The value(?) of repetitive RPGs

[Lilura]

Very few games - such as Baldur's Gate II - have enough quality content to last that long.

Chapter 2-3 are good, but everyone who isn't a fanboy agrees that it drops off and goes linear after that. Also, Throne of Bhaal is pretty shitty.

Any Codexer worth their weight in salt would cite the impeccable pacing of Fallout with its time limit.

 

[vivec]

I want to contribute to this thread. But society has not advanced enough to understand that the problem isn't with games but with gamers. Afterall, there exists a market for games like Candy crush saga and Dragon age II.

 

[mondblut]

Tuning out is what lots of people enjoy. If you don't get it, you don't get it.

Play diablo maybe?

diablo doesn't clickclickclick itself.

 

[Cael]

diablo doesn't clickclickclick itself.

So get an autoclicker :D

 

[Werdna's Revenge]

I can't believe there are retards defending Spellforce in this topic. The AI will lay down and die if you don't build a base, or it will send infinite zerg rushes if you do. Every god damn level is the same thing, no mixing it up like a classic single player RTS experience. The objective is always destroy the enemy base, and the AI is so fragile if you skip one trigger (build a base) it just stops working. And this goes on for level after level, it's fucking inane. I hate Spellforce.

I think it's a good example of bad repetition though. I love blobbers, and those can be repetitive too, but the difference is that if you have a good battle system and little rewards I can love repetition. Let me plan out my resource usage to explore one more hallway, let me try out the new spell and adjust my tactics around it. Even incremental equipment upgrades keep me on that treadmill, or at least distracted from the fact it's a treadmill. Spellforce fucks up by being so middle of the road sameish the whole time. Nothing sticks out about the game except how the AI has literally two modes. C&C games keep changing up the missions, you get a destroy the enemy base mission, then a get through the level with just this 1 unit, then a clear the path to escort this convoy through the map in 10 minutes one. They force you to change tactics and adjust, Spellforce is just too lazy to ask anything of you.

 

[Cael]

I can't believe there are retards defending Spellforce in this topic. The AI will lay down and die if you don't build a base, or it will send infinite zerg rushes if you do. Every god damn level is the same thing, no mixing it up like a classic single player RTS experience. The objective is always destroy the enemy base, and the AI is so fragile if you skip one trigger (build a base) it just stops working. And this goes on for level after level, it's fucking inane. I hate Spellforce.

I think it's a good example of bad repetition though. I love blobbers, and those can be repetitive too, but the difference is that if you have a good battle system and little rewards I can love repetition. Let me plan out my resource usage to explore one more hallway, let me try out the new spell and adjust my tactics around it. Even incremental equipment upgrades keep me on that treadmill, or at least distracted from the fact it's a treadmill. Spellforce fucks up by being so middle of the road sameish the whole time. Nothing sticks out about the game except how the AI has literally two modes. C&C games keep changing up the missions, you get a destroy the enemy base mission, then a get through the level with just this 1 unit, then a clear the path to escort this convoy through the map in 10 minutes one. They force you to change tactics and adjust, Spellforce is just too lazy to ask anything of you.

I suppose it would be boring if all I had to do was to type in "Iwinall" and automatically win the map, which is basically what exploiting a clear AI deficiency is about. I wonder what the reaction here would be if someone came in and said that all combats in BG2 is too easy because all you had to do was spam traps everywhere. So repetitive and boring.

 

[Werdna's Revenge]

The point is more that if you even try to mix up your tactics to try and make Spellforce more interesting all it does is break the AI so it won't do anything. There's exactly one way to play it, and it's not very good.

 

[Falksi]

Top thread felipepepe

For me it's all about stimulation. As you say, the second you suss a pattern out with something it starts to become boring, and it's far harder for bigger games to keep things fresh without you encountering simiar patterns more regularly.

However, the modern dev/publisher has embraced Joe Casual, and so can get away with more repetitive patterns in games, because Joe Casual is usually a fucktard who does whatever advertising or similar brainwashing tells them to, and who takes longer to suss things out.

We can only ever crticize games from our own personal POV, but I don't think it's far wide of the mark to say that there's a hell of a lot of dumb fucks currently experiencing their first RPG type games, spunking over them because it's all so new/fresh (and thus they're unfamiliar with said patterns), and ruining the standard of games as devs/publishers bend over for their mong-esq desires.

All we can really do is support & promote the better games, and hope that the devs find some way of including Joe Casuals' wishes, however retarded, whilst retaining quality & depth at the same time.

Actually, the decline of RPG came long before the modern age. It was already apparent back before 1992 when EA was going through its rampage of buying up smaller game developers and crapping all over the bought IPs.

As an indication: Ultima 4 took TWO YEARS to create. If you took 2 years to create such a relatively simple game in this day and age, you'd be fired (see the Feargus and Pillars of Eternity thread).

