Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement

Re:Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement by amalcon on Tuesday November 24, 2009 @04:32PM (#959991)

Some types of RPGs do have another attraction, that appeals to the "Master" style: they give you a single system, and steadily tack options onto it. While your character does improve as a result of this, if the game is well-designed, the difficulty remains roughly constant or increases over the course of the game. This gives you the opportunity to master aspects of the system in more manageable chunks. That is, it takes a complex system that would normally require a tutorial, and spreads the tutorial out over the whole game.

FPS/RPG hybrids often have this, the most notable I can think of being Deus Ex (Bioshock is a passable example, but nowhere near as complex in the endgame). Action and strategy RPGs have this if played in a certain way, though most of them are just really easy to begin with. Roguelikes have this in spades. The combat in pen-and-paper dungeons and dragons can have this.

Console-style RPGs like the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series usually don't have this. MMORPGs usually don't have this as such; rather, they usually have two almost independent games (beginning-game and endgame).

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Re:Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement by jerf on Tuesday November 24, 2009 @09:03PM (#960443)

There are also other options. I've come to enjoy playing RPGs with the deliberate goal of underleveling. Where a performance-oriented player's idea of an ultimate fight is walking up to the end boss and smacking them down in one hit with damage to spare, my ideal battle is every member of my party down but the mage, every expendable expended, with the only option left for the mage to attack with their staff... and that 1HP hit finishes the boss off.

I've never quite experienced this exact ideal, but I've come close. And I've also been beaten, which makes the next time even sweeter when my adjusted strategies carry the day.

This turns the game into a bit of a puzzle. Despite your mentioning them, Final Fantasies have typically been very good at this, if you take the minimal/"easy" game path. Which does mean not doing all the extras, but as FF games get bigger and bigger via copy&paste questing I'm finding this is less of an issue than it used to be. (You can still do the "postgame" stuff if you're that into it.)

The Persona series also involve some skill and some luck; sometimes I find it hard to believe how one error can be the difference between wiping my party out without me touching the enemy and my wiping out the enemy without them touching me. It doesn't seem like it should work that way, but it has happened to me numerous times, where even a well-leveled party for where they are gets themselves wiped out because I had a momentary brain fart and hit the wrong command in the first round. It's a very mathematically unstable system, vs. FF's very stable/predictable one, but great fun.

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Re:Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement by derefr on Wednesday November 25, 2009 @01:22AM (#960745)

Indeed, the (early) Final Fantasy series actually becomes quite tactically complex if you limit yourself such that you'll never take an unneeded step except to move toward the plot, use various amenities (inn/shop/etc) or take treasure. Doing so also means you don't end up with a glut of money, disabling you from getting better equipment at every opportunity (but usually often enough that it never becomes a serious problem in-and-of-itself.) Most bosses can be "brute-forced", but they usually also have a strategic weakness that most players might have never even discovered due to their higher-than-required level upon reaching them.

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