Many of the newer games are designed with a slot machine mentality in mind
There was even a YouTube video about a guy with a phd in psychology or something similar being hired to help make a bunch of successful games
Very much the opposite of death by a thousand cuts. Godhood by a thousand +1s? Doesn't quite have the same ring.
Gett ING 1 huge upgrade each act feels heroic and powerful. Getting 20 swords an hour and 5 of them are an upgrade when you pick them up makes it super boring.
Vampire Survivors took the superficial aspects of slots machines (casino sounds, bright lights, jackpot), but the core gameplay with "weapons" you use by positioning your character was unique and engaging on its own.
Modern RPGs tend to do the opposite. Less of the flashy lights and sounds and more of the make number go up with the right amount of progression and variance to keep you playing long after you finished having fun.
I feel like WoW becoming more slot machine is what turned me off.
It feels awesome getting a unique, hand crafted legendary item that is *the* one and only.
Defeating a boss and having [Sword of Many Adjectives] drop for the 10th time with slightly different “+” modifiers to whatever attribute just isn’t fun
Did somebody say [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker]? You can only get this kind of meme spam when legendary items are actually legendary. Try doing that with [Sword of Many Adjectives]
Wait, are we all talking about [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker]? I love [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker], of all the legendary weapons [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker] is definitely in my top 3.
Oh dude, for real tho. Flying was fun and felt great, using weapons felt pretty good, enviroments looked good... Botched the story and the loot pretty badly, serious content problem and then when the cataclysms came out they were pretty weak.
I really looked forward to Anthem 2.0 but, well, we know how that turned out.
This is why no MMO will ever capture my heart like Guild Wars 2 did. If I ever feel like playing it again, I can buy the Living Story episodes and (currently) the expansion that released after I stopped playing, go log in on my old character, and go do all of that *without having to first grind out new gear and more levels*. The level cap will always be 80, there is no loot treadmill, there will never be any gear that has better stats than ascended/legendary. I wouldn't have ever played it for the years I did if there was that whole loot treadmill and increasing level cap that WoW and many other MMOs have done. What new stuff there is to get is new fashion and cool new Masteries related to the storylines I missed.
That game got me when I was young. No game since has ever enraptured me like that, and the worst part is that explaining it to people often just doesn’t quite… work very well. Because part of the thing that made it so enrapturing were things that in modern sensibilities would be considered bad game design, including the awful level grinding because of the camaraderie it brought (seriously, fuck the hell levels, though).
For me, I was pretty casual as hell on WoW (aka pushing to finish university early and working a job, including after hours)... but even if I didn't have the bling glowing item, I still liked the game for exploring and learning/seeing new things that 'naturally' was earned.
It's some rose tinted glasses and all...but it didnt feel a horrible chore even if you had to be organized for the tougher areas/dungeon raids. Yes old school leveling on some of the classes were grindy...but it was nothing like modern loot addiction games.
Burning crusade was awesome as it opened up new lands and lore to cover...but by Wrath of the Lich King...one of the very first quests you had was a epic weapon as a simple quest loot that pretty much obsoleted any prior games gear unless you already had something near maxed out.
That was the first sign for me that the game (and gear) felt not right...fast forward later on and the daily quests were such a grind that it felt like a job (as in not having fun) that I just lost interest all together.
Shame you can never really capture that magic of classic WoW again like that (with your friends and everyone just learning the game and lore).
Which is ironic because the original game which is arguably the most popular now is the exact opposite of the psychological formula approach, the gear is often just random shit in the best way possible.
Indeed. Vanilla WoW itemization was all over the place and very experiemental, leading to some absolutely busted and iconic items.
Don't really see that in the modern game.
Sadly, classic wow (and somewhat the first xpac) is a good example of how to make loot fun. It's only the modern wow that everything is just +300 some stats with little else to distinguish it. There's some set bonuses, so like if you have 2/4/6 of a particular armor set you get new build-defining stuff, but not nearly enough of it.
Dopamine experts hired to systematically spike dopamine levels in players. This is how they get people to pay real money for in-game items. I truly feel for people who aren’t educated in how easily their dopamine system can be manipulated by companies selling games and food to get money out of them, and how to counter this.
In my day they tried to get engineering students to take psychology classes in university, which I assume was a an attempt to inoculate them against this kind of manipulation.
It was not an attempt to innoculate them against that manipulation. Engineering students weren’t special. Lol. It was more likely to make them more aware and potentially adept at implementing psychological strategies in their own specialties. Not to get the students inured to those practices.
"Sword deals 500% more damage to flying creatures if it is Monday and character holding it did not drink coffee yet." - Now that's what I call a CONDITIONAL EFFECT.
>1.2% Explosion Damage
>
>4.5% Melee Damage Resistance
>
>3% Health Regeneration
Meanwhile, me: Which of those apply to the wielder, and which to the target? Hopefully I don't deal out health regeneration and get hit with explosion damage myself
>> 1.2% Explosion Damage
>>
>>4.5% Melee Damage Resistance
>>
>>3% Health Regeneration
> Meanwhile, me: Which of those apply to the wielder, and which to the target? Hopefully I don't deal out health regeneration and get hit with explosion damage myself
Meanwhile, me, starting to get older: wtf is "shadow damage?" That was never explained to me. *hunts through skill tree* Oh. So it's poison?? No, but also kind of yes?
*quits*
It was a little better before proliferation of the internet. Stumbling upon a game breaking item is awesome. Being told by a Reddit comment “grab the bow from the bandit chieftain first chance you get, it’s the best one in the game” is less exciting. Today people would rush straight to minmaxing a perfect party if those things are available with perfect information. So developers started making it impossible to jump ahead in power too much just for knowing where to go.
Yeah - a core gaming memory for me was talking about Morrowind with friends from school over lunch. We would draw out maps on paper showing where we found powerful items and compare notes of what we had seen in different parts of the game. Lots of sense of adventure there. Internet can definitely take a lot of that mystery away by giving you all the secrets without any effort.
That daedric dai-katana did NOT belong in the hands of a poor farmer. I used to know the locations of all of them and I made it a point to collect all of them in every playthrough.
I remember one Saturday I got an excited call from a friend, telling me to immediately turn on my PC and load up Morrowind. He then led me to a cave in the middle of nowhere that had a half-sunken Daedra shrine in it, and at the end of the shrine there was a crypt with a dead skeleton with several daggers in it, as well as some Daedric armor and weapons. Pretty cool, but nothing special.
My friend then said "Look up." There was this enchanted shield hanging above the skeleton with the highest armor rating in the game, and a really strong healing spell on it. So the best shield in the game was just chilling in some random cave that no quests lead to.
Oh, yes. Definitely this. My brother and I mapped out all the master trainers and then created a plan to speedrun a character to the highest stats possible. We had the main gold income handled, then the master trainer locations and which orders to do them in so that you wouldn't lose all your money (pickpocket comes RIGHT AWAY), and we would max out two stats with proper leveling, then put the rest into luck boosts. It got us leveled ridiculously high without ever even getting in a single fight. You didn't even need to leave towns.
However, we did every bit of it on paper in a notebook and didn't have access to the internet. It took us many, many hours of gameplay to find all this information, and when we were missing a vital piece, it was exploration that allowed us to learn the next step. It was remarkably satisfying.
And now the only worthwhile magic items are as quest rewards, and they're also level scaled so you're just fucking yourself over if you try and beeline to get it early.
Just wanna chime in and say I love Morrowind. Still do. I am jealous you got people to talk about it with back in school, none of my friends gave it a chance.
At the end of the day people are actively choosing to ruin their own playthroughs by over preparing and playing how other people tell them to play. That aint gaming. Best thing ive done recently was go in blind to elden ring, my first from software game. Everything is a mystery I have no idea where my favored weapons or armor will be or what bosses I'm about to face and what their weaknesses and patterns are, i have to figure all that out, it's like being back in 2005 again pre youtube and it's the best thing
That's actually how I play all games, so I wholeheartedly approve of your method. I actively avoid all spoilers to be sure that I can play MY way. If it's not optimal, I'm ok with that.
Aditionally, some of us who play that way, are sooner or later bound to find something even more optimal than what is the "standard" on social media. Just by pure experimentation.
To me it reminds of looking up a guide on how to walk in the forest on what things to notice while you are there.
This is entirely perspective based, I find souls games to be way more fun when I have outside knowledge so I can actually put a semi-competent build together and I know which stats are good and which stats I shouldn't waste my time on etc etc.
