I don't have a lot of time to play cRPGs these days. Mondays and Fridays are particularly taxing. On these two nights, it's my family shift obligation, as I trudge through these long nights with dad, who has advanced stage Parkinson's, to help him along as he needs to get up every 20 minutes all night long. I can't sleep, but still too tired to do anything but lay there awaiting for his next stirrings to help him up and to the bathroom. My mind sometimes wonders into gaming. Such was last night.
I was thinking on what exactly is it about a new cRPG that is the most fun. Is it the fact that it's shiny and new? That it's mechanics and gameplay are unknown first-hand? That it's setting happens to be a favorite? That choice and consequence is touted to actually exist? That the writing is so good, I'll think the characters are standing right next to me? That the UI will be elegant, informative, and the opposite of cumbersome? Or that I read somewhere it will solve all of humanity's problems, starting with Parkinson's Disease?
For me, what I find most thrilling about a new cRPG is the beginning of the game. But not really for any of the reasons from above. It's the beginning of the game that is most exciting because it's the game's best chance, however brief, to present it's most mundane offerings (bare with me here), against enemies such as "tropey" rats in the cellar, which WILL kill you if you're not attentive and careful. This makes whatever you find during those early minutes actually matter and highly useful.
Find cloth armor with 1 point of armor defense, well it's better than the 0 armor underwear you start the game with. Get a rusty dagger, well it's better than using your unskilled fists. Survive enough of the early games toughness to reach level 2, at last you can finally get +1 in attack.
This initial experience however, only just opens the door to the broader idea here which is that gear, attributes, skills and so on need to matter and for these things to matter, the game's challenges need to be tough. This is the fuel that can make character development and progress in a game exciting from beginning to end.
Too often however, a game will provide all manner of gear, attributes, and skills and then take them out back and shoot them dead because the challenges in the game are not commensurate with the tremendous offerings of awesomeness along with a quick road to them. Too many games, including games I still enjoyed despite themselves, do exactly this.
It's arguable that cRPGs of the 80s and 90s had the same trajectory to awesomeness as the Wright Brothers first test flight… a brief stint a few feet off the ground only to be clobbered to death by Murphy's Ghost with your noob party in Wizardry 1. But today, the zeal by developers to propel you to awesomeness is a short vertical line from which the player is at the top within the hour.
Now I'm going to name names so let me get my helmet on so the bashing can begin. Skyrim, Witcher 3, D:OS2, Diablo 3, Dragon Age Origins, Kingdoms of Amalur, Assassin's Creed (Black Flag & Origins [cRPG-lites])… these are all games I played in recent years that qualify under my arguments (I could list some more, but this is already a great big wall of text). I enjoyed all of them for what they offered but they all quickly propel you to awesomeness way too fast causing much of the mid to end game gear/skills/attributes to become unexciting. When this happens, character development becomes uninteresting as do the "challenges" as they aren't really challenges but rather soft white bunnies for you to hop over along the rails to the end of the story (sometimes referred to as scaling).
Witcher 3 was particularly egregious in this department since there were way too many locations of interest, each offering some kind of gear reward that became useless 30 hours ago. Skyrim's highly marketed, highlighted, and underscored Shout system went largely unused because I was already way too awesome by the time shouts showed up. Diablo 3 is a little different, they offer a lot of great gear leveling up but once you get to end-game activities, potentially useful new gear shows up only after hours and hours of grinding and is awarded the Seal of Boredom since that game is all about gear. The Divinity Original Sin games offer a robust but useless crafting system that you'll rarely engage with in part because what you can craft is mostly useless but to a greater extent, you won't use it because you'll be too busy selling junk you found or anguishing over how to assign that recent talent point which you'll later conclude made absolutely no difference since you became awesome by or before hour 3.
So the next new game you start, be mindful that the first hour will likely have the best challenge to reward ratio thus making that early game play the most exciting and most satisfying part of the game, even when the game is one giant trope in an elvish land and you find yourself fighting rats in a cellar… but those rats are damn hard to beat, thank God you found that rusty dagger beforehand.
At this point, I'd like devs to include an auto-click to toss the next piece of junk into my off-site stash that triggers whenever I slightly wiggle my left pinky so as to make it as automatic as possible. And if devs are going to offer a bazillion attributes and skills to pick from, auto-assigning them perhaps isn't as bad as we thought it would be in Diablo 3 since you hardly notice them after the first few hours anyway when you've already far surpassed the challenge the game has to offer.
