The problem with modern computer RPGs

by Dr. John B. Williston

Posted: 19-05-2009

We all know what the problems are with modern role-playing games, but it does soothe the soul to hear a real Doctor talking about them and proposing some solutions

Let me start by saying that I like role-playing games (RPGs). I have only positive memories of playing pen and paper RPGs in childhood. The first game I ever purchased for a computer was an RPG (Tunnels of Doom for the old TI-99/4A), and the first game I ever bought for a PC was one of the original gold-box adventures (Pool of Radiance). In short, I’ve been enjoying RPGs for nearly three decades, so I’m not exactly a “n00b”.

Not surprisingly, computer-based RPGs (CRPGs) have come a long way in those three decades. As technology has improved, so have certain aspects of the various games. Today’s CRPGs span gigabytes of content, if not terabytes for the massively multiplayer online versions, providing vast virtual worlds to explore. There can be no doubt that graphics have improved, audio has improved, etc.

Yet despite all the improvements, I find myself finishing fewer and fewer CRPGs. There was a time when I finished every single game I bought, and most of them multiple times. But as excited as I get about the promise of new CRPGs, with all their spiffy new features, I find myself finishing fewer and fewer of them -- and buying fewer and fewer of them as a result. The purpose of this essay is to highlight the reasons, which I take to be problems with modern CRPGs.

Barriers to Entry

My stage in life surely exacerbates my number one problem with modern CRPGs. I’m a husband and a father, so the days when I could spend all day Saturday happily gaming away are long gone. I’m lucky if I can eke out a handful of hours to play each week. So when I sit down to play, I’m looking to be entertained; if I’m not having fun, and fast, I’ll look for something else to occupy my precious downtime.

My number one problem with modern CRPGs is the barriers they pose to get into the game. I’m not talking about the learning curve, mind you, as that has diminished rather significantly; if anything, most modern CRPGs are quite dumbed down compared to their predecessors. Even the Dungeons & Dragons rules, long considered the pinnacle of byzantine pen and paper RPGs, have been simplified. No, I’m talking about the barriers to get into the game: current position within the story arc, inventory management, and so forth. Modern CRPGs have become so complex and so story-driven, with so many quests, sub-quests, objectives, and goals, that just remembering who my character is and what he’s supposed to be doing can take quite a bit of effort.

It is particularly painful when it comes to inventory management. Yes, I realize a finite amount of inventory space is realistic, and yes, I realize that it forces the player to make “interesting choices” -- the very sine qua non of RPG games by some persons’ definition. But when I have to spend more uninteresting time fiddling around making room for the McGuffin of choice than I do actually making interesting choices, that’s a sure sign something isn’t right.

Some CRPGs require quest items to take up precious inventory space; others “remember” that you have them but don’t display them in the inventory. Either way is painful. The former sort of game effectively punishes me for every additional quest I accept, while the latter makes it difficult to figure out what I’ve collected and what yet remains to be done.

Lord of the Rings Online does the best job I’ve seen in straddling this fence, insofar as most quest items do not require inventory space while quest objectives change to indicate which are yet to be satisfied, but I still find myself running out of room in my bags during at least half of my play sessions. Even more frequently I find myself combing my inventory for that one thing I know I have but can’t find. Which little 32 x 32 pixel icon is the sparkling edhelharn token again? Excuse me while I squint and strain.

Frankly, the genre needs improvement. The complexity of CRPGs has gone up geometrically, but the in-game tools to manage that complexity haven’t kept pace at all. The trend toward more and deeper game systems is fully at odds with the quest for ever cleaner and more immersive interfaces. Something has to give; in my case, these factors pile up until it’s just easier to go play something else than to resume the story from where I last left it. And that’s a shame.

First, the barriers to entry need to be simplified. Getting caught up to the current point in the story should be easier. Journals are pretty common in CRPGs, but they’re often a bunch of text in some wacky, medieval-looking font on a woefully low contrast, papyrus-looking scroll; that makes for painful reading. How about a more dynamic tree display, which shows major plot points and side objectives more clearly? Titan Quest does this by breaking its content down by acts and objectives; something similar would go a long way toward catching players up more quickly.

