The Essentials of RPG Design 241
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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."
Importing characters from earlier games (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Role Playing (Score:1, Interesting)
Real men role play with pencil and paper, or nothing at all.
Can't ague with that but the computer RPG games do have the advantage that you don't have to muck about with the mechanics and dice. Plus part of the fun of computer RPGs is the building up of the character to accomplish a goal, gain power and over come enemies. Tabletop is more about the story and the socializing making the computer based ones merely shallow experiences in comparison. (Kind of like physics with out calculus, or for the more socially inclined, sex without a partner.) Personally I think we should call the computer ones something besides RPGs.
worst shortcomings are usually crappy stories (Score:4, Interesting)
Of the rpg's I've played in recent years, the ones that were the most tedious were the ones lacking in good stories. It makes the entire play experience feel like a chore.
If bad storytelling is the first sin, then the second has to be needless complication. Oblivion is the prettiest rpg I have ever seen but the leveling mechanics were atrocious.
The whole bit about having numerical stats and assigning points is a holdover from pencil and paper gaming. I think they should just ditch the idea of leveling. If you just make it equipment-based, you start out with crappy loot and get better loot the further you go. Better loot means you can take on bigger tasks. If you insist on having personal stats that advance independently of the equipment, then just make it be a linear progression based on the amount of time spent doing stuff. You use melee weapons a lot, your melee skill grows. You use the bow, that grows. But if you don't use staff weapons, then that stat never progresses.
What absolutely must be avoided at all cost is making the player feel like he has to consult a guidebook on how to play the game. When you have to think about how to play rather than simply play, all immersion is ruined.
What makes Japanese games tick (Score:2, Interesting)
The Plot
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
And they all contain a job system, an elemental weakness system (fire, thunder, water, ice, earth, holy), a super move, time consuming optional side quests, etc.
That seems to cover most of the modern 3d Japanese RPGs including Final Fantasy VII-XII, Chrono Cross, Skies of Arcadia, Grandia series, as well as some of the 2d ones (like Legend of Zelda). RPGS within a series have a number of other common elements including chocobos, tonberry and a character named Cid.
And even though they are largely similar, I still love to play them. The structure is the same, but the quality of the implementation makes it worth playing.
Re:Not just RPGs (Score:3, Interesting)
I have to wonder if the shift toward online multiplayer (such as in the FPS genre) is at least in some small part due to people wanting to find the difficulty and challenge that no longer exists in most single-player games.
Maybe. But they aren't finding it. FPS Multiplayer games aren't hard. They are short, simple, incredibly repetitive, and there are no real consequences.
MMORPG competitive multiplayer for the most part isn't any better. The consequences are minimal with a few notable exceptions.
And even one of those games that is an exception... that has consequences... such as eve. Its not challenging personally; its only challenging at the massive group level.
In Eve, like a soldier in a war, the VAST MAJORITY of individuals are just there forming part of the mass, and don't meaningfully contribute to the overall success or loss.
You login and find your corporation captured a station while you were sleeping.
An hour later you fight a heroic battle absolutely maximizing every element of combat perfectly, and are still pod killed in nothing flat because because their reinforcements arrived before yours did.
Six hours later your corporation suffers a serious blow because the leadership defected to a rival corp taking a bunch of assets with them.
There are lots of 'challenges' in something like Eve, but many of them are far beyond the control or even influence of the individual player that it ceases to be fun on that level at all.
It can still be 'fun' but not really the same way defeating a single player game is, where everything is always centered on you and what you are doing. Where victory or defeat hinge on how well you play the game.
In Eve winning or losing a conflict is more often decided by which side you are on rather than anything to do with what you actually do during the conflict.
Re:Disagree strongly (Score:5, Interesting)
I disagree with your disagreement. The key characteristic of grind is tedium. Even when you're playing conservatively, there are lots of options no how to proceed. It takes thought, you're not just doing the same thing over and over the way you would in Phantasy Star. The only time I ever felt like I was grinding in Nethack was when I just needed one or two pieces to complete my ascension kit, and had to find the right monster to drop the right items.
