Month: February 2021

RPGs Are Getting Boring. Here’s How We Fix That

With the release of arguably the most anticipated thing, let alone game, in human history, Cyberpunk 2077, the Role Playing Game continues to be a dominant genre in gaming. It’s not hard to see why; with a combination of long-form storytelling, character customization and complex open worlds, RPGs allow gamers to invest themselves in the experience far deeper than a disposable 10-15 hour campaign or repetitive multiplayer. From a publisher’s standpoint, that player investment translates to more monetization opportunities that grow the game world with more activities and customization options. It’s the perfect genre for both creator and consumer, but lately the genre has been showing signs of age, with more and more publishers churning out impressive looking titles that nevertheless rehash the same design principles. The same quest giving, the same distributing of stat and skill points, and the same boring fetching and killing in worlds that do nothing but sit around and await your arrival. The situation is particularly egregious in the East, with an endless parade of indistinguishable MMORPGs filled with brainless grinding and impractically armored women. Even more straightforward genres are expected to incorporate RPG elements, such as dialogue and leveling options. With an increasingly saturated market that borrows from the same cache of design conventions, creative stagnation in RPGs is real, and the circumstances couldn’t be more ripe for some new thinking. Here are some ideas that would make for a genuinely groundbreaking RPG that pushes the genre into the next realm of creativity.

A WORLD THAT CHANGES…WITH OR WITHOUT YOUR INPUT

Many RPGs advertise vast open worlds bristling with life (or death) that you alone can change. This sounds good on paper; after all, games are at their best when they grant players the agency to have profound effects on the game world. In 2021, the novelty has worn off and many of these open worlds are little more than glorified theme parks with animatronics that re-enact the same routine day after day. Nothing will ever change. The town with the ghoul problem will never do anything about it until you decide to, and even if you don’t, said ghoul problem will ever manifest into something serious until, perhaps, the “where they are now” sequence once you complete the game.

Here’s an idea: how about an open world that can change independent of your actions? What if the town with the ghoul problem hired an NPC mercenary to deal with it should you choose to ignore it after a certain amount of time, closing off the quest permanently? What if through an RNG roll, said NPC mercenary was killed in the process, inadvertently provoking the ghouls to swarm the town and massacre everyone, opening up a new series of quests that you wouldn’t have access to had you dealt with the ghoul problem?

A truly immersive game world is one that feels alive, and not one that only comes to life when you insert coins into it. This means that, while you might be spending time in one part of the world, events would be taking place in other parts of it that you have no control over. NPCs might migrate to new towns or even get killed. Towns might undergo changes in leadership, build new structures, and stores might flourish or go out of business. All without your input. Feeling a sense of smallness in a vast world isn’t just about size, but control as well, and ironically by removing some control over the game world, the actions you take that can in fact alter the game world feel much more meaningful as a result and not just an obligatory part of the game.

RETHINKING QUESTS

Nothing screams glorified theme park with animatronics like an NPC whose sole purpose is to stand around all day and bestows upon you a quest to fetch his prized family heirloom, the location of which he conveniently marks on your map. You proceed to the location and find the heirloom, returning it to the owner who rewards you. This is an archaic method of giving players things to do. What if, instead of having blips on the map that indicate a quest giver, the very act of getting the quest was itself a quest that players had to discover by paying attention to the world around them? What if you had to gain a character’s trust or build some rapport with them before they trusted you with such assignments?

Another aspect of quest giving that needs to go away immediately are “Activities”; essentially copy/paste quests of varying categories that are scattered across the world. Go here for an assassination mission. Go there for a racing mission. The biggest offender of this is Ubisoft, who for over a decade have been applying the same tiresome open world formula of having one main quest and hundreds of sidequests that, rather than having their own unique narratives, are simply the same rinse-and-repeat activities that you tire of after the 20th variation.

The best kinds of quests are the ones players give themselves when they connect the dots on what they need to do in order to advance in the game outside of simply grinding. This will require careful world design, with precious tools and resources located in very specific and perhaps remote areas, as opposed to simply acquired by murdering the nearest gang of enemies. One game that does this well is STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. Many of the structures and areas in the game are completely devoid of useful items. However, in order to navigate past the exceedingly dangerous areas of the game, you need weapons and armor. Surveying the land, you see a structure in the distance that looks like a military installation. Since it’s likely protected, you elect to go in at night so you can sneak in under the cover of darkness. That right there is a quest, and it came entirely from you, and not a scripted NPC.

