The RPG Scrollbars: Richard Cobbett's weekly RPG column

[V_K]

The only complaint of his I disagree with is about crafting never being useful - thank god it's never useful, that means you can at least pretend it doesn't exists (aside from a bit of pita with inventory management).

 

[Neanderthal]

On whole I agree wi this, good article, only one caveat: High level spellslingers workin wi crafters to forge magic items or even artifacts, on their tod making new spells and using spells to craft their domicile, be it a tower, dungeon or whatever. One o great things about AD&D, all them great spells designed for this kinda shit. Never really seen it realised in video games except maybe for craftin o Black Sword in Forge o Virtue.

Don't really mind collectin reagents, but ideally that should be a well crafted side quest or something you stumble across in a world that makes sense, like all spider silk or nightshade you can find in parts o Deep Forest. Thought that were really well designed, as opposed to all modern back an forth bullshit padding games.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/03/07/the-rpg-scrollbars-just-go-along-with-it-okay/

The RPG Scrollbars: Just Go Along With It, Okay?
Richard Cobbett on March 7th, 2016 at 1:00 pm.

Spoiler alert, RPGs are kinda ridiculous. Most games are, of course. While the Mythbusters may have shown that carrying Doomguy’s loadout into battle isn’t as bad as it might sound, there’s a reason they’ve never done a follow-up about doing it after taking a few rockets to the face. Likewise, we can’t know the effect of glugging down fifty health potions a day, but it must mean a lot of pauses for the heroic knight to hurriedly get his armour off for a quick pee-break.

Like a lot of things, there’s a line here – on one side, things that are interesting to see a game justify, and on the other, things that are probably best handwaved. Where does that line lie?

For example, more realistic RPGs like Darklands are probably better off not trying to keep things realistic to the point that the entire party is struck down with diabetes and liver failure after abusing potions, even though in ‘reality’ there’s a reason why the only thing separating medicine from poison is dosage. Health potions are also the bane of story/gameplay segregation, with one of my favourite ‘doh’ moments being the first Vampire: The Masquerade game, Redemption. Your hero has been wounded and spends months and months being slowly nursed back to health by the compassionate nurse Anezka… only to find out there’s a potion shop just a couple of doors away.

I do like it when games at least consider the details though, especially where other characters are concerned. Knights of the Old Republic II and Planescape Torment for instance are two of the few that offer a justification for why some of the toughest people in the universe have decided to drop what they were doing and go slay and murder on behalf of some passing antihero – the Exile’s subconscious Force Bond in KOTOR 2, and The Nameless One’s mix of drawing souls in torment and unfinished business with party members who just don’t fill him in on specifically why they wanted to join until later in the game. Less mystically, the whole point of Mass Effect 2 is that it’s a recruitment drive where you’re offering people a job, so while it’s arguable that you don’t need half as many rogues and miscreants taking up space on your ship as you end up with, especially with all the DLC, it’s at least easier to treat it both as a win and just assume that details like pay and whatever are being dealt with behind the scenes. The joy of having a very rich patron backing the journey.

When it goes wrong though, it can really go wrong. I remember the painful thunk early in Mafia 2 for instance, which specifically calls out main character Vito’s resilience with “You’ve always been a quick healer – must be your diet or something,” in a way that only draws attention to something that was better handwaved. Anachronox too aimed to be cute with its TACOs, and yes, it’s vaguely fitting for a game that already has its tongue planted firmly in its cheeck to be full of Totally Arbitrary Collectible Objects, but down that path goes most bad game parody – joking about how crap something is, and then straight-up doing the crap thing instead of the trickier task of finding some way to subvert it. One that I’ve always wanted to see for instance is to find a temple whose priests say “You will need the seven rainbow gems to open the portal… luckily, we had a bit of time over the last few decades, so we went out and found them ourselves. You’re welcome. We also learned to make really good chocolate cake.”

