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Original post by Talroth Quote: Original post by MrMorley Compare Fallout to Fallout 3. Do I really need to elaborate on this point further? Actually, yes, yes you do need to elaborate on that point. (I never got Fallout to work properly, and it would always crash on me.)

In Fallout everything was stats-based, there is a high emphasis on your characters stats and luck. A character with next to no small guns skill simply could not hit an enemy. End of story.

In Fallout 3, your stats do not determine, but rather they benefit. A character with next-to-no small guns skill can still kill Super Mutants with a pistol, provided the player can aim well.

Your proficiency with a weapon wasn't very stat-based, you couldn't miss if you were close because you pointed yourself.

Perhaps comparing Morrowind to Oblivion is easier to explain:
In Morrowind, the sword would either hit or miss based entirely on your stats.
In Oblivion, the sword would always hit, but higher stats vaguely increased the damage range slightly, and mostly gave you access to new abilities (a spinning directional attack and so-forth).

In Morrowind, spells could randomly fail based on your skill.
In Oblivion, so long as you could cast a spell, it always succeeded.

In Morrowind, lock-picking and speechcraft were entirely number-based, either succeeding or failing based on a roll of the dice.
In Oblivion, lock-picking and speechcraft existed in the form of mini-games. If you knew how (and it wasn't hard), a lv 1 warrior with no security skill could open almost any lock in the game just by the player playing the mini-game well.

Essentially, Morrowind to Oblivion was the final shift from an RPG with FPS elements to an RPG-FPS hybrid.

And that's the way the industry seems to have largely gone as a whole, not just Bethesda: There is a much greater emphasis on the player now, as opposed to the character. Stats aren't the be all and end all, instead they simply provide the occasional benefits because the random element and dice-roll gameplay has been largely removed and replaced with mini-games and the like. This can also be seen when you compare Knights of the Old Republic with Mass Effect (Which I've always thought of as Bioware's "Spiritual successor" to KoToR) with Mass Effect 2.

RPGs, for me, are about stats and roleplaying. The player is controlling a character and that character is supposed to be using *it's skills*, not the players, in order to succeed.

I could enjoy Fallout 3 and Oblivion, but only by viewing them as Freeroam FPS games with some RPG elements and playing them as such. Whereas Morrowind and Fallout, I could enjoy as what they were: RPGs.

[Edited by - MrMorley on June 1, 2010 7:57:27 AM]

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Original post by shoyoninja Yeah, I think I stated things a little too black and white :P. What I mean is that there is a different way to do it, and that it presents a different feel to the player. Lets say you have a plate mail and a leather vest on your game. Instead of a stats screen for it like this: Leather: Def: 10 Wg: 5 SPD: -2 Plate: Def: 30 Wg: 40 SPD: -10 You could tell just this to the player: Leather: Designed to provide some protection while preserving the user ability to move swiftly through the battle field. The tag reads: "100% dragon scale". Plate: Many own their lives to the hardened protection this piece of equipment provides. While the extra load isnt suited to the average, fast moving, pick pocketing, back stabbing thief, it will surely please a mighty warrior who would rather just walk over his enemies with sheer strenght, and is too lazy to worry about their arrows and swords. Also, looks good as decoration on the living room. And let the game worry about the numbers. It could work well, and its been a very long time since I saw any game using this kind of item system. Again, I dont mean that all games should be like this, its just a different approach that I miss.

I believe I understood you the first time. I both agree and disagree. I agree that games should experiment more with obscuring the numbers in favor of generic descriptions, but I just feel that the weapons I equip are an exception. I want to see all the numbers, stats, and details. To me, that's what makes it fun, and that is why I love sifting through loot. If important details were buried away in vague descriptions, I would be fairly upset. Perhaps someone else will have the courage to construct such a system, but I am just too attached to level of detail in loot right now (like in Diablo II).

My problem with newer RPGs is they hold your hand and walk you through the game like your a 3 year old kid.

My personal favorite RPGs that has some self-exploration,learning are Gothic and Risen both from the same developer.

