The Essentials of RPG Design 241
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the main-characters-with-a-mysterious-past dept.
from the main-characters-with-a-mysterious-past dept.
simoniker writes "As the latest in his Game Design Essentials series for Gamasutra, writer John Harris examines 10 games from the Western computer RPG (CRPG) tradition and 10 from the Japanese console RPG (JRPG) tradition, to figure out what exactly makes them tick. From the entry on Nethack: 'Gaining experience is supposed to carry the risk of harm and failure. Without that risk, gaining power becomes a foregone conclusion. It has reached the point where the mere act of spending time playing [most RPGs] appears to give players the right to have their characters become more powerful. The obstacles that provide experience become simply an arbitrary wall to scale before more power is granted; this, in a nutshell, is the type of play that has brought us grind, where the journey is simple and boring and the destination is something to be raced to. Nethack and many other roguelikes do feature experience gain, but it doesn't feel like grind. It doesn't because much of the time the player is gaining experience, he is in danger of sudden, catastrophic failure. When you're frequently a heartbeat away from death, it's difficult to become bored.' Harris' Game Design series has previously spanned subjects from mysterious games to open world games, unusual control schemes and difficult games."
Nethack is more exception than rule (Score:4, Informative)
NetHack still has more game awesomeness than any other game I've ever played. Not only are you potentially one cockatrice away from death, but the levels are randomly built and stocked (never the same game twice) and there are a lot of them. The game has many levels that are fixed (castle, town, etc.) but even there what you will encounter is a total crap shoot; the game even takes into consideration the phases of the moon and adjusts your "luck" accordingly (sacrifices don't give you anything, etc.). It has something of a story arc; you are definitely not the same character by the time you've "ascended" and the puzzles and challenges fit accordingly to where you are in the story. Throw in an amazingly deep set of game rules, more items than you know what to do with (though you'll want to cache them on some levels 'cause you're gonna need them coming back up), more characters and monsters than in the D&D MM, and the ability to play it on every computer/operating system in existence.
In short, if you don't mind that it doesn't have multiplayer or graphics that require OpenGL or DirectX, it's the perfect RPG. But as a college freshman who discovered it on a VT100 in the library, I can easily say it's the game I've played the most over the years, bar none. And I've never played the same game twice. And, to my eternal frustration, I've never ascended (got as far as the plain of water, though!).
Re:how about... (Score:5, Informative)
Don't forget The Forge [indie-rpgs.com], a great place to find off the beaten path games.
Oh, and, of course, Troll Lord games [trolllord.com] for those of us in the "get off my lawn" demographic.
If your cheap, you can wait a year until Free RPG Day [freerpgday.com]
Of course, me? I prefer boardgames. [boardgamegeek.com] (and card games [fantasyflightgames.com]).
Re:Importing characters from earlier games (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, that's power creep, and can be bad in multiplayer games: old players are forever greater than new players, and the newbies can't contribute.
Re:What makes Japanese games tick (Score:5, Informative)
1) A young naive protagonist who is resourceful and scrappy but not particularly strong.
2) gets caught up in a fight against an evil (organization, company, religion, empire, conspiracy)
3) requiring him to leave his small village
4) and gradually explore parts of the world on a linear path
5) until he eventually gets free roaming of the entire world
6) and eventually goes to visit outer space or time shift
7) on the way to fight the proto enemy, who turns out not be the real enemy
8) and eventually reaches the real, final enemy
What you just described there is referred to by mythologists as the Hero's Journey [wikipedia.org] and can be found in everything from Gilgamesh to Star Wars.
Re:Disagree strongly (Score:3, Informative)
If you ever find yourself in a situation where death is close, you are playing wrong, in order to succeed in Nethack (or any roguelike for that matter), you have to play conservatively, beating up on things that pose no threat to you while escaping anything that might pose a challenge. Even if you can beat a challenging monster 95% of the time, eventually that 5% will catch up to you and all of your progress will be erased by a small handful of bad rolls. This is why only obsessives play Nethack, nobody else has the patience to grind their way up to the godlike levels required to survive the games final challenges.