The best explanations though are the ones that don’t simply acknowledge a potential issue, but make something of it. If I occasionally get cross with games for not doing this, it’s because… look, it’s one thing to be beaten by Ultima (take a shot) or Baldur’s Gate or World of Warcraft or something, but there is no excuse to fall before the narrative might of Paper Mario 2: The Thousand Year Door. Yet so many games do. Pretty much every game in fact that asks you to collect a weapon or a key or whatever that’s been inconveniently broken into pieces and that both you and the baddies want. If you’re doing that plot, I insist on a good reason why I as the hero can’t just throw the first part into a wood chipper and wander off, content in the knowledge that the villain is foiled and we won’t have one of those embarrassing scenes where I finally reassemble the damn thing only for Lord Darkness to sweep in and pinch it.

What did Paper Mario 2 do? It has a character outright suggest this – or at least, not bothering to go and get the rest of the magic crystals that will free a dark, world-shattering force from its prison. It’s not a long explanation, but it doesn’t have to be. It just clarifies that yes, that would work, however the monster is growing in power all the time and will eventually burst out on its own. At that point it’ll be too tough to have a chance of defeating, so we need to go do it now while it’s still weak enough. Great! One line, problem solved, and hundreds of other RPGs looking uncomfortably at their feet. Admittedly, I’d still probably have chosen to bury one of the crystals until needed at the end of the game rather than walking around with the whole lot of them, but… look, I’ll take it, okay! At least a little thought went into it making sense, and that in a series whose main character communicates his thoughts by jumping.

The current King of all this is of course Undertale, a game I love very much and don’t care if you don’t. As with much of its genius, it doesn’t really come through on the first playthrough when you’re still picking up all of the details. Going back though, it’s wonderful to see how well thought out it all is, and how subtle – that opening boss Toriel doesn’t want to hurt you, so when your health gets low, she switches to a bullet pattern that can’t hit you (though it is possible to die, it’s by accident, and she has a special shocked face for if it does), or that skeleton guard Papyrus, whose job is to capture instead of kill you, will actually do that – lose his fight and you wake up in his doghouse because he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. It also works on its own definitions of terms like Lv. and EXP – Level of Violence and Execution Points, described as “A way of measuring someone’s capacity to hurt.”

Which got me thinking a little about some of the personal canon that I tend to use in RPGs – in particular, often treating what’s happening on stage as being somewhat metaphorical, rather than a literal, hit-by-hit fight. Take Final Fantasy VII for instance. Officially, I’m sure that we’re meant to take the summon attacks and other flashier routines on pure face value, even when it involves a dragon destroying the entire universe and only scratching your opponent’s armour. Or World of Warcraft, where a single boar on one new continent could single-handedly crush everything that came before about as easily as the headline threats like Deathwing and the Burning Legion. (World of Warcraft: Hogger’s Revenge, coming in 2018! Probably!)

In my head, I like to rework this a bit, so that it’s not that the new enemies are reallythose exponential levels of power greater than what’s come before, but that something like an angry boar is always going to be a threat to any adventurer, even a skilled one. Why doesn’t that apply in reverse when going to older zones? Shut up, that’s why. At least in World of Warcraft, though more recent games like Guild Wars 2 have codified it by applying max levels to areas instead of letting you bring your full force wherever you want.

This might seem unnecessary for enjoying the action, and yes, it is. But it makes it easier for me to accept and let this kind of thing go, and it’s not like the rest of the game doesn’t ask for similar leaps. Most bosses for instance aren’t really ten feet high. They’re blown up because trying to see and target a regular human sized figure in a 5-25 man crush would be a pain in the neck, arse and that twiddly bit between the big and next toe. We’re also expected to pretend that we’re the first ones to ever fight them, and that the fight going bad will lead to dire consequences for the world, instead of just an angry tank shouting “learn to play, noob!” It’s the unspoken covenant, that as long as Blizzard doesn’t push its luck, we give a pass to the stuff we know is a little silly or has to be out of step with the mechanics. Not every boss kill can be Kerafym the Sleeper, the Everquest boss with a zillion hitpoints who could only be fought once per server and whose death was meant to usher in Everquest 2 and a new age for mankind.

Do you have any mental house-rules that you tend to apply to RPGs? A few spare lamp-shades on standby for when something doesn’t make sense, or just an alternate way of thinking about things like character power and death? I know there’s a contingent of Final Fantasy fans for instance who get very cross if you ask why Cloud didn’t just give Aerith a Phoenix Down, as if taking a blade to the chest is somehow worse than taking a Doomtrain or whatever to the absolutely literally everything.

