Today is a very special day. "What day is that?" you may ask. Well, April 28 was the day that I did my first Arcanum blog and got this entire subject stuck in my head in the first place. That, and people always crapping all over Dragon Age 2 and I also finished KotOR 2 recently. Thus, to celebrate this momentous occasion, I've thought long and hard (ok, fairly long and fairly hard) about what differentiates the Baldur's Gate IIs and Fallouts of the world with both aforementioned games. Please note that I'm talking about Computer Role Playing Games, most of which are made in the west. I couldn't comment on JRPGs if I tried. You know the people who do, ask them. I'm not going to pretend I know anything other than "Yo, Final Fantasy VI is pretty rad, and Persona is as well"
To start off what may be a three parter, let me start with the less dangerous subject to tangle with: The actual gameplay part. While story can be a fairly subjective beast, and the Combat is a problem big enough to deal with in its own separate blog, The individual mechanics are a lot easier to objectify and quantify. That, and I don't entirely know what I will say for story at this point. I'll start with a general topic, and then give a few examples to show that, and while the points I list may be problems in plenty of good RPGs, they're usually either a bigger problem in these games or are compounded by the presence of other problems. Also, while my RPG knowledge may be fairly vast, it's not entirely comprehensive and in the end this is all my opinion anyways taken from some observations about my favorite genre. Remember that before you crazy people who like the games I'm bashing on come out of the woodwork to breathe fire.
Unbalance the gameplay, specifically the character building aspect
Unless we're talking about something more multiplayer or competitive focused, generally RPG developers aren't focusing on balance. And this is fine. I'm cool with the fact that Wizard Slayers are a totally bunk fighter kit in BG2 and unarmed builds or characters in any game suck balls (I'm looking at you Icewind Dale 2 and your total disregard for monks), but there's a line between something that makes your experience more difficult (or makes your experience stupid easy) and something that may require you to either restart or cheese the game to succeed. These are the kind of dead ends that frustrate after a few hours of play, or even worse only take place at the end of the game (more on that later) Fallout 1, despite having plenty of skill choices that aren't Small Guns or Speech still is probably beatable with a melee or stealth character. And I say probably, although there's like what, one good melee weapon in that game? I guess this is a problem that can be part of any genre, but it's most prevalent here in a lengthy single player experience, especially if there is only one player created character.
Example: Pretty much every RPG ever made, but especially stuff like Lionheart
Now while pretty much every RPG has a problem with this, I've decided to use one you've never heard of. Sure, I could talk about how being stealthy in Alpha Protocol will screw you over come the incredibly suckish boss battles, or I could tell you about how Arcanum's odd leveling system (giving you experience every time you hit something rather than every time you kill something, thus encouraging the use of quick melee weapons over underpowered guns or magic) totally favors vanilla fighters over mages and especially tech users, but I'll talk about Lionheart. For those who don't know (and frankly, that's probably all of you) Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader was the last RPG published by Black Isle Studios before they went under (but not developed by them as they were no doubt working on “Van Buren”, AKA Fallout 3) and it used the SPECIAL system like the first two Fallout games. Despite that pedigree and that fairly solid ruleset to draw from (not to mention an interesting premise), you've never heard of it because it wasn't very good.
Nonetheless, this game is a special case because, after roughly the first 5 hours the game drops any pretensions of wanting to be a CRPG in the style of Fallout and becomes a mediocre hack 'n slash with nary a speech opportunity in sight. Then add that the resolution is locked at 800x600 and the fact that all the enemies have insanely fast footspeed, and suddenly offensive magic and archery are less appealing options to build a character around. Thus, you're left with generic melee dudes, maybe with a little defensive magic for good measure. While this would be ok in other contexts, the bait and switch nature of this introductory segment (at the very least you could probably beat Arcanum with a tech character, for as neutered as they are in the early game.) and the range of wasted character building possibilities earns it's spot as my example.