One of the greatest moments in gaming was onboard the 747 in the original Deus Ex. You are tasked with killing a terrorist leader by your overzealous instructor, and the game makes you think you have a choice between either killing the guy or letting your instructor do it. However, what many players didn’t realize at first is that there is a hidden third option: You can kill your instructor in order to prevent the execution of an unarmed prisoner. This is what quest-giving should be like: having a strong narrative and world design that allows players to come up with their own objectives and solutions, and go “Wow, I didn’t know the game would let me do that and even acknowledge it.”

NO MORE HYPERSPACE INVENTORY

One big reason I just can’t immerse myself in most open-world games is how generous they are with how much you can carry. In Cyberpunk 2077, for instance, you can carry up to 200 pounds of stuff, with no size restrictions. This means you could be lugging 200 pounds of assault rifles on your body, which is literally impossible. It’s hard to immerse yourself in the world when you open your inventory and see an entire library of crap that no human being could possibly carry, but most games make this concession because, for the sake of entertainment, you are expected to face off against numerous enemies and other challenges that would necessitate having plenty of gear.

A truly immersive inventory system would factor in both weight and size. For example, you wouldn’t be able to lug around five assault rifles, even if you were under the weight limit, because you don’t have the space to do so. Conversely, you wouldn’t be able to carry around a stack of gold bars, despite their small size, because they would take you over the weight limit.

One of the great joys of any RPG experience, especially a survival RPG, is defining not just your character, but your inventory as well. Many games pride themselves on having worlds with scarce resources, but they forget that a skilled player can gradually accumulate a vast repository of weapons and gear that they carry everywhere. Choosing what to bring and what to discard should be just as important as how you define your character.

YOUR ENEMIES ACTIVELY HUNT YOU

One idea that I really like but don’t see enough of is that enemy characters can take the initiative and actively seek you out as part of their own quest. The notion that actions have consequences is criminally underserved in RPGs, and in many cases you can gleefully slaughter hundreds of enemy faction members with little consequence besides them imposing penalties on future dealings with them. In The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, killing too many members of certain factions can trigger bounty hunters to come after you. This sounds good on paper, but in practice it amounts to a randomly generated enemy NPC awkwardly trying to “sneak” by crouch-walking up to you in plain sight…during the day. In Fallout 2, you would start getting random encounters with squads of bounty hunters. This is a better, more realistic idea, but at the end of the day simply amounts to the addition of a specific type of random encounter.

Red Dead Redemption 2 comes very close to this idea. As you progress through the story, rival gangs that you previously inflicted death on will set up ambushes at specific points of the world. You could be riding on a road when suddenly a gang of O’Driscolls would pop up from behind a nearby hill and open fire on you. The best iteration of this idea would combine Skyrim and Red Dead’s concepts: organized opposition that seeks you out in more ways than one. What if, besides the usual physical confrontations, the bar that you frequently drink at spawns an assassin who poisons your food and drink? What if a call girl that you pay for a good time turns out to be an assassin who kills you if you don’t pay attention to details in the environment?

RPGs are big into empowering you as a legendary hero who strolls into town and kicks ass and takes names, but they rarely account for the negative long-term consequences of all that killing you do. The idea that, as you level up and build your reputation in the world, you must also be more vigilant for threats that actively seek you out, is something that would give players investment in what is becoming a more banal activity in many RPGs.

NO MORE FUCKING STATS

It’s a staple of all RPGs, the idea of item stats and character stats that allow your character to move faster, shoot better and take hits stronger. Having to look at your character’s stat points as if he/she were a robot with built-in monitoring systems to tell you how much poison resistance or critical hit chance he/she has was fine back in 1990s and 2000s, but today it is an unnecessary time sink. Having to constantly switch out the same type of weapon every half an hour because you stumbled upon one that does 5 points more damage than your current one is mind-numbing. Stat scrutinizing in RPGs is a distraction from immersing oneself in the game world; a holdover from the days of pen and paper RPGs. Why is it still a requirement for RPGs to have this feature in the 2020s?

A more unique and intuitive way to handle character build is for specific attributes to improve based on how you play WITHOUT any of the detailed real-time updates (ie “You gained 1 point in athletics” a la The Elder Scrolls IV). Players would instead have to pay attention to their character’s performance to notice these changes. They could then go to an NPC and undergo tests that would produce different readouts of their character build. This would be a great way to integrate game systems and game world together, and it would give players a sense of excitement as they anticipate what their character readout will say based on how they have played so far. Similarly, instead of looting very nook and cranny for a rare drop, weapon and armor upgrades can be best handled by seeking out increasingly skilled armorers or gunsmiths, allowing you to invest more deeply in a smaller pool of gear rather than having a revolving door of them. This spreads out the upgrading experience over a more meaningful and narrative driven manner rather than the loot-based design that has already outstayed its welcome.