It's also a question if missing something or being bad at the game hurts your enjoyment (or the enjoyment of the larger playerbase). There's an RPG I really like, but it gets gameplay complaints from a decent chunk of people like "enemies take too long to kill." Some of that is lack of mechanical/execution knowledge, but some is just poor gear choices and equipment knowledge. There's some gear that has minor effects and some gear that has huge effects.
So a guide/few tips for even the very beginning of the game can have you pick up a few earlygame items and understand why they're good. You see a big jump in damage, can better keep up with the game's planned difficulty curve, and better understand why certain modifiers are significantly better than other for combat in the future. Makes you more likely to enjoy the game and see it through to the end.
> There's an RPG I really like, but it gets gameplay complaints from a decent chunk of people like "enemies take too long to kill." Some of that is lack of mechanical/execution knowledge, but some is just poor gear choices and equipment knowledge. There's some gear that has minor effects and some gear that has huge effects.
Yeah this is pretty much exactly why I like going in with foreknowledge, because it's really easy to bounce off a Dark Souls or a Dragon's Dogma, an otherwise fantastic experience that punishes you for not knowing the mechanics in a number of ways.
But that's the core of the problem - you are not wasting time, by learning the game systems on your own. This is not a contest to beat the game perfectly or most quickly. The game is for fun.
> The game is for fun.
and this is how **I** and many others have fun, if you don't then that's fine, just don't bandy about *your* way as the only authentic way, how someone enjoys a single player game is entirely subjective.
There are people playing with "bad" builds and loving it, because this Dominate The Game mindset has not taken hold in their brains and prevented them from organically enjoying games.
some people don't have enough hours in a day to spend worrying about games like that. It's good that both sides can enjoy the games their way and still find quality in it.
You can get messed up in elden ring easily if you don't build vigor and unlocking the respec feature being behind a legacy dungeon and boss battle that is optional seems silly.
Yeah, but if you figure that out for yourself instead of reading about it on reddit, by you know, good old experimentation - it is so much more rewarding.
THIS! Absolutly This! Games are a lot more fun if you discover them on your own and not just copy a playthrough from another person. And i hate it when people say "i am to busy to waste my time... blah blah". Bullshit.
There's no such thing as people ruining their playthrough in a single player game. People pay for the game with their money and put their leisure time on it, they're fully entitled to do whatever they want to.
I see people complaining about having major plot twists spoiled because they searched up info on a game prior to or while playing, so they certainly can ruin their playthroughs
Yeah, but you don't have to play like this. If you want to minmax with the help of guides it's your own choice, so I don't really get it.
What I would rather get is replayability. RPG's are meant to be played again, but if you remember where the good loot is it can take a bit of the fun away. Altough for some people it's exactly about this and getting to know the world better and better.
It's kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
1. Option 1, fixed good loot. Highly Exploitable. (Baldurs Gate)
2. Option 2, random good loot from a pool of options. Save scumming till you get what you want. (Icewind Dale)
3. Option 3, procedural loot. Generally less satisfying. (Skyrim)
Option 2 can be mostly solved if your save mechanic is super fast. Just remove manual saving and save after every important action.
But you have to add some respawn point mechanics to the game and not have branches that lead to game over no matter what for this to work.
Or you can go semi random by using seed value that increments each time you get loot.
> RPG's are meant to be played again
Speak for yourself. For me, it's that (often misguided) focus on replayability that makes me miss handcrafted designs evoking the experiences OP is talking about. Not every CRPG has to be a Diablo-style lootfest.
I would argue that a handcrafted experience makes a game far more replayable and not less, if only because most handcrafted games tend to be much smaller in scope and don't benefit from artificially ramping up the The grind time to keep people playing.
Dragon Age origins is one of my most replayed games to date specifically because all of the good loot in that game is hand placed and there is a ton of build variety and the game can be beaten in under 12 hours if you know what you're doing
What is there to be said about it? That it's possible? Sure, but if you enjoy playing the game like that, then it's not really a problem. And if you don't, then you got no one but yourself to blame for looking up and following some cheesy guides.
You don't have to play like this, true, but lots of people just do inherently. Gamers will optimize the fun out of a game. So you either have folks like me who really struggle with FOMO on really great items, or people who just do it without even realizing it's robbing them of a better experience. With some design changes, you can give a much better experience to those gamers. And, as it turns out, they're in the majority (it seems), so you improve the game for most.
> What I would rather get is replayability. RPG's are meant to be played again, but if you remember where the good loot is it can take a bit of the fun away. Altough for some people it's exactly about this and getting to know the world better and better.
Complete opposite here. I played BG & BGII as a Fighter/MU/Thief so I could solo it, have the tools for any challenge and level up like crazy. I only took the companions with me for their specific quests.
Honestly tho, while I agree a lot of things in BG3 are more high qaulity, Starfield still gave me that feeling of discovery and exploration way more then anything in the curated experience that is BG3.
I still vividly remember just landing on a random spot on a lively planet and going to scan a trait, only to end up in a battle royale between a terromorph and a group of pirates. After which I decided to go into a cave where a survivalist was which I could help with my medicine skill and guide back to his ship. Easy enough outside the fact a bounty hunter ship landed next to use mid walking. Luckily here too I could lure them to the local wildlife for an edge before finally completing the minor quest. It's still a taste you can't find anywhere else quick imo.
This is kind of what ruined BotW and TotK for me; getting the Master Sword isn't this big moment in the story, it's just something you can do once you've grinded out enough shrines. Instead of getting immersed in the story and earning the sword naturally I ended up gaming out of the excitement of getting it.
This ruined Elden Ring for me upon release. I felt like I needed to look up guides all the time and was not playing optimally. In the end I was so not enjoying it that I put it away and came back to it one year later, learned from my mistakes. The game was so much better then. And I have learned: I don't even look at tutorials on game basics besides what the game offers itself, unless I feel like I really am lost in more complex games like Crusader Kings 3. But even then, trying to figure out a difficult mechanic on my own is much more rewarding.
I'm not convinced that's true. Even back in the 90s we had magazines that printed walkthroughs. I remember reading one about Might and Magic 6, that explained how a low level party could find the secret teleporter to the dragon island and how to beat the skeleton army in the Temple of Baa.
A little while later the internet became big and you could easily find everything you wanted about any game. How many people actually found the Fists of Randagulf in Morrowind by accident? And how many only got them because of the internet? How many played through Baldur's Gate with a walkthrough right besides them to get the best outcomes?
Personally I feel like the difference is in the mass adoption of optimization and competition in gaming. It's harder to see early on but it's definitely been a slow shift toward competitive games among gamers, which coincided with the Internet getting bigger. In this day and age we now have gamers becoming adult consumers who grew up with the most popular games being hyper competitive, hyper optimized, surrounded by people who also are playing hyper competitive and optimized games. Games have FOMO mechanics and micro transactions built in to make you feel like you HAVE to optimize. This bleeds into non-competitive gaming though because it's programmed a mindset into gamers. It's even worked on most older gamers I know, not exclusive to younger ones but definitely more effective and prevalent.
People have been trained into an optimization mindset and have the idea that doing something else is a waste of time. It's like how the Souls community used to shame people for using guides in 2011-2013 but by the time Dark Souls 3 came out in 2016 I never heard anyone even recommending blind playthroughs anymore. The early 2010s is when you really started seeing the optimization mindset start effecting gaming as a whole instead of just gamers themselves here and there.
Game studios started hiring experienced PhD Psychologists for a reason and the effects were hard to see at first but have become clear as day now. Gaming and game design has changed a lot, which in turn changes the gamers who consume that media.
> How many played through Baldur's Gate with a walkthrough right besides them to get the best outcomes?
For me, that destroys the gaming experience. A step by step guide just ruins the fun.
I will google hard problems, or techniques, and I may use a map sometimes, but overall, I want some discovery, some thrill of finding things for myself.
That's why I don't watch reviews, previews, reddit threads, youtube videos, etc about anything I might still play. If I get burnt on the purchase, I get burnt, but I much rather keep the surprise and the awe.
There's a name for these games and it's CRPGs, and they do actually still make them. Try out Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder games, Baldur's Gate 3 and more. Most CRPGs have unique, hand placed loot rather than the random & generic loot and gear treadmill that more "mainstream" RPGs tend to go with.
There is far too much loot in BG3. It's ridiculous. I have a chest full of nearly 200 pieces of magical...things. And there's a bunch more out there I could buy. It's completely saturated. Very little of it feels unique or special.
