wasted between the time you spend getting to this position and the time it takes you to recognize you're screwed."

The first one? Sure, why not. The latter two? Keep your sick fetish out of my gaming.
This guy has nailed it.
 

Blood Brain Barrier

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DRTJR said:
I miss AD&D style of RPGs...
Yep, me too. I think the terminology used by D&D exemplifies the process we've undergone. Complexity used to be seen as a good thing so 2nd edition became "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons". Now they've reverted back to just "Dungeons & Dragons" because apparently we don't like complexity and baffling rules - we need to appeal to people of all brain capacities. You see the same thing in literature, movies, TV.
 

Blood Brain Barrier

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Draech said:
Having to learn DnD rules is a negative thing. Not a positive. You can have complex deep gameplay without a needlessly complicated system.
How? If you want the player to think about how he/she is going to approach the battle, you need clearly defined and laid out consequences of each action. The D&D rules did that in the simplest way I can think of - any further simplification will make the tactics less tactical, so you end up with something like Final Fantasy where you have maybe 2 or 3 options for each character, which do not even interact with your other characters options.
 

Proverbial Jon

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Nov 10, 2009
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Just playing Oblivion today made me realise how dumbed down RPGs are getting. I was actually wondering how I ever managed to play the thing now that my head is full of Skyrim.

In Oblivion I actually have to play to my strengths, only really able to get by if I use my maxed out archery and stealth skills. In Skyrim I can pretty much pick up a sword with no prior combat experience and off I go!

And I'm not even a die hard RPG player.
 

Twilight_guy

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Nov 24, 2008
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Kahunaburger said:
Twilight_guy said:
Good game design dictates trying to tailor your game to the average player and adding difficulty modes.
Do you mean the average player for that game, or the average player in general? So, if I'm making a hypothetical Angband variant, do you think it would be good design on my part to design the game for people who have played Angband, people who play roguelikes, or the average gamer in general?

Twilight_guy said:
bad game design principles, such as not explaining rules or hiding information from the player.
This I agree with (mostly). One thing I like about RPGs is that they generally give you all the rules and stats up front. So you don't have to go digging around on the internet to find out what your weapons do, and you can generally get a pretty accurate picture of what abilities and items work with which build.
You design the game assuming that players are familiar with similar games but assume that they have no knowledge of your game. So they might know some general rules of rougelikes, skulking, assassination and such, but you don't assume they immediately know the rules specific to your game, "press X while hiding behind a plant to throw a poison dart." You can assume they will figure out 'you need to be sneaky' quickly though since they will learn after a few tries that head long fails. Mostly the explaining in good games is done though level design, scripting, etc. and trying to avoid text, (its boring). This also depends on the type of game begin designed as some games tend to be designed for gamers and some are designed for the average joe. I wish I could explain this better but my knowledge of design tends to be unstructured and very situationally depend unfortunately (working on it).

"I agree with (mostly)", name me one situation where not explaining the rules or purposely hiding something about the game from the player is ever a good idea. I honestly can't think of any situation like this.

I actually find that many (not all, don't kill me) RPGs tend to fail by either trying to front-load everything (here's some text about how weapon types work and are affected by other weapons, here's what stats do, and magic and this and that, and here's some stuff about doing this other thing, etc. etc.) since players need to actually see something happen before they can associate a particular rules with a practical situation, or the stats tend to be arcane like with situations where the player knows that strength, precision, and accuracy all make your attack go up but when he must choice between them he has no idea which one to choose since the only way to figure it out is to run a math equation.
 

wooty

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Vegosiux said:
wooty said:
This is why I still prefer games like Zelda or Final Fantasy. They dont have difficulty settings, if your not good enough to beat the enemies/bosses then piss off, practice and earn it.
Wait, you were supposed to be "good" to beat them? That is news to me.
Badly worded but you know what I mean. You often have to think with them, there are no way points, no guiding arrows, no pop up directions. If you get into a difficult fight, you cant just open the menu, drop the difficulty and then breeze through the game.

Not saying that "LoL, onli da tru hardcor gamerzs play deez gamez!!ololol", but you cant make them easier without putting the time and thought in.
 

Blood Brain Barrier

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Draech said:
Blood Brain Barrier said:
Draech said:
Having to learn DnD rules is a negative thing. Not a positive. You can have complex deep gameplay without a needlessly complicated system.
How? If you want the player to think about how he/she is going to approach the battle, you need clearly defined and laid out consequences of each action. The D&D rules did that in the simplest way I can think of - any further simplification will make the tactics less tactical, so you end up with something like Final Fantasy where you have maybe 2 or 3 options for each character, which do not even interact with your other characters options.
How about a super simple example. Chess.

