Now I personally can't stand the majority of the old RPG traditions for the following reasons:-
Turn based battles were fine back in the day but with the advancement of video game mechanics controlling your character has never felt more versatile. So it just feels like a step backwards when your character is rooted to the ground and you're only allowed to issue them prompts to attack as opposed to actually puppeteering them. It doesn't feel very immersive and it feels like the game is doing all the work for me.
Micro management. This is probably one of my biggest gripes with an RPG is having to wade through endless piles of junk to decide what is actually useful and what's just going to get sold off for coin. An example of this was the first Mass Effect where you pick up a ridiculous amount of weapons and armour throughout the game, but you rarely come across anything that's better then your current set up. So you end up selling these items for money of which I rarely needed to spend. I must have acquired something like 10 million credits by the end of the game. Presumably my Shepard must have used it to go on a drug binge afterwards, maybe do some gambling and hire a couple of Asari hookers?
Faffing around with stats and levelling up. Ok this RPG tradition is kind of necessary if you have aspirations of turning your novice mage into a world shattering necromancer, I just wish leveling up felt a bit more significant.
'Well I'm a level 26 rogue with 37 dexterity but I've just used a skill point to bump that up to 38 dexterity. Look out Darkspawn, sh*t is about to get real!'
The best example I've experienced of levelling up your character is in Infamous 1&2 (I know it's not an RPG but bare with me). At first you start off with a rather pathetic bolt attack but once you've acquired enough experience points you can choose a new attack such as firing rockets or having the ability to propel yourself in the air. The changes I see to my character are immediate and I feel like all the hard work I've done by doing sidequests and such had paid off. A bad example of levelling was Oblivion where enemies scaled with you and it felt like my character was only getting worse, until some weird breakthrough around level 21 where I suddenly felt like Zeus, God of Kick Arse!
Grinding. This ties in with levelling up. As much as I enjoy some aspects of the Final Fantasy series I get seriously fed up when I had to face a certain boss to progress but he's a bit too strong. Ok, I'll need to level up a bit and come back later. This would be fine if there were interesting sidequests I could complete in order to level up, perhaps with an interesting mini story of its own that would make a nice break from the main adventure. But no, usually what happens is I'll have to run around the map for hours getting in random battles until I've lost the will to live. Oblivion on the other hand, while it's levelling system was sh*te, it easily had some of the best sidequesting I've played in an RPG. Bethesda understood that scouring the land for adventure is fun when you have some sort of motivation, so the sidequests always had their own overarching plot that rivaled (if not bettered) the main quests itself. I must have sunk about 250 hours into that game, and I actually enjoyed it as there was always a fun new quest to complete.
You see, what makes an RPG for me is this sense of being on an epic adventure framed by an engaging story and to build a powerful character without it feeling monotonous and boring. Something like Mass Effect 2 was a near perfect game for me as it understood these core components. Gone were the superficial stat building and item management, in it's place was tighter gameplay with a good mix of fluid shooter mechanics and strategy. It contained incredibly entertaining sidequests each with their own unique story. Some complained when they ditched the traditional RPG elements from the first game, but as I explained before they were completely superficial. I proved this to myself when I played through the game again and decided to ignore levelling up and changing equipment all together. Alright there were a few hard bits, but it wasn't that difficult and actually made the game more fun as the pacing had dramatically improved since I wasn't pissing away so much time in menu screens.
Now I can already here the herd of uber nerds ready to trample over my clearly 'wrong' opinions of what makes an RPG and suggest I just stick to Call of Duty or Captain Bland Space Marine Pawns a Noob in Team Deathmatch. But that would be missing the point, those sort of games are too linear and short for me. A good RPG can last upwards to 50+ hours and take you to strange places and encounters, I just don't want my RPG to be a time sink where I'm some sort of medieval chartered accountant in between Orc slaying.
Now I'm not saying abandon traditional RPG's altogether, I may never get into something like The Witcher but someone else will still clearly get off on it. I just don't want all modern RPG's to be stuck in tired old formulas forever, all I would like is to experience an epic adventure without the grind.
Modifié par MacCready, 04 août 2011 - 04:07 .
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