I have no patience for RPGs anymore

[UnknownBro]

What I mean by ruined is that by continuing down this path you will find a place where you can not appreciate nor enjoy anything except in the most superficial way, and but for the briefest of moments. Imagine an existence where you 'enjoy' 10 million shallow exchanges a day, remembering none of them, and each of them only satisfying some sudden impulsive urge but for that moment alone because alas the next such urge is upon you again. A constant state of uneasiness, desire and want and ultimately, unhappiness.

 

[Stompa]

Underrail actually has fast travel, you can pay to go by metro or boat to most major hubs. And you can enhance your walking speed with items. I do hate the slow transition to the caves given that you can go to the docks without any of those bioscans even though locations available for sailing connect to the same caves.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

This is what I liked about Darklands and the first two Elder Scrolls games. (And the 1989 Microprose action-strategy-RPG hybrid Sword of the Samurai, but no one's ever heard of that one. Try it if you liked Darklands and you don't mind the occasional realtime actiony bits.) You can legitimately just do whatever you want and know that there's no danger of missing anything or running out of shit to do, since quests and events are procedurally generated on the fly wherever you are.

It's how my ideal RPG would work, except with way more moving parts than any of those games. Unfortunately, the early Elder Scrolls games, Darklands, and Sword of the Samurai all start getting repetitive and same-y way too early.

When I say procedural approach, I should make clear that I mean deep procedural systems like in Dwarf Fortress, not the shallow procedural stuff in Daggerfall or Darklands. As you say, those games get repetitive and boring very fast, because shallow procedural generation doesn't work well at all. To make it work you really need to put some effort into complex systems.

 

[Sitra Achara]

CheatEngine, eliminating tedious walking and animations since 2008 (or whatever)

 

[Overboard]

...

Speech is Silva, patience is golden.

 

[Mustawd]

At the end of the day, it's not RPGs that are at fault here IMO. It's just that many of our lifestyles don't really match up with how these games are structured. For example, I might have an hour once a day, three times a week to play the game. In a deep, complex, and great incline RPG like Underrail, maybe it takes me 5-7 mins to remember what I had done last time...where the story is, etc. Ok, great, so I realize i need to talk to 3 or 4 NPCs, so that's an additional 10 mins. So far 17 mins have passe. then I double check equipment, make sure I sold everything I need to sell, buy everything I need to buy; another 5-7 mins.

Finally, I can start to go out and start a quest; So that's what...30 minutes of good gameplay? Then the rest of the hour is walking back to town to make sure I save/sell everything...and that's my hour.

Imagine doing this a few times...after a while you'll just say "fuck it" and load some popamole or actioney game like Diablo II or whatever to help unwind from work. Same issue with my main game right now: Telepath Tactics: Great tacticool gameplay, nice and crisp GFX, but there's no in-game save. So we're talking one run through a large map...me rushing to finish the map before my time is up, etc.


Then you wonder why people like Tim Cain have AAA popamole games in their most played Steam library. It's not the game's fault. It's just that a proper RPG needs time..something that's less in supply when you're a bit older...

I guess what I'm trying to say is "fuck getting old"...

 

[Jools]

So, is it just me ? Or are other vets out there losing the patience to play through classical 40ish hours games ?

I, for one, am a big supporter of 40+hours, under certain conditions.

Said conditions being either a FUCKING EPIC story that will engross me start to end, and/or open world thing to just roam around and go a bit GTA. Obviously, and more to the point you made in your OP, if 40 hours means 25 hours backtracking because of no fast travelling options, then fuck it, because it means that's just lazy design or padding the game's length.

 

[Telengard]

My dad was in his 30s back in the cassette days, and he would play all of them real old -school RPGs, with their 30 minute load times. And I do mean minutes, pansies. Record was Telengard, where it took 15 minutes to load the game, and then it took him 50 minutes to load his high level character.

So, yeah. It's just you.