Rules tare fairly easy. When you know how each unit can move then you can go. But tactically deep.

How about computer game related.

MOBA games. 4 skills to use. Use them the best way possible. Each skill does what you more or less expect it to do.

How about guild wars?

How about fighting games? An up kick, kicks up but if you start going into the strategy of the game play its deeper that.

DnD rules are needlessly complicating things that can be visually obvious. The reason combat isn't a carrying element in a game with it. Because it sucks. It makes a chore out of what can be achieved better.
Who gets to say it sucks? The AD&D Gold Box games featured the best, deepest and most tactical gameplay bar none. That's my experience. I don't find it too complex. I find it fun. The question is for me why people find it so hard to consider their options in terms of these combat rules.

And why visually obvious? It's not obvious when you punch me how much damage it will do, but yet if you want a good simulation of an adversarial battle which is fair, you need rules which predict that. Will I do more damage with option A or B?

Chess many people find too complicated - most of my friends are like this. Don't ask me why. Each piece has different rules of movement. But chess isn't good in an RPG - there's no character development. If every RPG battle was chess there would be no reason to improve your character.
 

Schaaka

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Ha, here's the thing. Everybody will say they want a 'challenging' game but very few actually pursue or really desire a challenge. If you feel confident in a game's genre you should never play the game on 'normal' difficulty or less.
Normal mode for most modern games is really just a failsafe tutorial.
 

Kahunaburger

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Twilight_guy said:
"I agree with (mostly)", name me one situation where not explaining the rules or purposely hiding something about the game from the player is ever a good idea. I honestly can't think of any situation like this.
There are a number of games where spoilers are part of the fun - if you a friend are playing Zelda: Link's Awakening, and he/she tells you "hey, if you fire an arrow and drop a bomb at the same time, the bomb sticks to the arrow!" it's a much cooler discovery than the game telling you how to fire bomb-arrows.

Twilight_guy said:
I actually find that many (not all, don't kill me) RPGs tend to fail by either trying to front-load everything (here's some text about how weapon types work and are affected by other weapons, here's what stats do, and magic and this and that, and here's some stuff about doing this other thing, etc. etc.) since players need to actually see something happen before they can associate a particular rules with a practical situation, or the stats tend to be arcane like with situations where the player knows that strength, precision, and accuracy all make your attack go up but when he must choice between them he has no idea which one to choose since the only way to figure it out is to run a math equation.
I think that some games are better-off giving you all the mechanics at once rather than gradually introducing you to them. If Portal is the ideal "introduce the player to the game gently and gradually" tutorial, Oblivion (but with a 3-hour tutorial instead of a 1-hour tutorial) is what it would look like if they tried that with an RPG. I don't know about you, but I'm not a fan of an RPG tutorial that drags on like that, particularly because the RPG is a genre that is incredibly rewarding of experimentation. Don't know if this build is effective? Roll one up and find out! (If anything, I think that the best way to introduce new players to RPG mechanics without punishing them for experimentation is just to give them some way to re-spec a character that doesn't work.)
 
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You need games that have both complex and "dumb" games; games for the veterans and people who spend hours in these games and need to be challenged, and games for people with only a few hours or even minutes each week to pick up a game, and who are completely new at the genre. If I am playing an RPG on the bus to work each morning, then I am not going to want to sit through a massive tutorial and spend 30 minutes in each battle planning my strategy; I don't have time for that, my bus takes 20 minutes to arrive at work. So I reach for the simple RPG that doesn't take a lot of thought; I can grind away the time and hey! My favourite character reached level 12 today!

When I need to burn an idle evening away and need something to keep my brain churning over so it doesn't shut down from boredom, I'll pick up some really complicated RPG where I have to spend hours tweaking my stats and equipment for maximum effectiveness and actually spend time pondering the screen before hitting attack.
 

Kahunaburger

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Draech said:
Chess has the tactical depth to last through the ages, yet so simple i can write it on a piece of A4
Chess is a great game, and arguably the best game. It's also a highly abstract game. Not every game has to be chess, particularly when game design features simulationist and narrativist goals alongside gamist goals.
 

A.A.K

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I actually like games that are easy.
I was a hardcore gamer, then apocalypse happened and my life was remade.
So now it's between training/teaching/therapy and Uni, whatever time left is for gaming.

Which isn't much....but I want to actually do something in the game without having to get frustrated or invest much time into it.
So easy rpg's work well. Just go round, do stuff, make someone look cool and wig out. Go do something else.