What makes a great RPG?

[Yeekim]

Speaking of CK2, the Holy Fury expansion is shaping up to be spectacular.

 

[Mouthwash]

That's what we say to all the dev diaries (it's true for Stellaris's new release though).

 

[Robo-Star]

Something I'd like to see in an RPG is the ability to fail. Even strategy games these days are loathe to challenge the player, because the game needs to know what to do if the player fails. One issue is that (a) RPGs rely on the player's character progressing through the story, (b) challenges are frequently in the form of combat, and (c) combat is usually lethal. So that means if a player fails a challenge, their character is dead and the story is over. Even in the case of a puzzle, the game has to be prepared for what happens if the player doesn't solve the puzzle. Imagine a door, with a clever locking mechanism that the character must decipher in order to get through the door. What happens if the player is unable to decipher the puzzle? In most games, the story cannot continue, and the frustrated player looks up the answer on Google. That's not a game, that's just homework. I would be interested in a game that had an actual answer to the question: What happens if the player is unable to decipher the puzzle? The character's inability to get through that door is now a plot-point, a crisis. So what happens next?

I am reminded of "Torment: Tides of Numenera".

 

[Mouthwash]

I played that (awful) game, but don't recall where that happens?

 

[Robo-Star]

I played that (awful) game, but don't recall where that happens?

List of Occasions when "Failure" gets "Rewarded"

 

[MaryKB]

Have any of you ever played The Guild 2? I wonder if you feel that one counts as an RPG? I spent many hours playing that game several years ago, starting with my one first character and building my family, and eventually expanding through generations to take over everything in my town. I felt it's a lot of fun, how you have your characters and you build your skills, improve your businesses and houses, and earn nobility titles and political offices and everything. I really enjoy role playing games like this too, where your character has things to do other than just fighting all the time, there were lots of little mini-games to play like how you'd try to make sure you'd have enough political control to counter your rival families and such. And you'd train your children from a young age so she'd have those skills needed for whatever role your family is going to be needing soon, so you have a lot of planning for things to happen later.

 

[Arakhor]

I own The Guild 2 and its expansions, but it's one of those games I never got around to playing.

 

[Ryika]

Level scaling isn't inherently bad, and in open world games it's even necessary. I'll even go further and say that while the level scaling in Oblivion was gamebreakingly bad, the level scaling in Skyrim was pretty good.
I'm fine with some areas being gated off by very strong enemies. Exploring, running away and coming back later is fun, but alternating between trivial and overwhelming challenges because you didn't explore the locations in the right order is not. A game that allows you to go wherever you want needs some way to dynamically adjust the difficulty and a combat system with a good balance between character stats and player skill. Many games screw up the latter and make enemies that are two or three levels above you unbeatable.
That's the problem with Skyrim. The entire combat system is too dependent on stats and leaves very little room for timing or tactics which makes the scaling far too obvious.

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.

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.

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).

 

[Senethro]

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.

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.

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).

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?

 

[Timsup2nothin]

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?

TES modders.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

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.

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.

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).

took the words right out of my mouth. all of these issues are easily fixable by implementing

1) NPCs not scaling along with the player
2) changing the attribute mechanics: INT/magicka makes spells stronger and more effective instead of simply improving your mana pool
3) spells aren't always bought, but also gotten from the perk tree, or from quests and factions. having different ranks for spells and having the player make actual choices with every level up: invest 5 points into fireball and 1 into frostbolt, or do a 3 : 3 split for a balanced character build (much like in Diablo or games like PoE)

I also agree that having "bandits" carry the most rare armor in the entire game is immersion breaking and kills any kind of enthusiasm from the players side to grow. In Morrowind there was literally just one single full Daedric Armor and it was carried by a main-quest relevant NPC that you could not kill without screwing over your game

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?

Daggerfall and Morrowind?.. Daggerfalls map is btw at least twice or thrice the size of skyrims

I'm trying to get into TES modding to see how difficult it is to access/change formulae. the older games were ironically enough so much more in-depth in terms of "attributes":

Yes, some things were utterly broken, but can be easily fixed by either capping attributes or introducing diminishing returns

 

[Senethro]

TES modders.