Or on the flip-side, has a game ever done anything to either truly break you out of the experience with some small mistake, or won you back with an absolutely perfect justification? I know I can think of a few that I’m eagerly waiting for, like a shop at the end of the game whose owner stocks you up for free because of the incoming apocalypse… but if I can’t have that, I’ll at least take one who cheekily comments “I’m just that confident in your success!” A little acknowledgement. A wink from the designer. Doesn’t seem too much to ask for politely blanking so much more.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/03/14/everquest-next-killed-the-mmorpg/

The RPG Scrollbars: EverQuest Next Killed The MMORPG
Richard Cobbett on March 14th, 2016 at 1:00 pm.

Light a candle for the genre, it’s basically done. Oh, it’ll keep ticking along, of course. This month we’ve seen Black Desert Online, there’s others on the way, and there’ll always be some audience for both the mostly Korean-born clickers and the occasional new idea. Personally I’m hoping for City of Titans to scratch that superhero itch that Champions Online sure as heck can’t, and for Shroud of the Avatar to bring back some of that Ultima magic. (Take a shot.) But as a genre to actively watch for cool stuff? Stick a fork in it. Sony- sorry, Daybreak was pretty much the last great hope of breathing life into it in any form remotely close to how Everquest did it back in the day, never mind giving it back the cultural clout from World of Warcraft’s heyday.

In case you missed the hype, Everquest Next was due to be a crazy leap forward in many ways. A world built of voxels that could be blown up by spells, carved through to find secrets, torn up by epic battles. Rallying Calls, in which cities would need to be constructed by players, face threat by invasion, and then defended by vigilante players long after construction. Monsters driven by global AI instead of simple hand-placement, making it possible to defend the roads from settlement to settlement, but also have their cultures encroach upon civilisation if left unchecked. Worlds that players would not only live in, but construct, with Everquest Next intended as both a demonstration of how much freedom there would be, and as a place where buildings and other key bits of architecture would be directly sourced. Not since Richard Garriott’s infamous dragon story has a world sounded so reactive, right down to nomadic orcs relocating if their settlements ended up repeatedly raided.

…

So what went wrong?

Daybreak’s reason is, bluntly, that the game wasn’t shaping up to be any fun and so the plug was pulled. There’s honour in that if true, though it has to be said that only Planetside 2 hinted at the company being able to pull off something as impressive as Everquest Next intended to be, with the word “Sony” not hurting when looking at its intended scale. Looking at the rap sheet, H1Z1 has pretty much troddled along without incident or excitement of late, supposed pathfinder Everquest Landmark has shown about as much progress as the continental drift of its own landmasses, and of Next there’s been basically nothing, except for word that the development team had been moved across from Landmark to give it priority, and now presumably are back again, to punch in everything from an economy to updated tools to worthwhile PvP in time for the newly announced Spring launch and $9.99 entry fee. Which, while pretty appropriate for the amount of content on offer right now, isn’t exactly a confidence builder for its longevity.

Who knows, maybe it’ll be great. It’s not really the environment that you can imagine the next big thing in MMORPGs emerging from though.

The problem is, where else could be the source of an MMO with that same level of potential oomph? All the major players now have tried and failed and moved on. CCP could have merged the trust it places in players in Eve Online with a more personable setting with World of Darkness. Nope, gone. Blizzard’s Project Titan? Gone, with some pieces going to Overwatch, and Hearthstone probably more profitable than it would ever have been. Funcom? Hahaha, no. NCSoft perhaps could, but past attempts like Tabula Rasa and more recently Wildstar have left it licking burned fingers.

Elsewhere, the writing is on the wall – it’s more personal, focused, short-form but long-engagement games that are working right now, such as Destiny, The Division, and MOBA derived stuff. With the exception of Evolve of course, whose player remains confident it’ll take off any time now. (Keep the faith, Brian!)

I’ve talked about the problems facing MMOs before, but it’s probably worth repeating one of the biggest – the magic factor. By that, I mean that when the genre first hit, its fundamental sell felt magical – that we could enter amazing worlds with millions of other people, and every moment of doing so felt special. Now, not only is it no big deal, but we’ve come to realise that much like the real world, what matters isn’t how many people you’re surrounded by, but how many people you’re actually with.

