[Inquire] What is your dislikes about rpgs!

[brickhouse420]

Hello everyone,
I am wondering what everyone's pet peeves are w3hen it comes to rpgs.
What really turns you away from a rpg in mid play or even before you start?

Thanks every one for your input!

[stevehungry]

older ones are better..FF7 through 11, 12 was god awful. and most of the ones out now are crap to, the western rpg shooters arnt to bad, mass effect and fallout 3 for example. the thing that turns me away is a bad battle system, for a classic rpg i prefer turn based and of course every RPG i play i expect there to be some level system along with items quests etc.. everyone loves RPG's OR a game with RPG features cuz people like to level up and improve there character. kind of why the sims was such a hit.

[brickhouse420]

Yea it seems that lots of rpgs now have amazing graphics and decent game play, but the amount of things you level up are very limited and played out. I find too, that often to level up it requires a lot of repetitive tasks that usually are depending on random variables or levels, and this can become quite boring! What seems to turn me off is thinks like (example); Fishing, where you go to a fishing spot, press the button to start and you just wait to see if you get a fish or not (depending on your level) as opposed to having to press button combination or button repetitions. Obviosuly there are other ways to make these saldon entertaining events more enjoyable but, that's just a basic example.

[tomsamson]

I think its difficult to categorize rpgs as a single entity or genre nowadays because there are some very different types of rpgs.
There is the more traditional japanese rpg which often has androgyne characters with spikey hair, round based battles and often very linear story progression but in return heavy character leveling and sometimes big party building.
Then there´s something like the classic western (pc) rpg where one can level up and customize character stats values in depth, too but with often more mature story focus, maybe something like Fallout 3 or Dragon Age Origins.
And then there´s the more modern streamlined pc/ console optimized western rpg type, something like Mass Effect 2, which does away with a lot of the in detail character and stats leveling and puts way more focus on storyline, plot twists and heavy consequences of your decisions with quite branching story and/or gameplay outcomes.

I personally meanwhile most prefer the western rpgs like Fallout 3 or Mass Effect 2, i loved the japanese rpgs back in Snes and early PS One days but they feel all too samey and not evolving that much to me anymore.
With the western ones i have the feeling deeper more believable characters are created , the stories are often more unique or more meaningful to me and i like the branching options in dialogue trees and throughout the story.
That one part is a double edged sword though, i just wrote a blog post on that topic regarding my Mass Effect 2 experiences:
http://www.potatocows.com/?p=109

[Alluvian]

Western RPG:
Don't make every singe character of the opposite sex throw themselves at you to the point where you only have three options with all of them:
1) never talk to them
2) be a jerk to them so they hate you
3) select the only non sociopathic chat options and have them sleep with you by the third or fourth conversation.

This is mostly a bioware thing, but it really makes the 'mature' games seem anything but. I can practically hear Beevis in the distance screaming "She's gonna show us her titties!!"

JRPG
Don't keep splitting up my party! I stopped playing this genre all together because I hit a rut of three games in a row that kept splitting my party up or forcing me to take people I didn't want on missions. One person having to tag along every now and then is okay, but forcing my group into 2 or more separate entities and making me redo every piece of equipment to make them useful again is a nightmare. then we get back together, and I have to re-optimize the equipment again, then they split me into another subgroup with half the people naked again, AAARGH. Yeah, I don't like that. It is probably a result of horrible inventory management and an over-emphasis on gear stats that it makes me so annoyed.

Multiplayer RPGs
Let me group with my friends! I really don't like games that don't let people group if one is X% higher or lower level than the other. It is really hard to get a group of 3-6 people together than can play at the same time all the time and never want to play those characters with anyone else other than the core group. If you have a multiplayer game, you MUST allow for level scaling to either let higher level people lower their effective level, or let lower level people raise theirs so that the pairing can still have fun together.

[Ray Beez]

If the RPG is a Flash game, I will not play it.
;-P

[brickhouse420]

haha, how comde

[tomsamson]

Alluvian, those are some good points, regarding what you said on western rpgs i agree that there should be more varied versions of relationship interactions than the few extremes they usually force one into (though i feel like the western rpgs in many cases already offer way more choices and options than traditional japanese ones).
I also dislike it when there are sometimes no ways to improve the relationship again when something affecting it negatively has happened at one point.
Then i also dislike it when there are too few interaction dialog versions and one wants to push the story/ relationship with a character further but there´s only a very limited amount of often repeated dialogue/interaction sequences which are reused until something else in the game unlocks the next possible sequence for that character.
I´d prefer it if the character relation interactions were less tied to the overall story or event arcs in the games.
On the other side, yeah, even if its still in child shoes, the side i liked most in mass effect 2 was really building up my team, getting better relationships with the members and regarding the female ones also trying to get a closer relationship going with one of them
Spoiler: What i disliked most was that in one moment it came to a confrontation between two of the girls and the only dialogue options i could choose would make one or the other girl upset on me for the rest of the game.
That really annoyed me, i tried going back to the annoyed girl over and over to try to talk to her again but she´d always only say the same thing: Why don´t you go and talk with the other girl.
I didn´t want to make out with both (i actually ended up having a "steady" relationship with a different, third one) but it really annoyed me that one of them didn´t want tot talk to me at all anymore.
Yeah, its a game and cheesy, but it really got me attached so much that i was bummed out