Half a point - they're using someone elses world and saving gigantic quantities of work.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Half a point - they're using someone elses world and saving gigantic quantities of work.

True, but it isn't like BethSoft doesn't have a team. The guys coming up with their terrible leveling schemes are probably just as much "using someone elses world" as the modders are.

 

[Hygro]

Half a point - they're using someone elses world and saving gigantic quantities of work.

Yes but so is anyone on the dev team in charge of enemies and difficulty.

 

[Mouthwash]

Daggerfall and Morrowind?.. Daggerfalls map is btw at least twice or thrice the size of skyrims

It's, ah... quite a bit larger than that.

 

[Senethro]

Yeah, I really don't think that development works that way. How about comparing apples to apples instead of hobbyists to professionals? (who have different audiences)

And Daggerfall isn't so much open world as Empty Of Content world.

 

[EgonSpengler]

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.

I also agree that having "bandits" carry the most rare armor in the entire game is immersion breaking and kills any kind of enthusiasm from the players side to grow.

Right, the presentation has to match the mechanics. An adversary who can fly above the player, shrug off most weapons, and shoot cones of flame should look like a dragon, not like a bandit. If you're being deliberately surreal, that needs to make sense to the player eventually, if not right away. (I once had a player in a D&D game decide to keep a "dragonscale shield" he'd found in the crypt of a legendary dragon-hunter; once word had gotten around, I had a dragon pursue the party, taking an innocuous shape before morphing back into her true form as part of an ambush. At the beginning of the fight, the players didn't know why the "old crone" was confronting them - one of them was wearing her friend.)

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Yeah, I really don't think that development works that way. How about comparing apples to apples instead of hobbyists to professionals? (who have different audiences)

How about just accepting the point as made?

All the "oh my, it is just so hard!" from developers is pretty much blown out of the water when some hobbyist working from their basement solves the problem. BethSoft is the easiest prey for making that argument because they produce the most unfinished products in the industry.

Anecdote justifying my "give no quarter" approach to BethSoft:

Spoiler :

When Oblivion was released it had a 'crash on exit' bug. It did it to me frequently, my son's computer just about every time, and was widespread. BethSoft's response was the usual "We can't be expected to test our software with every possible hardware configuration, all your fault." So people went on about their business figuring it would be fixed in the inevitable series of patches that are now the norm in the industry.

Patches came, and patches went, and the crash on exit bug remained. The debugging shifted more into game issues as the outright software crashing bugs got fixed. People started asking "What about this CTD on exit thing?" more often because it seemed like resolving that sort of thing had been the first priority. BethSoft proclaimed that it was "due to a problem in the Gamebryo engine" so there was nothing they could do to resolve it, but maybe Gamebase would someday, and if so they would certainly pass it along.

Then a modder fixed the problem.

Then Fallout 3 was released, with a crash on exit bug. People said "this is the same bug that you had in Oblivion, WTH are you guys doing that you haven't fixed this?" BethSoft very quickly said that they had hoped that Gamebase had solved the problem, and again it wasn't fair to expect them to anticipate every possible hardware configuration.

The same modder immediately released a fix for the problem.

 

[AmazonQueen]

If you think the level-scaling in Skyrim was bad well the level-scaling in Oblivion was much worse. I never saw bandits in Skyrim running around in Daedric armour, ocasionally 1 of them might've had a Daedric item at high levels, but in Oblivion they had loads of Daedric or Glass at high levels.
In Morrowind only the NPCs (including bandits) weren't level-scaled. Creatures were which was why cliffracers were rare at level 1 and ten a penny a few levels later. Trouble was by 30th level (sooner if you were a good player or a mini-maxer) the NPCs were walkovers.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Morrowind, iirc, handled the level-scaling problem fairly well: some things leveled, some things didn't. There really were dungeons you couldn't go into in the start. There really were beasts that just became a breeze once you became strong. But other things leveled, so you got generally got a challenge to where you were at a specific moment.

For me, the cool solution to this would be to have certain planned evolutions in the world. When the character is levels 1-10, a dungeon contains rats. When the character hits level 11, a set of bandits clear out that cave of rats and set up their own camp there. When the character hits level 25, a dragon clears out the bandits and starts using the cave as his den.

partial x-post with AQ