Editorial Joystiq on Grinding in RPGs

Poor dear. Perhaps we should find him a novelization of the game.

I was going to post something but it is more efficient to just .

I don't love grinding in RPGs, but there are very few games made outside of Japan where grinding is necessary.

Super edgy -- he belongs on the Codex. Oh wait...

Oh Bee, you know how to make a man stop reading

Repetition is inherent in games, and there's nothing wrong with it as long as it is... FUN.

Grinding emerges as a concept when you give player repetitive tasks with no fine control over how they are performed, thus ensuring guaranteed boredom. I.E. clicking on an enemy repeatedly until their health bar depletes.

Modern RPGs and especially traditional MMOs are more guilty of this than other genres, because they heavily abstract combat - something that was supposed to be involving, and dare I say, creative, fun.

It's a shame that fun has such a fluid definition.

Going through the early Wizardry for the first time, I can't help but feel that these games got the right idea about grinding. For the most part, exploring and mapping the maze is the bigger challenge of the game, and by the time I'm done with a celllar, I usually fought enough beasties to be of an acceptable level for the next cellar.

Anyway article isn't terribly interesting and indeed who reads Joystiq anyway?

The issues of grinding and exploration will always be inseparable as exploration is one of the few ways to adequately deal with avoiding a rigidly non-linear RPG. Moreover, the definition of grinding ranges widely depending on your perspective. Is it simply going back and forth in the hopes of triggering a random encounter for xp gain (a la earlier jRPGs like Dragon Warrior or Phantasy Star or whatever)? Is exploration grinding? Is side questing grinding? Is side questing only grinding when it is mostly 'Fed Ex or Kill X monsters?'

Obviously there are other ways to deal with it like packing your game full of 'gateway' style choice and consequence moments such that, while ensuring your character/party sufficiently gains enough experience to beat the big bad/finish the game, there are meaningful deviations along the way in terms of factions, areas, quests, etc. Of course, you can have both but including an inordinate amount of side quests on top of a 'premeasured for xp' main quest leads to having an overpowered character/party and ruins the challenge (barring level caps). Then there's the lazy way of doing it: level scaling that nullifies any feel of progression.

When you're designing a combat focused ARPG then complaints of grinding ring a bit hollow. You pretty much know what you're getting into when you boot up the game. They all follow the same Diablo-esque formula. Beat encounter(s) to get stronger and find better item(s) so you can beat more encounters(s) to get stronger and find better item(s) so... blah blah blah... Essentially something like Dark Souls is no different in its formula it just has different (superior) fighting mechanics.

Get rid of leveling.

Oh, look, another of those fantastic articles about people that loves games but hate actually playing them...

I read stuff like that like I would read hispters complaining that rock shows are too long; they just wanna go there, take a picture and post on facebook, anything over 3 songs is just boring and pure repetition, no one goes there for the music anyway...

Is this even true? I didn't play it, but I played Oblivion and the combat is similar, so the only way I can see this being true is if your original strategy is just to soak blows and hit hit hit and suddenly an enemy can kill you in less than 5 hits so now you need to use the block button. Or if a mage you now need to backpedal. Desperate, memorable strategy indeed.

Do Film Critics who hate and barely watch,say, horror movies get paid to write articles about what horror movies should be like and how new horror movies are better because they streamlined the unintuitive and inaccessible scariness?

I guess I was one of those when I was younger: The whole point of the game-play portion of the game was to get to the next cinematic/cool new character or level, rather than the process of decimating the enemies that stood in my way.

I just figure the author is the eight year old me.

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Converting PDF to Kindle format as we speak . . . Deity preserve me.

I've always defined grinding as repeated, insubstantial to (possibly emergent) narrative or gameplay, or game's structure and technically (though not necessarily actually) optional activity that's undertaken by player solely as a means to an end.

It can be either a conscious design anti-feature (like in Derpblo 2 & 3) or it can result from a loophole (like Beth's inability to sufficiently grind proof their use-based system despite it being trivial to do).

Dark & Demon Souls makes you redo areas and kill the same enemies countless times, but it doesn't feel like grinding because everytime you learn something, and the enemies can still kill you if you're careless... problem with MMOs and some RPG is that all the battles against the same enemy fight the same.

But would you describe Baldur's Gate or PlaneScape Torment as an MMO-like grinding session?