As you can probably tell by now, all these ideas are designed to drive RPG design closer to how things are in the real world. At the end of the day, the goal of any RPG is to maximize immersion so that players feel invested in the experience. As game production values become more lifelike, the mechanics that drive gameplay must also become more lifelike in order to deliver what so many games aspire to but rarely ever achieve.

Cyberpunk 2077: A Ferrari With No Doors

More so than any other game in history, Cyberpunk 2077 is an abject reminder that, for all the technological sophistication of videogames today, greed and mismanagement still remain the biggest obstacles preventing the industry from advancing into uncharted waters. In the eight years leading up to its release, it really looked as if this gargantuan RPG from CD Projekt Red was too impressive to fail; the city looked amazing, the gameplay trailers were phenomenal, and of course the developer’s track record was immaculate. As detailed by a Bloomberg report, Cyberpunk turned out to be yet another classic case of a triple-A game with a spectacular marketing campaign, but behind the scenes was barely being held together by overworked developers and ruthless upper management. We’ve seen this many times before with publishers like EA, Ubisoft and Bethesda, but few imagined that CD Projekt, long regarded as a bastion of integrity in an industry awash with greed, would allow themselves to succumb to this sickness.

It’s important, however, to establish that Cyberpunk 2077 is not a bad game, or even a mediocre game. It is a good game with a breathtaking visuals, versatile combat, and a very engaging story. The problem is that Cyberpunk was supposed to be a great game; a game that would take the open world RPG into the 2020s. I’m not talking about the bugs; from Vampire: The Masquerade to Skyrim to Red Dead 2 and now Cyberpunk, it’s been established quite well at this point that it’s virtually impossible to launch a massive game like this without a slew of bugs. No, it’s not the bugs that are the problem with Cyberpunk, it’s the fact that there are so many gaping holes in the design of the world. Where’s the public transportation? Why is the police system utterly pointless? Why is the pedestrian and driver AI about 20 years outdated? Why are so many buildings inaccessible? Why are there no NPCs on motorcycles? Why is there no mechanic where you can repair, upgrade and customize your vehicles? Why, in a city full of reflections, is your character the one and only thing that never appears in any reflective surfaces? Why, for the love of God, is there still no “Walk” button for mouse & keyboard setups two months after launch?

Cyberpunk 2077 is like a Ferrari that drives fast as you expect it would, but is also missing the air conditioning, the radio, one of the doors, and the hood. CD Projekt have boasted in their marketing that they have crafted the most immersive open world ever, but a few hours in Night City quickly disproves that notion. While the sound and visual design of this game is immaculate, I found myself doing quite a bit of heavy lifting in immersing myself in world. For example, within literal seconds of exploring Night City for the first time, I was greeted with an endless parade of NPCs driving into a road barrier in front of me, ripping their cars apart thanks to their inability to negotiate a left turn. When driving to specific locations, I was again taken out of the experience when I realized there were no parking spaces anywhere. The only option was to park in the middle of the street, prompting a massive traffic jam of brainless NPCs who couldn’t understand the concept of driving around a stopped vehicle.

Another hyped aspect of the game was the level of character creation and ability to define your role in Night City as a Nomad, Street Kid or Corpo. Much ado was made over how the character creator was so detailed you could adjust the size of your character’s dick. It turns out this, along with the many Role-Playing aspects of the game, were red herrings. You can adjust the size of your dick or breasts, but can’t adjust any aspect of your body shape or height. You can choose between three character backgrounds, but aside from the first half-hour of the game and a few extra lines of dialogue here and there, this has no bearing on how the story will play out. Dialogue design is also sparse for a game of this scale, with generally only two dialogue options to react with, neither of which feel particularly distinct from each other. For a game that bills itself as an RPG, it’s really light on the character building.

The more I play Cyberpunk 2077, the more I feel that it’s a Deus Ex-style action RPG that wears the skin of an expansive open world game. Where the game excels is its story, and when it presents locations filled with enemies for you to tackle. Its atmosphere and the scale of its story is everything we’ve come to expect from CDPR on the backs of the legendary Witcher series. Where the game stumbles is when you try to live your second life in Night City, and find that you can’t because so many details and features you expect from an open world game today are hideously undeveloped or simply not there. There is a good game underneath all the missing skin, but we likely won’t see it until the end of 2021, after CDPR patches the myriad of bugs and hopefully adds all the quality of life improvements necessary to flesh the world out.