I don't agree. Players going for their first ascension often grind out incessantly, altar camping forever and making sure they have a whole exact set of items before starting the ascension run. But you don't _have_ to do that, and there are plenty of players who can ascend 60% or so of their games while moving through quickly (20,000 turns per game). Even the ultra-high percentage guys like marvin don't do much grinding and usually finish in a quarter the time most newbies take.
My best streak was 6 consecutive ascensions (with different roles in each), and they were all fairly quick without any altar camping or other grinding behavior. You learn to use your "outs" so that you can move quickly but still have plenty of tools to evade anything that presents a serious threat.
Re:Yes, if you only look at the big popular MMOs (Score:1, Informative)
don't lump all MMOs together- Final Fantasy 11 has incredibly harsh penalties for character death. You lose a nontrivial amount of experience points. It is not uncommon for characters to de-level upon death.
Games are too easy now... (Score:5, Informative)
I think the difference being mentioned between nethack and 'grinding' is probably that (and nethack excluded) most games are simply too damn easy nowadays.
I know by being a gamer since 88' or so I must have a lot more developed skills and such --- but -- really... I put games on the hardest levels and almost never die or 'restart' or whatever the form of LOSS is that happens in games.
Games are just too damn easy. Mario for NES was hard and took work. Anyone remember Abadox? Or Battletoads? Most games were much harder.
But at present, games have all these things to tell you exactly where to go, a million places to save (if not at any damn point), and a hundred other incentives to basically always keep you going. And then, without the challenge, people are just not as excited by games and in this case, the work of the game in many RPGs has simply been reduced to a 'grind'.
On the new Prince of Persia, you can't make the mistake of falling off a cliff... some magic chick comes and pulls you up EVERY SINGLE TIME. YOU CAN"T LOSE! To me, that's boring.
I'm guessing somewhere in the business/marketing/sales department, richer gaming companies have figured out that permitting noobs to continually succeed generates more sales... Who knows... That has basically been my assumption as I've seen game sales climb while the net difficulty dropping significantly...
I guess my point is that easiness/laziness seems to sell more games, and even if it gets boring, it probably outsells equivalent games that carry challenge and accomplishment. Hell, much of the reason of the MMORPG is to fulfill the lack of accomplishment in our mediocre reality by becoming doctors and architects with only a week's worth of effort... We grind through university, quickly forgetting why we took ethics and US History --- and all the important material we were required to learn. .................
Anyway.. Games are too damn easy now. I just read some article where nintendo is setting up to actually put the game on auto-pilot and have it play FOR you. .... :/ (no comment). It would be nice to be challenged/pushed. Many of us are begging for it, but multiplayer competition is pretty much the only place where we can find it. Game Dev's themselves are pandering to the weak for quick cash -- no wonder the real work is being generated in competition communities.
Re:Disagree strongly (Score:2, Informative)
Sure, you're not having traditional "grinding" behavior in the game, but you are grinding the game.
Six ascensions in a row? Yikes. For all outward appearances, you're grinding NetHack in real life for bragging rights. I mean, I guess for you that might be fun, but I guarantee your experience is not the norm. NetHack, to 95% of the people who play it, is a cruel, exacting master. Most people don't want hyper-realism in a game, they want what they can't get in life: realism plus some degree of player control in failure. NetHack provides exactly the opposite - a reality in which the consequences for failure are always "maimed, crippled, or killed," and failure is, oftentimes, not at all under the player's control.
Re:Role Playing (Score:1, Informative)
Such that when a player tries to do something that isn't pre-programmed, the editor comes up and gives the player a tool box to build the effect/outcome s/he was expecting. Then, the game automatically syncs all online copies of the game so that all players can use everyone's creations.
That's why there are many RP communities within Second Life simply because they can do exactly that.
But oh no, Second Life is stupid and silly blah blah blah...