>The role of game mechanics should not be the oppressive tyrant telling you to fetch and grind and be thankful for your crumbs of XP and DPS as the scenery blazes past.
That's generally not true at all. It may seem that way, but level systems are similar to a proof of work scheme. Player puts in some time and receives some fair reward for his time. Level systems are a way to facilitate this transaction without invoking pay2win overtones.
Do you think that was the idea when levels were added to classic pen and paper RPGs like D&D?
Levels are a way to give players choices about how their character develops over time. The choices they picked as their character levels up make up part of the story of their character that makes it uniquely yours.
This is why I hate easy respec mechanics that a lot of modern RPGs have. When you respec your character you destroy it's story. Your level 60 paladin is now the same as anyone elses level 60 paladin. A blank slate divorced from your personality. You have broken the illusion that even the very term Role Playing Game was intended to be about.
In the game I work on, Path of Exile, we have specifically made respec something that has a cost. The more you want to change your character the more costly it becomes. Changing your character then becomes part of the story of how it was created.
> In the game I work on, Path of Exile, we have specifically made respec something that has a cost.
My gaming group gave PoE a very serious try, and all eventually got bored, and I think this "feature" you boast of is part of the problem. To me, the good part of PoE was in evaluating different combinations, trying them out, seeing what combos work well together, etc. The gem system is fundamentally very good (except see the next graf). But locking in passive-tree choices prevents players from fully exploring the system you built (unless they're willing to invest thousands of hours). With an investment like that, any moderately-serious player will be driven to spend more time studying the wiki than playing, because a wrong choice is very expensive (though at least respecs are not impossible).
An even bigger problem, while I'm pointing out this I didn't like in PoE, is how a major factor in creating a potent build is grinding for "currency items", for dozens or hundreds of hours, to do things like reconfigure links on items. I think this sort of system is exactly the sort of thing that validates the sort of cynicism demonstrated in the parent comment. High performance is predicated on meeting a certain minimum skill level, and then investing the (many) hours.
And the latter two issues tie together, btw... because the respecs are expensive, you have to ensure that even Very Bad Choices are still viable, which is part of why there's never any meaningful challenge, except the challenge of staying awake while you grind.
Since you mention "story" and "illusion" and "role playing game", PoE's story, like nearly every other game's story, is basically total garbage. And the claim that a character is "uniquely yours" is laughable. Go look at your character creation process: choose one of 7 uninspired archetypes, listen to the dopey grimdark backstory, and sign up for the railroad characterization. You appear to want to hang your hat on writing that, in the realm of novels, would consign you to a vanity press, which baffles me.
Everyone will get bored of a single game in the long run. We still managed to hold your interest for over 23 hours of gameplay. I would call that a win.
I can't know this for sure, but if we had offered you free repecs I doubt you would have stuck around much longer anyway.
As to your comments on our story, that isn't what I was referring to at all.
When someone talks animatedly about their memory of an online RPG experience they don't talk about the game storyline. They talk about how they found this item or used this upgrade which made their character awesome. That is the story of your character and it's what forms your lasting memory of the game.
Maybe I play games differently but I always try and go for the optimal set up (the min/max)(even if it involves looking it up on the internet).
So theoretically, assuming players are somewhat rational. Then they'd always go for the optimal set up and most RPG players will end up converging onto the same optimal stats anyway.
This is where level systems shine, they can make the path to the optimal set up extremely painful, but players will still grind for it, since it's the optimal (and players like to be optimal).
Well, what is optimal? The first time I played Fallout 1 it was optimal to me to have a high barter skill, because I traded a lot and want to not lose money on that transaction. Later I found I can steal money, so I focused on theft skills instead. Years later I didn't play all too morally any more, therefore I could kill whole cities which meant weapon skills were more important than barter or theft. A few months back I played it again, and this time I found shooting people is boring, because I did that in all my playthroughs before. So I began using only melee weapons/skills on my character.
Optimal is different for different players and will change over time. A good RPG has a very high number of optimal or only slightly suboptimal paths you can choose from. I would even argue that sometimes the suboptimal paths are the more interesting ones (real roleplayers play their character in way that they might be scared of rats and run away, even if their character is able to one-shot the end boss; another example is above me deciding to only use melee weapons and make the most of it).
For any goal, there's only gone to be one (or a best a couple) optimal builds. Among players, the vast majority are going to have one or the same few goals.
In a MMO, most players are going to be chasing the most overpowered build. Which is why MMO developers change things all the time - not for supposed "balance", just to keep players on the treadmill.