The modern multiplayer world is geared more towards social groups that exist in reality – four or five friends playing Dota together, or teaming up with a friend in the evening to go and score some Destiny loot in an experience that’s a mix of chat, work and play. I’m speaking hypothetically of course, I have no friends. But that’s how it’s configured. MMOs have stepped back from the problem by increasingly making group content an optional extra, or something that can be purely farmed as necessary, with only Final Fantasy XIV – a game that gets better and better with every update, incidentally – really having the courage to say “No, you will learn boss battles by fighting an Ifrit who can party-wipe you, and you will queue up for dungeons when we say.”

It feels like an exception to the rule though, which gets away with it as much for the fact that it can offer chocobos and a Final Fantasy world as a carrot to go along with what to most players increasingly seem to consider the stick. It probably doesn’t hurt that if you’re a long-term fan of Final Fantasy (and yes, I’ve played them for many years myself) you’ve largely proven your willingness to tolerate a fair amount of bullshit to get to the stuff that you like. That didn’t work out so well for anything from The Old Republic to DC Universe Online – though both of them are currently ticking along and still getting quite a few updates rather than sitting in MMO stasis.

New MMOs meanwhile have largely given up on taking over the mainstream and becoming the next World of Warcraft, simply because there’s far more money to be had targeting the existing player who just wants a change of scenery, the casual F2P player who might be sucked in but at least adds a bit of screen-meat to the empty worlds, or the guilds that inevitably have a bee in their bonnets about something in whatever they’re playing and tend to move en masse between games before settling down again for the long-haul, and most of all, markets like Russia and Korea where there’s a hunger for what in the West often gets summarily dismissed. Starforge being described as “From the makers of Allods Online” for instance is something of a warning siren over here, carrying with it the stench of pay-to-win and similar mechanics, but not so much in its native Russia.

Either way, these are games to watch to see tweaks on formulas and ever-prettier graphics, but not so much reinvention and startling new ideas. Future MMOs to watch will instead be the ones that break entirely away from Everquest and World of Warcraft and their origins and do something that again feels like magic. Everquest Next was the last one in development that could have done so, and even then, it’s arguable whether players would have wanted to devote that much time and effort to building Sony/Daybreak’s world when they can do so much more in their own Minecraft worlds. It’s not like most crafting MMOs have been huge successes, from A Tale In The Desert to Wurm Online, before or after. It’s only when they again shrank down and became more personal, in the form of games like Rust, that the idea really took off – another case of an MMO only working in the absence of that additional pesky M.

Will games of those scale ever have what it takes again? Never say never. Assuming all goes well, entering Star Citizen’s living universe could be that moment for many of us. Certainly, give me a space-ship… and I’m sorry to say, a slightly more interesting universe than Elite Dangerous… and I can imagine getting sucked in. Maybe with VR, Second Life and its cohorts will find, well, a second life, where the crowds again become part of the experience instead of simply part of the scenery. As soon as they faded that far though, the writing was on the wall for the MMO versus smaller experiences.

Still, while the MMO’s last chance at full-on reinvention just got snuffed out, at least the quests will continue – hell, Everquest has enough players that it still gets new expansions, and Ultima Online just congratulated one of its guilds on 20 years in Britannia. Without what it did, we also wouldn’t have its successors, from survival and rogue games, to Minecraft itself. As a genre, they changed the world, and whatever comes next will almost certainly build on the templates they laid down much as they borrowed from what came before. The legacy of the MMORPG will be of the genre that changed gaming, and let us all enter a new world. The next worlds that change ours will be different, but something of them will live on forever – just as long as it’s more interesting than f***ing crafting.

 

[Crooked Bee]

So Cobbett is writing for Daedalic's new Star Control-like game:

 

[agris]

That actually looks interesting. I wonder how modifiable the ship will be though. I like the star-system wide macro navigation, and the fine-tuned navigation that looks like it'll be specific to combat and special encounters.

