Letting go of the checklist: Zombra says you shouldn't do everything in RPGs

[Jimmious]

Positive reinforcement trap. When games (this is not limited to rpgs) become piles upon piles of positive modifiers and rewards, the expected behaviour is to do everything. This is bad design. Tavern example: Game is Ironman mode (or checkpoint), you talk to the wrong dude, cause you didn't bother to examine and get trashed in the resulting brawl.
Bring back negative stuff, lots of it. Mainstream RPG devs should take some advice from Roguelikes.

Either that OR give alternative rewards for failed skill checks. Like more experience in that skill than what you'd gain by succeeding. Ok you failed to unlock that chest but you became better at unlocking shit in the future. Basically give incentive to continue even if you miss/fail some stuff

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Next time you play an RPG, leave the kitten alone. Walk away from the xp. See how it makes you feel. Seriously, try this for just one game. Refuse side quests that look like a waste of your character's time (and remember, he doesn't know what an "xp" is). Decline conversation options that you don't care about. Fire companions you dislike. Use a suboptimal weapon that suits your character better. Forget the scripted "good path" and "evil path" and just do what your character has a reason to do in each new situation. Smile at the kitten and walk on. Do all this and finish the game anyway because it turns out you never had to do any of that stuff. You did what you wanted to and said no to the rest! I promise it'll be like taking off blinders, a whole new horizon of fun in gaming.

Heresy was never as strong as with this post.

I have seen some shit from you Zombra but asking roleplayers to actually roleplay tops it all!

 

[Gregz]

I guess it's time for me to remind everyone that you don't have to click every option in every conversation. If you're not interested in some street thug's life story, don't ask him about it. Walk on by. It's cool to have that stuff there in case you do find a character interesting, but pretty much everyone will get to the point if you just say, "What's up, I'm here to disarm a bomb, where is it."

I wish I could still play games this way, sometimes I can but not often.

Sadly there are plenty of games that reward exhaustive exploration, and punish just doing your own thing.

 

[SophosTheWise]

Imagine if we apply Zombra's logic to any other medium. "Oh, the book is good, just skip 80% of the words, it's fine, don't fall into the Pavlovian trap".

A book is linear, a game isn't.

 

[Jimmious]

Imagine if we apply Zombra's logic to any other medium. "Oh, the book is good, just skip 80% of the words, it's fine, don't fall into the Pavlovian trap".

A book is linear, a game isn't.

Yeah the book was a bad analogy. There is no decision making while reading a book, you just read it all the way through (unless it's a CYOA where , guess what, you don't see/"do" everything with each read)

 

[Lacrymas]

No, his argument is that the game somehow becomes better if you skip the side content that you think is bad. You can also skip chapters in books you don't like and don't advance the story in any way. This only applies to bad authors who can't write for shit and require such skipping to make it bearable. Guess what that means for games. While it IS a viable decision to skip things in games, that doesn't make the skipped parts good or the overall game somehow better.

 

[MRY]

I find Zombra's philosophy exhilarating in theory, but beyond my ability to carry out. I don't think it's fair to call his view a LARPer one, it just about playing games the way you have fun rather than minmaxing at the expense of fun. But for me, narrative RPGs (in contrast to ones where the action is the essential content, like dungeon crawls) tend to be based around an implied structure that is something like, "The short-term gameplay [fights, dumpster diving, conversations] is about developing long-term capacity to shape the arc of the story. If you want to have maximum long-term agency in the story, you need to minmax the short-term gameplay." This may not always be true, but IMO the entire apparatus of RPGs is designed to make the player feel that it works this way. When there is good content (and good choice and consequence) in the narrative -- as in, for instance AOD -- the suffering of minmaxing seems worthwhile.

Ultimately I think game designers should work to "train" players to play more like what Zombra describes, but until that happens, it's hard to blame players for their operant conditioning.

 

[undecaf]

Guess what that means for games.

Nothing. It's a different medium even narratively and bad writing is not a related issue with this thing (it's an issue of its own, if it is).

While it IS a viable decision to skip things in games, that doesn't make the skipped parts good or the overall game somehow better.

The game is what it is and no amount of skipping or not skipping will change that. But has the point not been that this kind of roleplaying might improve your experience with it, not that it turns the game itself into something else.