Yes, I'm slightly grumpy, I didn't sleep last night.
I was thinking on what exactly is it about a new cRPG that is the most fun. Is it the fact that it's shiny and new? That it's mechanics and gameplay are unknown first-hand? That it's setting happens to be a favorite? That choice and consequence is touted to actually exist? That the writing is so good, I'll think the characters are standing right next to me? That the UI will be elegant, informative, and the opposite of cumbersome? Or that I read somewhere it will solve all of humanity's problems, starting with Parkinson's Disease?
For me, what I find most thrilling about a new cRPG is the beginning of the game. But not really for any of the reasons from above. It's the beginning of the game that is most exciting because it's the game's best chance, however brief, to present it's most mundane offerings (bare with me here), against enemies such as "tropey" rats in the cellar, which WILL kill you if you're not attentive and careful. This makes whatever you find during those early minutes actually matter and highly useful.
Find cloth armor with 1 point of armor defense, well it's better than the 0 armor underwear you start the game with. Get a rusty dagger, well it's better than using your unskilled fists. Survive enough of the early games toughness to reach level 2, at last you can finally get +1 in attack.
This initial experience however, only just opens the door to the broader idea here which is that gear, attributes, skills and so on need to matter and for these things to matter, the game's challenges need to be tough. This is the fuel that can make character development and progress in a game exciting from beginning to end.
Too often however, a game will provide all manner of gear, attributes, and skills and then take them out back and shoot them dead because the challenges in the game are not commensurate with the tremendous offerings of awesomeness along with a quick road to them. Too many games, including games I still enjoyed despite themselves, do exactly this.
It's arguable that cRPGs of the 80s and 90s had the same trajectory to awesomeness as the Wright Brothers first test flight… a brief stint a few feet off the ground only to be clobbered to death by Murphy's Ghost with your noob party in Wizardry 1. But today, the zeal by developers to propel you to awesomeness is a short vertical line from which the player is at the top within the hour.
Now I'm going to name names so let me get my helmet on so the bashing can begin. Skyrim, Witcher 3, D:OS2, Diablo 3, Dragon Age Origins, Kingdoms of Amalur, Assassin's Creed (Black Flag & Origins [cRPG-lites])… these are all games I played in recent years that qualify under my arguments (I could list some more, but this is already a great big wall of text). I enjoyed all of them for what they offered but they all quickly propel you to awesomeness way too fast causing much of the mid to end game gear/skills/attributes to become unexciting. When this happens, character development becomes uninteresting as do the "challenges" as they aren't really challenges but rather soft white bunnies for you to hop over along the rails to the end of the story (sometimes referred to as scaling).
Witcher 3 was particularly egregious in this department since there were way too many locations of interest, each offering some kind of gear reward that became useless 30 hours ago. Skyrim's highly marketed, highlighted, and underscored Shout system went largely unused because I was already way too awesome by the time shouts showed up. Diablo 3 is a little different, they offer a lot of great gear leveling up but once you get to end-game activities, potentially useful new gear shows up only after hours and hours of grinding and is awarded the Seal of Boredom since that game is all about gear. The Divinity Original Sin games offer a robust but useless crafting system that you'll rarely engage with in part because what you can craft is mostly useless but to a greater extent, you won't use it because you'll be too busy selling junk you found or anguishing over how to assign that recent talent point which you'll later conclude made absolutely no difference since you became awesome by or before hour 3.
So the next new game you start, be mindful that the first hour will likely have the best challenge to reward ratio thus making that early game play the most exciting and most satisfying part of the game, even when the game is one giant trope in an elvish land and you find yourself fighting rats in a cellar… but those rats are damn hard to beat, thank God you found that rusty dagger beforehand.
At this point, I'd like devs to include an auto-click to toss the next piece of junk into my off-site stash that triggers whenever I slightly wiggle my left pinky so as to make it as automatic as possible. And if devs are going to offer a bazillion attributes and skills to pick from, auto-assigning them perhaps isn't as bad as we thought it would be in Diablo 3 since you hardly notice them after the first few hours anyway when you've already far surpassed the challenge the game has to offer.
Yes, I'm slightly grumpy, I didn't sleep last night.
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