On RPGs and their unfortunate flaws.

In reply to my last blog entry, Foto Efekt asks what are (in my mind) the fundamental flaws of computer RPG and what needs to be changed. While I won't necessarily discuss what I'm planning on doing for my project, I am willing to point out the problems that the genre tends to suffer from. At least that might give you an idea of where I'm heading. Will I be able to rectify all of the issues? Am I just talking out of my ass belittling the gaming industry only to realize that what I'm suggesting can't be done? Time will tell. This post isn't really about that. It's about admitting that there's a problem, look at the cause, and try to improve game design philosophies overall. More importantly, it's about making cool games.

First and foremost, I think that there's a huge problem in the industry and how they handle storytelling. Most games (at least the big budget ones) are a few quick-time events short of becoming nothing more than interactive movies. Do any of you remember FMV games ([f]ull [m]otion [v]ideo)? There's a reason why that genre is dead and why most gamers don't like quick-time events in their games.

There are times when, depending on how it's executed, we don't mind the occasional quick-time events. So why do we normally despise them, though? Well, my reasoning is that the storytelling of the game is so not involving that it's the only way for the game to keep our attention. No one ever says "Hey, you know what would be cool? Quicktime events!" That can also be applied to many brawler-type games. It's so bad that those quick-time events remind us of how bad it is. That's my theory, in any case.

It's because the relationship between the gamer and the game is a one-way channel enforced by the designer. Do X or don't continue... or worse: fail. What -IS- failing, anyways? Is it death? Is it alternate objectives? More often than not, it's neither. It's just "BAM! Game Over! You didn't do what you were expected to do! Try again!" That's a major problem and it goes all the way to how the game's story is being told. This is true for even awesome game series like The Elder Scrolls. In Oblivion, for example (I mention Oblivion because it’s one of the games that I’m most familiar with), a lot of the events in the game follow the same pattern: The world is going to end, talk to Jauffre or nothing will happen... So, by logic, you shouldn't do anything!Tada! No Oblivion gates!

Diablo 2's storytelling (as awesome as it is) got a lot of flak back when it was released in 2000 because critics use to say "You're a hero, yet you're just following the flow of the story, not really contributing anything to the plot". I thought the way Blizzard and Blizzard North handled the storytelling in Diablo 2 was really cool. It works brilliantly for the kind of game that it is. However, it's not an RPG, is it? It's a mindless hack-n'slash and, at best, it's a campaign module. That's the case for nearly every game that has plot these days. Ever felt like you had to do everything to save the world and nobody else within that world was willing to lift a finger? Ever felt that all you had to do was NOT participate and the world would be fine despite what every NPC is telling you?

Or is that only happening in open-ended/sandbox games? Are we stuck between tunnel-vision design and stale freedom?

Is that the best that our favoured medium is capable of? I don't necessarily have issues with the method per say, generally speaking, but to see that happening in RPGs is just sad. RPGs are the pinnacle of choice. While the story should engage the player, it's important that the player is driving the story. That's what the dungeon master in a Pen&Paper game (read: Dungeons & Dragons) is for; to adjust the campaign to his or her players' choices. That's what makes D&D so fun. There's more to RPGs than having multiple "alternate endings" (I'm looking at you Mass Effect). Dungeons & Dragons is what every RPG game is trying to emulate.

Let me rephrase that last sentence to emphasize the more disturbing and/or disappointing truth: Every RPG (from Ultima to all the way to JRPGs such as Final Fantasy to current games like Skyrim and, now, Dark Souls 2) is a developer's interpretation/adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons. A game developed in 1974. A game designed to be played with pencils, dice and paper because, at the time, people didn't have easy access to computers if at all.

I mention "people didn't have easy access to computers" because we have to understand WHY people used dice, pencils and sheets of paper to play games. Why did players have to keep track of how much strength and how a 1-8 sword with a +1 modifier affected their characters... and how much experience points they have/need; it's because they're doing the math in their heads.

