2011-05-01 - The Problem with RPGs

RPGs have become a large part of gamming. Just about every two bit First person shooter needs some role playing elements. I hear Call of Duty multiplayer even has RPG elements. There's all this "Pick your skills", "Pick your perks", "Make your own character" stuff and frankly I hate it. Now I would like to state that I have never played a JRPG, and I don’t plan to play a JRPG if I can help it. I also must say that I haven’t played that many western RPGs. Though I am mostly thinking about the new genre of action RPGs (Basically take a normal game and add skill trees to it in order to make it more exciting) most of this will be about how I see the genre and less about how it actually is. Enjoy the rant.

My main problem with RPGs is that they have terrible stories. This is really distressing since most of them have great story potential. Look at Mass Effect, it's the first big Sci-Fi game in a while that has something more than "You big space marine, you shoot evil aliens"; however, it still has you spending four years scanning planets so you can upgrade your weapons. Now the main problem with story in RPGs is that they have to cover all their bases. The story has to be able to work with whatever back story you've picked, whatever gender you've chosen, and whatever actions you have taken up to this point. Whenever you want into a situation you have to be able to get out of it regardless of how you’ve chosen your skill set. We can't have female Sheppard get pregnant from all her galactic affairs because then we'd have to get male Sheppard pregnant and that just wouldn't work. So you end up with a story that has nothing supporting it. You can't have a deep story because you don't have time to write up a deep story for every single way a character might walk into a situation. Going back to Mass Effect 2 the big thing was that things you did in the first game would have consequences in the second game. These consequences are almost completely limited to either people mentioning what you did in passing or random characters from the first game popping up to do nothing more than comment on what you did to them in the first game. If something you did in the first game had a large scale effect on the second game then anyone who made a different choice would have to play an entirely different game. The game could have ignored those events completely and still worked the same.. The problem with a choice system is that you have to continue the story whatever the choice made which means that the majority of your choices become meaningless. Say you are faced with a moral dilemma to destroy a planet or not. Whatever action you choose you still have to be able to go on to the next story mission and complete the game. So yes you can blow up a planet or you can save a planet but at the end of the day you are still on the same story. Your choice in this seemingly important moment affects nothing. In Fallout 3 you have the option to set off a bomb or to defuse it. If you set the bomb off you blow up a town and get to go live in a tower. If you defuse the bomb the guy in the tower hates you and you get to live in the town. If someone story related later in the game said "I don't want to work with a man who blew up a town" the story would have been screwed. Logically it would have made sense for a lot of people to hate you but they can't. The story has to go on regardless of what you do. So every choice you make in a game is either meaningless by itself or meaningless to the story. There's no way to give you a bunch of heavy choices that impact the entire game and still give you the same story. The problem with this is that it makes a good part of the story superfluous. In a linear game the writers always know the actions you have taken to get to any given point because there is only one set of actions that can take you to that point. This allows them to construct deep stories because they only have to deal with one narrative. In RPGs where the story is created to be open ended you are forced to deal with shallow stories in order to ensure that story works in the context of everyone's personalized play through.

Another big problem I have with RPGs is the very idea of "Role Playing". The idea is that you create a character and play them however you want. Basically the game designers give you a blank canvas and you paint it according to your will and their guidelines. The problem with this is that again the story has to work around it. Sure you can make your character an Asian woman or a black man but the game can't say anything about that. Nothing can be based heavily on the character you create because the story writers have no idea of what character you are going to make. They can use markers to control dialog so that everyone refers to you as a she if you are playing as a woman but they can't treat you differently because of that fact. If one character was willing to help you as a woman but not as a man then you end up in a situation of creating multiple stories again. There's no way to account for all your possible choices so your choices have to be superficial. Another problem connected to this is the dialog dynamic with your party characters and to a lesser extent other characters. The one thing I hated about the first mass effect is that your party almost always ended up agreeing with you. You had these moments where you could go and talk to your crewmembers and have those personal moments with them. The weird thing is that your crew members would always start to believe whatever you told them. I remember I accidently told one of my party members that the best way to get things done was to do it yourself and kill people without asking questions. After this point he took up a complete "Vigilante is the best" attitude and I couldn't tell him that it was stupid. One little comment and I completely changed his character. Sheppard is just the most charismatic guy in the universe because whatever he says to people they automatically believe. Whenever the magical blue text comes up he can convince a mass murdering psycho to stop all the hate and become a hippie. I've never played as a renegade really so I can't say that the red text works the same way but I imagine it does. Sheppard must be a Jedi, he uses his Jedi mind tricks on everyone so that they always agree with whatever he says to them. Actually I think one of the Star Wars game had it the same way that whenever you picked a line of dialog that was coloured it meant you'd use your Jedi powers to say it. The problem with everything in the game agreeing with you is that it rather destroys that atmosphere for me. It doesn't make sense for every criminal trying to kill me to be persuaded by my charm because I levelled up my speaking skills to the max and did a bunch of good deeds to get all those goody-goody points. I was basically playing as a Boy Scout politician. Now I suppose that it's my fault for choosing that path but whatever way you play it the dialog works so you can persuade people to do things for you if you do things a certain way. Look at Half-life 2, it is largely considered to be one of the best story games of late and it does so with very little input from the player. You never say anything and everything you do is set by the game itself. I think that this is a much better way to present story. I prefer to read my stories instead of writing them. I want someone else to craft all the dialog and characters and events instead of me having to fill in some key blanks so that I can feel like I'm a part of the story. If I wanted to feel like I was making the story I would be writing novels instead of playing video games. The game designers are supposed to be the experts, writing stories is their jobs not mine.

Right, that's a nice rant. In conclusion I want to be given a great story and a great character. RPG stories tend to be more like adlib fill in the blanks except that the sentences with missing words are kept separate from the main story sentences making them pointless. Now I would enjoy a really well done branching story that allowed you to take multiple paths and end up and completely different places. I think it would be interested to have a truly non-linear game. It's just this non-linearity stapled to a linear framework that I find annoying. If you give me a choice I want it to be an important choice instead of having the only consequence be a comment by someone a few hours later.