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I have no patience for RPGs anymore

shihonage

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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
I seriously dont have any more patience for this stuff. I think the classical RPG format is loaded with boring shit thats just there out of tradition sake. Things like map-traversing in turtle steps are the most offensive one, but really, any map traversing at all is boring, except if its solely for exploration purposes. But for strolling through my own base ? Fuck just gimme a RotK 8 menu with options on static screens, man. Click-go-click-go. Done. By the way, I think the "sim" genre has some cool things that classical RPGs could take some lessons from.
Now, before anyone else accuses me of popamoleness, Im as old-school as it gets, with Ultimas and Underworlds and Darklands and Fallouts and Arcanums and System Shocks and Deus Exs and Stalkers and King of Dragon Pass and Alpha Centauris under my belt. (no Baldurs Gate nor Bioware though, those are crap). The last games I had the patience to finish recently was Invisible Inc. and Metal Gear Ground Zeroes, and both playthorughs together took less than 8 hours.
So, is it just me ? Or are other vets out there losing the patience to play through classical 40ish hours games ?

All true. But for me the problem with RPGs in general really boils down to these issues, some of which you mentioned:
  • Artificially extended NON-QUALITY playtime
    • Overextended travel distances and/or retardedly slow movement. In F1/F2 I found it scenic - and still do. In FO3/NV/Witcher/Skyrim/Far Cry/etc, it's annoying as shit, due to low content density. And in F1/F2 having camera movement separate as opposed to "tied to camera" made it a less trying experience.
    • "Crafting" and "Gathering" - i.e. making player tinker with mundane garbage instead of just finding strategically placed items, or having satisfyingly balanced random drops, or quest rewards. This MMO-derived "feature" is completely out of place in most games, and it destroys them.
  • Linearity
    • Over-reliance on combat for solving all problems in the world. Want to play the whole game as Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman? Tough luck. Go kill some more boars, mothafucka.
    • Dialogue choices not matching what character says.
    • Near-zero meaningful environmental reactivity (i.e. someone treating you differently, in a way that matters, because of your char.attributes or equipment).
    • Few alternate paths, which, if do exist, rarely match with what a reasonable player might WANT to do, and are always made obvious for the children. Think of the children!!
    • Lengthy non-interactive cutscenes, pulling you out of the game and beating into your head that all of it is predetermined, pre-acted and pre-voiced, and you have no real control.
  • Terrible writing
    • World design that easily falls apart (i.e. robbing someone's house in The Witcher while they're asking you for help).
    • No interesting characters.
    • No interesting quests, stories, lore, interwoven into gameplay.
    • Retarded "codexes" and "journals", which are not interwoven but are walls-of-text autistic rants because "that's what those nerds (i.e. us) must like". Often in some kind of separate menu, because we play games to read pages of boring drivel.
    • Everything is told AT YOU, THE PLAYER reminding you that it's a GAME. This bit of writing, let's say, from Firefly:

      BOOK: I do feel awfully useless.
      INARA: You could always pray they make it back safely.
      BOOK: I don't think the captain would much like me praying for him.
      INARA (turns away, doing kitchen stuff): Don't tell him. I never do.

      ... would look like this in the typical AR-PEE-GEE:

      INARA: (stares into camera with dead eyes) IT WOULD BE BAD IF THE CAPTAIN DIED. I CARE ABOUT THE CAPTAIN A LOT.
      YOU: TELL ME ABOUT THE BOARS AROUND THIS PLACE
  • Shit combat! You rely on combat as your go-to, meat&potatoes block of gameplay, and in the end it is shit.
    • Kingdoms of Amalur/Skyrim/Witcher/Dragon Age, etc all have repetitive combat with no strategy and poor sense of control. Witcher 3 apparently is the worst of them all, but they're all guilty. Mass Effect's combat feels like ass, too, and all those "strategic" options given to you are a fleeting mirage. You're there to PUSH BUTAN so TEH STOREY can be unraveled to you on your Xbox, dudebro.
    • Just because your combat is turn-based, doesn't mean it's fun. If it's just there for that "nerd interest checkmark", like those filler-text "codex logs", if it's there to just waste time - you just made dog food that nobody wants to eat.
Whenever some company comes out and says their game can be played for up to 200 hours, I want to ask - OF WHAT? The moment I detect that my time is wasted, i.e. load up Far Cry 3 and the first "quest" is to make some boar bags so you can carry more stuff or someshit... I am GONE.