You know what that is? It's essentially a game engine. The user interface is a sheets of paper and the graphics/sound is the imagination. We're in 2014 and we're still using game mechanics from the 70s. Is that all we can do? Is this really what "Next Gen" gaming really is? Right now, "Next Gen" only refers to the new generation of consoles. Okay; fine. What does the Xbox One or Playstation 4 offer that the previous generation of consoles couldn't? A new paint job? We're talking about video games, here; they run on computers. Computers... COMPUTE things so that means that they can handle all the math we want. Why are we still playing games that were designed with old gen mentality? Why are we still playing games with tooltips on the weapon telling us how much damage it deals? It's a sword! A sword can be better than another sword but the game is still communicating that through dice roll potentials. NPCs are empty shells that are there for you to click on them so that they can say their one or two line of dialogue... I saw that kind of behavior in the original Final Fantasy.

"Don't fix what isn't broken" is a very safe way to look at it. We're used to it but nobody seems to challenge it. Is it really the only way to do things? Isn't there a better way?

That also has a side-effect of making the focus of RPGs into a spreadsheet game. Everything (the story, the characters, the motives) becomes blurred out because the game encourages you to look into your stats and be as efficient as possible. "Can't kill that monster?" level up a few times and try again. If you meta-gem the socket into a whippo-blue-spectraltron (I made that up, by the way), your attacks will double and you can keep the monster permanently stunned! That's where the strategy is; in the spreadsheets. If you didn't have to do that, the game would then be too easy. I'm not saying that if you like that kind of stuff that you're either stupid or that you're playing the wrong games. Tactical RPGs are surprisingly fun. I'm just saying that if you want to play an RPG where you truly have the sense of adventure and want to save the princess, the spreadsheets have to go. The focus from a game design and player point of view needs to be on the adventure.

Is Morrowind really better than Oblivion? What about the Baldur's Gate series? Mass Effect? Ultima? Forget all that! No matter how you feel about The Elder Scrolls or RPGs in general, from the UI to the loot design, the TES series is the closest to being true RPGs the way people imagine it when they play Dungeons & Dragons. That's why it's one of my favourite video game series. We still have a long way to go, mind you, but I believe it's because each iteration of the series puts more and more emphasis on the adventure. You might prefer Morrowind to Oblivion but, looking at it objectively, Oblivion is a far simpler game than Morrowind; the spreadsheet is still there but it's very trimmed down. As a fan of Morrowind, you might say to yourself "Yeah! Take THAT Oblivion!" but this trimmed down spreadsheet is what makes Oblivion a better game to channel the adventure; it's just a shame that Morrowind features many more game elements that compliment RPGs that its sequel lacks.

To reiterate, when I talk about spreadsheets, I'm talking about stats that your character wouldn't see but that you need to see to understand what's going on in the game. A "1-8 sword", "hit rating", "block and critical chance", "50 spell resistance", "level 30 in Conjuration", "NPC disposition", "level 20 lock", etc.

You don't have that problem in Dungeons & Dragons because your imagination and ingenuity will always trump the stats. If your dungeon master is good, he'll promote that and, if he's bad, the experience is so organic anyways that the stats are just there to regulate everybody involved. Even if your D&D session is all about killing monsters (as some like to play), the dungeon master is describing everything to you so your imagination is the key element that makes it fun. What you remember at the end of the day is how you and your friends defeated the demon... and how you managed to jump on his back and tie a rope around his neck and everybody thought that was the most awesome thing you ever did.

It's a question of focus.

Peter Molyneux, a game designer behind the Fable series (and many, many other great games), had the right idea about trying to get the players invested in characters like the infamous dog. Or that creepy kid tech demo he had a prototype of for the Xbox's Kinect. It's a dog because it saves them the trouble of making you converse with it. Talking characters that are universally likeable are super hard to do and, when it happens, it's often times a fluke. Not to mention an animal is a great way to hide a clumsy AI if they realize halfway through production that the AI is subpar or that the computer can’t handle it. The dog is Mr. Molyneux's attempt (amongst many) at making a connection between the player and characters in his virtual world. I believe that he had the right idea, but ultimately attacked the problem from the wrong angle... because, he essentially forced that connection to the players as a gimmick. At the end of the day, regardless of the success that the dog might bring, it's still a spreadsheet game; albeit one with fart jokes.

