What makes a great RPG?

[Hygro]

I clocked 12 hours in Oblivion before I questioned my own existence.

If y'all counting Oblivion etc. then Legend of Zelda, particularly the latest ones, counts, as do many of the Grand Theft Autos, some Saints Row (esp 3) etc.


A lot of what is an RPG is a glory simulator through the vessel of the narrative of individual characters and their exploits. So the best RPGs make you experience the glory. Some games porn the glory a bit too hard, so in the end Diablo 1 is more Role Playing than say Diablo 3 (or what little I've played... maybe it gets better?). I find that increased abstraction like turn based fighting in a separate battle screen can help break the game into a narrative flow. But then linking the battle abstraction back to the over world and plot helps too increase the glory thru the written-in felicity of your characters' power (the best game to do this in the history of all games is Final Fantasy 4).

 

[Timsup2nothin]

So the best RPGs make you experience the glory.

Another statement that I can co-opt into my "it's the player" answer.

Going all the way back to the pen and paper RPGs, to people who don't understand why people play them there is an obvious description that the players refuse to see, and that refusal is what makes them a player who can enjoy a "good" game, even if it isn't. At some level the player in the RPG is, using the typical medieval fantasy setting for example, going in holes to kill monsters, so they can take the treasure from the monsters and use it to buy better stuff, so they can go in deeper holes and kill tougher monsters. The good player never says "I could skip the holes, and the monsters, and then I wouldn't need the treasure."

That's why I laugh at the always available complaint about TES games; "why in the world are these bandits, who are wearing armor that is worth a king's ransom, out here in the boondocks banditing?" If you don't get what makes that hilarious:

Spoiler :

they are just doing the same thing the player is doing. 'Why in the world,' indeed?

 

[AmazonQueen]

My opinion, and it's just opinion, is that Morrowind, all by itself, was really good. But nothing else I've seen from BethSoft that they made before or since is better than just adequate and there aren't many of those. What I thought was an indication of a brilliant game company has turned out to be just a proverbial nut that was apparently found by some blind squirrels.

If the 1st TES game I played had been any other than Morrowind I suspect I'd just have played the game for a while then forgotten it and the series, but the series does have a number of strengths that its competitors don't.

• Freedom to play as who you want. Too many games make you play a particular character (I've only ever played the first in The Witcher series partly because I don't like Geralt) or offer you very limited options (like Dragon Age). The blank slate is an advantage here.
• Freedom to do what you want. Main quest, factions etc, they are all optional. You aren't railroaded, theres plenty to do besides them.
• Freedom to play the game you want. No other CRPG series has so active a modding scene or so many mods available, ranging from the inconsequential to total conversions. This is a strength not a weakness. No game can be perfect for everyone.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Skyrim's level scaling was terrible. It made bandits run around in some of the most expensive armor types that exist. Why are they even bandits at that point? And why is a group of Bandits still a problem for the girl who just killed a dragon all by herself? Makes no sense at all.

OK, that's bit silly, but it was still much better than in Oblivion. I don't remember commom bandits in Skyrim running around with glass or ebony gear. Even bandit leaders usually had steel equipment.
Maybe I'm remembering wrong. Haven't played Skyrim in a while.
Though it would be nice if sometimes bandits approached you and one of them said "I think that's the Dragonborn" and they just scurried away after that.
Witcher 3 did that a couple of times. I remember some freelance toll collectors at a bridge who could be convinced to go away after you point out to them that you have two swords and a Witcher medallion. I don't know how well this would work in other scenarios. Witchers have a very distinctive look.

Mages also become weaker and weaker as they level up, because spell damage does not scale with anything, so suddenly your average bandit begins to take 4 hits before dying instead of 3, and then eventually, it will take 5. He'll also kill you faster and faster, because your defense doesn't really increase on its own as you level. That's just silly.

That's not a level scaling problem, that's a general balance problem. Easily fixed by introducing magic enhancing equipment for the weapons slot.

Both of those problems are Skyrim-specific and can be solved by proper implementations, but generally, level scaling always comes at the cost of at least some immersion - and more often than not, at the cost of the feeling of actual progress and power gain. I think level-scaling IS inherently bad, and if it is "required", then only as a result of lazy world building (as in, the physical game world, not the "lore" of the world).

The whole concept of XP and character levels can be immersion breaking if it's done wrong. You can do away with level scaling if you make a linear game, or if freedom is an illusion and taking one wrong turn will kill you, but in an open world game you need some diffculty rubber banding. Maybe not classic level scaling, but dfferent enemy types per area depending on how strong the player character is.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

You're kidding, right? Guys? Skyrim's world is why I could tolerate the completionist leveling system and horrendous story. If you don't like it, I'd say you simply don't like fantasy period.