Joe Casual is not a fucktard. It is that he had never had the chance to play really good RPG because corporate pushing has ruined every RPG since Ultima 7:2 (and even that one was a miracle it came out as well as it did). Compare Ultima 7 with Ultima 8. They turned one of the best RPGs in history into a freaking PLATFORMER! Joe Casual never had a chance to actually know what is good and what is bad. He is the very real representation of someone who has been fed sh!t his entire life and cannot conceive of anything better than eating sh!t.

You want to blame someone for the decline of RPGs, blame EA and their ilk. They are the ones who ruined RPG. Hell, even WotC managed to ruin the DnD franchise, turning it into Diablo on paper.

That's fair, but there is a certain element of demand to that supply.

It's a bit chicken & egg, but what's really sad is the trend to keep dumbing down. You'd think that these companies would learn that the more casuals play RPG's, the more they will actually crave deeper elements to give them something fresh with each installment. Yet said companies seem to water down each subsequent game even further.

It's like a never ending chase to grab everyone who can say "this is my first RPG"

 

[Cael]

That's fair, but there is a certain element of demand to that supply.

It's a bit chicken & egg, but what's really sad is the trend to keep dumbing down. You'd think that these companies would learn that the more casuals play RPG's, the more they will actually crave deeper elements to give them something fresh with each installment. Yet said companies seem to water down each subsequent game even further.

It's like a never ending chase to grab everyone who can say "this is my first RPG"

If you have never had anything better than sh!t, and people keep offering you sh!t, you will keep buying sh!t, thinking that it is the best thing ever. That is just the way human being work. Actually all animals work that way. Do you think pigs love to wallow in mud? They don't. But if they had nothing but mud, they will wallow in it. Given a choice between mud and water, pigs always choose water.

It is in the corporation's best interest to dumb things down because a dumb RPG is faster to make than an intricate one. Faster turnaround time = more revenue. They will keep pushing the envelope of dumbness, of that you can be certain.

 

[fantadomat]

That's fair, but there is a certain element of demand to that supply.

It's a bit chicken & egg, but what's really sad is the trend to keep dumbing down. You'd think that these companies would learn that the more casuals play RPG's, the more they will actually crave deeper elements to give them something fresh with each installment. Yet said companies seem to water down each subsequent game even further.

It's like a never ending chase to grab everyone who can say "this is my first RPG"

If you have never had anything better than sh!t, and people keep offering you sh!t, you will keep buying sh!t, thinking that it is the best thing ever. That is just the way human being work. Actually all animals work that way. Do you think pigs love to wallow in mud? They don't. But if they had nothing but mud, they will wallow in it. Given a choice between mud and water, pigs always choose water.

It is in the corporation's best interest to dumb things down because a dumb RPG is faster to make than an intricate one. Faster turnaround time = more revenue. They will keep pushing the envelope of dumbness, of that you can be certain.

I agree with you,but in modern days it is hard to remain "uneducated" on the games that you like.Take look at D:OS2,what a success it is. Many rpg fans do make their entry with some dumbed down game like oblivion or skyrim. People do like some kind of complexity,as long as it is not too complex. Also modern day people have very small attention spam and get bored fast.

 

[Lurker47]

Basically every quest can be boiled down to "fetch x" or "kill x" or "talk to a guy" at their core which isn't automatically a bad thing. Mechanics aside, these can all just be made fun by the scenario surrounding them.

Killing different giant lizards and bringing them to a butcher can be fun if he has some interesting information to tell you about them each time you bring their heads and you can ask him about his opinions on taxation down the line of conversation. Small talk is underestimated in a lot of writer's eyes; slow characterization of the world and people breeds a lot of intrigue. Usually, attempts to make fetch quests unique involves you or the person you're talking to be wacky and overly silly.

I also think every quest should contain a bit of every aspect of "fetch, kill, talk" too, just to feel less automatic. The "kill/gather" aspects should probably the shortest.

On repeated playthroughs, it's a given that some quests feel repetitive if done again but the extent of this feeling is representative of the game's overall C&C.

 

[agentorange]

Personally I don't know of a long RPG that provides high quality content during whole game. The closest would be Arcanum I think but even Arcanum had weaker moments (especially the late part of the game). Fallout 1 has perfect length (it ends before it begins to bore) but it's not a long (LONG) game, unlike Fallout 2 where San Francisco and Enclave are quite bad (some of the initial locations are also bad but then again this game was created in a very short time so it shouldn't be surprising). Age of Decadence is quite short on a single playthrough and that's why it's so enjoyable. There are no fillers here, no copy-pasting and no bloat. You can't grind here either because every fight is meaningful and there are no trash mobs. In fact, quite often it's more advantageous to skip a fight and skill points because the price is too big to pay. Now that's truly unique way of making cRPGs and goes against AAA way of doing things.