 

[Mustawd]

My dad was in his 30s back in the cassette days, and he would play all of them real old -school RPGs, with their 30 minute load times. And I do mean minutes, pansies. Record was Telengard, where it took 15 minutes to load the game, and then it took him 50 minutes to load his high level character.

So, yeah. It's just you.

Get serious. In my example he would never get to play. 50 minute load time? Lol


At the end of the day it's just another unfortunate side effect of your life becoming more filled up with other things. Sometimes I'll have a whole weekend (like now), where I can play RPGs or strategy games, and sometimes I have 20-45 minutes to waste and IO'll play an FPS or SHMUP instead. So to OP's point...yeah, you tend to lose patience with some stuff you used to feel was "immersive". again, this is not the game's fault. So yeah...,I guess you're right haha...it's just us older farts with little time.

 

[Trip]

At the end of the day it's just another unfortunate side effect of your life becoming more filled up with other things. Sometimes I'll have a whole weekend (like now), where I can play RPGs or strategy games, and sometimes I have 20-45 minutes to waste and IO'll play an FPS or SHMUP instead. So to OP's point...yeah, you tend to lose patience with some stuff you used to feel was "immersive". again, this is not the game's fault. So yeah...,I guess you're right haha...it's just us older farts with little time.

I think it's also a little bit the game's fault, really. Lots of these "100+ hours traverse-the-whole-map over and over" experiences model pretty closely the more insidious sort of fat fantasy, where "immersion" means describing some fucking blind alley of an action in way more words than is necessary, just so you can feel cozy under the covers with the 1000-page shit-brick in your hands and your milk and cookies on the side.

And yeah, once you get over a certain threshold of responsibilities in life, a pretty low one really, this starts getting on your nerves, especially when you know you can read four 300-page books by Gene Wolfe (i.e. Book of the New Sun) or even a couple of 250-pagers from Zelazny and come away with a much more powerful experience that the Wheel of Time's 15 000 pages. But I'm not sure if cRPGs have an equivalent to that; it sure would be great though. It is about ADD somewhat, but it also about me thinking of loading an old-school-like RPG and not having second thoughts when I remember what it feels to play these games, second-to-second, making hundreds of useless rounds of this or that area, rummaging through inventories, wading through thinly-veiled, badly executed tutorials and infodumps, not to mention poorly thought-out combat padding.

 

[naossano]

Playing UnderRail for the first time.

1. What an atmosphere! what cool little graphics! What moody sounds!
2. Damn the guy is too slow.. where is the run button ... fuck there is no run button
3. fuck, why dont the screens transition directly ? I have to wait this slow fade out.
4. Hey! Beardy dude by the crossroads is cool. Seems like someone avatar on the codex
5. what a moody exploration! Im excited! all those derelict stations and all
6. OH COME ON, no fast travel ?? I must traverse all these maps back in turtle steps !?
7. Ok, first mission is over. Now I must capture some little dogs.
8. FUUUUCK! MAPS TOO BIG! TURTLE STEPS AGAAAAAIN!!!!
9 quit

You made me want to play this game even more.
Especially the part about fast travel.
Thank you.

 

[Konjad]

I have a similar issue with RPGs, both new and old. It's not running around that's boring to me, I even like that (not in case of Underrail though, but ie. Morrowind). It's the FUCKING FILLER COMBAT EVERY 5 SECONDS that the whole genre suffers from. I know these are not adventure games but this is extremely annoying that it doesn't matter what RPG I run I must beat those goblins/bees/turtles/jellies every minute or two in average. Underrail suffers from it and so does the whole genre, even PST. Why not have a RPG where the combat is rare and meaningful instead of killing hundreds or thousands of poor creatures that we encounter throughout the game? I don't like Diablo enough to want it in every game, but that's what we get. I don't mind constant combat only in very few RPGs where the combat was actually really well developed, but these are exceptions (like D:OS, ToEE, E:C etc.). If you can't make a really good combat then make it rare! But no, we have to kill all those fucking rats and goblins every ten steps we take.