 

[Lacrymas]

It doesn't matter if it's "narratively different", the base idea is the same - skipping the parts that don't have anything to do with the main story that you think are bad. Skipping it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth and not wanting to engage in a game's content is a bad sign. Sure, skip to your heart's content, all the power to you. That doesn't make the problem go away, you are just ignoring it and giving devs/writers/filmmakers too much leeway.

 

[Delterius]

The game is what it is and no amount of skipping or not skipping will change that. But has the point not been that this kind of roleplaying might improve your experience with it, not that it turns the game itself into something else.

That was not the point in the original thread. The problem isn't that Shadowrun: Hong Kong has an excess of side content. In fact its an average RPG in terms of size. Its not even that its side content is bad. But rather that the whole game -- all of it, including the main quest -- is marked by overt and exhausting prose. To which Zombra claims that one does not need to do everything in a game to have fun.

This is a complete non-issue. Average and completionist playtimes have been recorded for decades now and there was always a discrepancy between different people. Ergo, people already do play towards their own satisfaction. And they already play differently.

Furthermore, no sane developer would design a game to 'train' people to let go of completionism. On the contrary, the whole point of the achievement system is to track what was gripping enough catch the player's attention. Even if you create an Age of Decadence you'll still, ideally, have people play at least twice in order to appreciate their C&C.

In the end, the discusion always goes back to the most simple truth of all:

Skippability is not a redeeming aspect of bad content.

 

[MRY]

It doesn't matter if it's "narratively different", the base idea is the same - skipping the bad parts that don't have anything to do with the main story that you think are bad. Skipping it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth and not wanting to engage in a game's content is a bad sign. Sure, skip to your heart's content, all the power to you. That doesn't make the problem go away, you are just ignoring it and giving devs/writers/filmmakers too much leeway.

Given that games are not intended to be completed (i.e., to have 100% of their possible content consumed) and often have a far more varied range of content than works like novels or symphonies, and almost always have multiple authorship, I think your metaphors are off. To me, the better comparison would be to a large art museum (like the Louvre), a large amusement park (like Disneyland), or -- to a lesser degree -- a large anthology (like The Norton Anthology of Poetry or The Complete Sagas of the Icelanders). We take for granted that a visitor at the Louvre or Disneyland should select the content that interests him, spending as much or a little time as he prefers, though we might suggest that at least some highlights are not to be missed. The same is true (to a lesser extent) with an anthology. Indeed, I remember being stunned when I read the NSRV Bible that each section started with a list of the important passages, taking for granted that one would not read the whole thing start to finish. (Regardless of that advice, I read it start to finish myself.)

While reasoning by analogy can only take you so far, it seems to me that the better analogy suggests that RPGs should allow players to pick and choose what they're most interested in, pursue that interest in as much depth as they find engaging, and skip the parts that bore them. As the good/bad aspects will likely vary among players (some will like to do meet-and-greets with princesses, others to go for the rollercoasters, others to see the shows, etc., etc.), the fact that some players skip some sections shouldn't be taken as prima facie evidence that the game is bad.

Obviously, the very best RPG, perhaps often those that are smaller and more focused, may reach a high rate of engagement (the Gallerias Borghese of RPGs), and bad content is bad content, worthy of criticism.

 

[undecaf]

That doesn't make the problem go away, you are just ignoring it and giving devs/writers/filmmakers too much leeway.

It sure doesn't, but I don't believe anyone's really argued for not criticising what deserves criticism, or for giving undue slack for incompetence because a certain playstyle can make the shitty parts more tolerable (or even a nonissue). That'd make no sense at all.

That was not the point in the original thread. The problem isn't that Shadowrun: Hong Kong has an excess of side content. In fact its an average RPG in terms of size. Its not even that its side content is bad. But rather that the whole game -- all of it, including the main quest -- is marked by overt and exhausting prose.

...

Skippability is not a redeeming aspect of bad content.

The discussion seemed to have sprawled to a more general level, that's what I responded to. In any case... Of course skippability isn't a redeemer (of anything). Bad content is bad content even if you fried it in butter. But I still hold to the point being more about (supported) personal experience than or excusing lousy writing/design.