Fail to differentiate the content given to the player/fail to make interesting side content
This is length padding at its finest. While one can claim the number of hours in an RPG to be massive, how much of that RPG is doing the exact same thing? This is more an issue with side content outside of the main story, as that is less likely to have a story hook to interest the player (Will talk about that in part 3. Probably). This may be a symptom of a post WOW world, where the raw breadth of content can be said to compensate for the general soullessness of it all (not to say that MMO style content doesn't work in the MMO context, but that it sucks in a single player context. Thanks Borderlands), but it certainly extends to older stuff, as seen in:
Example: The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
I was originally going to go for Dragon Age II on this one to, ya know, be relevant, (or Dungeon Hack, to be obscure) but I thought I might as well just go for recycled content at its utmost extreme. Daggerfall is a game entirely built upon undifferentiated, randomly generated content, at least outside of the main story where the dungeons were actually hand crafted. But to get to that story content in the first place, and the real meat of the game anyways, are the dozens upon dozens of randomly generated quests given to you by whatever faction you fancy yourself a member of. All of them pretty much boil down to: Go to this procedurally generated dungeon. Find the quest object (either a creature to kill or an item to obtain). What, the dungeon is a mess of identical hallways and the automap totally sucks? Welcome to 1996. This is the game. There is nothing else. You think that Oblivion is generic as all hell? Play this sucker. To be fair, it's not the part where this content is randomized that is the problem. It's the part where this is pretty much the entire game, and it's the extremely varying quality of all the random content.
Force the use of a guide
There's a line between being clever and demanding more of the player and being pointlessly and needlessly obscure or finding a way to screw the player over . This is definitely more of a problem with older stuff, as modern game design may have finally ironed a lot of it out. What do I mean by this? I mean the part where the game difficulty spikes randomly due to the way your character is built (see above), maybe throw in an encounter that's significantly harder than everything else (See: Boss Battles). Or maybe we're talking about a quest where the best resolution is totally out of left field or maybe even a puzzle that makes no sense whatsoever because it's from a time when Video Games were for nerds and people who played old RPGs were the biggest nerds of all. This may be some sort of unifying problem, as it dips its toes into combat and story as well as the general mechanics and structure of the game. You may call me a pansy, but some of this older shit is crazy. There's a difference between answering fairly clever riddles in pretty much every Bioware game (though the ones in the maze under spellhold in BG 2 deserve special attention) and having straight up secret walls, unclear objectives, and maybe even the occasional totally batshit boss battle, especially if they're paramount to the progression of the player
Example: Eye of the Beholder
I figured this was as good an example as any I could think of (once again, trying not to use Arcanum for every single thing). If we want to talk about intimidating, this may be the game. Indeed, EotB isn't so much a hack 'n slash as it is a really hard adventure game that occasionally has D&D style combat. If we want to talk about invisible walls, fairly difficult boss battles (apparently, the final boss is stupid easy... if you have a specific item. Or cheese the combat, which is quite possible) and puzzles puzzles puzzles, this is it. More a question of trial and error than actually being clever, you'll find that tossing rocks on pressure plates is a necessity, random hidden easter eggs that give sweet loot are the norm, and wandering around until you figure something out or die is the thing. It's hard to quantify this one without actually showing you, so look up a LP or something if you're interested. They may make it look seamless, but I know otherwise. Once again, I'm not especially sure if EotB can be considered a bad game per se, but it's one that I am entirely incapable of playing.
And a bunch of other stuff I didn't have time to talk about in detail
I'd also like to mention Level Scaling, the antithesis of grinding though not much better, making your game stupid hard, making your game stupid easy, not explaining the mechanics especially well, doing a bait and switch into a hack 'n slash or other similar degenerations of the gameplay, usually later on, and dumbing down the ruleset for no real reason. Next time, I'll probably go into combat, and why Icewind Dale and Temple of Elemental Evil are good, and other things are less good. I hope you read all of this, because more is probably coming.
Is there anything major mechanically that you think I missed? You think I'm totally crazy? You disagree with my examples? You read like one sentence and are going to give a snarky Tl;dr or otherwise show that you failed to read the entire thing? Then comment. Or don't. I'm cool either way.
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