Remember when games TRIED to be fun from the start? Not dumping a diarrhea of tutorial messages like in Pillars of Eternity, not sitting through lengthy cutscenes, but a subtle way to teach you AS YOU PLAY. PLAY, not go through some retarded tutorial.

Not a written-by-programmer-on-a-napkin dream sequence like in Dragon Age, or that awful vault sequence from Fallout 3, but just a character sheet. The first quest not being to FIND SOME BERRIES (PoE), or KILL SOME SPIDERS (DA) but actually something remotely interesting, to YOU, the PLAYER, who chose to spend money and time on the game!

Maybe I'm remembering games that were rare exceptions to the rule. What I do know is what it's like to have a job. The last thing in the world that I want, is a game that feels like one.

RPGs failed to grow up with me, and they've been failing for a very long time.
 
Last edited:

Trip

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Very good stuff here, both worldsmith and shihonage.
shihonage, I like the laundry list of stuff not to try and do. Luckily, my own programming and one-man-team limitations preclulde me from ever including anything from the more terrible stuff you mention in what I tinker with (extensive useless travel, filling the world with random herbs and fruit to "gather"). And many of the other problems you list are solvable by a single simple tool, seemingly kicked way back in many RPG developers' minds: writing skills. I mean, the best practices of good (at the least) writing are literally programmable, ffs. Now, structure is a bit more tricky.

Here worldsmith's point about playing at different levels of abstraction is a great one. Basically, structure is what the player expects is coming at any given moment. "So, I'm in town. Let's look at the NPC tooltips, see who has a name different than "Villager" and go receive quests... Ah, found one, "Jo'e". He's got a garden, he's distressed, "Oh, whatever shall I do?!" pops up above him now and again. K, will save myself some time and go clear out his garden first, then I'll click through the dialogue as quickly as possible and get all that sweet XP." If this happens in an RPG, the RPG has failed, irrespective of what happens later, and what twists and philosophical treatises on the nature of infested gardens the authors have in store.

Also, I don't buy the idea that you need to interact with the game world more or less in real time so you can feel "immersed". I feel plenty immersed in good novels even when they cover weeks in the space of a couple of paragraph. In the place of "good writing" RPG could substitite "good abstraction mechanics". (Though they could make liberal use of good writing to "cover up" these moments; visuals usually aren't very good at this anyway.)

Immersion in RPG is, to me, when the game encourages you to do stuff about which your avatar isn't crying in the corner at night, asking themselves "Why the fuck did I spent 20 hours killing boars? Why the fuck did I pick berries all day for that granny I met literally just now? What am I, the puppet of an idiot god?"
 
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As far as I can tell, the AI in Dwarf Fortress is very poor - it's all breadth (to deal with tons of game mechanics) and no depth (needed to produce behavior that appears more intelligent). A general purpose AI might be able to provide both breadth and depth with a reasonable number of development hours invested (and in fact I am betting on that in my own development work), but it seems to me the Dwarf Fortress AI is basically a bunch of hand-coded low-level behaviors (with A* thrown in for pathing) and not a general purpose AI at all. (Am I wrong? Are Dwarf Fortress AIs capable of complex non-pathing-related planning which fully takes into account not only the game mechanics but the likely behaviors/reactions of other characters? In this video they didn't seem to even notice the PC setting their town on fire.)

Well, first of all, imagine a typical video game (RPG, shooter, whatever) and all the AI problems it probably has. These games are relatively simple, everything is static, the developers have a good idea of what's going on, the systems are relatively shallow. And the AI still has all kinds of issues. Then you have Dwarf Fortress, which is the most complex game ever made, with tons of deep systems. It seems somewhat unrealistic to expect it to have perfect AI. Due to its complexity, it will always have some bugs or quirky unintended behavior, but most of those will get ironed out in time.

But even aside from that, I am not sure what you mean by DF AI being very poor. It's not a game that's dependent on having extremely lifelike AI, its fun and gameplay are derived from the multitude of in-depth systems in it and their interaction with each other and the player (combat/war, building/digging, economy, politics, crime, fluid dynamics, crafting, etc). As long as the AI is capable of navigating these systems in a believable manner, that's enough.