For anyone that figures that games back in the early days were so much better than they are today I have 6 words for you...

attack attack attack defend defend defend

What old RPGs had over modern ones is that they were the ones blazing new trails. Anything that was in one of the early RPGs was new and exciting. And those days were good. These days, as an older gamer, I find the novelty has worn off of certain features, it's harder to be suprised, and I've already heard a lot of stories. And since developers have moved more towards things that seem trendy rather than searching for innovation, I don't expect grand trail blazing elements anymore and just enjoy what's at hand.

The last RPGs I've played were Fallout 3 and Fable 2 and I can see why people would get tired of having their hands held throughout a game. But thankfully, when I was playing those games I was more focused on enjoying the game than picking apart the elements within it that I didn't like.

For commercial games, the popularity of game guides and the internet has made it easier to obtain information about game secrets, weapon locations, character building, ideal leveling spots, boss strategies, etc. etc. To some extent games are built around the assumption that players will make ample use of this information, and thus modern commercial games often have a level of complexity beyond earlier games which nevertheless gets trivialized because of the availability of that information.

Modern games also strive to be more fully-developed. Game developers are going to lead you through their world and their story, and they require or expect you to have certain weapons, party makeup, levels of progress etc. at certain locations and points in that story.

By contrast, earlier games offer worlds which give the player freedom to play the game in a way he or she wants by imposing his or her own rules while still keeping the game playable. It's not an accident that Baldur's Gate is both a challenging game for newcomers and has a legion of fans who have experimented soloing it without reloads with seemingly every character build conceivable. That game offers a tremendous amount of flexibility, despite having an identifiable story and some memorable characters.

The more we try to define every inch and element of our game world and make it all meaningful in the way we envisioned, the more we are taking the player's imagination and decision-making out of the equation. The competing schools of thought both have good points. On the one hand, if we are designing it, it is *our* game. We are telling the story and letting the player play in the world we created. On the other, we are making the game for the players, and it might be worth letting them have their "input" added to the game in real-time by building in more flexibility.

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Original post by Black Knight My problem with newer RPGs is they hold your hand and walk you through the game like your a 3 year old kid.

You must love Star Control II then. I have no idea how people ever beat it before the age of internet walkthroughs.

@Nanoha -- I would love to see a game offer that much flexibility in finishing the game. What is the best approach? Does the designer really have to come up with all combinations? Or is there some systematic/algorithmic approach that can be applied to how the story finishes?

@apefish -- My friend and I would often make fun of the TV show Samurai Jack in this regard (even though it was our favorite show). It was some kind of rule that all creatures are arbitrarily hostile and will attack mercilessly until one or the other dies. I like how creatures can be either neutral or hostile based on how you treated them in games like Ultima 8. There are a couple creatures in Zelda games that would only run away. I remember working hard to chase down and kill this one particular sprinter in Twilight Princess. (Sadly, there was no real reward for doing so. I was hoping there would be because the creature serves no other purpose. It's just weird that they exist.) I also like it when monsters fight each other based on the circumstances.

I like your comments on not having a mini-map. I never really considered that before. I think I will experiment with giving the player paper maps now occasionally to refer to but have no map displays otherwise. It's weird because it's one of those things that didn't really register until you mentioned it. It's like, "Hey, yeah, mini maps are stupid!"

@Bearhugger -- AMEN! I miss the 2D RPG era. One of my goals in producing in an RPG is to use 3D very gently. The world will be rendered in 3D, but I want to build it using a cube tile set of sorts. I want it to feel constructed in an old-school manner. Content creation is MUCH faster, and I think it can really attain that 'charm' element that was discussed earlier. I think bleeding edge 3D RPGs are garbage. The obsession with adding physics engines to nosehairs is really annoying today. There comes a point where visual realism harms the experience. That is my opinion, anyway...

@MrMorley -- Interesting observations. It really does seem that the individual games need to better decide what direction they want to take the rules. I bought Morrowind during a $5 Steam sale, but I haven't played it yet. Maybe I should get on that. I agree that in the case of RPGs, the focus should indeed be on the character's skills, not the player's.

