Autolycus wrote...
Not a question of my thoughts on Bioware. I am one of their biggest critics (which has landed me in toruble on this site on more than one occasion). It is a question of, is it really that much trouble to go back to an area to sell something? The answer in all honesty, unless your time is so precious (or you're just plain lazy) is no.
This is the wrong way to look at it. If it's so trivial, why can't the game be designed to alleviate this time sink from the player altogether? Why do I need to mindlessly run through empty areas for 40 minutes when I could instead actually be playing the game?
I don't think you are analyzing this game as a game. Every action the player makes is a choice. Good games should present players with non-trivial choices - choices where the best answer is not easily known. Otherwise, it's not really a game and it's essentially playing itself. Any choice where the answer is always 1 option and not the other is a clear problem with the game's design. The solution is to either automated it or redesign it altogether.
In this inventory case, the answer to this choice is OBVIOUS - sell your crap, all the time. There is never a point in the game where it is a good gameplay decision to drop an item and accept losing the gold. Sure, it saves HUMAN TIME, but with respect to gameplay, it is a horrible decision to make. So players will basically have to babysit the game and sell all of their crap - or be punished. This is not good game design, as the there is no choice to make. It is essentially forced.
Go back and read my posts on this point, as it is critical to understanding and eventually accepting my position.
Now before we go any further, as I see it, you're main issue is with wasting time going backwards and forwards to sell pointless junk, so you want an unlimited inventory. Now I actually do understand that point of view. And I can also understand why you would prefer that. It personally does not bother me.
I am glad you get this point. I am still raising the point that even if it doesn't bother you, you are still negatively being impacted by the game's design. If these inventory issues were fixed, I highly doubt your experience would be more negative. It really only has a positive benefit to the game to increase the inventory size. 200 would have been plenty. 90 at the start of the game was really low, as you'd have 40-50 used up quite easily.
We also need to realise that, a staple of RPG games (so far, though it is now changing) is that they are long, and involve a lot of time. I notice you don't moan about collecting quest A from point 1, going to point 2, only to have to 'waste time' going back to point 1 to complete it. Wheres the real difference? It's a game mechanic to make the game longer.
And this is actually bad design as well. The way to make these quests interesting is to have the player solve some kind of a puzzle in order to find the person they need to deliver the item to... or fight some enemies as they get from point A to point B. Things like that.
Sometimes a good design is to design the fetch quest to encourage the player explore the world more. A way to design these quests is to get the player to go out to new locations, and these fetch quests can provide an incentive/excuse to do it.
There are a lot of ways to make fetch quests interesting, and there's a lot of quest concepts that haven't even been explored yet.
Adding on from that point, if the game takes say for example, 80 hours, really, whats another 5 hours spent trundling about selling stuff?
What's a 5% tax increase? Heck, it's only 5% right? <sarcasm>
To make a tight game, ideally we want to have the player doing useful, non-trivial stuff all the time. Pacing and fluidity are really important.
I can understand in an MMORPG where they need to put in time sinks (and I will still complain about those too), but in a single player game, there is no reason for time sinks.
Some genres really have nailed the pacing. Some people complain about 20 hour single player compaigns in FPSs... but man, they are jammed packed with quality sometimes. Starcraft 2's campaign was non-stop goodness. There isn't a boring stretch in it at all. No time sinks whatsoever.
And in Mass Effect 2, almost all of the levels are designed so that you don't have to do a lot of backtracking. It's mostly very well placed. Mass Effect 2 totally deserved GOTY. It's very well designed, not to deviate off topic.
It really is neither here nor there in my opinion. Now, if the game was only really 10 hours long, and it 'became' 50 hours long 'becuase' of having to constantly sell stuff, then i'm right with you and support your argument. But in the case of DA:O, that is not the case. Again (I see you conveniently chose not to answer me), if it's that much of a big deal to you, why bother modding the inventory, when you can console command yourself the gold? (that you get from selling all that pointless fluff, tghus saving you from carrying it all around in your unlimited inventory).
I don't want to cheat. It's really that simple :/ I play these games on Nightmare - I want a genuine challenge. It feels wrong to cheat for me.
Now, as you 'have' studied game design (and I will admit I have not), perhaps what is actually needed is a better mechanism for what junk and inventory actually does for a game. Lets be honest, most of the 'loot' in a RPG game is fluff and junk. It's not needed and is utterly useless. Now, the only reason it's in the game at all, is to provide us with a means of earning money, to enable us to buy the thigs that 'are' useful.
I agree. I think the problem is that game designers just copy off their predecessors and don't think about the errors in the older designs. They either need to find ways to make inventory size an element of gameplay, or totally redesign the way items and the game's internal economy works.
I always thought just picking up the money off creatures - like in final fantasy - rather than items to later sell for money was pretty straight-forward and enjoyable. Sure, money in those games is pretty pointless and it has it's own share of problems, but they never suffered from these inventory blunders.
I think part of the solution has to do with crafting - getting components to make your own stuff, and just not putting limits on your crafting components. The way they did wade's armors was pretty nice. It would have been cool to have more of that type of thing. They have herbalism and poison making... why not blacksmithing?
Ultimately though, there's a lot of small quick fixes that could be made.
1. Make it faster to go back to camp/town. I don't like this one so much, because it allows the player to circumvent a tough encounter. The dungeon should be some kind of endurance run. This is a big problem with diablo - you can just teleport your way out of everything, which killed the challenge and fear of death.
2. Give an ability to transmute items into gold instantly.
3. Get rid of useless junk and just make the top tier items sell for less gold - basically balancing them to cost less with the junk items excluded.
4. Just raise the inventory size.
There are lots of solutions that are wider in scope too, like what the guys who worked on Mass Effect 2 did.
So, perhaps in reality, it is not the inventory systems that are flawed, but the core mechanic itself.
*Starts clapping and jumping up and down for joy*
Glad I am getting through.
Modifié par egervari, 07 mars 2011 - 08:54 .
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Sell everything at the earliest oppurtunity.
