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Healing potions and magic daggers begone!
Apophatos
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Greetings,
At the risk of going over well-trodden territory, I had hoped to reach out to any others who shared my not insignificant distaste for a now well-established theme among developers of third-person action-adventure video game RPGs.
Full disclosure demands that I reveal that I have a greater fondness for low-magic environments, then high-magic. I find myself more drawn to the drama of the people involved in any given conflict, and find that drama as equally conveyed by a drunken one-eyed thug and one-time paladin skulking in the shadows with a broken short-sword, as by a griffon-mounted cavalier brandishing a flaming spear of meteor-spewing.
With an eye towards such examples as Neverwinter Nights, Diablo, and Sacred (as well as their derivatives), game designers seem to be under the impression that somehow it is entirely practical for the barrels, crates, and trashcans of a city to be littered with casually discarded +2 greatswords of angel-slaying, piles of gold coins, and healing potions. The only possibly redeeming quality of this device, is that it was a cheap-and-easy way of accommodating a wide-range of skill sets on the part of players, offering even the unluckiest of button-mashers the opportunity to make headway through a miniboss if only enough time was spent smashing and rummaging through random containers in a city wracked by a revolution and/or some kind of cosmic catastrophe produced enough money to buy the gear to ease the fight. But, as a player who has a tendency of getting sucked into plots written on the cartons of breakfast cereals, I found the notion such items were casually strewn about the landscape and ripe for the plucking without any care or effort on the part of the player, significantly reduced their value. The irony, of course, is that as magic daggers, potions, and armour became commonplace pieces of discarded rubbish, they have the inverse impact on monetary inflation. With items valued at dozens of gold pieces (if not dozens of gold pieces themselves) simply sitting in a crate in the street, the result is a player who must face the pretense of spending tens of thousands of gold coins on a magic item that they hope to pin some as-yet untested though clearly ingenious strategy. I find this device to be not only a barrier to the narrative (and needlessly prelonging what we all signed up for: overcoming monsters), but an example of singularly uninspired game design.
I have no bone to pick with strategically-relevant magic items, or players being rewarded for spending time calculating microvariables of permanent and temporary enchantments interacting with terrain under the right combination of effects. I think it is a sign of a well-designed game if it can sustain and reward such a deep level of strategisation on the part of the player. The interaction of talent points and the careful choice of gear are a big part of such a level of depth.
But I am not convinced that there is not a better way of doing it than filling city squares with sacks full of healing potions, and crates full of magic daggers.
-Apo
At the risk of going over well-trodden territory, I had hoped to reach out to any others who shared my not insignificant distaste for a now well-established theme among developers of third-person action-adventure video game RPGs.
Full disclosure demands that I reveal that I have a greater fondness for low-magic environments, then high-magic. I find myself more drawn to the drama of the people involved in any given conflict, and find that drama as equally conveyed by a drunken one-eyed thug and one-time paladin skulking in the shadows with a broken short-sword, as by a griffon-mounted cavalier brandishing a flaming spear of meteor-spewing.
With an eye towards such examples as Neverwinter Nights, Diablo, and Sacred (as well as their derivatives), game designers seem to be under the impression that somehow it is entirely practical for the barrels, crates, and trashcans of a city to be littered with casually discarded +2 greatswords of angel-slaying, piles of gold coins, and healing potions. The only possibly redeeming quality of this device, is that it was a cheap-and-easy way of accommodating a wide-range of skill sets on the part of players, offering even the unluckiest of button-mashers the opportunity to make headway through a miniboss if only enough time was spent smashing and rummaging through random containers in a city wracked by a revolution and/or some kind of cosmic catastrophe produced enough money to buy the gear to ease the fight. But, as a player who has a tendency of getting sucked into plots written on the cartons of breakfast cereals, I found the notion such items were casually strewn about the landscape and ripe for the plucking without any care or effort on the part of the player, significantly reduced their value. The irony, of course, is that as magic daggers, potions, and armour became commonplace pieces of discarded rubbish, they have the inverse impact on monetary inflation. With items valued at dozens of gold pieces (if not dozens of gold pieces themselves) simply sitting in a crate in the street, the result is a player who must face the pretense of spending tens of thousands of gold coins on a magic item that they hope to pin some as-yet untested though clearly ingenious strategy. I find this device to be not only a barrier to the narrative (and needlessly prelonging what we all signed up for: overcoming monsters), but an example of singularly uninspired game design.
I have no bone to pick with strategically-relevant magic items, or players being rewarded for spending time calculating microvariables of permanent and temporary enchantments interacting with terrain under the right combination of effects. I think it is a sign of a well-designed game if it can sustain and reward such a deep level of strategisation on the part of the player. The interaction of talent points and the careful choice of gear are a big part of such a level of depth.
But I am not convinced that there is not a better way of doing it than filling city squares with sacks full of healing potions, and crates full of magic daggers.
-Apo
- Apo
Apophatos on
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