Development time on these small features compared to the length of time player interacts with them is rough. More importantly, most of the time the player can't interact with the detail directly beyond simply looking at it, and it doesn't contribute much to narrative of the main quest line. It's kind of like a piece of a disjointed book, and only then if the overarching picture is cohesive.

I could accept that some people enjoy this despite the limited interactivity, but it's not interesting for me at anywhere remotely near the level that can compensate for bad mechanics the player interacts with constantly.

 

[Senethro]

The supposed man hours spent on one aspect are not transfererable to others (or not always anyway) and you are wrong to present them as if they are in opposition to each other.

 

[civvver]

Development time on these small features compared to the length of time player interacts with them is rough. More importantly, most of the time the player can't interact with the detail directly beyond simply looking at it, and it doesn't contribute much to narrative of the main quest line. It's kind of like a piece of a disjointed book, and only then if the overarching picture is cohesive.

I could accept that some people enjoy this despite the limited interactivity, but it's not interesting for me at anywhere remotely near the level that can compensate for bad mechanics the player interacts with constantly.

I totally agree. If instead of spending money on writers writing a million short stories in books you could read all over skyrim they should've spent more money on developers to make a better leveling system or item system or anything really.

 

[Synobun]

I totally agree. If instead of spending money on writers writing a million short stories in books you could read all over skyrim they should've spent more money on developers to make a better leveling system or item system or anything really.

Hate to tell you this, but the people writing for games are not earning any amount that would have an appreciable impact on dev costs.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I picked up Styx: Shards of Darkness while it was on sale, and I already regret it, but for this thread, it's a great example of awful game design:

• Turn left when you should've turned right. Die. Reload. Start again.
• Wait 3 seconds longer than you should have. Die. Reload. Start again.
• Run ahead when you should've waited 3 seconds. Die. Reload. Start again.
• Attack a guard when two more are around the corner. Die. Reload. Start again.
  
• Jump to a ledge, miss by an inch. Die. Reload. Start again.

It's like Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow, but without being at all clever, humorous, or charming.

 

[Lexicus]

Maybe I'm remembering wrong. Haven't played Skyrim in a while.

I've never seen bandits with the highest-tier items at all. Sometimes they will have items stronger than mine but that's usually the high level ones so it works out as a reward for winning a challenging (by the standards of the game, which are low) fight. I've never seen bandits with armor better than Nordic Carved, which is fairly high-tier equipment but nowhere near the highest.

That's not a level scaling problem, that's a general balance problem. Easily fixed by introducing magic enhancing equipment for the weapons slot.

It's just straight-up not true. It would be true if mages didn't get access to a larger mana pool, faster mana regen, and spells that consume more mana to do more damage in a shorter period of time as they level up. Experience in playing the game is that mages start out weak but become freakishly powerful once they get a sufficient mana pool and access to the right perks. The one actual problem along these lines is that, due to the absurdly long casting time which uses both hands, the Master-level spells are generally vastly inferior to the Expert-level ones.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

I picked up Styx: Shards of Darkness while it was on sale, and I already regret it, but for this thread, it's a great example of awful game design:

• Turn left when you should've turned right. Die. Reload. Start again.
• Wait 3 seconds longer than you should have. Die. Reload. Start again.
• Run ahead when you should've waited 3 seconds. Die. Reload. Start again.
• Attack a guard when two more are around the corner. Die. Reload. Start again.
  
• Jump to a ledge, miss by an inch. Die. Reload. Start again.

It's like Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow, but without being at all clever, humorous, or charming.

Those sound more like standard stealth game problems than RPG issues. All stealth games (or games with stealth systems) from the first Thief to the latest Deus Ex encourage some degree of save scumming.
What makes Styx particularly bad ?
A lack of anti-frustration abilities for stealth games (see through walls, vision cones, short-term invisibilty) ?

It's just straight-up not true. It would be true if mages didn't get access to a larger mana pool, faster mana regen, and spells that consume more mana to do more damage in a shorter period of time as they level up. Experience in playing the game is that mages start out weak but become freakishly powerful once they get a sufficient mana pool and access to the right perks. The one actual problem along these lines is that, due to the absurdly long casting time which uses both hands, the Master-level spells are generally vastly inferior to the Expert-level ones.

I had the opposite experience.
Spells do a lot of damage in the beginning but become comparatively weaker and weaker as better weapons become available.
It's all about the DPS.
Your magicka regen will allow you to spam higher level spells, but you still need to cast a couple of allegedly powerful spells to deal the same amount of damage a melee combat focused character can do with one good wallop with his ebony mace.
Killing something with a melee weapon is just much faster than killing something with magic.