On the level of detail front, the game also appears to fail. E.g., see this video where the guy gets a quest that involves going into the sewers to kill some creature (oh, such a novel quest!). He says he's never managed to solve a sewers quest. Why? Because he's never managed to find the sewers. So he proceeds to just wander around manually looking for sewers while (retardedly) "oooing" and "ahhhing" at what appears to be a lot of random junk. Almost 20 minutes later, while still trying to find said sewers, PC gets in fight and is killed. (How fun.) In fact, some Dwarf Fortress youtubers like here realize that long stretches of the game are nothing but boring crap, and have skips in the video so they can just show the more interesting bits. As a player, I want that "skip feature" built right into the game so I too can skip all the boring crap. (At least the game does have fast travel - but much more is needed. That same page suggests this tidbit of exciting gameplay: "Now go find someplace reasonably safe and walk back and forth until your Crutch Walking skill gets up to Legendary or above.")

The reason why doing a sewers quest is awesome in DF is because unlike a typical video game, you can run into pretty much anything the game has managed to procedurally generate. And with every new system they add to the game, the type of stuff you could find increases. Maybe there is an ancient vampire cult beneath the sewers, or an abandoned tunnel to one of your old fortresses that got built over by this NPC city.

And what's wrong with spending time to look for stuff, or having to walk/explore between interesting bits? Do you just want an IV delivering a steady dose of AWESOME into your bloodstream? When games try to remove all tedium and less exciting parts, it almost never works as intended. Without effort, there can be no achievement, without slower parts, excitement loses its magic or wears you out.

Add to that the atrocious visuals (where you can't tell what anything is), poor UI, even more focus on combat than some other RPGs (if you ignore the long mostly pointless wandering around) and the game seems to me to be highly unlikely to be any fun for me. (I've already tried Dwarf Fortress in fortress mode in the past - didn't really care for it. Haven't really played much adventure mode because, unlike fortress mode, adventure mode never even gave me the impression it might be fun.)

Visuals can be quite different. There are graphical tilesets for it, some of which are pretty (Phoebus, Obsidian), a 2D isometric visualizer which might or might not work as a graphical interface these days called Stonesense, and a guy working on a 3D graphical interface using Unity, though that one is still early in development. There is also a mod being made for it now that creates a mouse driven interface.

Adventure mode is very raw. A couple of updates ago, there was nothing to do in it, now there is a bit more stuff, but in the future, I expect it to be glorious.
 

Trip

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Without effort, there can be no achievement, without slower parts, excitement loses its magic or wears you out.

Not sure if playing the "slower" parts should mean "drumming my fingers nervously while fiddling around with stuff that I know will play out exactly as I know it will, flitting back and forth between A and B in the process." Slower parts should still be enjoyable, if not for the drama and excitement, then for putting in motion some longer-term strategy, or learning about the world in an enjoyable manner.

People from the PnP genre have made some good distinctions in these types of game interactions. Exploring a world first-hand specifically to find and enjoy interesting stuff in it is called a hexcrawl (of course you might know this, if so, sorry for spelling it out); it has its rules and practices. Covering ground first-hand for the express purpose of just getting to some dungeon/NPC 5 town-maps away, on the other hand, is called bad design. If the game has stated "Now you shall go dungeoneering", I expect it to get me to the dungeon without useless hassle; or otherwise to at least strongly imply that there might be hassle, and it might be worth my time.
 

T. Reich

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If the game has stated "Now you shall go dungeoneering", I expect it to get me to the dungeon without useless hassle; or otherwise to at least strongly imply that there might be hassle, and it might be worth my time.

It's not the same genre, but you may want to try out the modern shooters, they should be right up your alley. None of distractions, just walk forward and enjoy the show.

Or wait for AoD, with its magical dialogue teleportation.
 

Trip

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It's not the same genre, but you may want to try out the modern shooters, they should be right up your alley. None of distractions, just walk forward and enjoy the show.

