Why do RPG games miss the mark? How can they be improved?

The Game Room
21

Eh? I don’t know about the other games you mentioned, but the Ultima series and FFX did not have your average story lines.

In the Ultima series (which are wonderful games, btw), you play a guy called The Avatar who has been apparently saving the world of Britannia since basically forever. You’re a normal guy in the modern real world. For example, in Ultima 9 you start out at your modern 2-story house circa the year 2000. When you’re needed in the alternate reality of Britannia, you get summoned and you start kicking bad guy butt.

I used to love that story mechanic! Heck, I still do!

In FFX, you’re not some humdrum villager, either. Since the story is so awesome (and the game positively cinematic) I’ll have to spoiler box this one:

[SPOILER] I mean, c’mon! You start out as a young star athlete in one of the biggest sports of the game world. You’re incredibly famous. That’s one thing that makes the protagonist not normal. The other thing? Oh, yeah… You’re not real. As you find out late, late in the game, you’re actually just a summoning. You’re a hero dreamed by the faye, which are the preserved dead spirits of your city that was obliterated a thousand years ago.

Not to mention the game starts out with your city being eaten by an enormous, anonymous monster. Only for you to wake up a thousand years in the future!

FFX had an incredible story. This spoiler is a bare taste of the depth that they couldn’t even explore in just one game. That’s another reason why FFX is the only FF with a direct sequel :wink: [/SPOILER]

22

I’m sure FFX had a nice story and gameplay and all, but I swear EVERY time I saw one of my roommates playing it, they were either:

a) On a big boat fighting a giant sea turtle or something?
b) Walking in some dark field with lighting hitting everywhere and trying to avoid random encounters.
c) Playing that God-damn underwater water polo.

But as I mentioned in a different thread, I really don’t like Japanese-style RPGs. I don’t like that the completely force me into a role, I have NO say at all in who he/she is, what they look like, etc…They even choose the weapons I have to use! This guy only uses freakishly big swords, this guy only uses water polo balls (the fuck?) and this goth chick only uses teddy bears? Seriousl?! A TEDDY BEAR? WTF is that shit?

ETA: Oh yeah, one more thing I saw them do: race giant chickens so they could get one part of the rarest (and BEST!) weapon for one person in the game. I mean, race them for fucking HOURS because they were half a second too slow.

And don’t tell me their chokobos. They’re giant chickens. I know it, and you know.

23

I think it’s just useless to expect one type of “RPG” to be the same, or even offer the same experience, as another type. Isn’t that why we distinguish MMORPGs, Japanese/Console RPGs, RTS RPGs, tabletop RPGs, etc.? I happen to like the Japanese console style myself, partly because it doesn’t bother trying to pretend it’s anything but what it is (see smiling bandit’s post for the reason why). But I don’t begrudge the existence of any of the other types; heck, I’ve sorta wanted to play FFXI for quite a while, just to play my favorite job, Blue Mage.

It’s just a matter of finding whatever type fits what you like and what you’re going for.

24

More bodily functions. Why don’t heroes sleep, eat or crap regularly? If I were a developer my guy would drop a load every day at 06:45 whether he is girded for battle or not.

25

Oh, be fair now. Lulu doesn’t always use a moogle, sometimes she uses other stuffed toys. And besides, she uses magic…since her job is Black Mage, she’s not expected to be really great at using weapons. Cloud uses a freakishly big sword because he’s been infused with Mako. Wakka uses a stupid ball because he’s one of the lamest characters ever, and they had to have SOME sort of reason for him to be interested in Tidus.

I’m right behind you, though, on the “racing chocobos for an Ultimate Weapon” and similar tasks. Sidequests should be hard, but not nearly impossible. It’s one of the reasons I never finished FFX. Another reason was that I couldn’t stand fully half of the main characters (Tidus, Yuna, and Wakka).

26

FF represents a different kind of RPG from the open-ended types like Elder Scrolls or D&D. The Final Fantasy series is really like reading a book or watching a movie. It’s a story that unfolds for you, and you get to participate in. I find that extremely pleasing, because I usually enjoy the stories a lot. If you’re frustrated by the fact that your personal decisions only have a nominal effect on the story, then there are definitely other kinds of games to try.

Like a movie or TV show, FF requires that you like the characters and concept from the get-go. It’s not a game you’re going to keep playing for 8 hours to try to like, only to suddenly discover that you love it. It would be like me watching Master and Commander, disliking the characters from the first half hour or so, and then becoming too disinterested to continue watching.

Personally, I tend to dislike very open-ended games like Morrowind, Baldur’s Gate, etc. I mean, I LOVE, LOVE their mechanics. I love some of the quests, the world, the combat systems, etc., but I just get so damn bored. The worlds are too open ended. I don’t feel driven to do anything. The story doesn’t engage me, and they can’t possibly cover every decision that I might make, so they don’t try.

