Be Excellent To Each Other

Inspired by Lave's comment in the Gold Sellers thread:



I don't think RPG levelling as a concept is necessarily broken, but certain systems for it are. And that's before the whole argument that experience points from, say, picking locks should not be able to be applied to anything else (if I pick 50 locks, I won't be any better at swinging an axe)

Oblivion's levelling in itself works fine, I reckon - you gradually increase the things you can do and the skill/power with which you do them, just like practicing in real life. A few anomalies where you have a spell or ability where the magicka cost doesn't quite jive with the resulting spell aside, it's fine. However, it all falls on its face with the fact the monsters keep pace with you, effectively rendering your progression worthless as while you can swing a bigger sword, you'll now only have more resilient things to swing it at.

Fallout's system I would say is slightly flawed, but this flaw is in no way unique to it. Basically, your skill with the gun determines the damage you deal with shooting things with it. Which is complete nonsense - a gun damage the same whether you know what you're doing or not. Otherwise, you'd have have reports of kids accidentally shooting themselves with daddy's gun, as there complete lack of skill would ensure the bullet would do no damage.

The alternative to a levelling system is naturally just to make the game itself get harder, and let the player themselves 'level' by getting better at it as they progress. To this end, Mass Effect has an interesting system which I think works well - your improving skills increase your accuracy and other subtle but useful aspects of your weapon use rather than outright changing how hard the bullets hit. After all, uses third person real-time for the combat, so hitting your enemies is down to your own ability - which can compensate for low skills. Likewise, you're not restricted from using particular weapons if your skills aren't high enough. However, this has a unique and massive downside in that there are hundreds of varieties of gun and gun upgrade, each slightly better and different from the last, which means after every mission you need to spend too much time sorting out your inventory, re-equipping your squad with slightly better guns and then even more time scrolling through the (unsortable) vendor list to sell all the stuff.

Any thoughts?

As hated as they can be, I really like the novelty of some of the Final Fantasy levelling systems, particularly ones where you roam around a grid improving your characters according to your own priorities. Adds a lovely amount of customisation to character progression, although it clearly has no basis in matching skill growth to skill use.

The best RPG levelling in existance is that seen in Zelda.

Constantly reshaking the way you can interact with the world is much better than increasing numbers.

I think more games, especially MMO RPGs should take a leaf out of Magic The Gatherings book. A guy with 2000 cards can still be beaten by a guy with 200 but the guy with 2000 has more options and ideas available to him.

I think I'll mention System Shock 2, which also had an illogical levelling system that didn't stand up to scrutiny. In order to gain levels, you needed 'cyber modules', and you only got doled out these by the lady giving you your missions. Each skill required a certain number of modules to learn...

...which makes sense up until you realize this isn't just applying to complex disciplines that would otherwise require years of study like xenobiology and chemistry, but also guns. Or, to put it another way, your character cannot learn how to use a shotgun or assault rifle (despite knowing how to use a pistol) without several of these presumably extreme advanced, valuable brain-chips. And your character, it has to be mentioned, is a three-year military veteran.

For the more advanced or complex weapons I could sort of understand (but only sort of... surely just reading the instruction manual would suffice as opposed to shoving nano-augmentations into my brain) but this just defied logic and angered me as a pointless, artificial obstacle.

Levels and points and the like are useful games mechanics, I guess - it means you always have something to aim for and a prize when you get there. It's a tried and tested method, and I think it's how people think "RPGs should be".

I know it's not an RPG but Crackdown was levelling done perfectly.

There are two different types of levelling, though. In Crackdown you can use every weapon from the start, you don't have to learn anything.

But don't a lof of RPGs use that same type though? I played FFVII for 64hrs. And Pokemon for about the same length of time. And for at least 50 of those hours I didn't learn a single new mechanism.

Sure more impressive animations were unlocked and shown to me instead but nothing actually changed.

Thats why I liked what they were aiming for in Oblivion. Go anywhere do anything from the very start! Sure as you go along will make things more impressive but here are the mechanisms from the get go - enjoy them.

If RPGs did levelling like that, I'd play more of them.

Guild Wars isn't a million miles away from this system. You can easily reach the traditional level cap in a couple of weeks, and after that it's entirely down to your choice of skills, of which there are an immense number, but you can only take a small handful with you at any time, and you need to travel around and earn funds to pick up new ones to improve your paltry starting selection. It works quite nicely.