BTW, often criticized "teleportation" is one of the reasons why I like AoD so much. Same goes for Fallout 1 where you could run through even biggest cities very quickly. Yet these games have to offer more quests and characters (that had something interesting to say) than most cRPGs in recent years. Take Fallout New Vegas: in most locations there were only a few quests but the location was so big that you still had to walk through huge distances just to walk a 100 m distance (fast travel was only between cities). You just walk and walk and then walk so more, tedious and boring but Bethesda can boast that people spend hundreds of hours in game, right? Another example is Vampire The Masquarade: Bloodlines - sewers were just too long and you had to waste time on walking through virtual corridors. But Santa Monica and Downtown were superb even though you've had everything squeezed in a small area.

Exploring a huge location and walking a huge distance might be fun as a first time experience, although even that isn't that easy to achieve (only Gothic 1 comes to my mind at the moment) but for a replay it gets tedious and is a waste of time IMO. There should always be an option to speed things up. It's not making a game easier, it just cuts something as simple as holding a keyboard key or a mouse button (or worse - a clickfest). Having this is similar to having subtitles in a voiced over game - usually you can read the text faster than actors read them and many people just skip audio and read at their own pace because otherwise it would take too much time (proper intonation takes time).

In general most developers like to lengthen the game with such tricks like decreasing our speed or increasing the distance between points, adding crafting and shit ton of items, adding bartering with items scattered all over the place (so if we want to build something we need to visit almost every trader or if we want to sell something we need to seek the proper trader), adding some secondary quests along the way (knowing perfectly well that the gamer must go through that place/road and he will stumble upon it), etc. etc.This is true for many games, including Witcher 3 or Underrail.

Said everything I wanted to say about the topic. I really prefer these sort of segmented open-worlds that games like Arcanum and Fallout employ, even VTMB, where there is an abstracted overworld that can be traversed very quickly, then individual, highly detailed locations to explore. Or taken to the extreme of being shunted between locations like in AoD, which I too liked. It was just playing to the strengths of the game: if you cannot have highly detailed environments with hand placed encounters then don't force me to walk back and forth between your copy pasted, randomly generated nonsense.

Like you said Gothic 1 and 2 are some of the only fully open world games that are continuously fun to explore, and a lot of that is because they are relatively small for open world games. They also have a smart way of gating off certain areas without it feeling artificial, so that as the story progresses you continuously have new areas to explore (getting into the upper district of Khorinis in 2, the orc cemetery in 1, etc.). Sadly ELEX fell into the trap of trying to compete with the large open worlds of games like Skyrim and ended up being all the worse for it.

Pathologic is another small scale open world game that handles repetition in an unique way. As the character is trapped in a very small town, and each day essentially involves running back and forth between locations in said town. However the plague mechanic means that the town is continually changing over the course of the games, areas being locked down, criminals prowling about at night. There is also the ever important time limit running throughout the game, which lends a sense of urgency to even the smallest of tasks.

But yes now days most single player games seem to be employing MMO strategies that are used to keep people playing for longer periods of time. Excessive crafting, and the gathering of materials for said crafting, excessive amounts of repetitive side-quests, player housing and base building type stuff, and so on. Stuff is collected just for the sake of collecting more stuff.

Anyway these excessively large, repetitive and also importantly predictable games seem to be attractive to people for the same reason as TV shows like CSI, Law and Order or airport paperbacks that run to 1000 pages, Dan Brown, Stephen King, etc. They are comforting, you can just sit there and as people have already said "tune out." You know exactly what you are getting and that you will be getting the same thing for dozens or hundreds of hours. It's like slipping into a comforting behavioral routine. I dislike it but I get why people like it.

 

[Zenith]

Thread has died down a bit, so I'll post a thing I don't want to start a new thread for. Seems (barely) appropriate since the it's about filler content / bang for your buck / casual games / quick turnaround...
Not sure what to think of it myself yet, but anyway, I watched this video today. The video itself isn't really relevant here, main takeaway is this: it took a team of dozens of people 6 years to make a 3-hour long linear game that sells for $20.
Six years! With a whole year of just polish! For a game with fixed camera, three-button gameplay and no spoken words anywhere.
When you think back to Troika only getting 3 years to make the entirety of Bloodlines, basically negative time for polish, and getting fucked over anyway, can you imagine what an RPG dev wouldn't give to work for 6 years on an hour of content?
No, but seriously, what gives? On Codex 20 hours is usually the lowest bar people mean when they say they prefer "shorter RPGs". About 15-30 hours is about right for hub-based hybrids, and 60+ hours are RPGs proper. Would you play a 6-years-in-development 3-hour long RPG? Are there any?
Naturally, unless it's 100% storyfaggotry, the mechanics would need to take a pretty big jump from conventional "increase stats 2% per hour" cargo cult, but hey, could find a way to make it work in 6 years, no?