You're right, I don't want distractions. I want lots of relevant stuff to do. Not that what I'm describing are distractions, really. They're just a sluggish mess I have to wade through, looking at my destination in the distance and grinding my teeth. If it weren't a sluggish mess, I'd gladly get lost in it, believe me. (Which is what the whole hexcrawl game structure is about, really.) Also, it's not like RPGs now (and before) really have that "Oh, I'm just traipsing across a town/wilderness-map and all of a sudden I find something super-interesting (or it happens by itself) that distracts me in a good way from my goal." If they did, I'd have a lot less objections to that part of the whole thing.
 

thesoup

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tl;dr op is a faggot

I'm not in school or unemployed, I struggle with time to play games, yet I don't want instant travel popamole crap.
 

naossano

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Well said Shihonage.
Although, i would be happy if the game succeed in two areas out of three.

But the thing is, C&C and player agency shouldn't even be limited to RPG.
The whole point of a game compared with a book or a movie is that you participate in the experience, have action that have some impact. If the game ignore your action, you might as well play a movie. (although some games are still great without player agency, this is still failing to make use of the full potential of an interactive medium)
 

Leitz

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ITT we learn Cadmus' daily routine is that of a loser.


Ugh...I had that fuck Cadmus on ignore, and should have kept him on ignore to avoid his shitposts. Well, that's lesson to me I guess. Anyhow, back to ignoring.

Think twice before you put people 'on ignore', you might have a loss of 10-20% possible reply-posts on your side. You don't want that much more free time, don't you?
 

Drowed

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nH7Zf3i.png


:hmmm:

That, right there. He says he don't have patience (and "time", since he's too busy with life, work, etc) but as he said in that topic, he "got so addicted that we watched together most of the normal series and all Shippuden episodes until now".
The two statements just do not add up.
 

T. Reich

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That, right there. He says he don't have patience (and "time", since he's too busy with life, work, etc) but as he said in that topic, he "got so addicted that we watched together most of the normal series and all Shippuden episodes until now".
The two statements just do not add up.

Why, they do add up quite nicely. "I'm big into Naruto, so I have no patience for RPGs anymore." No wonder, really.
 
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Is there something that could really sell me on the game? Convince me that it's worth sinking a bunch of hours into it? Maybe demonstrate that I'm all wrong about its AI being shallow or about its inability to skip boring stuff? (I've tried finding such convincing materials - no such luck.)

Well, you did spend a bunch of hours researching other people's playthroughs so I imagine lack of time is not an issue. You could just go ahead and try to play the game yourself.
 

Doctor Sbaitso

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Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Grab the Codex by the pussy Serpent in the Staglands
You need to become a combatfag or systemsfag. RPGs with great TB combat mechanics are instantly gratifying, easy to pick up/put down.
And practically non-existent.

In no particular order, here are some games with great TB combat that I have thoroughly enjoyed. I have heard FF tactics is also good but haven't played it yet.

Pool of Radiance
Dark Sun: Shattered Lands
Knights of the Chalice
Temple of Elemental Evil + Co8 mod
Wizardry 8
Blackguards
Jagged Alliance 2
Xcom UFO Defense
 

Lord Azlan

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Playing UnderRail for the first time.

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

Interesting post. About the passage of time and how we change. Change is the only constant! What about good gaming design? As we get older have we lost the patience to play RPG of 40 hours?

Any game XXX

Graphics

I know it is not that important in a game because I remember playing Larn and Nethack in my student days. These are games where the graphics were made from keyboard characters. I remember playing table tennis on the first home Ataris. Elite and Sentinel on the BBC B. So a game like LoX is released and some people may just ignore it due to the graphics - I am willing to give it a chance. Reading the various reviews, many people knocked the graphics and presentation. To me, they were better than what I have experienced in the past - they were sufficient so not a reason to reject.

Would I play Larn again? No chance. Hmm - maybe on holiday on a tablet. But I did spend more than a hundred hours on Dungeons of Dredmor recently.

Interestingly enough I played BT1 again and enjoyed it. I tried to play BT2 and BT3 but stopped when I realised the graphics were from the crappy PC/ Apple versions not the colourful C64 versions I remember. So with graphics, maybe everyone has certain limits they would not drop below depending on what they remember and grew up with.