 

[DraQ]

I have no patience for RPGs anymore

What is it with all those self-ejection threads lately?

Spoiler

I have a similar issue with RPGs, both new and old. It's not running around that's boring to me, I even like that (not in case of Underrail though, but ie. Morrowind). It's the FUCKING FILLER COMBAT EVERY 5 SECONDS that the whole genre suffers from. I know these are not adventure games but this is extremely annoying that it doesn't matter what RPG I run I must beat those goblins/bees/turtles/jellies every minute or two in average. Underrail suffers from it and so does the whole genre, even PST. Why not have a RPG where the combat is rare and meaningful instead of killing hundreds or thousands of poor creatures that we encounter throughout the game? I don't like Diablo enough to want it in every game, but that's what we get. I don't mind constant combat only in very few RPGs where the combat was actually really well developed, but these are exceptions (like D:OS, ToEE, E:C etc.). If you can't make a really good combat then make it rare! But no, we have to kill all those fucking rats and goblins every ten steps we take.

Actually, D:OS has surprisingly few combat encounters for how combat centric it feels.

If there is one thing it got truly perfectly it's the pacing of combat encounters (combat system itself is great and incredibly fun - more than enough to float the game as whole - but there is a lot of room for obvious improvement there).

And yeah, I find being forced into pointless or repetitive activity far more tiresome than just having forced downtime when walking or waiting. Coincidentally this applies to nearly all minigames as well as trash combat encounters.

 

[worldsmith]

snip

I think all games that want to cater to people who value their own time (and have no shortage of other things they could be doing) have to try to provide sufficient entertainment-per-unit-time. And I agree that RPGs tend to fall far short of where they need to be. I wish I could speak more definitively on this, as I could if I had a lot more RPGs under my belt, but every time I try one and it too falls short, that just makes me even more wary of investing any time into the next one, so I find myself in my current situation where I own a lot more RPGs than I have actually played.

For the entertainment side of the equation I am convinced that the best way to achieve that, especially if replay value is desired, is good AI. There is just no substitute for good AI. (And for RPGs I do not just mean tactical combat AI, though the principle certainly holds for tactical combat -- good tactical combat that is interesting, feels fair and has good replay value requires good AI.)

For the time side of the equation there are many things that can (and should) be done, but for RPGs I believe one of the most important features needed is to support the player playing the game at whatever level of detail they want to be playing it at at any given time. E.g., if they want to manually walk around a town, let them. But if they want to just do some trading and would prefer the game simulate the walking around part without them having to watch it or live it in real time, then let them do that. If they want their character to search an entire section of dungeon for secret walls, then let them issue that command and it all gets simulated - for crying out loud don't make the player manually go around clicking on every wall segment to see if it's real or not! If they want their character to keep up their regular training regiment (or whatever regular behaviors the player has set up) but they don't want to actually control their character until a certain date (maybe there's some special spell-casting/ritual date coming up), then the game should support that. If the player wants the game to stop simulating and give back control of their character in certain situations (e.g., this should be enabled by default for dangerous chance encounters - not "random"-as-in-dice encounters, but encounters that actually happen during simulation), then the game should support that. Basically, give the player tools that allow them to focus on the bits they find interesting, and simulate/automate the rest.

all of them real old -school RPGs, with their 30 minute load times

My Dungeons of Daggorath cartridge loads in, let's see... zero seconds flat. So not all old games had long load times. (I just had that game in mind because it recently came up in Cleve's thread. But it's also true that most of my game library in those days was cartridges. As far as I can remember, the only tape game I ever bought was Pyramid 2000.)

Record was Telengard, where it took 15 minutes to load the game

Sounds like the C64 - so much of that machine was just... subpar. Tape was only 300 baud. For comparison, a Tandy Color Computer (CoCo) did tape at 1500 baud (making it nearly as fast as the C64 floppy drive).

and then it took him 50 minutes to load his high level character.