 

[Infinitron]

Richard Cobbett returns to one of his favorite topics, games with boobs: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/03/21/scarlet-blade-retrospective/

 

[Infinitron]

Cobbett approves of the popular new trend in RPG design: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/04/04/baldurs-gate-story-mode/

The RPG Scrollbars: Story Mode
Richard Cobbett on April 4th, 2016 at 1:00 pm.

About eighteen years or so after marking Baldur’s Gate off my To-Save list, I’m knee-deep in the Infinity Engine once again with Siege of Dragonspear. I’m not going to talk too much about it here, not least because there’s a full review coming soon. But there’s one thing I do want to talk about – not one new to the Enhanced Editions, admittedly, and that’s its Story Mode option. Essentially, at any time you can flip a switch and even a Level 1 mage can suddenly wander into a Beholder’s lair and poke every single one of its eyes out without the slightest danger. You can’t die. At all. In every possible way, you render playing large chunks of the game pointless.

I entirely approve of Story Mode.

It brings up a lot of philosophical arguments that I’ve had many times, mostly related to MMOs. When I reviewed World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria for instance, I said that Blizzard should offer every player a free Level 85 character to play with. Fans hit the roof. How would anyone learn how to play, demanded the same people who usually insist that the levelling curve isn’t actually playing and that you only learn to play at the endgame. Why would anyone not want to sit through the 84 levels of (mostly deserted at the time) content that haven’t interested them in the past, including the achingly outdated Burning Crusade expansion, to play the game that finally made them want to jump in? What would that say to the players who paid their dues, to see a whole new generation of players simply having fun in exchange for time and money?

In essence: “I don’t want other people to have it better than I did.”

Well, as Descartes once so memorably put it, fuck that noise. I like games to be inclusive. I like the response to someone wanting to try something new to be “Absolutely.” That doesn’t mean accommodating every desire, no matter how silly – “Baldur’s Gate needs car chases!” “Planescape Torment should have been a shooter!” – but it does mean accepting that games are now big enough that even fans of a particular series can come to it for many different reasons and in many different ways. Looking back, Baldur’s Gate’s big success was proving that D&D could be cool, but the parts that are generally remembered most fondly are the characters and the narrative side of their adventures rather than the minute-by-minute action.

It wasn’t a particularly great tactical experience though, and much of the combat was deeply underwhelming. Wanting to go back to hang out with Minsc and Boo some more, or see more of the Sword Coast, is every bit as valid a reason to be interested as the new bigger scale battles that Dragonspear promises. There’s lots of reasons to love the genre, whether you like Mass Effect or still have the entire of The Magic Candle mapped out and mounted on a wall somewhere. The word ‘fan’ shouldn’t be a badge that you have to earn, but a statement of enjoyment. And I think it’s totally okay to accept that someone can be a fan and still not like a particular element.

Or for that matter actually be any good at playing RPGs.

It’s a genre that’s historically demanded much and taken few prisoners, whether it’s the 50-100 hour playtimes that don’t necessarily fit into peoples’ lives any more (and often don’t have the content to actually deserve that playing time) or the genre’s habit of letting players get half-way through an epic quest before revealing that their character build is 60 points worth of mistakes or that the second half of the game has all the balance of a drunk one-legged lemur unicycling on chain-links over Niagara Falls during an earthquake.

It’s also a genre that typically expects, if not outright demands, a solid grounding in systems and vocabulary that aren’t necessarily intuitive – buffs and armour classes and skills intended to play into other skills and systems. Pillars of Eternity for instance expected all players to be immediately comfortable controlling a full party of unusual classes without any AI support, and the fact that the core playerbase probably had played Infinity Engine games before doesn’t stop that being pretty bad/shortsighted design for 2015. At least it was patched after release.

If Story Mode is what it takes for players to get through a game that appeals, or even just a comforting option in a particular encounter, then so be it. I defy anyone, no matter how hardcore, to say that they’ve never used a cheat in a game, whether it’s punching FUND into SimCity, tooling up in Doom with IDKFA, running a trainer, knowingly using an exploit, or outright hex-editing a save-file. Unless it’s online, and thus affecting someone else’s fun, it just doesn’t matter.