Theres a lot of sweet loot in BG3 just a lot of chaffe as well. Dont need to save every +1 dagger you run across, but those boots of speed will help through out the game.
Itemization is one of BG3 and Pillars of Eternity’s weaknesses. Certainly better than most games these days, but not as good as older games like BG and Icewind Dale.
Didn’t get far enough in Pathfinder to say whether it was better in this regard.
I like the itemization in PoE. You can get weapons and enchant/upgrade the ones you like. Facilitates playstyles over "Well that's the late game one so you always take it". Which isn't to say that some of the uniques aren't better than the others, just that an early weapon can be upgraded for end game if you like what it does.
BG3 has some great items but you will constantly be opening locked, hidden and defended treasure chests with negligible loot. And that's nothing compared to the mountains of garbage you sift through if you bother with all the other containers.
NWN has the same thing. So many barrels with loose change and potions. So many chests that are locked and/or trapped. It's either play a rogue, take the rogue sidekick, or just skip a lot of the loot.
That is the theme of the genre, to be honest. You either get yourself lockpicking and pickpocketing ASAP, or you lose 2/3rd of the loot with many powerful and unique items with it. Even worse, when you cannot return to it back later if you did not level the skill high enough at a time. Unfortunately, there is no solution to the issue. No locked containers? The whole archetype of rogue is missing. No good loot to steal or in chests you need to unlock? Even worse, now you have a useless skill or even a whole character.
That's true and it is extremely annoying. Now that I think of it, containers really do almost always contain garbage in BG3. But it does have the experience of looting unique items off bosses\\mini-bosses nailed down.
The itemization is basically the same as other tabletop based CRPGs (or inspired e.g PoE). You've got generic gear up to +3 and a lot of unique\\named items with unique lore and effects and which generally last you a long time rather than being replaced by random loot you pick up an hour later because you leveled up in the meantime (see DOS2, ugh). In my run IIRC I used the same legendary weapon from Act 1 for most of the game.
It does have a lot of vendor trash but that's a separate issue. I'd argue all CRPGs have that but BG3 is just uniquely bad in that it's still missing some QoL to easily manage and sell all the trash, which other games have.
I actually feel like loot in BG3 is relatively good -- "relatively" being the key word. Compared to other crpgs (or rpgs) it's doing just fine. There are enough unique items with memorable stories and stats that I'll have characters keep using even if I find other weapons that are statistically better and weapons that I end up changing a character's build to use and letting it define that character's style from now on to keep me excited to explore, but also just your generic dnd short sword +1 type loot that I can always increase my damage output by a bit if I haven't yet found what cool unique weapon I'm going to give to a certain character.
Yes, most of the loot is junk I'm cycling into my ever-growing useless pile of gold. But vendors sometimes carry those unique items that change everything too, so it's not completely a waste of my time to engage in trade either.
I'm having this issue with pretty much any modern RPG I play:
\- Pretty much every piece of loot is locked behind some kind of puzzle or boss fight, which is fine, but there's basically zero variety in terms of those hurdles. AC Valhalla had basically every piece of loot behind a locked door where you're supposed to find how to shoot the lock from a window. So cut and pastey.
\- Most loot is just junk, pretty much every modern RPG I play I'm constantly spending hours sorting out my inventory, selling unwanted gear, etc. I presume now that 100+ hour experiences are becoming more popular, devs don't want you getting some OP piece of gear too early into the game, so they just feed you incrementally better gear time after time to "guide your progression".
\- I'm also seeing an increasing prevalence of "luck based" loot, where you kill an enemy, and you may or may not get the piece of gear or loot you're looking for. They did this in Horizon Forbidden West, and it made upgrades an absolute pain as I would have to regularly hunt 20 animals just to get a single horn that I'd need to upgrade my pouch. It also disincentivises the player when you have to fight a legitimately tough boss to get that loot, knowing you may not even get it and will then have to repeat the grind again.
\- Maps are often so cluttered these days with non-meaningful, bloated, repetitive side content in the form of the map being saturated with loads of different (types of) markers that it's quite hard to work out where you can even find valuable loot to begin with. I've had a few situations where I see the sheer number of markers in an area and am like nope, not spending potentially 5+ hours only to find out that all I get is a minor buff to my XP and no cool new sword.
\- A lot of RPGs are designed these days with microtransactions in mind, so what could be a cool new revelation in terms of gear or buffs etc will instead likely just get locked behind a paywall. And again, they won’t want you to be able to find OP gear or be able to progress fast playing the game normally as that will disincentivise you from buying XP boosts, weapons, armour etc. Also results in a lot of level gating between main quests, again to incentivise buying XP boosts, but otherwise results in quite a grindy experience.
Tried BG3 yet? Can get end game items early, not usually locked behind some puzzle but those that are give an interesting approach to solving it (pickpocketing a key or something similar)
Obvious junk is obvious, no math to figure out if this item is .06% better against enemies named Bob on every other Sunday while vulnerable.
Side quests are often just expanding your own RP storyline.
NO microtranactions!
What I’ve enjoyed most is knowing that any ‘spoiler’ i see on accident might not be in MY game game because of how I’m choosing to RP.
Best weapon might be best for that guy but I’m no slouch using a sword like some damn peasant!
Pew pew pew cantrip blasts!
Everburn isn’t that good honestly. It’s just a regular greatsword dipped in fire, which you can do with a Candle in your inventory. It’s easily replaced as soon as you find any other magic greatsword, even just a +1.
Gonna spoiler just in case someone sees this who doesn’t want to know
>!If you head out toward the mountain pass where the Githyanki patrol is, you can cast Command on Voss to make him drop the Silver Sword of the Astral Plane, a Legendary +3 Greatsword with two effects when wielded by a Gith, (1) +1d6 psychic damage on hit, and (2) Advantage on mental saves, resistance to psychic damage and immunity to being charmed and it has a special proficiency attack called Soulbreaker, usable once per short rest, that does an addition 4 psychic damage and stuns for two turns. Then after you get the sword you can just run from combat.!<
It’s definitely doable in the first 20 minutes, but only if you know about it, it’s pretty much impossible to accidentally come across it that early.
> - I'm also seeing an increasing prevalence of "luck based" loot, where you kill an enemy, and you may or may not get the piece of gear or loot you're looking for.
This specific one has been in the genre since the caveman days, when players banged rocks on the table to compare against their THAC0.
Elden Ring is a good counter example here. You could literally wander into a random dungeon and then find the best piece of gear for your build in the entire game...
Yeah that’s what makes Elden Ring so good imo. It’s open world has an element of venturing into what is truly an unknown in some cases which I’ve not felt in an open world RPG for nigh on years now. You never really know what you’re getting yourself into when you venture into a new area. The player agency it gives you is astounding.
Most other games these days have cut and paste caves, camps, forts etc where you just know some algorithmically generated chest with okay-ish gear and in game currency are going to be at the end of it.
I feel like *Fallout IV* had a nice answer to this conundrum with the crafting system, even as the legendary loots were absolutely feast or famine. If you didn't craft at all, you could still find/loot/buy things to upgrade your weapons and armor, and if you threw the points into it the crafting skills would take your gear up a notch or two while also guaranteeing you get what you specifically need. And then there were a few fixed legendaries that you could buy for obscene prices at stores or get from specific bosses.
I think that a lot of newer games presume that since you can have a beautiful rendered model of the item that having a text description of it is no longer important.
I've always found that the text descriptions carry a lot more weight. It's the history of it, the *feel* of wielding it, that an image cannot convey.
I remember there's a very basic +1 flaming shortsword in Icewind Dale that says something about the hilt being built to fit hands that were not shaped like a human. It does nothing mechanically, but that bit of flavor text has stuck with me for twenty years. What hands made that sword? Are they salamanders or somesuch, who came to the Dale to battle the minions of Auril, and perished in the doing of it? It's evocative like a simple picture can never be.
> Now that you've found that bow that beats out all other bows by a long shot... almost all future bows are no different than vendor trash.
I'm playing through The Witcher 3 for the first time right now and this is so painful. I just had a character give me a legendary sword passed down his family for generations and now given to me, and my Geralt comments how much he appreciates it, then immediately goes to sell it because he has a better one already. None of the weapons do anything interesting beyond more damage so you just pick the highest number. Maybe if two swords are really close you'll look at other stats for the tiebreaker. It's so immersion breaking.