Err - I believe you should be busy drawing, sir.

The concept of a character getting stronger is just fine.

If I may illustrate another genre's equivalent, money in Gran Turismo, specifically GT5 Prologue. In Forza and the like you need to get money, fine, you might have to do well, repeat the odd race, no problem.

In GT5P you WILL get stuck at the A level and you WILL have to do the same shitty oval race 50 times to get anywhere.

That's broken. Forza isn't.

RPG levelling is fine, if the only way to get there is constant repetition or shitty unavoidable random battles, it's broken.

Darklands wins. No levels, just basic stats (only three of which had any effect on combat at all, and one was rather limited), and lots of skills that could could pay people to train you in, or attempt to practice, but there was no regular progression - in Oblivion, every time you hit something with a stick, you gain 0.1% (say) of stick skill. In Darklands, there's merely a chance every time you use or study a skill that you'll improve in it. This meant that you could basically just play merrily away trying to get some money and equipment together, and by the time you've got some decent gear you'll probably find that your team has improved a lot of their skills incidentally. There was nothing stopping a hermit from becoming a great archer through practice, or a thicko sword swinger from learning to read and study saints (broadly analogous to spells).

Plus it was a brilliant game in many other regards. You basically played it, and your characters developed naturally - the closest you'd get to grinding is studying a subject a length, but you'd do that while your other characters were resting and/or earning some money with a day job, so it's not even intrusive.

Also, Mount and Blade did it well, too. I particularly like the fact that it avoided the cliches like "strength points = more inventory" (making a weak character utterly useless). Again, there was nothing stopping a skilled archer from learning how to use a spear simply by practicing. Also, even a character with poor stats could take on a character with stronger stats and equipment if you the player played well enough. Likewise, however hard you became, a single lucky shot from a lowly watchman could screw you right over if you got too cocky.

I struggle to think of an RPG that doesn't have random battles. Whether it stops you in the middle of an area and takes you into a fight accompanied by repetitive music, or whether you're wandering down a path known to be inhabited by wolves, or whether you're in an area of a city that is patrolled by goons working for the nearest crime boss, or whether you're accosted by supermutants whilst crossing the post-apocalyptic desert, they're all random battles.

Gygax & co invented random battles, and they pretty much invented RPGs.

Do 'avoidable encounters' (things lying around that you can bump into or ignore (Chrono Trigger, Baten Kaitos)) count as random battles?

Unavoidable is the key. In Pokemon for instance they're almost exclusively avoidable. You can get between towns without hassle.

This is not true in, say, FF7 as much as I could stand to play it.

I like EvE's skill system.

To a degree, they're not "Random", at least you can choose when you want to get involved but if you have to spend 90% of your time random battling to level up, that's still broken.

In Darklands, the majority of encounters could be avoided if one or more of your team had the right skills/equipment. Wolves could be scared off by a good woodsman, bandits spotted by a sharp eye and either intimidated by a good talker, scared off with an alchemist's potion, or avoided with a bit of stealth, or outrun with horses, and so on. Only ambushes caught you without giving you an option to take evasive action, and those were very rare if you had an alert team member or two.

What? Do nothing and level up?

Bearing in mind you have to pay a subscription to do nothing in the first place... It basically works out as Pay money to level up, but slowly.
It's an MMO, they're designed to bleed money out of you. The levelling is one way they manage it.

yeah, but I quite like getting something out of doing nothing but pay, and I also like the extra %age advantages being 'specialised' come with on paper.

There are the RPGs that have set piece type battles like Shining Force, Vandal Hearts and FF Tactics. Also, with Evolution I & II on the Dreamcast at least as you were wandering around the dungeons you could see where the enemies were so you could try and avoid fights or at least prepare for them.

I'm about to dash to catch the train, butttt:


Ultima Online had it best. If anyone else has said this: goodgood.
Fallout1/2 were also quite good systems in a very similiar way to UO.

Wow, ok. That sounds good. Everything I've heard about GWs seems to imply that if I'll ever like an MMO it will be that one.

Does Deus Ex count as an RPG? Because to me it seemed like the 1st person version of Mass Effect or should I say Mass Effect seemed like a 3rd person verison of Deus Ex. Deus Ex improved upon Eldar Scrolls Oblivion as the best action RPG in my humble opinion.