@Black Knight -- Outta curiosity, can both be achieved? Can a game offer a free-roam experience next to a hand-holding experience for those whose brains are incapable of wandering aimlessly? I definitely agree that the hand-holding needs to stop, but if too many people hate the experience, it's just as damaging. I really want to build a game that appeals to all audiences.

@Crowseye -- It is really difficult to mitigate the one-best-path issue. It seems that no matter how many options there are, players like to funnel into some guide containing the "best path" with the "best loot". Ideas?

I don't know how if both can be achieved as they are very opposite in nature.
If you put in lots of help in the form of directions arrows or showing where to go on the map or minimap people will use that because we are lazy.

For example in gothic 1-2 you have a map but i never shows you where to go you just get a quest from someone telling you to find this x person at the old mines and gives you rough directions like head out of town follow the road in to the mountains etc. etc. So you only know the name of this person and finding him becomes a quest on its own. You go through the map, avoid monsters on the way or get killed if you wander too deep into the forest and finally you find this npc. After doing some quests between these characters and the surrounding area you begin to know these places,characters and you know that you can find Diego sitting by the fire at the old camp or Milten with the fire mages in the castle etc. The characters become like real persons. If the game had a minimap and arrows to show you where to go your brain will follow these directions instead of trying to learn the area and associate them with the npcs etc.

The beautiful thing about gothic was npcs were moving from place to place depending on the time of day or where you were in the storyline so if diego wasn't by the fire he was probably at his hut nearby or chopping some wood.

But I totally agree that this kind of design makes lots of people just ditch the game after playing for like 10 minutes because they can't find a NPC and get killed in the first quest because they charged into a beast that is too powerful.

[Edited by - Black Knight on June 1, 2010 8:59:16 PM]

I agree with pretty much everyone here that Gothic and Fallout are probably the best RPG's ever made. What I find lacking in most newer rpg's is the concept of player rewards. In gothic and fallout running into more powerful enemies occur quiet frequently, but being able to push your charater into beating them at low levels, and at your leisure, can be very rewarding. In Gothic the improvements in abilities as the game progresses feels very rewarding. Same enemies over and over again in different color variations and getting weapons with slightly higher stats isn't a proper reward.

Final Fantasy used to have this concept in ffvi and ffiv. learning to use espers, Edgars tools, and Rosa becoming an esper in ffvi, and Cecil becoming a paladan, learning meteo and various other things in ffiv were pretty big rewards(as they were useful tools throughout the rest of the game). FFVII wasn't bad at them either with the socket system and tons of unlockables but it still didn't have the same kind of feel.

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Original post by Storyyeller Quote: Original post by Black Knight My problem with newer RPGs is they hold your hand and walk you through the game like your a 3 year old kid. You must love Star Control II then. I have no idea how people ever beat it before the age of internet walkthroughs.

We took notes. [grin]

Sometimes I feel the major difference between RPGs of today and RPGs of yore is a bit like the comparison some folks make between growing up in the city and growing up in the country-- regimen and structure. I think many RPGs started out like life in the open wilds, without a big brother to tell you every second where to go or what you had to do. Many games had freakin' MASSIVE worlds-- Daggerfall's hundreds of towns, entire continents in Ultima, 200 stars and 800 planets to explore in Starflight.

I get a little sad when I see how small modern games are in feel. There's not a world or universe to explore, there's a postage-stamp sized area littered with DO and DON'T signs safely fenced in for our protection. God forbid that we should be frustrated by a puzzle we have to sleep on or an enemy we have to experiment with to finally beat.

My dream RPG would probably be anathema to many AAA RPG players these days: There's a story but you can tell it to go hang itself while you do your own thing; there's as much combat as you seek or avoid because the game offers variety in stealth or negotiation or other non-linear strategies; and the world or universe is really that-- cohesive, thought out, filled with small little activities and HUGE.