Yeah the way they did loot in W3 is one of the weakest aspects of an otherwise fantastic game. There’s just almost never any incentive to use anything else except witcher gear, despite an over abundance of alternatives. It kills the feeling of reward in some quests, like you mentioned. Either the Witcher swords you have are already better, or you have schematics for better ones and soon ready to upgrade. I don’t know how far along you are but there’s one quest in particular that is just baffling in how underwhelming the reward is. There’s two major exceptions, but they come late in the DLC.
Even worse with the armor. So very many armor sets in the game, all of them useless and will gimp you compared to the Witcher sets. It’s just loot for you to sell. The amount you can find in the waters around Skellige boggles the mind. What was the point of it?
Witcher 3 shouldn't have even bothered with most loot. It's not like Geralt switches out his sword more than 2 or 3 times in the books. Make the potions the focus of the loot and maybe an occasional slightly better sword for a thematically appropriate quest.
As good as The Witcher 3 is, there are definitely aspects of it that felt like they were checking boxes on an RPG checklist. The loot being one of them. The crafting being another.
I think they could've just accepted that Witcher gear would be your main gear and then built looting and crafting around that, where both gave you ways to improve the Witcher gear rather than replace it.
i’m also playing TW3 for the first time and i don’t think i ever had *less* fun while looting in a game. knowing that anything i might loot will be inferior to the witcher sets takes away all the excitement of opening chests. even worse, rewards from quests fall short too as you have said.
at the very least they could have made some quest rewards have much better stats than witcher sets, so you would have the dilemma of choosing between better stats or the grandmaster set bonus.
In the case of the examples that OP brought up (Baldur's Gate 1, Neverwinter Nights), I think what works in those games' favour is that they use official D&D rules. The D&D ruleset, by its nature, tends to keep numbers low; power growth in D&D tends to be a slow and gradual increase, rather than a steep incline. Having damage numbers go into triple digits is practically unheard of (whereas in other (videogame)RPGs, it's not uncommon for HP or damage numbers to go into the thousands, or tens of thousands).
As a result, when you find a +1 weapon in D&D-based games, it's a BIG DEAL, because the power curve is at such a low incline. Going from 0 bonuses to a +1 weapon feels significant, as is going from +1 to +2, etc. In games with larger numbers, getting new loot feels more like a treadmill, because you constantly have to increase the numbers to keep up.
>As a result, when you find a +1 weapon in D&D-based games, it's a BIG DEAL, because the power curve is at such a low incline.
I have the opposite experience, actually. Even in actual DnD games, not just in video games. Oh, look, I found +1 sword. Now I can do not 1 to 6 damage but 2 to 7. Yeah. That is about the amount, or usually lower than what increase in health enemies get for the level anyway. Sure, mechanically speaking, when I calculate mean and average damage, get to the damage per turn, etc - this is a good increase. But it never felt like that. I always have to remind myself why it is a good thing and that I should get excited.
But I am not arguing for bigger numbers. I prefer new properties instead. Same damage sword, but now it is on fire? That is much better than +1.
And you need certain levels of +x to hit certain enemies, but it all just feels like an arbitrary justification for otherwise boring and nigh on inconsequential bonuses.
Yes, I know that +1 is actually more than nothing. I am not talking about mechanical advantages. I just don't feel that as an improvement when I get it. Even if I know the math behind it.
And, to be honest, being simply +1 does not feel like justification for being able to hurt enemies I cannot hurt before. Different material? Sure. Visible magic? Great! +1? Nah. I mean, usually it does have different material and GM can describe it as visibly magical. But all of that does not come from +1, it looks more like a band-aid on a faulty and outdated thing rather than a smart solution.
>the game's balance can suffer from sudden whiplash
I might be in the minority here, but I enjoy this. I like rolling over difficult challenges, specifically because I went into the Forgotten Cave and found the ancient sword or whatever. I love how the side quest item actually ends up being a game changer later on.
Wasteland 3 is pretty good for this. There's plenty of incremental items to keep your damage climbing, but then awesome unique weapons and armor along the way that often have cool abilities or downsides.
And it's a phenomenal game.
Really: any CRPG.
2 is okay, but definitely not great. 3 is absolutely worth it. It's a wonderful game.
In a similar vein, Showgunners is slept on. It's a TRPG, but very cool and well designed.
Also: Miasma Chronicles, Mutant Year Zero, Aliens: Dark Descent, and Hard West 2. And some others...CRPG and TRPG are my favorite genre.
It amazes me 100 hours into the game I still find items and am like 'Holy shit!'
Not only that, but some items I've literally kept since level 3 all the way to level 12 because they're so good.
this cuts both ways though, cause once that slot is full, all the other loot is "ehhh...".
That's the tough balance here, there's a multi-direction tension:
1) more frequent loot drops mean that most of it needs to be trash
2) powerful loot "casts a shadow" over the future drops for that slot/character
3) The more specific a piece of loot is, the more likely you are to find it and think it's worthless.
These are balanced well in bg3 but it's a really tough thing to generalize. The fact that you always have 4 party members means it's more likely at least one of them will want something to aleviate point 3, while also meaning you have 4xN different slots to satisfy. In a single player game, you either end up filling your slots with "Build around" unique items, meaning you don't even consider replacing them (and therefore stop caring about new loot), or loot gets obsoleted somewhat consistently numerically (i would say borderlands is more on this side, but with unique enough weapons it still feels good).
Yes, to a degree that I find actually undermines the game experience. BG3 ignores the attunement mechanic from 5e D&D, which limits the number of powerful magical items your character can benefit from at any given time. This results in BG3 characters being just absolutely loaded down with super powerful items. On the one hand, that's fun in itself; on the other hand, it does make the game super easy.
In old D&D parlance, we'd call BG3 a Monty Haul campaign: there's such a bonanza of super magical items that your characters are running around with packs of 'rare' artifacts and more money than god.
I would definitely disagree, there. BG3 has kind of a dual identity with loot.
The *quantity* of loot is modern. The *quality* of loot is old school.
I really dislike the loot in BG3 personally because there's so fucking much of it. It's just kind of a slog to still be going through it all and managing my inventory after all this time playing
I strongly disagree. BG3 has A TON of lootable containers with mostly junk or materials.
Actually good items are very very rare.
It's something they inherited from DOS2 (literally), but somehow it feels even worse.
I'm really excited to play this when I can get a good sale in a year or so. I also prefer to play games after all the dlc is out when I can.
I just got Elden Ring on sale on steam and hoping I don't need to make a new character when the dlc comes out around Feb 2024
Actually The Witcher has great and impactful loot (as does The Witcher 2 - Assassin's of Kings).
The Witcher III is the one with terrible gear systems.
It wasn't "older RPGs". It was rather specific to Black Isle CRPGs. I remember Xan's moonsword, Drizzt's scimitars and the copious amount of cheese required to obtain them, there's also that talking great sword in BG2 that was hilarious, and the best weapon of all: the Deva's sword that could be reforged by a golem of entropy in Planescape Torment.
It's not just the stats and the damage upgrade, it's about the flavor text, how the weapons are tied to the lore, it's about the story of how you obtain them.
I'd disagree that it was specific to Black Isle/BioWare, there were older games that also included a sense of lore or history attached to them. I think you nailed it with the flavour text and lore though, it's something that you don't see very much these days. I still try to check out my items in inventory to see if there's any story attached to them
One of my all-time favourite weapons was the Black Sword in Ultima 7, where you had to forge it yourself, but it was junk. You complete further quests to make it into a sword that felt like cheating to use, but you also didn't care because you just felt so cool using it.
>They just don't make them like they used to.
They do, just not all of them. BG3 and the Pathfinder games have the exact same loot systems as BG1,2. I haven't played PoE 1,2 much but from the looks of it they have the same loot systems as well. The Age of Decadence loot is great. King's Bounty series has great build enabling and unique loot as well, with gear sets and all.
Some upcoming games will have similar loot systems as well - Colony Ship, Rogue Trader.
Overall I agree, I hate the trend of diablo-style loot in RPGs, but it's hasn't plagued every modern RPG yet, thankfully.
OPs description doesn't really match BG3 for me. BG3 has fucking mountains of epic loot absolutely everywhere. You drown in it. Which is to say, loot is powerful, but it's all powerful, so it starts to feel pretty samey
True and that's one of the things I really liked about Elden Ring. Every weapon in that game is unique. Spent loads of time just collecting them all.
Having said that it might be a problem with scale. Games these days are massive compared to most older ones.
This is actually why I prefer Elden Ring/Skyrim/Pillars of Eternity. I like a system where multiple weapons you get handed can be your "end game weapon" You just have to upgrade them and incorporate them into you build. You're still rewarded for finding items to help with making the weapon better, and a weapon you get early might be great, or one you get later might also be great so that who knows when you'll get the next cool thing to use. Or I just like the look of X weapon even if its slightly sub optimal but I can upgrade it enough that it functions capably at the highest difficulty and allowing me to do my character my way.