As for the type-casting of weapons, I think that they usually make sense. That isn’t a teddy bear that Lulu uses, it’s a voodoo doll. It’s supposed to appeal to that half-gothic/half-kawaii image. You can get dolls that have pins and such in their heads too, if you like. Wakka uses a ball because he’s not a warrior. He’s an expert blitzball player. Tidus uses a big sword because he’s the main character and people who play FF expect the main character to have a BIG sword :wink:

FF is all about story. Story driven by surprisingly well-written characters. If you had too much control, that element would definitely be lost. I find that apparent in one of their newest releases. FF12 was crap, and why? Because the story isn’t engaging at all until the 2nd half of the game. They let you do way too much on your own. By the time the 2nd half approached, I just didn’t care any more about the plight of the main characters.

27

You’re kidding. Drinking strange water, eating campaign rations, sleeping in strange beds - you’d have either chronic constipation or rampant diarrhoea, and would be dreaming wistfully of a nice long holiday at home and healthy, regular bowel movements again. It’s like how Henry V’s archers mostly had their arses hanging out of their trousers by Agincourt, not because all that marching was hard on the gusset but because it was much less trouble when you were uncontrollably crapping forty times a day. :smiley:

This is, however, Slightly More Detail than I for one want out of a computer game.

28

It’s not like this is a recent development by greedy or lazy developers.
I can remember this plot happening in Shining Force (and shining Force 2!) on the Sega Megadrive (Genesis).

On the subject of giant chickens, personally, I love em.
I’ve played through Final Fantasy VII just to get to the Chocobo races.
My wife has a huge database on her Giant Chicken breeding project.
She managed to find the maximum stats a Giant Chicken can have and breed both a blue and a yellow with those stats.
I have a similar database with regards to greens and training.
It’s all very interesting because we had to experiment to find the numbers rather than looking them up on a website.

29

Many so-called RPGs make parcheesi against a 5yo seem high strategy. There’s no options; no real consequences; very little in the way of choices. They’re completely linear hack’n’slash.

With WoW or Baldur’s Gate, your choices matter. You can go straight for the theoretical “goal”, you can set other goals as your priorities. Lilbro’s first shot at Baldur’s Gate was following the story step by step; mine was exploring every area, I didn’t go to the city until I’d explored everything else I could explore. By then I had like 5 fireball wands in my inventory :smiley: he’d arrived with none.

30

I’m a bit torn on FFX. I loved the game, but it was because the story gets very good towards the end and it’s such a pretty game with an awesome soundtrack.

I don’t think the storyline though is that different from the standard ‘template’ I described. I mean, what is “sin” anyway, other than the standard generic “evil force” with no will or reason?

And much of the game I did spend wandering from combat to combat, bored. How many times do you have to fight that bloody guy (Seymour?)? Surely after the second time you’d gut him or something, and keep the guts with you in a container – just to be on the safe side. :wink:

31

Like the chocobo racing, these are required to get some of the best weapons in the game–dodge 200 thunderbolts for Lulu’s weapon, and play a LOT of blitzball for Wakka’s (I actually enjoy the latter–the Thunderplains in just sadism.)

Whatever might be different, FFX still follows the same basic storyline as the others–the status quo is corrupted, so time to change it. And it started the same way as FFXII (though not nearly as bad) with a lot of railroading at the start–sure, all JRPGs are really just looking to get to the next cutscene, but FFX for the first hour felt a lot like playing a movie. It was also one of the few recent FF games not to involve some sort of action-battle system (the active-battle system is alright, but I never cared for it). For that reason alone I enjoy it more than most of the others in the series.

Mijin,

Seymour is actually dead after the first time you fight him–he’s just unsent. So it’s kind of hard to kill him again. And I don’t think he’s about to stand around and let Yuna do her little water-dance, pretty though it is.

32

But even Baldur’s Gate (one of my favorite games of all time) puts you on a rail. You took the local, lilbro took the express.

I loved Daggerfall. It gave you a story, and as long as you kicked it off in a timely manner, you really were free to do what you want. Daggerfall also had many factions, something most games miss. Baldur’s Gate II had the greatest NPC interactions, including the romances and all the distinct dialogues based on party composition. When modders went in and finished some of the dialog trees that didn’t make the released edition, the depth of what Bioware was attempting was even better. It was enough to help you forget the rail you were on.

That said, all games seem to have the “obviously evil” and “obviously good” answer trees. I’d like to see some more nuance. NwN and KotOR started this, but didn’t take it far enough, IMO. Tie the subtle alignment shifts to faction shifts too, and you will have me as a customer.

I used to love the JRPGs, but now I can’t sit through the beginning of FFX to actually get to playing the game! It’s like 45 minutes of cutscenes in the first hour of play. If I wanted to watch anime, I would have put an anime DVD in the PS2. Let me play the damn game.

33

I don’t think I meant Ultima…I’m thinking of another game but the name is eluding me at the moment. And I agree, the Ultima series was good.