In answer to the question. Can you have an RPG without levelling? Not in the modern thinking of an RPG at any rate. Howver Fighting Fantasy books didn't have you gaining experience every time you had a fight. A skill bonus was a rare and precious thing.

I know what you are thinking: But Fighting Fantasy books had a set path you couldn't deviate from too much in order to win. My answer, who wants to role play their entire lives when we have the best role playing game of all, real life.

Me, because I'd rather be a barbarian hero saving the worlds from the undead hordes than an approaching-30 systems engineer with a mortgage that's being carved out of my skin?

Yeah I thought I might get a reply like that after I posted. My point was that when you role play you should have a quest that needs a hero or group of heroes, and when that quest is complete that is the role play done. There is nothing stopping you starting another game where this time a dragon is threatening the village or whatever, but games must keep evolving both story wise and character wise. This is surely the point of role play. I can't imagine how tedious it must be for a level 70 character in WoW to be waiting around for a new expansion pack to come out.

Levelling is done well in NwN but it too sufferes from the same problem that as you get stronger your enemies get stronger. Ok you can pick easier parts to do first but the same problem still remains that an elite ranger should not wander round the wood and be nearly killed by a raccoon.

Must buy that game.....

Sir? Oh. Stick him on the list with AceAceBaby.

If you're spending 90% of any game doing anything then that IS the game. If you don't like it fair enough but it somewhat akin to moaning that Call of Duty is broken as you spend 90% of the game shooting German soldiers or that Monkey Island is flawed as 90% of it is just talking to people and solving puzzles.

It's down to the developer to make such battles/puzzles/conversations interesting and varied enough to keep your attention.

But there's certainly no inherent flaws in the concept of levelling, assuming you don't force the player to run around with no direction just to fight something to get powerful enough to not have the next area kill them off in seconds. Hell, FPSs do it too: congrats, you're now on level 3, have this gun that does more damage than your other gun. When you get to level 6 you get the sniper rifle so you now have the ability to hit stuff at a distance.

Most RPGs could basically just 'level you up' whenever you reach a new town to pretty much the same effect, it's just a bit more interesting for the geeks amongst us to be able to track the stats, especially with something like FF where you can often tweak your characters in many different ways.

Except when the monsters get tougher as you do, then you could argue there's no point to it whatsoever.

FFVIII used this, except levelling up alowed you access to slots to junction magic to, so it depended on what types of magic you were able to source and stock up on to junction to various stats.

Not exactly.

Throughout the game, you get enough GFs and enough GF experience to fill the junction slots to full at the endgame, (you can even pick the abilities your GFs learn, you can get all the necessary junctions very early) while having characters less than level 9:
Your characters get EXP for defeating enemies through HP loss in battles, unless they were boss battles.
GFs get AP from defeating enemies in all battles.

If you never level up, you can take advantage of the low innate stats of your enemies due to their low level through your junctioning (even the crap slots and crap magics you get for the first 20% of the game (until you get magic refining abilities) give you a ridiculous advantage if you choose to fight). If you never kill your foes (Break aka. petrify), and never even encounter them (possible with an early acquired GF ability), FFVIII is the stupid easiest FF game ever, next to most of Crisis Core. Even if you do level up normally, the only way you'll screw up is if you never seek out the alternate routes of aquiring magic, say by carrying useless inventory items around and never turning them into high magic.

I want to talk about Mario Golf on the Game Boy Color.

All golf games are sort of maths/puzzle games anyway, but if you're good at Mario Golf, you can execute good shot sequences with even your starting character, and eventually become superhuman by the end of the game. You can beat Mario on his home course with the starting character.

That's the good bit. This is the strange bit:

In Mario Golf, you have a number of stats:

Drive. (Affects all shot distances except putts and approaches)
Height. (Affects your shot length (greater height decreases it), and how your shot is affected by wind.
Shot. (This affects how your shot curves. It can go left, right or straight.)
Meet Area and Control (This affects the size of the mark you have to hit to not fail the shot, and some nebulous 'accuracy' non-thing).

Every time you level up, you can improve one of these stats. When you do, the other stats all get slightly worse (except Drive). I've never understood why this is. On my first game, I kept trying to keep all my shots easy and straight, but I didn't have any drive. On my next playthrough, I only selected Drive improvements. I can now get holes in one on Par 5's, but I have to really consider the problem: my shots don't end up where I'm pointing the cursor, the wind chucks them all over the place and I have a tiny timing mark to hit to execute the shot.