 

[Lexicus]

I had the opposite experience.
Spells do a lot of damage in the beginning but become comparatively weaker and weaker as better weapons become available.
It's all about the DPS.
Your magicka regen will allow you to spam higher level spells, but you still need to cast a couple of allegedly powerful spells to deal the same amount of damage a melee combat focused character can do with one good wallop with his ebony mace.
Killing something with a melee weapon is just much faster than killing something with magic.

Well, the main determinant of damage is leveling your skills, so if you level your one-handed to 100 then of course you're going to be doing more damage than you could with spells. In my current playthrough my one-handed is level, like, 64 with no perks to increase damage and I can assure you that I can kill everything much faster with my spell spam than with melee weapons. You can also damage (and stagger!) multiple targets at once with Adept-level destruction spells, something you can't do at all with melee weapons (minor exception for that two-handed perk that lets you attack all enemies in front of you at once).

 

[Ryika]

It's just straight-up not true. It would be true if mages didn't get access to a larger mana pool, faster mana regen, and spells that consume more mana to do more damage in a shorter period of time as they level up. Experience in playing the game is that mages start out weak but become freakishly powerful once they get a sufficient mana pool and access to the right perks. The one actual problem along these lines is that, due to the absurdly long casting time which uses both hands, the Master-level spells are generally vastly inferior to the Expert-level ones.

A lot of the problems are most prevalent on higher difficulties, because higher difficulties just mean bigger health pools for your enemies, which means more mana problems, and more time for enemies to reach you. This is why the only "real" way to play an actually "efficient" mage in Skyrim is to go enchant your gear so that it reduces the mana cost of casting destruction magic down to 0, and then perma-stunlock just about any enemy - including dragons - until they're reduced to ashes. On legend difficulty, it takes ages to kill enemies that way, while a properly specced and geared archer will simply two-shot that very same enemy in 2-3 seconds or so. That's again because mages' damage does not scale with anything, other than skill level - a flat number increase - and perks, which add a single modifier. Anything else is just there to reduce a mage's downsides - mainly their low survivability, and their mana restrictions.

Those are problems that the two other archetypes don't have to begin with, they're not built around resource restrictions, and they have very strong defensive tools built into them - armor, stagger, high HP (and knockdown if you use a shield) for melees, and stealth for archers and rogues. Which is why their whole package is built around scaling up their damage. Archer damage scales with weapon damage, arrow damage, %-modifier damage enchants, flat damage from weapon-improvement and %-modifier from Smithing Perks, Stealth Multiplier, Potions, and I've probably forgotten a few sources because I haven't actually played the game in a while. The numbers that you can stack on top of each other are just SO much higher, and all with no downsides or risk at all, as long as you don't forget to buy some arrows before you head into the wild.

There is this short window of opportunity between roughly level 8-16 where mages can be decently powerful in comparison to other classes because they have the next tier of spells and the perks that allows them to cast a decent amount of them before being out of mana, but that's about it. Mages start weak, and they end up even weaker in comparison to other classes.

And that's even the "good" mage - the destruction mage. Conjuration is completely unusable on high difficulties (your pets don't scale and most of them get one-shot as a result), Alteration offers Utility that is weaker than the strength that you will add to your enemies by gaining levels from increasing your skill in that sphere, Illusion offers gimmicky crowd control that again doesn't offset the additional levels you add to your enemies, and Restoration is useful at the beginning, but no longer needed once you stunlock your enemies - so once again it just increases the levels of the enemies you're fighting against, and therefor their health pools.

 

[Ryika]

Whats the alternative though and who has successfully done it?

Hard mode: Who has successfully done it on the scale of a TES series map?

I think Gothic 2 is still the king when it comes to open world design. It does cheat a bit by segregating the world into two parts (three if you add the expansion), one (two) of which has generally stronger enemies and is not accessible at the beginning, but I think that's fair. It also spawns new enemies between acts, but it offers story-explanations for why they're there - there's an Orc raid going on, which is why there are now strong orcs running around in areas that weren't that dangerous before, those giant bugs have swarmed onto a farm, there's a small undead army ravaging the lands, and that new bandit clan over there has started terrorizing the farmers as well. The world actually evolves as you play the game, in a way that is sensible, explained by the storyline, and integrated with by the population of the world.