 

[Grauken]

Many platformers/shmups/other 2d games can be played through in under an hour, when you're really good, but to get this good you usually spend an ungodly amount of time (depends, there are some piss easy games). I don't know about Inside, but in general for these games the content versus time spent in game count works completely different than in RPGs.

 

[felipepepe]

I would definitely play a 3 hour RPG IF it was replayable. For example, Age of Decadence's first city would still be a cool stand-alone RPG IMHO - a more "experimental one", but still cool.

The problem is that RPGs need a minimum length to give weight to the decisions and allow them to have consequences, but a short RPG is definitely possible and interesting. Way of the Samurai 4 feels finished in 8-10 hours, while Undertale tells a full story in 5-6 hours - although getting all playthroughts might push you to 10hs as well.

Still, both these games have somewhat simple combat and no real level-up mechanic. Resource-wise, it would probably be a waste to develop a complex combat system & character progression if there's like 5 fights in the entire game.

 

[CryptRat]

I would definitely play a 3 hour RPG IF it was replayable.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/563430/Void_Pyramid/

 

[Jaedar]

The problem is that RPGs need a minimum length to give weight to the decisions and allow them to have consequences, but a short RPG is definitely possible and interesting.

This so very much, but it also cuts both ways. Imo, so many modern RPGs have way more content than their systems actually support: you will have finished the entire parties character builds and have half the game left to go, and while the enemy graphics will change, your tactics won't.

Of course, you also have stuff like Aod, where the system has enough depth to support a lot of playthroughs. Or good roguelikes for that matter.

while Undertale tells a full story in 5-6 hours

I have not played it, but many of the clips I have seen suggest repeated identical combat encounters, which to me suggest the game should be even shorter, especially true for turn based games where executing your strategy is often very simple(even if, this particular case, dodging is action-based).

 

[felipepepe]

while Undertale tells a full story in 5-6 hours

I have not played it, but many of the clips I have seen suggest repeated identical combat encounters, which to me suggest the game should be even shorter, especially true for turn based games where executing your strategy is often very simple(even if, this particular case, dodging is action-based).

On a normal playthrought you'll maybe fight 3-4 times the same random monster at most. And they are finite - you can clear an area of monsters, which is masterfully used in the "evil" route.

But yeah, you could make it a bit shorter, removing 1 hour of dungeons and random battles, and not lose anything of value.

 

[Zenith]

I realised Consortium kind of fits what I had in mind when writing that post. Ridiculous amount of backstory crammed into a keyword-hunt terminal that you're free to completely ignore, a couple dozen NPCs locked inside a couple of rooms, etc. Combat system as an afterthought, with combat being avoidable. Although I guess there's not much left warranting an RPG label. And like 5 years of dev time for a couple hours per playthrough. Too bad they kinda fucked up the "find the spy" part with contrived scripting.

The problem is that RPGs need a minimum length to give weight to the decisions and allow them to have consequences, but a short RPG is definitely possible and interesting.

I think it's possible to spin the web of small choices with unpredictable weight, take Alpha Protocol and cram it all inside a single building, something like that. If you really spend the time on it, after a while the player might even lose the urge to minmax every conversation.
Also, while there aren't many examples to pick from, RPG systems don't have to be combat-focused. Could be stealth. Or crafting, I guess.

I had this idea for a game where you would want to get your level up to access locked doors and gadgets/weapons, but would then want to get your level back down to zero to sneak successfully (say, you glow brighter in the dark the higher level you are, and in social environments NPCs are quicker to notice you as something out of the ordinary). It'd be set in a sort of virtual world, and the point of the game is essentially corporate cyber-espionage, so you'll have to lie, convincingly and consistently, so as to not trigger suspicion when your lies are cross-examined (when NPCs talk to each other behind your back).
Now, it's a pipe dream kind of idea (feel free to rip it off though), the principles wouldn't apply across the board anyway. But I think with the kind of filler content bloat we're used to, the whole thinking during the dev process gets skewed, making it p. unlikely we'll see something like this anytime soon.

I don't know about Inside, but in general for these games the content versus time spent in game count works completely different than in RPGs.

For Inside, 3h was a generous estimate on my part. Even for a first playthrough.

 

[Trashos]

I agree with Tigranes' post on the 1st page. Other than that, remember that 20% of the Western World population cannot even follow simple written instructions without supervision. The gaming industry has expanded to include them.

 

[Cael]

I agree with Tigranes' post on the 1st page. Other than that, remember that 20% of the Western World population cannot even follow simple written instructions without supervision. The gaming industry has expanded to include them.

Average Western "intelligence":

That is all.


:D:D:D