Similarly, inventory management needs to be simplified. It needs to be crystal clear what items I can sell to a vendor, what stuff I have to keep for main quests, what stuff I have to keep for side quests, and how items fit into my character build path (if at all) and/or compare to what I’m already using. I think half my inventory management woes stem from the facts that (1) I’m scared to sell stuff I don’t really understand for fear that I’ll need it later, and (2) I’m hesitant to use powerful items because I’m scared I’ll use them up and be unable to complete the game.

Perhaps dividing up the inventory space into groups would make more sense, putting weapons, armor, consumables, baubles, etc. into their own distinct pages that make it more immediately obvious what’s better and what’s worse. Similarly, knowing that everything I need for the final, big boss fight will be available in the form of quest items I can’t sell, drop, or otherwise lose, would give me the freedom to use up other stuff as needed. Alternately, making it possible to recharge/refill every item would give me the same freedom. These seem like obvious choices to me, but few games use them as mechanics.

Lifetime Commitment

It’s not a happy confession, but I think I might be something of a completionist. I never thought of myself as being that sort of person, but maybe my childhood -- queue parental flashback: “While you live in my house, you’ll damned well finish what you start, young man!” -- warped me worse than I thought. This leads me to a second problem: they’re so bloody enormous they practically require a lifetime commitment for those of us with completionist tendencies.

I find it very difficult to focus solely on the main quest line, and even when I do, plenty of modern CRPGs still want thirty or forty hours to see it through. When you sometimes go more than a week without even touching a game, that works out to a lot of calendar time. Add in optional quests, which often aren’t so optional given the sorely needed gear they provide, and some games require hundreds of hours to finish. I read recently how one reviewer spent over three hundred hours playing The Witcher, exploring all the options; I can’t even imagine that kind of devotion to a non-MMORPG game.

For example, Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn was released back in September of 2000. I know because I bought my copy on release day. I’m ashamed to admit that I still haven’t finished the game nearly nine years later! Part of the reason is that I get vexed by the aforementioned barriers to entry, but another part is that I can’t drum up the forty-plus hours before six months have passed and I’ve lost interest. I come back to it, roll up a new character, get a few chapters in, and then my interest fizzles out before I finish. It’s not a bad game; it’s a great game. But it’s so darned big that I just can’t complete it.

Paradoxically, such scope is one of the things that draws me to CRPGs in the first place. Every time I read about some new game with its massive world, rich and interesting history, diverse character classes, and so forth, I almost salivate. By the time the game is released, I’m practically in a lather to get my copy installed and start playing. I know I’m not alone in this. You know what I’m talking about, fellow gamer.

A few weeks hence, however, I usually find myself stalled from the game’s barriers to entry. Shortly thereafter the game essentially defines a new cluster of dead sectors on my hard drive. I can’t bring myself to remove it until I complete it, but I can’t find the time and energy to do so. Instead, I keep coming back to it from time to time, usually because it sits there taunting me in my games menu. I feel bad that I haven’t finished it, but when I play it I feel bad that I’m not finishing the other games I’ve since purchased instead. Yes, I’m nuts; I get that.

I don’t think it’s far from the mark to suggest that a big part of the time commitment could be eliminated if only CRPGs were more streamlined. A constant complaint about such games is the go-fetch nature of so many quests. The player talks to some non-player character (NPC) at point A, has to run and talk to another NPC at point B, has to run to point C to go kill the big bad or collect the N thingies, then run back to point A, then to point B, and so forth. Multiply the transit time by a hundred quests and you find that what you’ve really bought and paid for is a running simulator, not a game.

I can’t think of a way to provide a huge world to explore that doesn’t take any time to explore, but it wouldn’t be difficult at all to provide the player with a means to see where the good bits really are. If you’re the type who likes to wander amidst the virtual flora, you still could; but if you’re on a mission to retrieve a sample from the nearest tainted stream for some NPC, would it really be such a crime to show the player precisely where it is?

It’s not like CRPGs don’t use markers on the map for other things; why not provide a straightforward hint layer that can be enabled as desired? I realize that’s a compromise to realism, and I’m sure some game developers would be opposed to it for making the game “too easy”, but honestly, developers, whom do you think pays your salary? Sometimes I have the time to explore; when I don’t, it would be a big help to know precisely where to go. Some games already do this, but too many CRPGs don’t.