Are you playing less of the game if you do it? Sure. But by being able to focus on the bits you like, you’re also probably playing more of it. And next game? Maybe you’ll take the training wheels off now that you have a little more experience or comfort with the basic world. Or even start again after a few hours with more of a sense of having ‘gotten it’.

And, y’know, fair’s fair! If you don’t like the talkie bits, why not have the option to cut them down to the bare minimum too? “Shepard, I was wondering how you felt about blue ladies-” “NO TIME FOR LOVE! SHEPARD SMASH! SAVE GALAXY!”

There’s obviously a limit to how much games can bend over backwards for different tastes, though RPGs have a longer history of doing so than most – class choices, moral decisions, alternate paths, romances etc all in service of allowing the player power on a meta-level as well as in-game. The fact that the genre tends to be so systems-driven makes it easier to open up more possibilities than in other games.

Honestly, I’d like to see more options, where possible and appropriate. I’m not saying for instance that Dark Souls should have an Easy Mode, even though I’m probably the worst Dark Souls player on the entire planet. The whole nature of the game; its exploration, its learning by failure approach, its expectation that you work for your victories and so on mean that pulling a Story Mode would destroy the entire experience. It’s asking for a completely different game that it has no interest in being, while removing most of the combat from Baldur’s Gate is closer to just asking for your baconburger without cheese.

I would however love Blizzard to add a Solo Mode to World of Warcraft’s endgame content, so that I can finish off storylines that previously ended in dungeons/raids. I want to fight the Lich King, who spent most of the expansion trying to make this personal. I want to bring down Hellscream in the Siege of Orgrimmar, like I’ve taken down so many threats to the Horde. I want to do the last 2% of my character’s story – to see the big locations and meet the bosses and have a final epic fight… to feel part of the action instead of just watching the cutscenes later on. It’s not that it’s hard to find a group, it’s that I don’t enjoy WoW’s dungeon or raid play, especially with random people who’ve already seen everything and have no interest in anything beyond what’s in the box at the end of the fight. There’s a reason few epic fantasies contain lines like “Thorin turned to Gandalf and said mage food plz’.” or “And then Bilbo rage-quit.”

Is this asking too much? I don’t think so. I just want to finish the stories the way I’ve been playing them, with a character I have around ten years of attachment to. Keep the titles. Hell, don’t open the Solo Mode version until the end of the expansion. I’ll wait! At least there’d be no need to render a new cut-scene, since officially all the world’s ills inevitably end up saved by some NPC running up and stealing the credit.

And I can think of quite a few other games where I’d have liked some more measure of control. Obviously, if you’re making a game with spiders and you put a no-spider mode into it, then you’ve automatically earned 2% or a sentence about how awesome you are in any review. But that’s a hyper-specialised example. While playing Fallout 4 for instance, I’d have loved to have been able to turn down a combat dial and turn up a survival one, to be able to personally tune the systems the way that I want them instead of hoping that the upcoming Survival Mod shares my priorities. In just about every game, I want to switch off hacking minigames. I’m sorry, but nobody’s ever invented a good hacking mini-game, and I’d rather just be told ‘nope’ if I’m not going to break it.

Going the other way, one of the very few things I liked about the rebooted Thief was how you could tune the difficulty according to how realistic a thievery simulator you wanted, even if there wasn’t a ‘goodness’ slider. And of course, we can’t talk about custom difficulty without mentioning System Shock – a game so confident in its users that it basically lets you turn the entire game off. Even if it does lead to lots of hilarious moments where SHODAN goes “Welcome to my death machine!”, only for a bunch of cyborgs to awkwardly appear and not be allowed to shoot anyone.

A little excessive? Perhaps. But I’d prefer controls like this to just one general easy/medium/hard option. Case in point, Deus Ex’s Realistic mode, which technically counted as a ‘hard’ mode, but in a way that shaped the experience closer to what it wanted to be. Or, again, 2014’s Thief reboot, which treated difficulty more as a mark of professionalism than anything else, by removing assorted meta assists. I can think of many, many games in which I’d have been happy for a fast-forward button, or simply a GTA V style “You’re struggling. Want to move on?” option. But it doesn’t just have to be about making games easier as a way of avoiding getting good at them, or adding more satisfaction to repeated and top-tier play.