Run button

I know what you mean. In some of the real early games you moved around as fast as your finger could type or keep your finger on a button (or joystick). I remember playing Morrowind and one of the first things I used to do was increase my speed. Being able to run everywhere is everywhere although I recognise it is not realistic. I think developers make the wrong choice when they introduce 'real time slow paced walking'. I want to be able to move around the world as I did in the Bards Tale or Ultima, heck even Pools of Radiance. I don't want to pay for and play a game in 2015 that has slower movement. That is MY expectations.

One of the many comments about pre-release LoX was about the speed of the party. How many people would have bought and played the game if the party could only walk around at a slow pace. Gamers are not stupid. If part of the "50 hours game time" involves 30 hours walking around - you will get the middle finger. Remember the "Click here to Always Run" option? There is a reason it was introduced.

Fast Travel

Let's not pretend this is a new concept. Think Ultima IV moongates - think 1985. LoX has the dimension portals that in 100+ hours I have only used twice. It is good design people. Don't make the gamer go through 5 hours of gaming and then go back through empty, vacant, completed space. If you make them go back there better be some reward or some chance to do something.

Don't have to be Oblivions fast travel to every little hut - but have some options for goodness sake.

I can't remember exactly but in Arena or Daggerfall I tried to run/ walk from one map to another as some guy said he did it. He said it was possible. After about 3 hours moving in one direction and I gave up and felt like a fool.

Movement in games is interesting in itself - the way the designers do it. Would be nice to see some interviews with designers about this.

Summary

Now, going back to my first sentences - is change the only constant? Do gamers evolve or are we settled from an early age concerning what we like and don't like?

Are there any denizens of the Codex willing to admit they have changed their mind about some RPGs due to arguments found in the Codex?

I changed my mind about Fallout 1 and now think it's a great game. I remain unconvinced about Witchers, Dragonages, Baldurs Gates and Star Wars Old Republics. Saying that I really enjoyed Jade Empire and Mass Effects 1 and 2.

I am going to give Planescape a third go and maybe do a "Let's Play".

Do we have 40 hours to spare to complete a decent RPG? Off course we have. Play in bits, even over 6 months like that guy said.

What we are talking about is intelligent game design and our own preferences.

I gave Risen and Arx a chance due to Codex recommendations and loved them. Played them a long time.

I gave Alpha Protocol and Witcher a good, good chance and only feel nauseous and offended and would like my money back!
 

Immortal

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Some of the answers in this thread are pretty pathetic annoying. I agree that RPGs are notoriously padded, but don't use your age as an excuse for your popamole tastes. Yes, life gets more complicated when you get older and you have less time for your hobbies. But it's simple: if you care, you will make time. If you don't, just drop the hobby rather than half-assing it like a mid-tier manager who plays a game of tennis once a month.

It took me over half a year to finish MM6 because it's the type of game that you need to spend at least three or four hours on per session if you want to get anything signficant done, and I rarely have that much time left in a day. It boiled down to a simple question: is this game fun enough to be worth the scheduling hassle? And guess what, the fact that it took a lot of dedication to finish made it all the more rewarding, and it motivated me to try the same with Wizardry 8, which is now one of my top 5 RPGs.

Accept the fact that you have less time, evaluate your priorities accordingly, and then act on them. If that means dropping certain genres, fine. Just don't whine to the world about the fact that you don't care enough to make it work.

I totally agree with this answer except for one issue. Many times I set down an RPG for my "Super Important Big Grown Up Business Work" only to come back 2 months later and totally forget what the fuck is going on in the game, which invariably means I restart or just kinda muddle through until I remember again.

Same issue with novels I put down for a while too.

I am -not- arguing for shorter games, just saying I can kind of empathize with people who enjoy long drawn out narratives in games but get interrupted by real life issues naruto.


Ouch.. :lol:

> I have no time for RPG's, I am an important business man
> Proceeds to watch all 200 seasons of Naruto with a young child...
 