Better quest grouping wouldn’t hurt either. You know how it goes: you wander into a new town and every NPC has some indicator that he desperately needs you to go fetch/kill something. So you pick up half a dozen quests and then find yourself with the conundrum: where to go first? Given my luck, I inevitably choose the least efficient thing. I go to point B when I should have gone to point A, so about the time I’m turning in the quest that took me to B, I find that two of my other quests were at point A. So I head out to point A instead, only to discover that I wasn’t done with the quests from point B.

The sort of hint markers proposed earlier would largely eliminate this problem, or at least turn it into a travelling salesman problem for the player to solve -- that might be an interesting feature for some folks. If you’re dead set against such hint markers, then at least highlighted areas on the map would be helpful for showing where groups of objectives are located, allowing the player to plan better.

Again, Lord of the Rings Online is noteworthy: it highlights areas on the map for quests on the tracker list until the player nears the objective. That provides clear assistance in grouping quests and getting off to a good start, but it doesn’t completely preclude the value of exploring once the player has reached the general area. Personally, I’d prefer more precise markers that were visible only upon request, but I have to admit it’s a darned good compromise.

Perfectionism

As if being a completionist weren’t bad enough, I’m also something of a perfectionist. I’m practical enough to look for a good solution today if the perfect solution is months away, but I’m enough of a perfectionist to wait if I think the perfect one is achievable next week. The problem with this, of course, is that something always comes up next week, so I end up making zero progress.

This is relevant to modern CRPGs (honest) because I, and many other gamers I know, find it difficult to be satisfied just playing the game. I have one friend in particular who plans meticulously ahead of time. By the time he starts playing a given CRPG, he already has a world atlas, lists of all the best gear, notes on how to group quests, and usually has all his skill (and other) points mapped out ahead of time. The result is that he has all the information needed to build das über character right from the get-go.

The problem, of course, is that he rarely finishes CRPGs, and rarely enjoys them as expected, because it feels more like work than fun. Big surprise, eh? The drive to make the perfect build, the most powerful character, have the best gear, etc., can be so strong that players lose sight of the whole reason for playing the game: to play the game and have fun. I suffer from this myself, though in my case it’s usually limited to worrying about making a bad build that will be unable to finish the game or being disappointed because I’m missing out on various cool bits/secrets.

The obvious response to this complaint is that modern CRPGs are so chock full of options that they’re almost infinitely replayable, some even providing multiple endings for different styles of play. Read any gaming magazine these days and you’ll see terms like ‘non-linear’, ‘emergent’, and ‘sandbox’ applied universally as positives; in contrast, ‘linear’ gameplay is always disparaged. If you feel like you’re missing all the good bits, then simply play through it again, right?

The problem with this response should be equally obvious: if barriers to entry and a lifetime commitment are problems, then suggesting another play through isn’t exactly a comforting solution. If it’s more work than fun to finish a game the first time, how does suggesting I finish it twice (or more) really help? Seriously, who has time to spend hundreds of hours on a game and then dive back in for a second bite at the apple? Anyone? Bueller?

Conclusion

I’ll say it again: I’m nuts, and I really do get that. I’ve got enough psychological hang-ups and idiosyncrasies to keep three headshrinkers busy for a decade. But I know I’m not alone; I’ve had enough conversations with gaming buddies over the years to know that lots of other people have similar issues with modern CRPGs. Maybe it’s a gaming prerequisite to be nuts, or at least to be nuts in some of the same ways as I am.

Whatever the case, though, being nuts doesn’t change the fact that today’s CRPGs aren’t as entertaining or accessible as they could be. The gaming consumer deserves good value for his entertainment dollar, and while modern CRPGs supply an insane amount of content it’s more of an open question as to whether they’re well focused enough to be entertaining and encourage completion. I’d hate to think we’re all spending our money on running simulators, but sometimes I get precisely that feeling.

Unfortunately, this essay is more about problems than answers. I’m a doctor, not a physicist. Or rather, I’m not a game designer; I’m a game player. So while I can say that modern CRPGs are sub-optimal in the various ways I’ve mentioned, it’s a lot harder to suggest obviously good solutions. Nevertheless, I’d like to hope that at least some of my suggestions resonate with fellow players and perhaps developers.

Here’s hoping we all get a chance to find out in future CRPGs. May they someday be all that they can be.