 

[Lacrymas]

MRY, games aren't a collection of toys, rides and knick-knacks for you pick and choose what you want to play with. I think this all comes from the misunderstanding that somehow "side content" means "have nothing to do with the rest of the game". While developers have treated it as such, it shouldn't be, it should still be a part of a larger whole. We don't pay for a ticket to an amusement park or museum, we pay for a whole game which we expect to be at least cohesive. The book analogy still works, like it always has - you don't pay for jumbled chapters and stories that don't have anything to do with one another and you can skip what you don't want. Unless it's The Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs and even that book's anachronistic chapters are still connected to each other.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

I don't know where this originally came from, but Zombra is so fucking right, and in the Elex thread I talked about the vacuum cleaner mentality where people feel like they have to check every room, open every chest, talk to every NPC. It's something that especially hardcore RPG players get used to and then it feels so strange or niggling to not do it - but it is something that really really adds a lot of unnecessary boredom and pointless crap to your own enjoyment.

E.g. In the Witcher 2, there's an early section where there's fighting going on - the La Valette Castle grounds, I believe. And there's like a dozen houses you can enter. Every singe one has a bit of loading screen, and the stupid accelerating movement animations make navigation inside tiny houses annoying, and there are a million tiny little containers to loot all of them with like two pieces of soiled cloth. I remember going into each one of those houses and looting everything and talking to every dumb villager, and being really annoyed. And then, I realised, why am I doing this? It's a fucking castle on fire, move on.

One line of counterargument is, but I'll never know if I'm missing something really important. I don't know if it's just shit flavour text & soft toilet paper until I get there. You're right. So just think rationally about the tradeoffs. You can spend the entire game checking 400 houses - or you can check 10 as fancy strikes you. Do you think you will miss 20% of the quests in the game? No, especially not in modern RPGs. You're going to miss about five small quests and like three interesting items. Are those things worth the hours of time and frustration and boredom spread out over your playthrough? If yes, then more power to you. It's not worth it to me. I'd rather move on, play more games, or even replay this one if it's good.

Another line of argument is, but the game forces me to open every fucking barrel because there's all these little herbs and crafting ingredients and 10 XP for talking to a villager about his sex life and otherwise I'm gimping myself. Yeah, so again, actually sit down and think about whether that's worth it. Is it worthwhile to reload 8 times until you can kill that bandit before he fires any shots, just so you can loot 5 extra arrows from his body? Or to reload and try all the dialogue options until you get 300 gold instead of 250 for the reward? Usually you're going to find that you spend 5 frustrating hours early on going out of your way to collect every single Iron Ore because that's going to give you a Sword with 18 damage instead of 16 at Level 3 and feel good about yourself... except in that same time, I could just have moved on, levelled up, and got myself a New Sword with 25 damage.

(The question of what devs should do is a whole different one. Obviously, whether I talk to 80 NPCs or 2, a badly written game is a badly written game. Devs need to stop writing shit sob stories all over the place or encourage players to loot 1000 barrels, that doesn't change at all. What does change is how much of your life you're wasting enjoying yourself when you play a game you like, or how much of your life you're wasting not enjoying yourself. If the game is shit all round, drop it, stop forcing yourself to complete it because of achievos or some other retarded reason. If the game is great but has some shit stuff, skip that shit, no, you're not fucked and your player isn't fucked because you skip a cutscene or don't loot that body.)

I see from the reaction to this post that there's quite a swell of people getting all codex-obsessed up with this supposed version of incline, and I often find that I disagree with you on a lot of subjects, so I think its worth my time here to try and nip this escalating decline opinion in the bud before it gets out of hand and I have to have even more facepalms with you in the future. Some points to note:

1. Examining everything is not because of the reasons you think it is.

People examine everything because it is there to be examined. It is really that simple. One chooses to play a game because one has spare time they wish to use up by entertaining themselves. RPGs are games which offer a large amount of playtime in an immersive world to which entering an RPG with the mindset to get to the end of it in the most time-efficient way possible is not only not the objective of a gamer of RPGs, but, more importantly, completely the opposite of why most people play RPGs. People choose to play RPGs precisely because they are games where you dally about doing whole rafts of 'pointless' shit. That's what makes them different. That's what makes them stand out from the crowd.