That sounds like something was seriously performance-broken in the game's software. Even a C64 shouldn't take that long. Loading all 64KB of RAM should only take 30 minutes tops if done right, and that would cover loading both the executable and the character.

Maybe it was doing a "load, process, load, process, ..." loop. That was one way to make tape on the CoCo super slow because every time you stop loading to do some processing it has to stop the tape motor, and then the next load not only requires spinning the tape motor back up but requires reading (or writing when saving) a new sync/header block (which is basically wasted space on the tape and wasted read/write time). It would still take a lot of such cycles to add up to 50 minutes though. (If each cycle takes at most 4 seconds, that means 750+ start/stop cycles.)

So, yeah. It's just you.

No, you're severely confused about reality.

Your dad did not have the internet we have today providing so many opportunities to spend his time on other things. Nor did he have a modern (2010+) computer and an absolutely gigantic library of other games available to play, many of which provide significantly more entertainment-per-unit-time. If he did, he would not have been regularly wasting 65 minutes of his life just for the chance to play that game.

Furthermore, even back then, when load times were so long, only a retard would sit there doing nothing while the game was loading. Instead you get up and do something else and then come back when it's done. That's a completely different situation than RPGs that require you to remain at the controls the whole time. (Now if a modern RPG was "simulating the world" while your party rested, so that 8 hours of rest takes 30 minutes of real-world time, that could be dealt with the same way as the old loading times - walk away and come back when it's done. Trying to walk away between successive mouse clicks where each click only results in the game doing something for a very small number of seconds though, doesn't really work so well as a time-conservation strategy.)

 

[Sykar]

The game has (logically limited) fast travel and a Sprint feat. Speed is affected by carry weight and the maps are not really big. No idea what the problem with the fading is. You prefer loading screens every 5 minutes?

This OP is pure .

 

[Trodat]

I still have more time to play that is good for me but I just find fewer and fewer games to be actually worth the effort.

you realize you have let the internet, TV jump cuts, modern sensibilities etc ruin your natural ability to sit and appreciate being a human being alive on the earth?

This is true and a good point to make.

 

[StaticSpine]

I have a similar issue with RPGs, both new and old. It's not running around that's boring to me, I even like that (not in case of Underrail though, but ie. Morrowind). It's the FUCKING FILLER COMBAT EVERY 5 SECONDS that the whole genre suffers from. I know these are not adventure games but this is extremely annoying that it doesn't matter what RPG I run I must beat those goblins/bees/turtles/jellies every minute or two in average. Underrail suffers from it and so does the whole genre, even PST. Why not have a RPG where the combat is rare and meaningful instead of killing hundreds or thousands of poor creatures that we encounter throughout the game? I don't like Diablo enough to want it in every game, but that's what we get. I don't mind constant combat only in very few RPGs where the combat was actually really well developed, but these are exceptions (like D:OS, ToEE, E:C etc.). If you can't make a really good combat then make it rare! But no, we have to kill all those fucking rats and goblins every ten steps we take.

for this post!

Tho D:OS is too long and has a lot of filler combat IMO.

I'm really looking forward to AoD and TToN cause both are going to have zero tharsh mobs/filler stuff.

But most of other devs seem to think that the more stuff the game has the more fun and attractive the game is (even if the stuff is repetitive and only serves as an artificial source of game length). All those "we have 100+, 200+, 500+ hours of gameplay" advertisements scare the shit out of me.

 

[mondblut]

you realize you have let the internet, TV jump cuts, modern sensibilities etc ruin your natural ability to sit and appreciate being a human being alive on the earth?

You must be the guy who whined over Geralt in Twitcher always running.

If being a human being alive on the earth was anywhere near fun and exciting, we wouldn't need fucking computer games in the first place

 

[naossano]

Why not have a RPG where the combat is rare and meaningful instead of killing hundreds or thousands of poor creatures that we encounter throughout the game?

This isn't an rpg and i didn't try it, but shadow of the colossus seems to fit the bill.