to Ray: well, that´s harsh. I understand where you´re coming from to some degree though since rpgs are probably one of the most design time consuming things to do in game dev so its kinda tough to do something big and beefy.
I decided i will probably never do an rpg game and if i´d ever change my mind on that i´d have to have a big team and propper budget for it or it would have to be a very tight setup where its about doing few things and doing them right instead of trying to compete with the most massive things out there.

[tomsamson]

oh yeah, i wanted to add one more thing, this one actually applies to way more game types than just rpgs:
In some cases i really dislike it when the gameplay interactions and missions based storyline and the narrative side told storyline don´t fit together at all.
Sometimes this can be fun in weird way, other times its annoying and can make the game, gameplay or story way less believable and/or enjoable.
The first example that pops into my mind on that is actually not an rpg, its GTA IV:
In older GTA games it was more common that it didn´t take itself overly serious so gameplay and story fit together way better in my eyes.
In GTA IV i liked the more fleshed out characters and seemingly more likable protagonist Nico, but then the gameplay felt somewhat unfitting to me.
In the storyline, up until close to the end they wanted to tell the story of a person with values who is no psycho mass murder, more someone who was thrown into a tough spot and wanted to get over with it, but the gameplay as usual in GTA games, turned it into a mass murder sim in no time again.
Somehow the focus on making the characters and game world more real in a way to some degree also made me be way less into doing goofy (fun) crap throughout the game.
Then there were also the relationship with girls parts in GTA where it felt like unwanted comedy when i´d do an escape from the police in the car while she was in the back seat and she kept on talking about the side that i´m one of the good guys..

Overall, yeah, the more characters should show a fitting reaction in games the more work is involved to even just halfway address all possible scenarios they could react to and the more dev time has to be spent on that, so its really one of the things that takes extremely long to do well and i feel like it´ll still take several years until we´re fully there, though some nice achievments towards that are made these days.

[Alluvian]

Tying in with what tomsamson was saying about gameplay not matching the narrative, examples that come to my mind within an rpg setting would be things like:
+Character can fly, but combat is so restrictive they just hover 2 inches off ground and let people hack at them with swords.
+Character is seen dispatching people effortlessly in cut scenes with one shot kills left and right, and then 30 seconds later I am fighting some minor wild animal and I have to slash it for 5 turns to kill it. MMOs are REALLY bad at this due to mobflation, where at level 15 they want to make you feel epic by having you kill some level 19 lich king, but then an expansion comes out years later where you are hunting level 86 rats for faction quests.
+Characters have easy access to resurrect items and they are used in practically every battle, but then the storyline says that love_interest_01 dies from a nasty paper cut and they are gone forever.
+Combat has you performing things like orbital strikes at will that would devastate whole cities, but only do 2530 damage out of a total of 10,000 damage on a wild antelope, and don't hurt the rest of the encounter or your allies in any way.

I could go on, but RPGs are often the LEAST realistic of all genres, especially the japanese style ones.

[Alluvian]

As far as flash and rpg, I don't think I would ever play a full rpg on flash or iphone either, but I would welcome some rpg elements into flash or iphone games.

Things like character ability progressions and character persistence are nice, and devs should like them because they promote attachment.

Something like an adventure game where you gain new abilities and can then play it a second or third time with progressively harder enemies using your new abilities to defeat them. It is somewhat of a balance nightmare though, at least for the inexperienced (like me!).

[tomsamson]

great posts Alluvian, i totally agree =)
And yeah, regarding the unfitting things being offputting:
It really applies to all sorts of games, a game can be totally unrealistic, say a plumber rescuing princesses from giant dinasaurs or turtles, but it doesn´t feel off until its inconsistent in itself in most cases.
With inconsistent in itself i mean things like your examples with the flying characters that hover low enough to be hit by swords and man are there many examples for such things in pretty much every game.
I find that more acceptable in flash games where i often imagine its due to dev time constraints, but it also still happens a lot with bigger commercial games.
One of the classics was probably for a long time something like the unbreakable wooden door: You have that big muscled super hero character with tons of weapons he can carry around, but then can´t open a basic old wooden door when he doesn´t have the key to it (for example in most of the Resident Evil games but also happens in most other games and game types).
I like it when in newer games they break that disbelief cause in some cases by allowing the character to break some doors open =)
Another commonly experienced disbelief cause is the character can do all sorts of things by himself or with vehicles but then can´t get over a small hill that blocks his way when the collision mesh isn´t made for that.

Besides the ranting: Good call in adding rpg elements into other game types, too.