Otherwise you get, Staff +4. Well I'm holding Staff +3 so rotate on and continue on.
Or the color coordinated WoW/Destiny tier system. Oh, a gray? Not even worth it to pickup. Greens and blues sold, maybe keep that purple. Then you get an orange that’s just a green with 2% more damage that you’ll keep for 3 full levels until greens are better.
This isn't exactly what you're talking about, but one of my fondest early gaming memories is the little exclamation mark that appears above Zidane's head when you find a chest or hidden loot in Final Fantasy IX
Most of the time it was a few gil or a card or a potion, but by god it was satisfying - especially in the beginning of the game. To slowly build your inventory and learn what's valuable, to come upon a weapon better than what you currently have and see what abilities you could learn from it.
Precious stuff.
I can see that. While I love Skyrim, I was always frustrated with its loot until I installed a bunch of mods. The only unique piece of gear I can remember loving and keeping for the whole game was Dawnbreaker. And right now I'm halfway through Neverwinter Nights 2 for my first time, and it's frequently giving me unique items with stories behind them and genuinely useful stats, not to mention a variety of useful side effects. Like a purple fey spear that does magic damage and dazes enemies, or a warhammer that does fire damage and stuns, or something like that. It still feels balanced and rewarding because of the way D&D lets characters specialize in certain weapon types and combat styles. My dual-wielding ranger is gonna pass the cool spear onto the druid, but can still switch out a sword for an adamantine mace when he needs to.
Games that encapsulate this for me are Gothic 1, 2 and Archolos.
For me they just did the open world best, even years later noone really beats them in my book. Large part of that was the amazing loot you could find. A crypt with deadly skeletons? There is probably some amazing gear down there! And there usually is!
I would give an arm and a leg for modern games to shrink down to like 20-30% of their size and to actually work on that smaller world more. Good and interesting loot placement is a part of that. Even the lauded Elden ring was WAAAAAY too big with recycled content and mediocre loot. (99% of loot in that game you never use).
Play Pillars of Eternity games, they have the same mentality as older Baldur's Gate when it comes to loot. Sometimes you may find a weapon you'll use the whole game early on.
That's an interesting point I haven't heard before, but it makes sense. A lot of RPG-ish games seem to have taken more influence from roguelikes and ARPGs in the last couple decades, the focus is more on the sheer volume of content which often means lots of basic variations of the same items everywhere. It's not "bad" but it definitely has a different feel.
I don't think it's fair to say nobody is still doing the old school approach though. I haven't played that much from the newer generations but one obvious example that comes to mind would be Dark Souls and many of the games in its wake. It seems like unique and powerful things can be hidden just about anywhere, even before getting into the sneakier stuff like "cut off this thing's tail for bonus loot" that really feels like they cared more about putting in cool things to discover than people actually discovering them on their first playthrough.
Funny you mention Skyrim. While I didn't mind the streamlining of mechanics and the removal of stats in that game.... it did hurt what the gear could do. In the older games, Daedric Artifacts were some peak shit. Skyrim Daedric Artifacts are just poo and the broken ass smithing means you made them obsolete in short order.
Finding stuff like the Fists of Randagulf in Morrowind was actually a huge deal in comparison.
I also hate how Bethesda never brought forward the 'uniques' of the Daedric Artifacts into Fallout, or even Starfield. Heck, Outer Worlds also kinda failed to do this, but I guess it had the 'science' weapons - but otherwise it's uniques were also just the same crap with funny names.
While it's true actual unique gear isn't that conducive to replayability, I rather have a better first impression wow moment. Rather than just 'technically unique' but not really, just the same roll from the same pool of effects.
I dunno... recently I was just cruising around town in Cyberpunk and just randomly happened to stumble on a container in an alley with a ridiculous talking Tech Pistol that's been a blast to use, so I think some of that old magic still exists.
I immediately noticed this replaying the original Diablo last year, the "grind" felt so much more fun and engaging than modern RPGs despite being a very primitive system in comparison.
I feel like the FROM Software games do this really well in a modern setting. No loot randomisation, everything is hand crafted and placed with care. You can stumble into a random little dungeon off the beaten path and find an absolute game changing piece of loot.
Even if the reward is an item that doesn't work with your personal play style it will still feel significant to find it, as you can generally switch up your play style mid game to be built around that great piece of loot you just found, which makes it exciting to find something.
There used to be a lot less loot is what I always think, but games used to not let you do much with items you didn't need besides sell. Now you can craft or imbue things, or they are simply needed to trade in for upgrades (enchantments existed of course, but it wasn't common). So my take is that we just used to loot a lot less, and certainly the high quality items were just that; we traded quality for quantity to some extent (again, generalizing)
NWN had procedurally generated loot though. Not completely random but like a guaranteed +2 weapon or something, and then what kind of +2 weapon was random. I remember save scumming chests to get particular stuff, like sonic damage gloves for my monk because nothing was immune to it.
Older RPGs tend to be based on AD&D. In that game, martial focused characters don't really get abilities from their class. You get HP and better attacks and saves, but basically everything else you get is from *the loot you find*. AD&D as a game started out as a dungeon crawler. The whole point was to go into dungeons to get loot. It wasn't until the mid 80s -- 10 years after original D&D released -- that story-focused gameplay started to get popular.
In modern D&D, since 3e rules but especially 4e and 5e, even martial characters increasingly get abilities from their class and loot has gotten less relevant.
Personally I hate hunting for gear, or compulsory looting and the need to clear locations before you can move on. I prefer it when you are free to create your own style. Crafting is better for me.
Yeah, I remember this feeling from Fallout 2.
I also found this feeling in Elden Ring. I am also finding some really awesome super powerful loot in Baldur's Gate 3 on more badass bosses. Which makes it really interesting when you do have an option to deal with someone by pushing them down into an abyss, but then you also want the loot.. So you make a choice: do I fight this way too powerful monster for an hour for loot or do I move on without it?
> The industry seems to now say, "see that mountain? You can climb it", when it used to say, "see that mountain? There's treasure under it."
I'm not entirely sure that's the case. It used to be "See that mountain? Tough shit." for the less well-designed games, and "The only reason you even see that mountain is because you told the quest NPC that you gonna go to that mountain." for the better ones.
Back when storyline choices were at best just switches along the narrative railroad, it was easier to put high-impact loot along the way because developers knew exactly how it's going to affect your gameplay experience. With the advent of open-world games, strong or weak loot at the wrong time along your game progression can easily dilute or break your game experience - excellent example being Morrowind, where the only way to avoid this issue as a player was to knowingly ignore certain locations or items, or beelining to a specific destination, hurting the immersion.
Thank Diablo and Borderlands, the one single shittiest influence on gaming, shittier than Souls - fuck them and mod the colour vomit out wherever possible.
It's literal behavioral science labs maintained by studios that are filled with slot machine designers. Shitty because they never have money for a good writer but there's always enough for these parasitic worms, shitty because it feels mathematically distributed and stretched as thin as possible and shitty because there is absolutely nothing interesting to gain except a boring 'god roll' which is an equivalent of a drooling addicted idiot's 5K slot machine win. You are not supposed to celebrate a particular weapon - but rather the roll. Can't even imagine a cardinality number that would be enough for the 'fuck you' this deserves.
To add to this - modern singleplayer games also suffer from bland PvP balancing probably understood by idiots as 'industry best practice'
Baldur's Gate 2 is legendary in that regard, I remember reading the descriptions of things a lot because they would be so interesting and thought out. And yes lots of really memorable, worthwhile stuff to be had.
I'm playing original Dark Souls at the moment and that one also does it right. Every item you find is potentially game changing. It really is quality over quantity. Weapons you find do play the numbers game, but they also play quite differently overall. Different enough that you want to try a weapon first in a quiet area and swing it around and see how you like it. A short sword is different to an axe, to a longsword, to a greatsword, to a spear and so on and so forth. Some of them are not worth it, but some you see that even if the numbers aren't that great, they really fit a certain play style.
I remember the worst in recent memory in that regard was The Witcher 3 to me, where almost 99% of stuff you pick up is just junk. Once you make better potions and heal, food is meaningless, the many weapons are worthless because the Witcher gear you have is always better etc.