worldsmith

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"Crafting" and "Gathering"
Over-reliance on combat for solving all problems in the world.
I just wanted to point out that crafting and gathering could (at least in theory) be "done right". The key though is that (like pretty much any other game play element that is going to be good/interesting/highly-replayable in the game) they would have to:
  1. involve game play mechanics that pit the player against an AI (so they are challenging/interesting)
  2. allow for automation of the entire process if/when the task is simple (to avoid "boring minigame syndrome")
  3. be useful in making some meaningful impact in the state of the game world
Coming up with a solution for that first step can take some imagination. Note that the AI in question does not have to be an NPC - it could be a representation of nature, the essence or spirit of a river, or any other mumbo jumbo that can be fit into the game world's lore. (I will just add that for my own project I already came up with a solution for doing exactly this for enchanting items, which is one instance of crafting. And I really hope I can come up with a good solution for another instance - smithing - as well, just because I think it would be very cool to be able to essentially win a war just by providing your side with better gear - while of course doing so via fun game play. I really haven't given gathering much thought though. That one might be a tough one to apply this to, especially as it's not "self contained" like crafting is. I.e., it relates to resources "in the wild".)
I also quoted your comment on combat because I wanted to point out that:
  • it is an example of the same 3 ideas as above (or at least would be if RPGs would support #2 - many strategy games with tactical combat do support #2, letting you choose "auto-combat")
  • if you want the game to not rely so much on combat, then it (of course) needs to rely on other things, and (again of course) those other things should be fun/interesting, and using the 3 ideas above is a way to do that (though not necessarily the only way)
  • the fact that RPGs mostly only apply something like the 3 ideas above to combat is a "tradition" that should be broken

Well, first of all, imagine a typical video game (RPG, shooter, whatever) and all the AI problems it probably has.
How about we stick with the strategy games I already listed as being fun for me. I've already stated RPG AI tends to be inadequate, so trying to use it as an argument for DF AI being good enough is logically invalid.

These games are relatively simple, everything is static, the developers have a good idea of what's going on, the systems are relatively shallow.
Wrong, wrong and wrong. The strategy games I listed are fun to me specifically because the developers have no real idea how things are going to play out (and therefore can't ruin the game play by scripting everything), especially since every one of the games I listed supports random maps (which is how I prefer to play them), and the state of the buildings/units across the map over time is 100% emergent (due to interaction between my side and the AI sides). In fact, they are in some ways far more dynamic than DF - you can have an entire side representing 1/4 of the entire population being wiped out in just a few minutes. In AoW even the map is not static (as tunneling is a game mechanic in AoW), so DF is not unique even in that respect (though DF has more than just the 3 levels that AoW:SM has, though more levels would probably be more of a problem for AoW players than for the AI).

And the AI still has all kinds of issues.
Accomplishing its purpose, providing higher level strategy to challenge the player, even with "issues", is far better than DF which provides no such higher level strategy at all.

Then you have Dwarf Fortress, which is the most complex game ever made, with tons of deep systems. It seems somewhat unrealistic to expect it to have perfect AI. Due to its complexity, it will always have some bugs or quirky unintended behavior, but most of those will get ironed out in time.
No, this is also wrong. DF AI is not shallow/buggy/quirky by some inviolable law that says complex systems make AI flawed. DF AI has the problems it has because of how it has been coded - as a bunch of special cases (similar to an expert system) rather than as a generic AI (generalized search and learning). With a generic AI all you have to do is codify the rules (the "complex systems") in a format the AI understands. (A generic AI does require more effort/skill to create than a bunch of special cases, but once it's done you can add more rules without having to redo the AI, without having to worry about complex AI bugs, and without ending up with an AI that doesn't know how to use rules except in the few special cases that have been explicitly coded.)

It's not a game that's dependent on having extremely lifelike AI, its fun and gameplay are derived from the multitude of in-depth systems in it and their interaction with each other and the player (combat/war, building/digging, economy, politics, crime, fluid dynamics, crafting, etc).
I never said the AI has to be "lifelike" (though for NPCs I certainly think that would be a good thing). I said the AI has to be "good". (And your statement is implicitly subjective, because "its fun" does not even exist for me.) To further clarify what "good" is, and why good AI is so critical, consider that all good stories are about conflict, and that all "reliably" interesting conflict is between two intelligent entities (or groups thereof). A sandbox game like Factorio may be interesting to play while you're still mastering its systems, but once you achieve that the game quickly turns to being boring. And that's because it lacks any AI with which the player can enter a meaningful conflict, where instead of "being mastered" like some deterministic game mechanic, the AI is able to throw different strategies at the player, keeping things more interesting. DF has a lot of sandbox quality to it, and some people really like that kind of thing - that's all they need to make them happy. I am not one of those people. I want some meaningful conflict. Weak/shallow AI simply can not provide that. Yes, you can have (generally not interesting) tactical combat with such shallow AI, and DF has its gratuitously numerous ways in which you can maim and kill each other. But that is shallow and short-lived conflict. Are there ever kingdoms going to war and employing some reasonable strategy in doing so in DF? Are they constructing outposts, training new troops, researching weapons, and otherwise gearing up for conquest? That is one kind of "higher level" planning/action an AI can engage in (and what most of the games I listed are about). Of course, higher level planning need not just be about war - it could be about city building, making trade empires, growing a guild, all kinds of things (and all of those could be platforms for meaningful conflict between player and AI).