As for character progression.. you start weak and can only really fight against normal animals without exploiting the bad AI at the start of the game and progress from being able to fight goblins, to bandits, to raptors, to orcs, to dragons and anything that's in-between. The world is constructed in a way that makes it very clear where the high-level enemies are, by offering you more "civilized" areas - two towns, a cloister, and the roads and forests that connect them - and the further you move into the wilderness, the more dangerous the enemies become. As the story progresses, and as you become stronger, you have to journey into more and more of those unexplored areas, but you can explore them early to get some of the rewards that you find there if you're willing to take the risk.

Too bad that the ancient controls make it so I can't really recommend Gothic 2 to somebody who hasn't played it.

As for scale of TES series map... I would say that for all its other failings, Gothic 3 actually did a decent job at that. It uses the same concept as Gothic 2, but takes the "vertical" storytelling (returning to the same NPCs between acts) and stretches it horizontally into a rather large map for its time. And a very open map, too. You can go explore the world from the very beginning, very similar to how TES does things. The "trick" here is really to segregate the world into zones. The "civilized" areas simply do not NEED to offer a challenge when you've turned into a super hero, and when you've just entered Riverrun for the first time you should probably not expect to be able to clear a vampire den. That is of course, partly at least, a difference in design philosophy, but I would argue that a world that is not fully accessible but cohesive and thematic is vastly preferable to a world that is the opposite.

One of the big failings of the world of Skyrim is actually that it does not project which areas are dangerous and which aren't. There is this idea that elevation and frost equal danger (the devs actually talked about that pre-release), but that theme just isn't consistent. Bleak Falls Barrow is one of the first quest targets after all. That's the sort of lazy world building that I mean. If they actually went through with it, a low level character would quickly understand what areas to avoid, and a high-level character would understand where they find the strong enemies. A lot of the more ridiculous scaling would not be required anymore.

And as an added bonus, it would actually allow for more natural progression. Hunt some wolves to craft some leather armor that allows you to go head to head with the local bandit clan, loot their hideout to get some armor that gives you the protection you need to pillage one of the low-elevation Draugr Tombs, get the Reagents that you need for some protective Gear Enchants, etc. etc.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Ah, Gothic 2 was so good (once you got used to the weird tank controls),
Too bad they didn't - I repeat: they didn't !!! - make a sequel.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

it's ALL about them modifiers my girl ryika got it figured out. Ironically these things are by far the hardest to access for any modder so I doubt I'll be changing any in-game formulae anytime soon..

And that's even the "good" mage - the destruction mage. Conjuration is completely unusable on high difficulties (your pets don't scale and most of them get one-shot as a result), Alteration offers Utility that is weaker than the strength that you will add to your enemies by gaining levels from increasing your skill in that sphere, Illusion offers gimmicky crowd control that again doesn't offset the additional levels you add to your enemies, and Restoration is useful at the beginning, but no longer needed once you stunlock your enemies - so once again it just increases the levels of the enemies you're fighting against, and therefor their health pools.

I feel the exact the same way. Destruction is the only viable magic tree on higher difficulties and all the others range from gimmicky to bad. When leveling Alteration to 100 makes your character weaker, not stronger, something is wrong with the game design I found all schools besides Destruction and Conjuration completely obsolete. Conjuration seemed extremely broken on lower difficulties and very weak on higher ones.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Those sound more like standard stealth game problems than RPG issues. All stealth games (or games with stealth systems) from the first Thief to the latest Deus Ex encourage some degree of save scumming.
What makes Styx particularly bad ?
A lack of anti-frustration abilities for stealth games (see through walls, vision cones, short-term invisibilty) ?

Right, those were all specific things I experienced in the first ~30 minutes of that particular game, not every game. I was just using them to illustrate my earlier point about a game moving forward after the character or player fails to do something, or does it a little differently, a little inefficiently, or less than perfectly. You're right that the issue is common in stealth games, even though this game seems particularly bad in this regard (it's noticeably worse than the first Styx game, which had the typical stealth-game problems).

Games that combine stealth with other things often end up solving the problem, perhaps by accident. Styx is a "chute-style" game, where your path is prescribed but you have a little "wiggle room" to move around. An open-world exploration game, otoh, allows the player to reconnoiter an area, just by virtue of being open-world. The stealth mechanics in Fallout 4 aren't any better than in Styx, but it turns out to be a better stealth game. Of course, stealth only matters in Fallout 4 if you play at the highest difficulty setting and use mods; in the vanilla game, it's so much easier to just get a suit of powered armor and an arsenal of weapons and destroy everything on sight (at this point, though, anyone playing Fallout 4 unmodded is just being dense, and not only because of the stealth game). Someone earlier mentioned Dishonored, either in this thread or the other games thread, which has the same issue; playing stealthily is so much harder and less efficient than simply killing everybody, and the consequences of bathing in everyone's blood aren't enough to discourage it. This isn't really "solving" the stealth-game problem, so much as shooting it in the head and declaring "problem solved."

