A gripe about sidequests and loot in CRPGs

[ThirdWizard]

Ah CRPGs. You have to talk to every NPC three times. Just in case, check treasure chests twice. I only know of two cases where it's paid off, but hey, it paid off in two cases. Check everything from clocks to random ground tiles that look different. Heck, just run around constatnly hitting the "check" button just in case. Then go back to an area you've been to already and do it all over just in case they spawned something somewhere.

A fun little anecdoete I like to tell is Resident Evil 4. It's not an RPG, but it still relates. I was at my friend's house showing it to him, and his wife was watching as well. In the first area, I saw a bird and shot it. The bird dropped handgun bullets and I picked them up. His wife expressed her amazement that a bird would be carrying such a thing. I had never even considered it odd. That's just how it is, kill something and get a reward.

The games are most likely always going to reward the obsessive/compulsive players. Some less so than others, but there doesn't seem to be much momentum to stop this. (I have heard that NWN 2 is going to have less random gold pieces and such laying around, though, so maybe that's a start.) Side quests exist perhaps as a way to make a game feel less linear and pad the length. So far, most people seem to like them, so I don't suspect they'll be gone anytime soon.

 

[Zappo]

Videogame RPGs have been like this since, hmm, about forever and a half. It isn't limited to console RPGs either.

I don't expect the situation to change in the foreseeable future. It has to do with the fact that you must make games that take X hours to play, but you don't have anywhere close to the time and money required to actually make content for X hours of playing. So you reuse the same rooms and NPCs and stuff with whatever lame excuse you can find; Final Fantasy games are particularly bad in this regard (luckily they're pretty good in most other fields).

Since noone is going to start taking ten years and a hundred millions to make a game that actually has X hours of real content, the situation won't change until the costs of creating content go way down. Unfortunately, the costs are currently going up, since more powerful machines allow for more detailed environments, better textures, more polygons, blah blah, all of which takes lots of time and money to make, but in terms of hours of play doesn't add zilch. And, sadly, that is what sells.

 

[CarlZog]

Unfortunately, the costs are currently going up, since more powerful machines allow for more detailed environments, better textures, more polygons, blah blah, all of which takes lots of time and money to make, but in terms of hours of play doesn't add zilch. And, sadly, that is what sells.

It's funny you say that. In a separate thread, I've been seeking out the games that folks consider truly deep in terms of being mentally challenging, complex, and immersive. So far, nearly everything mentioned is more than five years old:

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=159642

Carl

 

[Mercule]

What I hate is when you have to fight enemies over and over until one of them randomly (1% chance) drops some decent equipment.

Oh, yeah. I'd forgotten about that. Or minigames that are nearly impossible on their own, plus have a random "drop" -- I'm thinking the Bombchu game in "Ocarina of Time".

*What about moogles?

Those are beyond my capacity to comprehend. I ignore them as much as possible.

 

[Dog Moon]

Originally posted by Mercule
I just want to take this opportunity to say that I really, really hate Chocobos. Really.

Aww, why the off-topic hate?

Anyway, I always hated the games [of which there are a few] where you are given a list of 'special words' which you can ask people. By the time you're halfway in the game, your list is like 30 words long and sometimes you have to ask a person about every single word until you find the right one.

I also thought if funny where if you talked to a person and were trying to convince them of something, but you failed, once done you found the option to try to convince them of the same thing, so you try again, fail, then try again, succeed. All in the same conversation.

Originally posted by ThirdWizard
A fun little anecdoete I like to tell is Resident Evil 4. It's not an RPG, but it still relates. I was at my friend's house showing it to him, and his wife was watching as well. In the first area, I saw a bird and shot it. The bird dropped handgun bullets and I picked them up. His wife expressed her amazement that a bird would be carrying such a thing. I had never even considered it odd. That's just how it is, kill something and get a reward.

I think the first time I found that odd was in D2, when I first killed a little bird and a suit of full plate popped out onto the ground.

 

[drothgery]

What I hate is when you have to fight enemies over and over until one of them randomly (1% chance) drops some decent equipment.

There was a time in my life when I was sufficiently patient to fight dinosaurs until I had four Economizers and an entire party able to cast Ultima. I don't think I'd ever do that now.

 

[Captain Tagon]

I was playing WoW the other day. Killed a Wolf. It dropped a spiked mace. No wonder these animals are attacking everyone, they have large chunks of metal in their tummies, I'd be irritable too.

 

[Mercule]

I know this is really sick, considering the point of the thread, but I'm starting to have an urge to play FF7 again.

 

[ThirdWizard]

I think the first time I found that odd was in D2, when I first killed a little bird and a suit of full plate popped out onto the ground.

I never found that strange in the slightest. Perhaps there's something wrong with me.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Heh. It's like in console RPGs, where you generally find chests with stuff in every house in town. Or in barrels.

One of the things that I liked about Arcanum - if you looked in the trash cans you tended to find things like newspapers, broken springs, and rags... all of which would occassionally come in useful (For example Rags + Fuel = Molotov Cocktail) but none were beyond belief. (The best I ever found was a broken pistol, which I could fix. It was outside of a gunsmith shop.)

The Auld Grump