In most RPGs, like in DF, combat is procedural - it's player vs AI using the game's combat-related mechanics. So in that respect they are the same. And note that while I agree that if an RPG is going to have combat it's preferable that that combat be good/interesting, my main beef with RPGs was not the combat, but the stories. The problem is that those higher level conflicts are scripted stories, and I want something better than that. What DF provides in its place is nothing. There is no higher level conflict in DF. It just doesn't exist. That means there's no real over-arching story lines either. Sure, you can make a blog of what your DF character did this day and the next and the next and call that a story, but that's really not an interesting story, at least not to me.

The kind of thing I'd like to see is this: Say I make a party of bandits and start attacking merchants traveling along the road and stealing all their stuff (and not killing them if I don't have to because I want to rob them again some time). The merchants may respond by hiring more security and/or traveling in a caravan and/or trying different routes. If goods aren't reaching their destination, prices should go up and there may be scarcity. If some of the goods going scarce are considered important to the kingdom's security (maybe the merchants were trying to deliver goods to the capitol or some castle), the local lord or king may get involved, sending guards on patrol and/or hiring some adventurers/mercenaries and/or posting a reward. Maybe meanwhile characters in some city off in the opposite direction hear about this and spot an opportunity and start producing those scarce goods themselves and shipping them to the capitol for sale (since they heard me and my bandits have only been operating in an area they don't have to travel through).

Those kind of things can not be hand-coded into the AI by the developer. It's just not feasible. Maybe you could hand-code the one scenario above, but then there's the next thousand interesting scenarios, and the thousand after that, and you really can't stop until you've coded up so many of them that the player rarely has face-palm moments due to the NPCs acting unbelievably dumb because you've hit a scenario they know nothing about. (And then every one of those scenarios has a thousand variations that are basically the same thing but which hand-coded NPC reactions are not likely to recognize and treat as such.) That's why a general purpose AI is needed - so stories like the one above can emerge from the interactions of the PC, the NPCs and the game world mechanics.

As long as the AI is capable of navigating these systems in a believable manner, that's enough.
And what part of that video I posted, where the player sets the elf village on fire, and then the elf elder is happy to have a cordial chat with the player while the village burns (and the elf guards just stand in the fire and burn) was "believable"?

The reason why doing a sewers quest is awesome
Dude, I watched the video. Awesome it was not. It was boring. Don't think you can use argument to convince me that what I watched was in fact not boring. (Though technically I didn't watch most of it, just listened to it while I read other stuff and only flipped it back to foreground to watch if something interesting was going on. It was almost 20 minutes of pretty much nothing interesting.)

And what's wrong with spending time to look for stuff, or having to walk/explore between interesting bits?
It's a waste of time. It's boring. I would rather be having fun. You know - fun - that reason why I play games in the first place.

Do you just want an IV delivering a steady dose of AWESOME into your bloodstream?
Don't try to make this about some "awesome button retardedness". This is about wanting something that is fun/interesting to play. That doesn't mean 100% "AWESOME, WINNING!" It can mean having a puzzle to work on, or trying to figure out what some clues mean, or running away for my life because I just walked into something I really wasn't ready for, or any number of other things. But what I don't want is 95% boring crap and 5% interesting game play.

Without effort, there can be no achievement, without slower parts, excitement loses its magic or wears you out.
You're just engaging in strawmen/confusion here. Of course there has to be effort - in the form of challenge, conflict, solving problems, etc. There does not need to be effort in the form of "slowly click mouse button 200 times in slightly different locations to lead your character through boring streets". And "slower" does not need to mean boring. Working on solving a puzzle is going to be slower than engaging in real-time combat, but they can both be interesting game play. And recall that from the start I have always stated that the level of detail the player plays at should be up to the player. If you enjoy walking everywhere, then the game should let you do that. If I don't, then the game shouldn't make me. Everyone gets what they want. What's wrong with that?