Re:"Casual" mechanics (Score:1, Interesting)
those games were far more entertaining than end-game World of Warcraft is today.
So why is it that world of warcraft is the single most successful game of all time?
How much money did "those games" make compared to the money that WoW is still making?
You speak as if there is some sort of objective criteria for entertainment value which "those games" met and which World of Warcraft does not. I will directly challenge this. Millions of players world wide find World of Warcraft so entertaining that they are willing to pay a monthly fee to continue playing it. If millions of people found "those games" as entertaining, then they would be paying monthly fees to be playing them too.
WoW is not as entertaining to you. That doesn't mean that they are less entertaining in some objective sense. It just puts you in a different target market.
I will add that all games get boring eventually. World of Warcraft will get boring to its current subscribers, and they will move on. "Those games" had their day, and got boring, and people moved on. Games are just like that.
the same but different... (Score:3, Interesting)
this is also why there are no more janes type sims. no one is willing to spend a week learning how to work the controls just so they can take off and not blow up.... (mig alley im looking at you).
i LOVED janes games. longbow, f15, f/a18. excellent gameplay, good replay, tough to learn in sim mode.
the only hardcore game like that left i know of is ww2online [wwiionline.com]
Nethack is a winner (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Importing characters from earlier games (Score:2, Interesting)
in american quest stories though (Score:2, Interesting)
the young naive protagnoist is usually not naive or weak. In fact, the protagonist is often portrayed as strong, cocky, and sometimes needs the wisdom of a counterpart (usually a woman) to temper his ego to help him complete his goal.
see - Indiana Jones, Top Gun, (most any Tom Cruise movie), Conan, Star Trek, Tarzan, etc.
Re:Importing characters from earlier games (Score:3, Interesting)
Or, perhaps, do what the oh-so-clever people at SSI did, don't give players god-like powers, and pick up where the game left off. Unthinkable, huh?
Dungeons and Dragons, played "by the book", doesn't really give you enough XP to get to level 20 in the course of the typical CRPG. Given the extension of Neverwinter Nights, you'd probably be like level 10 at the end, tops. So what they did with the Gold Box games is that the first game in the series is the low level adventure that leaves you at like level 5-6, the second game picks up at about that level (and the plot hook itself explains why you were stripped of all your cool gear) and takes you to low-mid levels. The third game picks up there and takes you to mid-high levels, and the final game, with a truly epic plot (not necessarily good, but decidedly epic, with gods, major demons etc involved), takes you all the way to the highest levels. At no point before the final game were you really "god-like" in power.
Part of what makes this possible is the fact that the games are single player but party-based. A party of 5 at level 5 isn't very strong, but you had 20 level ups along the way to incrementally power them all up a fair bit, rather than 20 "micro-levels" for one single character.
Re:Role Playing (Score:3, Interesting)
It's really a shame that after our party completed that really fun adventure module that all copies of it in existence spontaneously combusted and all electronic copies deleted themselves so that no one else could ever be the ones to save that village.
Not quite, but the adventure is over within the framework of the world you are playing.
You aren't going to wander back to the village after rescueing the girl fom the infamous goblin captain grog -- whom you personally slew, separate from your companions, only to be immediately invited to join a group to rescue the girl from Grog again.
You aren't going to ever have a conversation like... "What are you up to? I'mrescuing the girl from grog. Oh, yeah, that was fun, he drops a nice breast plate; I had to do it 5 times though to get one for me and my alt...oh hey, when he gets down to half health he spawns 3 minions. Just kill the caster and tank the other 2 until grog is dead."
Its hard to get a sense of 'I've done something that mattered in this world' when you are constantly confronted with this.
And even compared to single player crpgs... which are better by far than mmogs at keeping the player in the ceter... but even so if you get stuck there is a walkthru with the location of all the secrets etc.
With PnP, even if I downloaded a copy of the module and read it cover to cover, I know it wouldn't help THAT much, especially if the DM knew or suspected that we'd read or played the module previously.