 

[pakoito]

Why not have a RPG where the combat is rare and meaningful instead of killing hundreds or thousands of poor creatures that we encounter throughout the game?

This isn't an rpg and i didn't try it, but shadow of the colossus seems to fit the bill.

Titan Souls does the same.

 

[DawnrazorDCLXVI]

I notice that RPG Codex seems to prefer spreadsheets to more organic experiences, very left brained thinking. Everything has to be dialogue-heavy, isometric, and with turn based combat...or else.

Rarely do I hear a Looking Glass game mentioned, much less a new Deus Ex, or System Shock 2, and even then, only in passing. Elder Scrolls series seems to put everybody off. Dark Souls got brief waves, and even Witcher undergoes heavy waves of criticism despite fanboys. Yet nobody would dispute Fallout 1-2, and given the choice, I think most players here would prefer a new Jagged Alliance, or Wasteland, or Original Sin sequel, than a new Underworld, even if it was done properly gauging by the number of comments.

Give them first person, or real time, and it's OH GAWD NO! Especially if there's no dialogue, or minimalistic dialogue with few choices.

I don't mind criticising binary choices, but aside from the idiosyncratic liking for Diablo 1-2, which is "too simplistic," if compared even to Oblivion, it ironically derives more attention from fanboyism, despite the fact it is, at its core, a gigantic hamster wheel.

Meaning people here prefer spreadsheets to cinematic gameplay, or visual artistry. It reminds me of my VT classes, where the instructor mentioned two classes of people: one type goes into visual design, the other type goes into C++. While it takes both to make a game, I think most people here are literal thinkers, to where a piece of cardboard chalked with binary code would hold more interest than a game with unique design, and direction. Which means they would major in C++, and leave the Visual Technology for people like me.

I probably belong on the TTLG forums, but I hate censorship, and RPGCodex is nothing if not interesting--I tend to like lurking. In my ten plus years, I still enjoy every moment of the circus, where people are free to speak their minds. It's like grabbing popcorn to watch the carnival. Just watch out: Not my circus, not my monkeys.

No matter what you say, someone will misconstrue you, or be offended.

That said, it still has 20% more Jewgold mentions, making it a fascinating rodeo, and perhaps the worlds largest social experiment, where people are free to act like themselves without limit. Thus, it functions much like an anarchist society might, pointing out exactly how such a pirate utopia might be non-governed. Anyone with a strict libertarian viewpoint might be intrigued to see how their hypothetic society turned out, simply by tuning into how people act online, in these forums.

That said, the trolls worry me, IRL. Hysterical from a distance, but in such a society, they'd cause quite a wrench in such a social system.

/Ramble.

 

[commie]

To be here for 10 years and only now reveal yourself as a ADD addled popamole faggot is really impressive.


At least there is still this:

DawnrazorDCLXVI

Educated

Joined: Jan 11, 2015

So at least some things stay the same...

 

[Mustawd]

/Ramble.

 

[DawnrazorDCLXVI]

To be here for 10 years and only now reveal yourself as a ADD addled popamole faggot is really impressive.


At least there is still this:

DawnrazorDCLXVI

Educated

Joined: Jan 11, 2015

So at least some things stay the same...

Really? I was expecting someone to get defensive. Your biases just exploded in your face: it's no wonder you're getting defensive. People who are wrong often get defensive.

 

[DalekFlay]

Not sure patience is how I would put it, but one reason I haven't played a game since Septermber is a very similar quick-to-boredom reaction when playing a game. I don't think it's the game's fault really, or patience especially, but more just you aren't in the mood anymore and you can't force it. I just take super long breaks from games and then when I come back I am usually eager to take those turtle steps, rather than find them annoying.

 

[Mustawd]

To be here for 10 years and only now reveal yourself as a ADD addled popamole faggot is really impressive.


At least there is still this:

DawnrazorDCLXVI

Educated

Joined: Jan 11, 2015

So at least some things stay the same...

Weird....his profile shows he joined Jan 10, 2015