Well, you did spend a bunch of hours researching other people's playthroughs so I imagine lack of time is not an issue. You could just go ahead and try to play the game yourself.
No, I didn't spend nearly that long. I did not "watch" the entirety of the videos I linked (e.g., I stopped with the "sewers quest" one at his first death), and as mentioned above didn't really even watch most of the time (just listened while I read other stuff). I also have dozens of RPGs from GOG I could "just play myself", and the ones pakoito suggested, and a bunch of free ones I've noted, and then non-RPG games, and then non-game stuff. There's quite a few things there I would spend a lot of time on before sinking hours into DF adventure mode simply because my estimation of the value of doing so is significantly higher than my estimation of the value of playing DF adventure mode. That's kind of the point - if I'm going to play a game, it's going to be because it's the best thing I can do with my time at that moment.
 

Ashenai

Learned
Joined
May 1, 2015
Messages
91
When you were young, things were new. Fewer things felt like "been there, done that", because, well, you hadn't been there, and you hadn't done that yet. In addition, we weren't inundated with games. If you couldn't handle XCOM's godawful interface, tough. There simply wasn't a decent alternative.

So we buckled down and learned the interface, and drew the maps on graph paper, and took notes, with an actual pen, on actual paper, because that's what we had to do. We did all the horrible, dull grinding you had to do in Bard's Tale, and went up and down multi-level dungeons just to heal at a temple, because that's what you did. We didn't even mind, it was part of the challenge. Fast travel? Hah.

And somewhere along the way, games became a big business and supply began outstripping demand, and accordingly, we became demanding, whiny little bitches with entitlement complexes and ADHD. Oh no, it's like 30 seconds to walk across the map! Oh no, nothing exciting has happened for like two minutes now! This game sucks! I bet Naruto would have punched like three dudes' faces off in this time!

Yeah well fuck you. The merit of a game is how much fun can be extracted from it, not how much it shoves at you constantly. Would a game be better if it never wasted your time with pointless backtracking or shitty tutorials? Yeah. But if you're unwilling to make the effort to work past a game's flaws and find the fun in it, then I don't think RPGs are really your thing. Also, your 12-year-old self is ashamed of you.
 

Goral

Arcane
Patron
The Real Fanboy
Joined
May 4, 2008
Messages
3,552
Location
Poland
(...) I'm not in school or unemployed, I struggle with time to play games, yet I don't want instant travel popamole crap.
Instant travel is the opposite of popamole. Fallout 1 was so fun because there was no bloat and you could run through even biggest cities very quickly. Yet they had 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 (and fast travel was only between cities). 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).
 

prodigydancer

Arcane
In My Safe Space
Joined
Feb 16, 2015
Messages
1,399
We didn't even mind, it was part of the challenge.
I don't want to rain on your nostalgia parade but how about being honest with yourself? Playing those old game didn't entirely consist of grappling with primitive UI and backtracking through hordes of respawning enemies. Other things made them fun. For instance, well-designed combat systems. Or writing - not perfect perhaps but at least free of eye-scratching grains of anachronistic corporate speak. Or jokes that actually made you laugh.

Now a typical today's mainstream game is either a hackneyed interactive movie with a cutscene at every step or an MMO-flavor recipe: 50% of more-of-the-same and 50% of arms race. Or a mix of both (like DA:I). Bad parts become progressively more noticeable and more irritating as good parts evaporate.

Of course it's still possible to find a good game, thanks to KS and indies. What I'm saying is that it's not all burnout.
 

naossano

Cipher
Joined
Aug 26, 2014
Messages
1,232
Location
Marseilles, France
Instant travel is a game killing for me.
It is clearly an awfull lazy move from dev considering the billions of more believable options to speed up travel.
It isn't like the only two options are walk slowly like a turtle with crippled legs vs teleport everywhere anytime.
There is no excuse for such a failure when you can copy paste much much much much much better concepts.

As a side note, i think watching Naruto all the way require more patience than playing RPG. I doubt i would have such patience.
 

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