I suppose it's less of a character improvement system and more of a difficulty select? (Or erraticity select... a limit selection of irreverable shunts you can use to edit the functions game a bit.)

Mr D:

Never played Mario Golf. The way you describe the Height stat sounds oddly broken in that improving it decreases you shot length (unless you improve it by decreasing it). I am not trying to disprove your point here in any way.

My main feeling is that what makes an RPG. Even with Pong you could argue you were playing the role of a plucky white rectangle whose job it was to keep that othe white rectangle out from behind it.

I "role play" in every game. In Forza I am a racing god. Shut up everyone who was there when I played in Forza night. In Wii sports I am Tim Henman winning Wimbledon in his swansong year. Stats do not really matter surely? Nearly all game playing is role play. Surely the acronym RPG refers to a game where levelling is part of the mechanic.

To re-address the question. In the context this question came about I think levelling is an absolute necessity. It tickles the same reflexes that collectors get when they want the whole set of something. Collecting is not always fun. But the sense of reward/relief once it is finished outways the hardship to get it.

I'd love RPGs if it weren't for grinding. Levelling up is a wonderful feeling, a la KOTOR or Mass Effect or CoD4 online, but having to do the same repetetive shit iver and over isn't fun, and breaks my mojo in a game, I stop living the experience.

See also random battles, overcomplicated weapons and magic upgrades (<better this way> or <better that way> s fine, but not <different somehow>, thankyouverymuch), overabundant side quests (what am I doing in this city, again?) and games where even with the sketchy 'journal' if you leave them for more than three evenings, you are utterly lost and the open ended nature of the title makes Gamefaqs an utter slog to find the key facts that reunite you with your real quest. Metroid, Zelda and so on, I'm looking at you. I mean, Windwaker - I'm in a boat, near an island, which looks like the other twenty. And I've still got the water temple and the hideously drawn out and broken third quarter of the game to come. WTF? And Final Fantasy (VII) - I'm walking over there, that's my preferred mission in the game. Don't make me have to randomly battle the same dull lineup for the nth time in order to face the interesting new baddies where I'm going with a chance of defeating them. Allow this to be switched off in return for less powerful interesting baddies and give people the choice, because when a game has significantly more than one gameplay mechanic the odds of all of them being up to standard are not good. Can't really be much harder to get right than Forza 2's driving aids thinger, which has roots in Crammond's Grand Prix titles of the nineties, for pity's sake.

Well, having some or all facets in common with the gameplay and mechanics of a tabletop pen-and-paper role playing game, true to the original use of the term, whatever its literal meaning. So role of dice mechanics, or something which equates to or feels like that, or character design features, or a points and/or turn based combat system, and so on.

So a random factor is essential to all RPG's. No wonder everyone loves FF7.

Yes. Should've made that clearer: increases more Height makes your shots shorter and more erratic, levelling up the Height stat decreases tbe amount of Height. (Though decreasing Height too much makes your shots go a bit low and funny, but I don't know if that's intentional.)

That still makes no sense.

In Top Spin 2, you have to level your career character up before you play online lest you get torn limb from limb. You level up either by playing the career, or by doing the training levels. The training levels give you a timed task to do, and if you fail, you only get one more star to increase your stats with. The last few training levels are UTTERLY IMPOSSIBLE.

I've maxed out my power and serve by doing the career mode, pretty much. Training just seems too hard and I don't get as many stars as when I win Wimbledon, for example.

I like RPG levelling, mainly as I like to feel I have a goal to head towards, and there being rewards for progress towards that goal.

See also:
- Oblivions world levelling being rubbish (as it removes the progress part)
- MMOs being rubbish (due to lack of an overall goal beyond pissing all your money away)

Anything where you can make Comical angry is never lacking goals.
Except for WoS, maybe.

Talking of RPGs (and this isnt worth a new thread), is there any hint of a new Baldur's Gate game anywhen?

Given that Black Isle haven't existed for 5 years, I doubt it. You may get something new from the Bioware folks, but I doubt it'd be BG branded.

*Someone* must have taken ownership of the BG intellectual property- it was too valuable for someone not to have made a point of keeping it or selling it.

Other than WotC, obv.

Well that's the key point - what IP is there that isn't under license from WoTC? A few character names and artwork?

I've no idea...