Your points essentially boil down to "eh, things are boring these days, if it was mildly enjoyable then fine." Yeah, I'm using a lot of hyperbole and there are merits in many tropes and cliches. But it's not hard to move at least a couple steps beyond what makes up the bedrock of RPG game designs. "The Reckoning" just manages to somehow encompass them all, done at the most obligatory level. As for:
Well duh that's what tutorials are for better than nagging you about every single new thing with popups 2 hours into the game.
You mean like completely locking my screen until I press the requisite button, like it does half a dozen times during the tutorial? Me mashing the stealth button furiously, because I have more than 2 braincells and look at my control mapping before I play a game, and having to wait for the game to tell me I have to hit the button because I hadn't walked over the trigger that would lock my screen? Jesus christ, I welcome a game that asks me to figure something out for myself occasionally.
Anyways, in its day it was said this game would be a BFD, for reasons I never understood just looking at it. And it really is just bland, for which:
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." Charles H. Duell
Is often used as the excuse for.
For me it's the elemental triad that really pisses me off. Traditional it's been 4 elements. Earth Fire Air Water, at a minimum, and you can add light and dark to taste. And somewhere along the way, someone said "It's hard thinking up stuff that's cool that Air, Earth and Water do. You know what is cool though? Ice spears and Lightning. Let's just stick to those three elements. Add some shields made of the stuff too. Phew. That's way easier than dealing with the implications of all that
other stuff wot doesn't kill people."
In D&D, the elements made sense. There was a logic to it that allowed for possibilities instead of nice, neat endings. There were paraelements formed from 2 or more (even some times opposed!) elements. Each Sage in their House. But as games kept failing to live up the implications of their own magic systems, it continually became an excuse to pare away more ideas because " a resist for every element, attack spells, defense and utility spells for every element is just too much work and leads to redundant crap." If there's
one place you can get away with having complex things and tons of options, it's a video game. Instead now, we have three elements that are basically plotted on lines, never intersecting with each other, instead of a circle where things meld into each other.
Do me a favor. From now on when you play RPGs, just mentally count how many rely on the triad. When the number starts to depress you, you'll be where I am. Is the circle of 4, 8, and on more original than the triad? No. Is it more interesting and makes possible way more things? I think so.
As games have gotten more expansive, mechanically they've gotten a lot simpler IMO, because the larger the game more variety you end up needing to reach the Fun Quotient. You usually get the most variety with art because that's a priority in non-indie games. But the scope of mechanics doesn't usually get the same amount of priority, because coding is expensive and closed, structurally simple designs have flourished because they're quick and easy to debug. It's why games like DF or Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, the ones that's aren't really slaved to making money and spending money, stay with me far longer than Things With Reckonings. They've got the time and the luxury of being focused on the executing the ideas instead of meeting a quotient of playability. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup regularly pares off ideas because they're deemed useless. But imagine it if the core magical theology of DCSS was "Fire, Ice and Lightning. Derp." And DF....DF doesn't even have magic as a lot of RPG players would understand the term. I'm not saying "Why can't AAA mass market RPGs be like DF!" I'm saying "Why can't AAA mass market RPGs have at least a shred of its bravery!"
Author
Topic: Things that made you RRRRRRAAAAGGGGEEEE today: Trust-o-nomics Edition (Read 3764189 times)