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Hot take, RPGs are innately shit.

Every RPG has bad gameplay and most of the time it is because they are RPGs.

Good gameplay isn't 100% objective but there are some fairly objective parts. Gameplay should foster experimentation and progressive improvement. Both of these conflict with core elements of RPGs.

RPGs have you make permanent decisions about your character, STR vs INT, mage vs warrior. The fact that you might have to replay hours of gameplay just to see what you could have done differently ensures that you stick with what you started out with even if it means save scumming your way through hard fights.

Another fun aspect of gameplay is progressively facing new challenges that build on old ones. Because most RPGs these days are open world and don't know where the player will go when they can't pace challenges properly and most of the time just scale enemies based off your level so that the challenge remains constant throughout the game.

Roguelikes are the fix for this. You reset every run and can experiment with a new build and have randomized elements so that you don't just stick with one build when you find a good one.

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>RPGs have you make permanent decisions about your character, STR vs INT, mage vs warrior. The fact that you might have to replay hours of gameplay just to see what you could have done differently ensures that you stick with what you started out with even if it means save scumming your way through hard fights.

Solved decades ago with respec, which just about every RPG has these days.

>Another fun aspect of gameplay is progressively facing new challenges that build on old ones. Because most RPGs these days are open world and don't know where the player will go when they can't pace challenges properly and most of the time just scale enemies based off your level so that the challenge remains constant throughout the game.

Not all open world RPGs do this, I don't even know about most. The only big game I can think of off the top of my head that does this is retail WoW, most RPGs that do scale do it incrementally to strike a balance between giving the player a sense of progression and making the player basically invincible to 90% of enemies in the game.

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