We’re not all good at the same things, and we can’t be good at everything – as most designers who’ve ever had to think up a hacking mini-game will prove – while increasingly, the amount of time it takes to implement features in big games means that alternate routes and choices can be a big risk. If what starts as a minor itching irritation can soon explode into absolute fury – like Arkham Knight turning the Batmobile into Car-Car Binks over its running time, or a stealth-character in something like Alpha Protocol losing all hard-earned advantages thanks to an opening cut-scene where you get discovered – the risk is even greater. In this new era where nobody puts cheat-codes into their games any more, it’s nice to know you have an escape hatch.

Should every game offer them? Nah. But in cases where designers know that players will be coming from such different vectors, as in most RPGs built on story instead of just dungeon crawling, it really wouldn’t hurt to see a few more options. It’d be good to have options in game, after all, rather than simply forcing players to choose between sucking it up, seeing how the game ends on YouTube, or drifting away with the job undone.

Sometimes, it’s okay for cheaters to prosper, especially when there’s no reason for the rest of the world to either know or care.

 

[Neanderthal]

What I do when i've not got enough time to finish a big game is split it up into a few hours o play one day, repeat next day an so on, revolutionary I realise but it works. Personally I thinks devs should be tryin to make good, enjoyable systems in their games that folk wanna play stead o just avin storymode, after all games are meant to be played, learned an mastered not watched. Thas got telly an flicks for that.

 

[Bubbles]

What a strange piece. I wasn't aware that PoE required you to start with a full party, or that a Fighter and a Rogue with one active ability each were "unusual classes" that required "AI support". Is Cobbett concern trolling here?

 

[PlanHex]

I'd like to see a return of cheat codes or just a cheat options menu. Giving everyone that option might even mean that devs wouldn't dumb everything down, because players can just cheat through the hard parts if they want to. Better for everyone. His thoughts on customizing the difficulty of different mechanics sound pretty good too. I would also like a skip-all-minigames toggle.
But I think it's weird that it has to be reframed as "story mode" etc. like it's skirting around the issue. It's a god-mode cheat. Just say so? Are they afraid they'll lose customers that won't admit to themselves that they're cheating or something?

 

[Lord Azlan]

Brilliant piece on Story Mode. I agree with everything he said.

Mentions

Magic Candle +1
IDKFA +5
Shodan +10

Playing BT1 and UIV back in the day is different for a few reasons.

Back then I was a student and only had a few games.

My eyesight was better.

Now I have about 400 games across Steam and GOG and need to beg for large font size.

Don't give a monkeys about WoW though.

Inclusive nature of Wasteland 2 and PoE led me to purchase Baldur's Gate and its cousins recently - that is surely a good thing?

 

[Zetor]

Yea, pretty much. If people want to cheat through the game - whether they are using actual cheat tools, file-editing, save-scumming, or abusing exploits like Goldbox item duping (or, say, a difficulty setting called 'story mode') - more power to them, I don't mind.

System Shock 1 is a really good example of how difficulty settings should be implemented, but I don't see most developers investing that much :effort: just to please a relatively small part of the playerbase... so something like a cheat menu could work better.

 

[V_K]

One thing I'd like to see a comeback of is the autocombat option - for when you don't quite feel like cheating yet but would rather see how the story/level develops than go through the fighting motions.

 

[GrainWetski]

I'd like to see games that are played through a first-person perspective where you explore a world without the annoyance of gameplay.

 

[pippin]

One thing I'd like to see a comeback of is the autocombat option - for when you don't quite feel like cheating yet but would rather see how the story/level develops than go through the fighting motions.

I liked the option of avoiding combat in WL2. I also liked that it was related to rolls or something like that, and if you fail then you're forced to fight. A punishment for being a lazy coward. Autocombat feels too cheap imo.

 

[oldmanpaco]

I want to watch a good movie.

 

[Maxwell's Demon]

In essence: “I don’t want other people to have it better than I did.”

How are they supposed to get into the genre, if they aren't even playing it? Adding story modes just give the developers an excuse to half-ass the game's systems and tell us, "there's storymode if you don't like our gameplay." There are already visual novels for people who don't want to actually play games.