I think the last, really good, stealth game I played was Thief: The Dark Project. I'm not sure why the game design on stealth stalled after that. The next stealth game I remember playing was Splinter Cell, which got into the "die, start over" style of play. I was so enamored with the setting and the graphics of that game, and some of the character's interaction with the environment, that I was happy to overlook it's glaring flaws ("I can climb along the outside of a moving train, but I can't step around this camera tripod without knocking it over? Seriously?" ). At the time, I chalked up some of the differences - good and bad - to the fact that Splinter Cell was a console game. I guess it's possible that the demands placed on console games heavily influenced game design across all platforms in the last 15 years in ways that I'm not even aware of, and some things have been forgotten, like the welding techniques developed by shipyard workers during WWII.

The Deus Ex games were pretty good, fwiw. I don't remember being aggravated by those, in this way. Some of the military sci-fi games, like Mass Effect and XCOM 2, have stealth mechanics that suit the role of stealth in those stories, which is all you need anyway. Stealth games raise the bar for themselves by making stealth more important. Thief and Styx go all the way to one end of the spectrum, making the player-character really poor at fighting. Deus Ex and Dishonored are somewhere in the middle, and the character is pretty deadly but a lot of things can be accomplished by finding a back window or a duct. Mass Effect and XCOM are at the other end, where stealth is just for the preliminary stages of a mission and you're mostly supposed to kill everything to progress.

 

[Lexicus]

A lot of the problems are most prevalent on higher difficulties, because higher difficulties just mean bigger health pools for your enemies, which means more mana problems, and more time for enemies to reach you. This is why the only "real" way to play an actually "efficient" mage in Skyrim is to go enchant your gear so that it reduces the mana cost of casting destruction magic down to 0, and then perma-stunlock just about any enemy - including dragons - until they're reduced to ashes. On legend difficulty, it takes ages to kill enemies that way, while a properly specced and geared archer will simply two-shot that very same enemy in 2-3 seconds or so. That's again because mages' damage does not scale with anything, other than skill level - a flat number increase - and perks, which add a single modifier. Anything else is just there to reduce a mage's downsides - mainly their low survivability, and their mana restrictions.

I don't know what to tell you. I play on Legendary Difficulty and have done all combat playstyles, and it's flat-out not true that an archer can kill a target in two hits that would take expert-level destruction spells forever to kill

Mages' damage doesn't scale with skill, incidentally - mana cost reduces as your skill increases, so damage/mana ratio increases, but not damage itself.

And that's even the "good" mage - the destruction mage. Conjuration is completely unusable on high difficulties (your pets don't scale and most of them get one-shot as a result)

Yeah, and this is just completely not true as well. Conjuration level 100 allows you to summon two Frost Atronachs or Dremora Lords. Conjuration is arguably the most powerful magical school of all. Alteration allows you to cast paralysis which makes the game so easy that I mostly just don't use it.

I guess we must play the game very differently because all the stuff you're saying entirely contradicts my experience in playing the game.

I suppose it's worth pointing out that I usually get Enchantment to level 100 first, and that is the key to becoming powerful as a mage, since Extra Effect allows you to stack up enough mana and mana regen to basically have an infinite pool.

I've also done the -100% cost in various schools of magic, I found it inferior to enchantments that increase your mana pool.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I guess we must play the game very differently because all the stuff you're saying entirely contradicts my experience in playing the game.

In many past situations I have found that the complaint really translates to "all the different skill possibilities cannot be interchangeably used within my very small spectrum of playstyles."

Personally, I play like a tank. If I choose the right skills for a tank the game is easier than if I choose the wrong skills for a tank, because I'm still most likely going to play like a tank. If there are skills available that make it impossible to succeed playing like a tank I have the awareness to realize that doesn't mean those skills are defective, but a lot of people don't.

 

[Lexicus]

In many past situations I have found that the complaint really translates to "all the different skill possibilities cannot be interchangeably used within my very small spectrum of playstyles."

Personally, I play like a tank. If I choose the right skills for a tank the game is easier than if I choose the wrong skills for a tank, because I'm still most likely going to play like a tank. If there are skills available that make it impossible to succeed playing like a tank I have the awareness to realize that doesn't mean those skills are defective, but a lot of people don't.

I have the same kinda deal in League of Legends (which I've started playing again, to my shame...), I default into a tank playstyle unless I'm actively thinking about what I'm doing so I generally play tanks with the occasional other archtype thrown in for variety.

In Skyrim I also haven't played with any of the stealth stuff because it just has no appeal for me.