I agree on the MMO part. That's why for me MMOs aren't really RPGs. My statement about good RPGs was a little different, though. A good RPG really has different optimal builds, e.g., you can't say that one of the starting characters in Diablo 2 is really better than the others. If one build overpowers the others that's really a balancing issue and a game claiming to be a good RPG has to make sure that this doesn't exist. As you say I also believe that MMOs have the goal to keep players on the treadmill and therefore prefer a changing imbalance over a constant balance.
But sometimes people like role playing an actual character, not just grinding to get 'best' character. As an example there are plenty of suggested SPECIAL setups for Fallout3.
Yeah, exactly. I have more fun making the character that I choose the best it can be relative to its starting state, not every other character in the game.
Well there are multiple different personalities that we have to cater to when designing a character progression system. You are what we would call a Spike player (going from the terminology coined by the design team of Magic the Gathering).
It's okay that you act like that because following towards a goal that you think is optimal is fun for you.
However, it's our challenge as game designers to make it so that opinions will differ in the player base as to what is optimal. Once you have a diversity of player builds than you will still feel a bond to your character because you still picked between different efficient options that were presented on the internet.
Maybe I play games differently but I always try and go for the optimal set up (the min/max)(even if it involves looking it up on the internet).
I think the fact that you can min/max a game easily is a testament of bad, or at least simplistic, game design. In games like System Shock, one of the examples in the article, there is no simple optimum but multiple viable paths to victory.
Of course simplistic game design has it's place, for example in mindless shooters like left 4 dead. That one is extremely linear (on a level that really killed immersion for me), but it perhaps aids the game designers goal of completely braindead (hah) entertainment.
It's perhaps the same thing as in literature: The author asks for more Goethe but only gets Tolkien & Co. Both are fine, but Tolkien selling more copies doesn't make it good literature, "just" great entertainment.
This is why I burned out so hard on "RPGs", and why one of my favorite games to this day is Space Station 13, which is possibly the only true multiplayer roleplaying game (and please point me to more if I am wrong).
The core game mechanic is actually playing out some role, and interacting with others playing out their roles, sometimes conflicting and sometimes cooperative. The game starts, and you are given a job on the space station. The mechanics are complex, pretty punishing (permadeath lasts until server reset, or someone clones you etc), and partially irrelevant; incompetence is realistic, and expected. Dysfunction abounds. Some people might be assigned as secret agents and given tasks automatically like theft or murder. Most of the time, however, is spent playing the drunk police officer, crusty cynical mechanic, horribly unhelpful bureaucrat, or janitor who "forgets" to put up wet floor signs for amusement. The chemists and farmers trade goods, the scientists perform dangerous experiments for dubious ends, etc.
The irony for me is that the only way to restore a true feeling of "playing a role" was removing the stats, and many of the normal objectives, and building a theme where the only optimal play is, essentially, to play sub-optimally and just go for whatever is fun (excluding things that get you thrown out an airlock or tossed in jail for a few hours).
I guess I just got a different idea of what RPG meant from pen-and-paper roleplaying games, and my coding background makes me a bit allergic to games that could be "solved".
I avoid leveling system games, I guess because I feel like they are abusing some stimulus-reward system in my mentality, but I am asking what you think there, not trying to be snide.
Well there is a payoff at the end. Let's say you were playing Runescape and you were min-maxing (building a pure). If you go PKing, you'd almost always win the fight (unless the other person was a pure). The real fun with Runescape is writing bots though.
>In the game I work on, Path of Exile, we have specifically made respec something that has a cost.
And you made it so I have no idea what I should be taking and not taking. And you made it so the game heavily punishes me for unknowingly taking the "wrong" thing and not being perfectly optimal. This is why everyone stopped playing so quickly.
I generally play games as a way to self-actualize in an alternate reality. Trying on a character and a way of (excitement filled) living like it's a jacket.
Putting in some time and getting some reward is a poor bargain. In particular, it makes replays agonizingly painful. My time is actually valuable; I'd much rather put time into learning a skill or technique that I can start using immediately in a replay.
I disagree wholeheartedly. Leveling should never be about pavlovian rewards for menial tasks. That is lazy game design that leads to pathetic and unfun games. Leveling should be about 2 things:
1. Pacing. The timing that determines when the story should move forward needs to be tuned so the player has just about exhausted the fun and interest of the current level.
2. Controlling complexity. When a game begins, only the simplest world and player abilities should be available. When it is assessed that the player has a good handle on the world and game mechanics, new abilities and areas should open up. Leveling up should always be about giving the player more options instead of giving an existing option a +1 (and then giving the corresponding challenges a +1 to stay balanced.)
That's generally not true at all. It may seem that way, but level systems are similar to a proof of work scheme. Player puts in some time and receives some fair reward for his time. Level systems are a way to facilitate this transaction without invoking pay2win overtones.