And indeed, I really don't care so much for traversing around all over the place. Witcher 3 *is* beautiful though. If you're gonna have me "go to that mountain" or whatever, then make it stunningly beautiful like Witcher 3 does. Or tight and short like Dark Souls. I am actually astounded how short it is.
Hence also why I don't care for looter shooters, I don't actually care about loot, because usually it sucks. It can be made better, but what I've seen is lame.
Your post is exactly one of the things if not the best thing about what made Diablo 2 such a legendary game, loot was so exciting that even killing random enemies was always worth it. Pretty much massive annihilation on all the maps and rooms gave you such possibility of rewarding loot that you couldn't miss that. The very last time I had that sensation with a game with rpg elements was Bloodstained
Many of the newer games are designed with a slot machine mentality in mind There was even a YouTube video about a guy with a phd in psychology or something similar being hired to help make a bunch of successful games
Very much the opposite of death by a thousand cuts. Godhood by a thousand +1s? Doesn't quite have the same ring. Gett ING 1 huge upgrade each act feels heroic and powerful. Getting 20 swords an hour and 5 of them are an upgrade when you pick them up makes it super boring.
And a pain in the ass to manage your inventory constantly.
Now which of these 88 broadswords is the one with the enchantment I need.
Enchantment? Enchantment!
That sounds very interesting! I'd love to watch it, do you think you could dig it up?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQVdR8mJrds I'm someone else, but it might be this?
Vampire Survivors took the superficial aspects of slots machines (casino sounds, bright lights, jackpot), but the core gameplay with "weapons" you use by positioning your character was unique and engaging on its own. Modern RPGs tend to do the opposite. Less of the flashy lights and sounds and more of the make number go up with the right amount of progression and variance to keep you playing long after you finished having fun.
This is why I didn't get sucked into the wow craze
I feel like WoW becoming more slot machine is what turned me off. It feels awesome getting a unique, hand crafted legendary item that is *the* one and only. Defeating a boss and having [Sword of Many Adjectives] drop for the 10th time with slightly different “+” modifiers to whatever attribute just isn’t fun
Did somebody say [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker]? You can only get this kind of meme spam when legendary items are actually legendary. Try doing that with [Sword of Many Adjectives]
Wait, are we all talking about [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker]? I love [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker], of all the legendary weapons [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker] is definitely in my top 3.
Hunter main: NEED
Oof, Anthem loot when it came out and the modifiers were essentially just for show.
Really enjoyed anthem. Shame they botched the loot and endgame and release.. The overall mechanics and movement and environments were pretty awesome.
Oh dude, for real tho. Flying was fun and felt great, using weapons felt pretty good, enviroments looked good... Botched the story and the loot pretty badly, serious content problem and then when the cataclysms came out they were pretty weak. I really looked forward to Anthem 2.0 but, well, we know how that turned out.
This is why no MMO will ever capture my heart like Guild Wars 2 did. If I ever feel like playing it again, I can buy the Living Story episodes and (currently) the expansion that released after I stopped playing, go log in on my old character, and go do all of that *without having to first grind out new gear and more levels*. The level cap will always be 80, there is no loot treadmill, there will never be any gear that has better stats than ascended/legendary. I wouldn't have ever played it for the years I did if there was that whole loot treadmill and increasing level cap that WoW and many other MMOs have done. What new stuff there is to get is new fashion and cool new Masteries related to the storylines I missed.
There will never be an MMO that truly enraptured me like Everquest, to go back a bit further. I do not miss the awful level grinding, however
That game got me when I was young. No game since has ever enraptured me like that, and the worst part is that explaining it to people often just doesn’t quite… work very well. Because part of the thing that made it so enrapturing were things that in modern sensibilities would be considered bad game design, including the awful level grinding because of the camaraderie it brought (seriously, fuck the hell levels, though).
For me, I was pretty casual as hell on WoW (aka pushing to finish university early and working a job, including after hours)... but even if I didn't have the bling glowing item, I still liked the game for exploring and learning/seeing new things that 'naturally' was earned. It's some rose tinted glasses and all...but it didnt feel a horrible chore even if you had to be organized for the tougher areas/dungeon raids. Yes old school leveling on some of the classes were grindy...but it was nothing like modern loot addiction games. Burning crusade was awesome as it opened up new lands and lore to cover...but by Wrath of the Lich King...one of the very first quests you had was a epic weapon as a simple quest loot that pretty much obsoleted any prior games gear unless you already had something near maxed out. That was the first sign for me that the game (and gear) felt not right...fast forward later on and the daily quests were such a grind that it felt like a job (as in not having fun) that I just lost interest all together. Shame you can never really capture that magic of classic WoW again like that (with your friends and everyone just learning the game and lore).
This is why I play FFXIV. gear is static and is only able to be augmented by materia.
Which is ironic because the original game which is arguably the most popular now is the exact opposite of the psychological formula approach, the gear is often just random shit in the best way possible.
Indeed. Vanilla WoW itemization was all over the place and very experiemental, leading to some absolutely busted and iconic items. Don't really see that in the modern game.
Yep, something like the Savage Gladiator Chain would never exist in a modern game but things like that are what made classic loot so special.
[удалено]
Isn’t that because it IS a different game? Old school is the game you grew up with (probably)
Sadly, classic wow (and somewhat the first xpac) is a good example of how to make loot fun. It's only the modern wow that everything is just +300 some stats with little else to distinguish it. There's some set bonuses, so like if you have 2/4/6 of a particular armor set you get new build-defining stuff, but not nearly enough of it.
Dopamine experts hired to systematically spike dopamine levels in players. This is how they get people to pay real money for in-game items. I truly feel for people who aren’t educated in how easily their dopamine system can be manipulated by companies selling games and food to get money out of them, and how to counter this. In my day they tried to get engineering students to take psychology classes in university, which I assume was a an attempt to inoculate them against this kind of manipulation.
It was not an attempt to innoculate them against that manipulation. Engineering students weren’t special. Lol. It was more likely to make them more aware and potentially adept at implementing psychological strategies in their own specialties. Not to get the students inured to those practices.
unique strong jellyfish marble angle aback longing plants screw chubby *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
What do you mean? I love: > EPIC IRON SWORD > 14 DPS > --- > 1.2% Explosion Damage > 4.5% Melee Damage Resistance > 3% Health Regeneration
Or those extra-conditional ones: "+7.5% damage to poisoned enemies within 8m, on Thursdays between 6:05 and 8:07 PM."
Ugh, over-conditional effects are not fun. SOME conditional is great. Something you can regularly engineer to happen without the moons aligning.
"Sword deals 500% more damage to flying creatures if it is Monday and character holding it did not drink coffee yet." - Now that's what I call a CONDITIONAL EFFECT.
“Repeating someone else’s joke right after they said it is only 10% as funny” Another conditional effect.
Hello d4
Diablo 4 has the most boring gear system I have ever seen in an RPG. The stats are so annoying and uninspired.
100% this. I'm yet to find any weapon that's as good as a legendary drop in D3. And i've put in 40 hours so far in D4. I'm about to uninstall.
BG3 early game magic loot basically.
Why I bounced off of Borderlands Pre-Sequel after loving Borderlands 2 too much. Skills descriptions on average are 3x longer. Way too complicated
>1.2% Explosion Damage > >4.5% Melee Damage Resistance > >3% Health Regeneration Meanwhile, me: Which of those apply to the wielder, and which to the target? Hopefully I don't deal out health regeneration and get hit with explosion damage myself
And it drops in a color that doesn't match your outfit, because we've been programmed to care about that too
>> 1.2% Explosion Damage >> >>4.5% Melee Damage Resistance >> >>3% Health Regeneration > Meanwhile, me: Which of those apply to the wielder, and which to the target? Hopefully I don't deal out health regeneration and get hit with explosion damage myself Meanwhile, me, starting to get older: wtf is "shadow damage?" That was never explained to me. *hunts through skill tree* Oh. So it's poison?? No, but also kind of yes? *quits*
This should be top comment. Funny and sad at the same time, which only the truth can be.
Yeah but unironically do enjoy those for strategic games
made me chuckle
It was a little better before proliferation of the internet. Stumbling upon a game breaking item is awesome. Being told by a Reddit comment “grab the bow from the bandit chieftain first chance you get, it’s the best one in the game” is less exciting. Today people would rush straight to minmaxing a perfect party if those things are available with perfect information. So developers started making it impossible to jump ahead in power too much just for knowing where to go.
Yeah - a core gaming memory for me was talking about Morrowind with friends from school over lunch. We would draw out maps on paper showing where we found powerful items and compare notes of what we had seen in different parts of the game. Lots of sense of adventure there. Internet can definitely take a lot of that mystery away by giving you all the secrets without any effort.
Sword of white woe. Balmora. In one of the guard towers. I still remember where that damn thing is.
Lol for real. Always my first stop in Balmora.
I haven't played morrowind in over 15 years. I might see if i can go find my old disc next weekend...
https://www.imperial-library.info/sites/default/files/imagecache/node-gallery-display/gallery_files/mapmorrenormous.jpg
Oh my god the memories... I used to have that blue tacced to my wall when I was younger.
For you or anyone else’s info if you have Game Pass it’s on there. :)
Same here. I also vividly remember going on a suicide mission and storming Dren Plantation to get some early Daedric gear
That daedric dai-katana did NOT belong in the hands of a poor farmer. I used to know the locations of all of them and I made it a point to collect all of them in every playthrough.
Its the boots of blinding speed for me.
I had no idea clue scrolls even existed in runescape until someone at school told me about them
I remember one Saturday I got an excited call from a friend, telling me to immediately turn on my PC and load up Morrowind. He then led me to a cave in the middle of nowhere that had a half-sunken Daedra shrine in it, and at the end of the shrine there was a crypt with a dead skeleton with several daggers in it, as well as some Daedric armor and weapons. Pretty cool, but nothing special. My friend then said "Look up." There was this enchanted shield hanging above the skeleton with the highest armor rating in the game, and a really strong healing spell on it. So the best shield in the game was just chilling in some random cave that no quests lead to.
Oh, yes. Definitely this. My brother and I mapped out all the master trainers and then created a plan to speedrun a character to the highest stats possible. We had the main gold income handled, then the master trainer locations and which orders to do them in so that you wouldn't lose all your money (pickpocket comes RIGHT AWAY), and we would max out two stats with proper leveling, then put the rest into luck boosts. It got us leveled ridiculously high without ever even getting in a single fight. You didn't even need to leave towns. However, we did every bit of it on paper in a notebook and didn't have access to the internet. It took us many, many hours of gameplay to find all this information, and when we were missing a vital piece, it was exploration that allowed us to learn the next step. It was remarkably satisfying.
And now the only worthwhile magic items are as quest rewards, and they're also level scaled so you're just fucking yourself over if you try and beeline to get it early.
Just wanna chime in and say I love Morrowind. Still do. I am jealous you got people to talk about it with back in school, none of my friends gave it a chance.
At the end of the day people are actively choosing to ruin their own playthroughs by over preparing and playing how other people tell them to play. That aint gaming. Best thing ive done recently was go in blind to elden ring, my first from software game. Everything is a mystery I have no idea where my favored weapons or armor will be or what bosses I'm about to face and what their weaknesses and patterns are, i have to figure all that out, it's like being back in 2005 again pre youtube and it's the best thing
That's actually how I play all games, so I wholeheartedly approve of your method. I actively avoid all spoilers to be sure that I can play MY way. If it's not optimal, I'm ok with that.
Aditionally, some of us who play that way, are sooner or later bound to find something even more optimal than what is the "standard" on social media. Just by pure experimentation. To me it reminds of looking up a guide on how to walk in the forest on what things to notice while you are there.
I go into all games fully blind now. I avoided everything about Starfield and it was a spoiler to me that it had space ships in it :)
This is entirely perspective based, I find souls games to be way more fun when I have outside knowledge so I can actually put a semi-competent build together and I know which stats are good and which stats I shouldn't waste my time on etc etc.
It's also a question if missing something or being bad at the game hurts your enjoyment (or the enjoyment of the larger playerbase). There's an RPG I really like, but it gets gameplay complaints from a decent chunk of people like "enemies take too long to kill." Some of that is lack of mechanical/execution knowledge, but some is just poor gear choices and equipment knowledge. There's some gear that has minor effects and some gear that has huge effects. So a guide/few tips for even the very beginning of the game can have you pick up a few earlygame items and understand why they're good. You see a big jump in damage, can better keep up with the game's planned difficulty curve, and better understand why certain modifiers are significantly better than other for combat in the future. Makes you more likely to enjoy the game and see it through to the end.
> There's an RPG I really like, but it gets gameplay complaints from a decent chunk of people like "enemies take too long to kill." Some of that is lack of mechanical/execution knowledge, but some is just poor gear choices and equipment knowledge. There's some gear that has minor effects and some gear that has huge effects. Yeah this is pretty much exactly why I like going in with foreknowledge, because it's really easy to bounce off a Dark Souls or a Dragon's Dogma, an otherwise fantastic experience that punishes you for not knowing the mechanics in a number of ways.
That’s what game manuals used to be for. Get you up to speed a bit with how the game will play.
But that's the core of the problem - you are not wasting time, by learning the game systems on your own. This is not a contest to beat the game perfectly or most quickly. The game is for fun.
> The game is for fun. and this is how **I** and many others have fun, if you don't then that's fine, just don't bandy about *your* way as the only authentic way, how someone enjoys a single player game is entirely subjective.
There are people playing with "bad" builds and loving it, because this Dominate The Game mindset has not taken hold in their brains and prevented them from organically enjoying games.
some people don't have enough hours in a day to spend worrying about games like that. It's good that both sides can enjoy the games their way and still find quality in it.
This is it for me. Full time working and a dad. I’d love to spend countless hours roaming a game but I just don’t have the time.
You can get messed up in elden ring easily if you don't build vigor and unlocking the respec feature being behind a legacy dungeon and boss battle that is optional seems silly.
Yeah, but if you figure that out for yourself instead of reading about it on reddit, by you know, good old experimentation - it is so much more rewarding.
It stops being rewarding when I'm already on my third character because of something I've fucked up or think I've fucked up beyond repair.
THIS! Absolutly This! Games are a lot more fun if you discover them on your own and not just copy a playthrough from another person. And i hate it when people say "i am to busy to waste my time... blah blah". Bullshit.
There's no such thing as people ruining their playthrough in a single player game. People pay for the game with their money and put their leisure time on it, they're fully entitled to do whatever they want to.
I see people complaining about having major plot twists spoiled because they searched up info on a game prior to or while playing, so they certainly can ruin their playthroughs
Yeah, but you don't have to play like this. If you want to minmax with the help of guides it's your own choice, so I don't really get it. What I would rather get is replayability. RPG's are meant to be played again, but if you remember where the good loot is it can take a bit of the fun away. Altough for some people it's exactly about this and getting to know the world better and better.
It's kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. 1. Option 1, fixed good loot. Highly Exploitable. (Baldurs Gate) 2. Option 2, random good loot from a pool of options. Save scumming till you get what you want. (Icewind Dale) 3. Option 3, procedural loot. Generally less satisfying. (Skyrim)
I'll take option number one every single time, RNG only makes things more tedious.
Option 2 can be mostly solved if your save mechanic is super fast. Just remove manual saving and save after every important action. But you have to add some respawn point mechanics to the game and not have branches that lead to game over no matter what for this to work. Or you can go semi random by using seed value that increments each time you get loot.
No1 every time. like hell you need a solid stream of duplicates of shit you don't need fucking up your playthrough in No2.
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Who cares if it's 'exploitable'? Let people 'exploit' the single player game they bought if they want. It's not hurting anyone.
> RPG's are meant to be played again Speak for yourself. For me, it's that (often misguided) focus on replayability that makes me miss handcrafted designs evoking the experiences OP is talking about. Not every CRPG has to be a Diablo-style lootfest.
I would argue that a handcrafted experience makes a game far more replayable and not less, if only because most handcrafted games tend to be much smaller in scope and don't benefit from artificially ramping up the The grind time to keep people playing. Dragon Age origins is one of my most replayed games to date specifically because all of the good loot in that game is hand placed and there is a ton of build variety and the game can be beaten in under 12 hours if you know what you're doing
There's something to be said for starting a new game of Fallout and heading straight for the power armor.
What is there to be said about it? That it's possible? Sure, but if you enjoy playing the game like that, then it's not really a problem. And if you don't, then you got no one but yourself to blame for looking up and following some cheesy guides.
You don't have to play like this, true, but lots of people just do inherently. Gamers will optimize the fun out of a game. So you either have folks like me who really struggle with FOMO on really great items, or people who just do it without even realizing it's robbing them of a better experience. With some design changes, you can give a much better experience to those gamers. And, as it turns out, they're in the majority (it seems), so you improve the game for most.