I loved FFX, I logged several hundred hours on it and am well versed in the storyline. But it does follow the basic format, teen boy with no obvious special skill for combat is discovered to be the one that is key to saving the universe from the big bad evil. It was a fun story and a great game, but it was overall a very formulaic story.

34

You could go with the earlier Ultima games, where you would use up your food and, once it ran out you’d take damage for each step you took - leading to the oddball thing where you’d lose 1HP per many-mile step on the overland map and a 1HP loss per five-foot step on the town maps.

Or, you could go with the earliest Ultima games (1 and 2?) where you’d drop dead the moment you ran out of food.

-Joe

35

Though I agree with the general idea of more metagame, I have to disagree here. There are some calculations meant to be private (in my opinion). In D&D the DM doesn’t use a magical formula to determine who the monster goes for (not usually anyway). He uses his judgement, both for what would be most fun for the players and for what would be appropriate for the situation. Things like aggro try to make the computer emulate that, and as such I feel that many of the numbers not shown by the game are not shown for a reason, in some cases bad ones (just show me the damn multiplier, not this damn “nearly doubles” crap), but in some cases such as aggro some solidly founded ones that I feel should be kept. I personaly refuse to use a threat meter in WoW unless it’s absolutely non-negotiable I have one because I feel it detracts from the immersion and game portion of the world and turns it into a meter watching fiasco.

So in my opinion:
More stats to affect more things = good
Endlessly watching meters to determine these things = not so good.

Though, I wouldn’t mind if they were done via animation/speech turning to you and hissing for example could be a sign your aggro is getting too high.

36

I’m a sucker for Nippon Ichi games. For whatever reason I find them all ridiculously addictive, especially after I’ve done one playthrough and can start applying massive overkill to everything. (Phantom Brave is especially egregious once we start abusing certain aspects of the game engine to create parties that can dish out eye-dropping levels of damage.)

I’ve logged 200+ hours in almost all of the Nippon Ichi titles I’ve tried, although perhaps in my case it’s less that I find it fun and more that I’m hopelessly addicted.

37

I still think the original Fallout was the best Computer RPG to be made to this date. Multiple ways to build a character. Multiple ways to get around problems. Turn based combat allowing for strategy. Intriguing storyline. Getting shot in the back by Ian all the time…

Fallout 2 was even better from a mechanics standpoint. You could push your party NPC’s out of the way so they wouldn’t trap you. (In Fallout 1, there were a couple locations that if you weren’t careful, the pary NPC’s would stand in a certain place and wouldn’t move unless you moved. However, there wasn’t enough room for you to move to get them to move, essentially trapping you.) There was a title system where based on what actions you took, it affected how the NPC’s in the game would react to you. However, it didn’t have as good of an atmosphere, had many pointless sidequests, and threw in too many pop-culture reference easter eggs which decreased from the immersion in the game.

But still, I’ve yet to play any CRPG’s that can hold a candle to them.

38

Unfortunately, watching the aggro meter is pretty much what all the higher-level dungeons are about. You mostly need to have the right person have aggro at the right time. if the game were more flexible, I’d agree with you, but since you pretty much have to have that aggro meter to survive, and all the tanks and DPS and healer will have it* and desperately need it. So, why fight it or pretend it doesn’t exist? This is a game where somebody can yell a taunt to a monster which is incapable of comprehending any human language, and distract the foe from a wizard unleashing nuclear devastation while said fighter… hits the monster with a sharp pointy thing.
*Ironically, the only people who don’t have it are Hunters and suchlike, who specialize in messing with others’ aggro. They rarely pick up anything significant themselves.

39

Tell that to the hunter who has been pulling aggro and dying a LOT lately (he says the mechanism to tell him feign death failed isn’t working. Sure…).

That said, some fights are more aggro sensitive that others, and some players need the meter more than others. I’m a tank, so I rarely look at the damn thing–I just throw target-of-target up and as long as the guy is hitting me or another tank, I’m good. But, say, Voidreaver, you probably want it because the tanks are constantly getting their aggro cleaved.

Just because you have the thing doesn’t mean you have to look at it, or even have it visible, but you need to at least have it for the sake of other players :dubious: . Now, the Solarian alarm mod, that’s one I can get behind tossing (It’s been a bit contentious in our guild, with myself and a few other players not using it to prove a point. The damn thing was CAUSING wipes one night, because of the load it places on the graphics card.)

40

I see a lot of people complaining about the girly-looking teen boy main character in JRPGs. Seriously, it’s easy enough to ignore that character and focus on the ones you like - I’ve been doing that forever. For every Cloud, Squall, Tidus and Vaan, there’s a Cid, Zell, Wakka and Balthier, or if you want another archetype, there’s a Vincent, Irvine, Auron or Basch.

And if you think Cloud and Sephiroth are girly, you haven’t read enough yaoi. :stuck_out_tongue: