Vapourware What are your favorite non-combat, non-dialogue related activities in RPGs?

[Desiderius]

Exploration and mapping in everything.

Crafting likewise, especially rare items.

LotRO Deeds back when they mattered.

Tracking down elite skills in Guild Wars.

Getting my Artisans and Kingdom buffs up as swiftly as possible in Kingmaker.

 

[Desiderius]

Exploration, few things are memorable to me as exploring the world of Morrowind. Finding a remote hidden cave featuring no enemies or loot but just few pages of a diary expanding the lore of the world felt more satisfying then killing any amount of enemies. Using levitation to reach highest corners of every dungeon not to find anything until that one time when I found deadric bow on a ledge above a deadric shrine. I wish more RPGs have magic utilized in more ways then just combat.

Yeah finding the Belfry in the Serpent Temple of Wizards & Warriors twenty years after first playing the game was pretty epic.

 

[SoupNazi]

Finding out ways to break the game in a fun, not-too-buggy way. Combining certain spells and sequences to have an infinite turn, using the game's existing mechanics in a potentially unexpected ways. D:OS2 gets a lot of shit here, but it's one of the best at it. Is a lot of it gimmicky? Sure it is, but barricading yourself with paintings and barrels in the Magister's ritual room on the first island is just really fun, even if barricading with paintings doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Same with Deus Ex' mine-climbing - get two mines, place one on a wall, jump on it (even though it's literally maybe a 2cm wide "step"), place another, jump, deactivate and pick up the first one, place it, jump, rinse and repeat... it's time consuming, unrealistic, probably doesn't let you skip much of anything other than getting to Maggie Chow's apartment early on in Hong Kong, but it's fun.

Moddable games are also great for finding broken builds, because you can theorycraft and figure out a broken build (again, DOS2 comes to mind with invisibility, or the corpse explosion trick) but then up the difficulty via mods so that the game remains fun.

 

[Marat]

Walking behind female characters ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

In all seriousness, I like to read lore - if it is presented in an organic, interesting fashion. For example by reading newspapers you can realize that when Walton Simmons comes to confront JC in the underwater lab, he is in a middle of a coup d'etat against United States and that dumbass thought that abandoning everything to have plasma rifle shootout is the optimal course of action. Gothic 1+2 also do it very well, feeding you snippets of information and bits of trivia that really seem like they could come from a larger world around you. It really does wonders to engage imagination and allows me to immerse in the game world.

 

[Sykar]

Making my own spells in Morrowind was glorious. Also liked creating my own potions and items via Enchanting and Alchemy. Never sold that stuff because I quickly realized how easy that would have broken my game. Also stayed away from the two... "special" merchants.

 

[Joggerino]

I really like stronghold or base development, a little bit of an strategy element.

 

[Thac0]

 

[Thac0]

2 more

Spoiler

I quite enjoy inventory tetris. Especially if some of the weapon sizes are a little weird, so you always have to work your brain a bit when you open your inventory. Also getting more inventory space as an upgrade feels great.

Spoiler

Games are Resident Evil 4, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Diablo 2 and the last one is an obscure JRPG called Fragile Dreams. Do not bother with that one, it is not even all that good. Quite interesting tho.

 

[Pink Eye]

Ravenloft had a couple of really nice riddles and puzzles. Decoding the Stone Prophet's Prophecy is a real delight! Nice break from the dungeon crawling Anyways, to first figure out the symbols. You needed to delve into the depths of the Obelisk. Within it, lie pieces of paper. I think there's either four or five of them - don't remember. Here's what they look like:

Then you needed to use those words on the Stone Prophet's Prophecy:

And it fully decoded:

Hot gales, the sands arise. Flesh corrupts and falls away. These are the signs of their coming.

The wrath of Anhktepot burns the land. Who hopes to rule must lure the evil to him.

In the Ancient Burial Hall, the Guardian of the Gate of the Dead awaits. She shall judge them by deeds both good and bad.

Her son the sweet lute did play. This gentle music the ghost awaits.

To the priest, the mystic urn is given. The Temple of Harvest shall be restored.

Beyond the Gate of the Dead, he awaits. The soul of the stranger knows the way.

Master of the winged win. Three signals, the whistle sounds, summoning forth the Falcon.

The eight tears shall fall. Ra weeps and the stone shatters; a fragment of the seal revealed.

They capture the sun and in a coffer hold the might of Ra. By its light, the soul and the seal are freed.

Two seals, each in four pieces lie. Piece to piece, the seals rejoined, two gates are opened.

Into conflict the foes are led: Anhktepot and the other. When falls the wall of Ra, so shall the way be opened. The way home.

Good luck figuring out which dungeons the Stone Prophet is talking about without referencing the cluebook, LMAO!

 

[gurugeorge]

I like tasks that are tied to exploration and discovery, like the Sansa's map emporium tasks in POE2.

I quite like the base management systems that quite a few modern RPGs have. They're usually not as well fleshed-out as they could be as minigames per se, but it's nice to see the visuals change as you progress.

Crafting is always a bit hit and miss. I absolutely loathe MMO style crafting where you have to gather ridiculous amounts of mats, but I quite like "side-crafting" that's viable but not OP at any level, where you get most of the mats in the ordinary course of adventuring, and you just need to find one or two rare things to complete the craft. When crafting's good, it's good, it's an absorbing sideline, but when it's bad I just ignore it- athough I'm just enough of a completionist that it makes me uncomfortable to do so.

 

[ShaggyMoose]

Crafting. It's just a boring grind of collecting 2304 pieces of copper ore and 3413 pieces of tin ore so you can smelt them into bronze ingots so you can forge a generic bronze sword +5. Just have a boss enemy in a dungeon drop a magic bronze sword, that feels a lot more rewarding and cuts out a lot of grind. Extra negative points if your game features an unskippable mining animation when mining ore (looking at you, Skyrim). Crafting is a boring grind of generic resource farming which doesn't fit into the RPG gameplay loop at all. It makes exploration and combat less rewarding because instead of getting that juicy +5 sword as a drop from an enemy, or finding it tucked away in a dark corner only reachable with levitation, you find generic [insert metal type] ore clumps all over the place and collect enough of them until you can forge the sword yourself. Meh.

I generally agree with this, but I think crafting can be done right. I find it satisfying when ingredients have a specific purpose and only appropriate combinations produce results, requiring recipes or inventive exploration to determine. Finding a rare ingredient forces you to make decisions about how you will use it. The same often applies to games that allow crafting of enhancements rather than crafting items themselves.

One example I can think of is the game Legend for the Amiga. This type of approach has been used as a spell casting system as well (Dungeon Master, Nahlakh).

 

[J1M]

Resetting talent points to try out new builds.

Pazzak.

Swapping subclasses on party members.

Completionist activity that has a moderate time requirement.

Lufia 2 style dungeoneering where spells can interact with the environmental puzzles.

Exploring areas that feel like the lead designer didn't intend players to go.

Breaking game systems by finding interesting interactions.

Grid-based building placement or similar optimization puzzles.

 

[Quillon]

base building/management, not in like FO4 where you literally place everything but like in NWN2; fixing/upgrading buildings(goes for inventory equipment too), getting necessary resources/key NPCs, managing safety; sending out patrols with a satisfying conclusion where you feel all you did was not in vain.. at least a bit

MGSV's base management was a good one too but I don't remember if a strong base mattered in the end there(?), game was incomplete anyway. tho the plague in the base was a good twist

deadfire's ship base was shit not only because the ship combat sucked but having different ships instead of just one cool one with a cool name that you can upgrade throughout the game like in Black Flag

Mass Effect 2 is a game where the goal is upgrading everything; you upgrade companions with loyalty missions, upgrade the ship along the way and all of it matters in the end, mechanically satisfying experience :D

 

[Hag]

If the map allows it, I like hiking around, trying to reach remote spots, top of mountains, etc.
Otherwise, I also like to try and climb roofs, trees and everything vertical, whether the devs had planned it or not.
Finding ways to get out of bonds of the game maps is also fun.

 

[undecaf]

I like exploring and solving puzzles (so long as the puzzles don't get repetitive) and generally finding out what all my character/party is cabable of provided that the game supports non-combat/-dialog activities via skills and stats.

 

[Beowulf]

Drying leaves.

Spoiler

Can't wait for Black Gayser release.

 

[Machocruz]

Rapine

 

[luj1]

Exploration ofc

 

[luj1]

Pazzak

Rare well done minigame