The leveling system should die

[crusher]

I've disliked level grinds for an eternity; and try to remove leveling (via mods) from my games, if possible. The guy who invented the pen-n-paper rpg said it was a huge mistake to have used stat-creep "Vertical Progress". The better games today are using --horizontal progress-- games that typically claim they are skill-based.  

 

Ultima Online, Guild Wars Original, soon to release Star Citizen, Conan Exiles.. modded Witcher 3 (dynamic scaling)... these do not 'gate' content using level pathing. I discovered Skyrim while fleeing in abject disgust from Guild Wars 2. Being able to mod Skyrim so everything scales dynamically, and that your progress is only skill points, this is a much smoother experience for a 'true sandbox'. And being able to lose skill points (prison overhaul patch) is fantastic. The complexity of mods cross-interacting is, has never been done before, so much can and will go wrong that you can just ignore scripted quests and play purely emergent experience, with outcomes completely unique to your play-style and choices.. 

 

In a sandbox you should be able to go anywhere you want, completely ignoring the main quest-line for as long as you want. Heavily modded Skyrim is the best I've found. Conan Exiles may be a solid contender, using the Unreal Engine, where modding may be very robust -- and Funcom is already adding in slavery, nudity, dark fantasy, class-less characters.. etc, by default; heavily customize-able servers and being a mod-able multiplayer game? Potential is unimaginable.  

[afa]

Good and Bad is very much useless if you really get down to it. The correct long terms descriptor of so called "good" and "bad" games are "I like/I don't like", "you like/you don't like", or at best "this set of data show X number or X% of people like/dislike this game"

People also seems to be going on and on about how game companies are only interested in make money, (first of all, no shit!) but the truth is profit and number copies sold are almost the only quantifiable metrics that exist to measure a game.

 

Pursuit of "real life" is interesting. A lot of real life "games" already exist, pick up any flight or driving simulator and that's pretty much as realistic as developers can get it to with the resources available. It isn't that they aren't realistic, it is that they might not be the realistic games that you want....or if the game that you want is even realistic to begin with.

You want the realest "role playing" game? Try American Truck Simulator, you get to role play a trucker, it is a very common profession, therefore it is very much "real." You haul containers up and down the country/state/cities hours at a time, you have seen trucks before right? Real. You need to put gas, try not to get in accident, maintain your truck, and you could also get too tired and fall asleep on the wheel, just like real life. You get a loan to pay for your truck, and you work to pay off that loan, again real. And people love that, it is...beautiful.

[bjornk]

The problem with saying that "good" is subjective is that it derails any real discussion. I think there is enough overlap in peoples definitions of "good" that it is quite possible to discuss whether certain features are "good".

Some of us think leveling systems are "bad", others think it's "good". Are we also derailing the discussion? Nobody has to accept your views.

 

Lots of developers do attempt to make radically different games, if you get away from the big publishers and look at indie games.

Radically different doesn't mean they are revolutionary. Any dev may attempt to make something different in order to sell their product, but that doesn't mean that they pursue their dream of genre changing revolution.

 

But ruthlessly pursuing maximum realism does not lead to fun games. Realism also has to be tempered by the need for gameplay to be compelling.

No one claims otherwise.

 

I strongly disagree with your claim that the technology is already out there. There's a reason hardly anyone uses the voice recognition on their phone unless they are driving, and even then it tends to involve a lot of shouting and repetition. On a PC, you could type your dialog and the game could feed it to a natural language keyword lookup system, but how is that really any different than the dialogue system from Morrowind? The illusion of real dialogue would fall apart within five minutes of starting the game.

I wasn't talking about voice recognition systems. Morrowind's system is limited by predefined keywords, which isn't bad but it's primitive. I'm talking about AI supported dialogue systems that can learn. They can surely tell you compelling stories if you program them that way. With a few modifications, what is currently "out there" is enough to create a revolutionary change in handling NPC dialogue.

 

I don't know why you try to argue with me on what *I* expect from a revolutionary RPG. If you're happy with the way they are, well, good for you.

[merryMalfunctioning]

I don't know why you try to argue with me on what *I* expect from a revolutionary RPG. If you're happy with the way they are, well, good for you.

Because I enjoy discussing videogames. Sorry if it comes across as hostile.

[the_mess]

If the numbers are not something the player can see in RPG, its not a RPG anymore. The RPGs are games of numbers, its not that much of game of skill, but numbers. 

 

If you want to remove the numbers from the RPGs you will make an action game like Chivalry or Counter Strike or Red Orchestra, where its about the skill of each player rather than what weapon he is using. 

 

The leveling is what makes the RPGs RPG more than anything, if you take out the leveling you will have simply an action game. (which doesn't mean GTA Online, Call of Duty, etc, fps with leveling are rpgs ofc lol)

[bjornk]

Role-playing has nothing to do with numbers. You just want a "game" that you can play, which is essentially the same thing as the ones you mentioned, except for its rules. Funnily enough, quite a lot of RPG players don't even role-play, they just min-max the shit out of these games just to be able "win" it, often as easily as possible.

[the_mess]

Well, I think the traditional "role playing" died long time ago, sadly, when the games became mainstream.

[Kaldor Draigo]

if you play the souls series you NEED the leveling system