You know what annoys me the most about spreadsheet games? It's that it doesn't make good use of the medium. Show, don't tell. If you visibly show that a sword is on fire or that heat waves are emitting from it, a player is smart enough to figure out that the sword deals fire damage especially after a few combat situations. It saves you the trouble of making a stupid tooltip. Make the victim scream in pain or have him/her engulfed in flames or even just have a fiery sound effect when you swing. You probably couldn't do a lot with ASCII graphics back in the old days but, again, we're in 2014 now. We have the technology. We had it for years! Of course, now, it'd just look better. NPC disposition is high? Make the NPC look like he's happy to see you. Have the NPC say how much he enjoys your company. Don't just give me a rating.

The counter argument I hear sometimes is "how do you communicate to the player how much damage he/she can deal? If you communicate that the sword is on fire, how much damage does that fire deal?" and, to me, that's the wrong way of seeing it. In fact, saying stuff like that just means you don’t get it. You have to think outside the box; especially in RPGs. I mean, we expect the players to think outside the box to solve challenges so why are the developers taking the easy way out?

The fantasy is feeling like a hero, not a manager. "Visual presentation" is the answer. It's not so much telling the player how much he/she can deal, but showing the player the damage he/she IS dealing. The early first-person shooters did this rather well, actually. Grab a shotgun and you can kill enemies in one glorious shot! There were no tooltips and it was done with very few graphical sprites. How much damage the shotgun shells actually did is pretty irrelevant, at least to the player. It was GORY!

It's so strange that, for a genre that's so number-crunchingly intensive, combat is getting faster and faster as the years go by. Like both of these things are supposed to work harmoniously somehow. Are we playing a strategy game or an action game? There's an issue with pacing, here, but RPGs circumvent the issue by pausing the game either by accessing your inventory (Bethesda) or by pressing a pause button that allows you to activate spells and abilities (Bioware). JRPGs are traditionally turn-based but even some of them tread in real-time waters (FFIV ?, FFX?). They do this because they want to deliver an exciting cinematic experience… yet they still want you to be able to figure out what you have in your inventory and spell books.

While there's nothing wrong with wanting to deliver a cinematic experience (I mean, those ARE cool, right?), as a game designer, you're stuck in this proverbial ditch; it requires you to craft your story which makes it linear and basically pigeonhole-ing the player into doing exactly what you've planned them to be doing. Traditionally speaking, you can't have "cinematic experiences" and "player-driven" in the same sentence...because one requires you to take control from the player. Unless you're just talking about the presentation (like a massive epic combat scene in the background, or just being inside a majestic ancient ruin). A player might end up doing something that is epic, or found himself (by his actions) in a situation that is so out of control that it becomes "cinematic"... but you can't plan that. If you can't plan it, it's not something game designers can consistently offer. However, it's part of the organic nature of what RPGs should be… or, at least, what they should strive to be.

Think about Minecraft for a second. Ok, it's barely what I'd call a game, but it's 100% player-driven. That's the kind of stuff our favourite media can do and it ignites the imagination.

The issue with player-driven gameplay is that it's hard for developers to make characters or events that the player will be invested in. Lets face it, most NPCs are still acting like robots. More often than not, because of this higher-paced combat, the AI seems inept. An encounter is challenging not because the AI is clever, but because the enemy hits harder or has more health points... or has spot-on accuracy. But even outside of combat, characters act like robots. Those that move have a routine. Aside from their short-term reactions to what you do around them, the player's actions hardly (if at all) influence that NPC's routine... with the exception of you murdering them. I think the closest we've seen in that regard is in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. You steal all the gold and food from an NPC and they'll eventually turn to crime... and then die from the brutally unsympathetic guards.

That's great! We need more of that! The entire game should revolve around stuff like that.

So, with the linearity of the story design with little to no player-driven content and "spreadsheets mechanics", I believe that RPGs are a shallow representation of what they truly stand for. They're still incredibly fun (for the most part) but with the Xbox One and Playstation 4 settling in more and more houses and this wave of new "next gen" games, all of it has me rolling my eyes. It's just a new paint job.

I have plenty more to talk about on the subject, but I'll leave it at that for now.