Yes, some people do speedruns of RPGs, but those speedruns are monocled because in order to complete them the player has to have looked in every single nook and cranny to know every available time-saving exploit. If you want a timed game then play racing games, play word whomp, play a whole raft of genres where time is the whole point of the exercise. Bringing the concept of time into the RPG genre is the equivalent of suggesting racing games cease with the whole time limit thing - it is quite the most absurd suggestion you can possibly make.

2. There is no such thing as optional content until you have learnt, from playing, what is optional.

The earlier in a game you are, the more you examine everything. The more a game takes the piss out of your sense of curiosity the more you will skip later. It's a learning process. If Diablo suddenly dumped you in a dungeon full of NPCs with huge dialogues half-way through the game, you'd probably read every inch of dialogue, because you wouldn't have a fucking clue what was going on. If Torment: Tides of numanuma suddenly dumped you ina dungeon of non-stop trash mobs you'd probably kill every single one of them, because you wouldn't have a fucking clue what was going on.

However, in both games, because they are both consistent in what they do, you can learn to skip. In Diablo you can learn to simply run past combat. In Torment you can learn to skip dialogue. Because they are simple and obvious games. A good RPG is neither simple nor obvious. A good RPG will mix all that shit up to such a high degree that you will never know what is a waste of time and what is utterly crucial. A good RPG will indeed bluff someone down a pointless dead end with no rewards at the end, because it is training the player that every route does not have the same outcome. A good RPG just wont do this in excess. If the game is good then you will never have any clue as to what will or wont be worth your time - and it will do this in an enjoyable way <-- crucial point.

If something is shit in an RPG, it is shit. Apologising for it is absurd. Inventing clauses as to why something should be shit is absurd. Having shit taste and then trying to force that shit taste onto others as some form of intended design is utterly absurd. If you feel the need to skip anything in an RPG then what you are doing is experiencing shit content, which should be described as shit content and nothing else.

3. Zombra and the idea of roleplaying.

If you choose to skip dialogue options because you feel that's what you're character would do, then I have no idea what character you're playing. Certainly not one from the character options sheet. I don't think I've ever played an RPG where you get to choose a character's "Impatient stat". Dialogue options are usually related to Intelligence or other mental faculties. If the game offered good roleplaying and you want to roleplay a skip dialogue character then you would choose low numbers on those stats and the game automatically reduces your dialogue.

Making a game chock full of painfully bad and over-extensive dialogue trees does not, by itself, automatically mean the game has provided you with role-playing options, it means the game has taken the piss out of you. You have learnt from your own personal (not the character) experience that the game is mostly shit and you, yourself, are adapting to that. If your character is able to read/hear the dialogue lines then they are roleplaying in the universe in which they themselves exist, it is you who are the outsider making non-universe decisions about what that character might or might not like to hear/do.

4. Open world philosophy.

Are you people ever going to be satisfied with anything anyone ever does that is less than a carbon copy of real-life digitised and transmitted to you via prosper animations? As I have a said before, many times, it would be great if these "ever bigger" open world games simply put the "end game" door right next to the starting area. Let people end the game whenever they want, in the first 3 seconds if they want, 5,000 hours later if they want, because the whole concept of "Open world" means precisely that you are not playing a game, you are merely "experiencing" something. By suddenly suggesting a time limit all you're doing is turning your open world game into a linear game. Why the fuck don't you play linear games? Linear is bad apparently. Is it? Why? No-one ever says. "Because we like to do what ever we want"? Well why the fuck are you recommending time limits then? Replay value? Fuck me, I've got enough of an RPG backlog to last me until death and a bit further, and I've no doubt people will be making a lot more games between now and then. And I still enjoy replaying linear games anyway, why the fuck can't you replay a linear game? Choose a different team and it feels completely different. Who gives a fuck if a few dialogues are the same. Really, who gives a...

 

[Lhynn]

Are you people ever going to be satisfied with anything anyone ever does that is less than a carbon copy of real-life digitised and transmitted to you via prosper animations?

No.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

skipping the parts that don't have anything to do with the main story that you think are bad

As far as I can see, he asks for playing an RPG organically - arguably the way its supposed to be played - not about 'just doing the main story'.

 

[Lacrymas]

Like Delterius mentioned, he isn't arguing that, people have been playing and skipping whatever they want since RPGs have existed. You can't skip the main path in RPGs, so the point still stands.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

skipping the parts that don't have anything to do with the main story that you think are bad

As far as I can see, he asks for playing an RPG organically - arguably the way its supposed to be played - not about 'just doing the main story'.

Organic cRPGs don't exist though, it's an oxymoron. If you're desperate for something which more resembles the organic approach... that's what roguelikes are for.

 

[Tigranes]

IncendiaryDevice I'm fine with most of that.

An argument for the merits of not vacuum cleaning isn't an attack on vacuuming, it's not a belief that you should never vacuum, etc. All it means is that if at some point you find yourself doing shit that is boring and frustrating just because that barrel or NPC is there and you feel like you have to tick all the boxes, then you should just move on and you probably won't miss a lot. This obviously means if you want to stop and smell the roses, you should, and if you want to spend some hours delving into side content, you should.

As for some of the stuff I can only assume you're talking to someone else not me. Of course something is shit no matter whether you skip it or not, as I've said multiple times. And I don't know what you're arguing against in 4/ or where you're going.

 

[Lacrymas]

Or devs design a game which doesn't require vacuuming? Why do they feel the need to make barrels, clay jars, literal trash cans, cardboard boxes interact-able and full of garbage loot? PoE's vacuuming is even worse, mobs drop their entire inventories on death which you quickly scoop up to add to the mountainous pile of shit you've collected. Not to mention PoE's random loot generation, which is predictable depending on which day and month of the in-game calendar is, but we have no way of knowing that at first and then memorizing which container will have good loot or not is impossible. Checking the date and alt-tabbing to see whether the loot you want has spawned is the opposite of "immersive" or "organic". And good loot does drop from random containers, like the Gloves of Fast Action, or whatever the attack speed one was called. Devs are the those who encourage such thorough looting.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

I don't know what you're arguing against in 4/ or where you're going.

The concept of "Open World" as somehow the optimum choice for an RPG setting is bogus. People desiring time limits is evidence of that, because a linear game would not require a time limit and time limits turn an open world game into a linear game. Pretty much all the "problems" we hear about with RPGs stem from people trying to make open worlds "work", be it level scaling, trash mobs, empty and boring content, dynamic dialogue trees, day and night cycles, crafting, shit loot, you name it, a more linear game will not have any of these problems. A well made more linear game can do anything well, and do it more easily. Blah blah blah elex does XYZ open world issue better then Skyrim. Does it? That's nice. Practically every more linear game I've ever played has done almost everything better then both of them. IMO.

 

[Lacrymas]

Gothic 1 and 2 have great open world design, just plagiarize that.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Gothic 1 and 2 have great open world design, just plagiarize that.

Oh yeah...

and more buggy, less class distictions/uses/charatcer options in general.

What do open world games offer that is in such high demand? One thing: the magic word "exploration". I dunno about you, but, to me, exploring a more linear world is still 'exploring'.

 

[Sigourn]

3. Zombra and the idea of roleplaying.

If you choose to skip dialogue options because you feel that's what you're character would do, then I have no idea what character you're playing. Certainly not one from the character options sheet. I don't think I've ever played an RPG where you get to choose a character's "Impatient stat". Dialogue options are usually related to Intelligence or other mental faculties. If the game offered good roleplaying and you want to roleplay a skip dialogue character then you would choose low numbers on those stats and the game automatically reduces your dialogue.

It's more about your character being able to talk in ways that make sense for that character. Which is hard enough as no one in real life goes around chatting everyone up. One underappreciated element about Gothic is that it gives you the perfect excuse to chat up people: you are in a penal colony, and you NEED friends. Talking to other NPCs makes perfect sense in Gothic because the only excuse not to is to say "fuck it, I can take care of my own" (and the game brilliantly shows you you are dead wrong; even better because NPCs don't kill you and give you, Ponytail Dude, to realize you were wrong and you really need whatever extra help you can get).

In your average RPG, you talk to people for no real reason other than "they are there". There's no "overhearing conversations", which would be a natural way to strike up conversations with someone as opposed to "hey you, tell me about who you are and whether you have stuff for me" (appropiate for certian RPGs, but not every single one in the market).

 

[Tigranes]

I don't know what you're arguing against in 4/ or where you're going.

The concept of "Open World" as somehow the optimum choice for an RPG setting is bogus.

OK, but nobody was talking about that? Well, in any case, I agree, open world often exacerbates problems.