 

[V_K]

One thing I'd like to see a comeback of is the autocombat option - for when you don't quite feel like cheating yet but would rather see how the story/level develops than go through the fighting motions.

I liked the option of avoiding combat in WL2. I also liked that it was related to rolls or something like that, and if you fail then you're forced to fight. A punishment for being a lazy coward. Autocombat feels too cheap imo.

The thing about autocombat is that the way it was implemented in, say, RoA games you always ended much worse off if you chose it (i.e. lost much more health/mana than if you fought manually). So given that in RoA healing took days and health potion were extremely rare and expensive, the tradeoff was pretty fair. For games where your main enemy is the attrition/survival rather than individual encounters autocombat makes a lot of sense.

 

[Bubbles]

I'd like to see games that are played through a first-person perspective where you explore a world without the annoyance of gameplay.

That's the future of RPGs imho.

There are already visual novels for people who don't want to actually play games.

Or Let's Plays, which have the additional advantage that they can run in the background.

 

[Infinitron]

Richard Cobbett moans about not being able to get into Dark Souls: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/04/11/dark-souls-iii-difficulty/

Ever had one of those games that you just long to get into, but can’t? There haven’t been many I’ve wanted to get into more than the Dark Souls series. To sink into the world I see people talking about on my Twitter feed. To have that sense of discovery in ash and ember. For that crumbling world to feel like something more than just a succession of traps and gauntlets. I want to like Dark Souls. I really hope Dark Souls 3is the clicking point. But… so far, (whispers) I’ve never managed to like Dark Souls.

I say ‘managed’ for a reason. I’m not saying Dark Souls is bad. Nor do I have any problem with a game that’s a brutal challenge, or simply a game that’s not for me. What frustrates me is that I desperately want it to be for me. From the snippets of Keza and Jason’s book to the little bursts of design like Miyazaki wanting to see tragedy rather than horror in his undead dragons, it sounds great. But then I try to play one of them and just bounce right off in a way that I haven’t really done since STALKER.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Richard Cobbett moans about not being able to get into Dark Souls: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/04/11/dark-souls-iii-difficulty/

Ever had one of those games that you just long to get into, but can’t? There haven’t been many I’ve wanted to get into more than the Dark Souls series. To sink into the world I see people talking about on my Twitter feed. To have that sense of discovery in ash and ember. For that crumbling world to feel like something more than just a succession of traps and gauntlets. I want to like Dark Souls. I really hope Dark Souls 3is the clicking point. But… so far, (whispers) I’ve never managed to like Dark Souls.

I say ‘managed’ for a reason. I’m not saying Dark Souls is bad. Nor do I have any problem with a game that’s a brutal challenge, or simply a game that’s not for me. What frustrates me is that I desperately want it to be for me. From the snippets of Keza and Jason’s book to the little bursts of design like Miyazaki wanting to see tragedy rather than horror in his undead dragons, it sounds great. But then I try to play one of them and just bounce right off in a way that I haven’t really done since STALKER.

Sounds like a bloke who likes his story mode in rpgs alright.

 

[Beautiful Clown Painting]

I totally agree with him, I'm a real loser at action games, hate learning boss fights patterns, and so can't progress in Dark Souls. And that's a shame because I love FROM Software and the atmosphere of their games, so I stick to the old King's Field serie.
But then I think the difficulty of the Dark Souls is part of their charm for others... But personally, I just can't play them.

 

[Maxwell's Demon]

Because of the action mechanics, it is understandable why you wouldn't get into it. However, I suspect that Cobbett would complain about the difficulty of turn-based games too.

 

[Infinitron]

In an article about speedrunning, Richard gets a little naughty: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/04/18/speedruns-fallout-witcher/

I must confess, since finishing Siege of Dragonspear the other week, I’ve not actually fired up any RPGs. It’s not for want of them to play. I’m particularly looking forward to finally trying Final Fantasy IX, which I missed back in the day, and Beamdog’s recently announced interquel, Planescape Torment: The Nameless One And A Half. (It’s very similar to the original, only now whenever someone asks “What can change the nature of a man?” a furious little goblin pops onto the screen to yell “#notallmen!”)