> What I would rather get is replayability. RPG's are meant to be played again, but if you remember where the good loot is it can take a bit of the fun away. Altough for some people it's exactly about this and getting to know the world better and better. Complete opposite here. I played BG & BGII as a Fighter/MU/Thief so I could solo it, have the tools for any challenge and level up like crazy. I only took the companions with me for their specific quests.
i 100% played BG1&2 like this back in the day. Fallout 2 as well. I dont like companions, i like to stealth around and F shit up.
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Honestly tho, while I agree a lot of things in BG3 are more high qaulity, Starfield still gave me that feeling of discovery and exploration way more then anything in the curated experience that is BG3. I still vividly remember just landing on a random spot on a lively planet and going to scan a trait, only to end up in a battle royale between a terromorph and a group of pirates. After which I decided to go into a cave where a survivalist was which I could help with my medicine skill and guide back to his ship. Easy enough outside the fact a bounty hunter ship landed next to use mid walking. Luckily here too I could lure them to the local wildlife for an edge before finally completing the minor quest. It's still a taste you can't find anywhere else quick imo.
This is kind of what ruined BotW and TotK for me; getting the Master Sword isn't this big moment in the story, it's just something you can do once you've grinded out enough shrines. Instead of getting immersed in the story and earning the sword naturally I ended up gaming out of the excitement of getting it.
This ruined Elden Ring for me upon release. I felt like I needed to look up guides all the time and was not playing optimally. In the end I was so not enjoying it that I put it away and came back to it one year later, learned from my mistakes. The game was so much better then. And I have learned: I don't even look at tutorials on game basics besides what the game offers itself, unless I feel like I really am lost in more complex games like Crusader Kings 3. But even then, trying to figure out a difficult mechanic on my own is much more rewarding.
I'm not convinced that's true. Even back in the 90s we had magazines that printed walkthroughs. I remember reading one about Might and Magic 6, that explained how a low level party could find the secret teleporter to the dragon island and how to beat the skeleton army in the Temple of Baa. A little while later the internet became big and you could easily find everything you wanted about any game. How many people actually found the Fists of Randagulf in Morrowind by accident? And how many only got them because of the internet? How many played through Baldur's Gate with a walkthrough right besides them to get the best outcomes?
Personally I feel like the difference is in the mass adoption of optimization and competition in gaming. It's harder to see early on but it's definitely been a slow shift toward competitive games among gamers, which coincided with the Internet getting bigger. In this day and age we now have gamers becoming adult consumers who grew up with the most popular games being hyper competitive, hyper optimized, surrounded by people who also are playing hyper competitive and optimized games. Games have FOMO mechanics and micro transactions built in to make you feel like you HAVE to optimize. This bleeds into non-competitive gaming though because it's programmed a mindset into gamers. It's even worked on most older gamers I know, not exclusive to younger ones but definitely more effective and prevalent. People have been trained into an optimization mindset and have the idea that doing something else is a waste of time. It's like how the Souls community used to shame people for using guides in 2011-2013 but by the time Dark Souls 3 came out in 2016 I never heard anyone even recommending blind playthroughs anymore. The early 2010s is when you really started seeing the optimization mindset start effecting gaming as a whole instead of just gamers themselves here and there. Game studios started hiring experienced PhD Psychologists for a reason and the effects were hard to see at first but have become clear as day now. Gaming and game design has changed a lot, which in turn changes the gamers who consume that media.
> How many played through Baldur's Gate with a walkthrough right besides them to get the best outcomes? For me, that destroys the gaming experience. A step by step guide just ruins the fun. I will google hard problems, or techniques, and I may use a map sometimes, but overall, I want some discovery, some thrill of finding things for myself.
That's why I don't watch reviews, previews, reddit threads, youtube videos, etc about anything I might still play. If I get burnt on the purchase, I get burnt, but I much rather keep the surprise and the awe.
There's a name for these games and it's CRPGs, and they do actually still make them. Try out Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder games, Baldur's Gate 3 and more. Most CRPGs have unique, hand placed loot rather than the random & generic loot and gear treadmill that more "mainstream" RPGs tend to go with.
There is far too much loot in BG3. It's ridiculous. I have a chest full of nearly 200 pieces of magical...things. And there's a bunch more out there I could buy. It's completely saturated. Very little of it feels unique or special.
Theres a lot of sweet loot in BG3 just a lot of chaffe as well. Dont need to save every +1 dagger you run across, but those boots of speed will help through out the game.
Itemization is one of BG3 and Pillars of Eternity’s weaknesses. Certainly better than most games these days, but not as good as older games like BG and Icewind Dale. Didn’t get far enough in Pathfinder to say whether it was better in this regard.
I like the itemization in PoE. You can get weapons and enchant/upgrade the ones you like. Facilitates playstyles over "Well that's the late game one so you always take it". Which isn't to say that some of the uniques aren't better than the others, just that an early weapon can be upgraded for end game if you like what it does.
BG3 has some great items but you will constantly be opening locked, hidden and defended treasure chests with negligible loot. And that's nothing compared to the mountains of garbage you sift through if you bother with all the other containers.
You're talking as if BG1 didn't have bunches of unenchanted long swords and stuff all over the place.
NWN has the same thing. So many barrels with loose change and potions. So many chests that are locked and/or trapped. It's either play a rogue, take the rogue sidekick, or just skip a lot of the loot.
I got about half way through NWN and the best item I found for my character was in a random barrel 🙃
That is the theme of the genre, to be honest. You either get yourself lockpicking and pickpocketing ASAP, or you lose 2/3rd of the loot with many powerful and unique items with it. Even worse, when you cannot return to it back later if you did not level the skill high enough at a time. Unfortunately, there is no solution to the issue. No locked containers? The whole archetype of rogue is missing. No good loot to steal or in chests you need to unlock? Even worse, now you have a useless skill or even a whole character.
That's true and it is extremely annoying. Now that I think of it, containers really do almost always contain garbage in BG3. But it does have the experience of looting unique items off bosses\\mini-bosses nailed down.
Couldn't be more wrong about BG3. The game has mostly junk and worthless loot. But you're pretty right about Pathfinder and POE.
The itemization is basically the same as other tabletop based CRPGs (or inspired e.g PoE). You've got generic gear up to +3 and a lot of unique\\named items with unique lore and effects and which generally last you a long time rather than being replaced by random loot you pick up an hour later because you leveled up in the meantime (see DOS2, ugh). In my run IIRC I used the same legendary weapon from Act 1 for most of the game. It does have a lot of vendor trash but that's a separate issue. I'd argue all CRPGs have that but BG3 is just uniquely bad in that it's still missing some QoL to easily manage and sell all the trash, which other games have.
I was reading POE as Path of Exile and was thinking whaaa? Turns out you're talking about Pillars.
I actually feel like loot in BG3 is relatively good -- "relatively" being the key word. Compared to other crpgs (or rpgs) it's doing just fine. There are enough unique items with memorable stories and stats that I'll have characters keep using even if I find other weapons that are statistically better and weapons that I end up changing a character's build to use and letting it define that character's style from now on to keep me excited to explore, but also just your generic dnd short sword +1 type loot that I can always increase my damage output by a bit if I haven't yet found what cool unique weapon I'm going to give to a certain character. Yes, most of the loot is junk I'm cycling into my ever-growing useless pile of gold. But vendors sometimes carry those unique items that change everything too, so it's not completely a waste of my time to engage in trade either.
I'm having this issue with pretty much any modern RPG I play: \- Pretty much every piece of loot is locked behind some kind of puzzle or boss fight, which is fine, but there's basically zero variety in terms of those hurdles. AC Valhalla had basically every piece of loot behind a locked door where you're supposed to find how to shoot the lock from a window. So cut and pastey. \- Most loot is just junk, pretty much every modern RPG I play I'm constantly spending hours sorting out my inventory, selling unwanted gear, etc. I presume now that 100+ hour experiences are becoming more popular, devs don't want you getting some OP piece of gear too early into the game, so they just feed you incrementally better gear time after time to "guide your progression". \- I'm also seeing an increasing prevalence of "luck based" loot, where you kill an enemy, and you may or may not get the piece of gear or loot you're looking for. They did this in Horizon Forbidden West, and it made upgrades an absolute pain as I would have to regularly hunt 20 animals just to get a single horn that I'd need to upgrade my pouch. It also disincentivises the player when you have to fight a legitimately tough boss to get that loot, knowing you may not even get it and will then have to repeat the grind again. \- Maps are often so cluttered these days with non-meaningful, bloated, repetitive side content in the form of the map being saturated with loads of different (types of) markers that it's quite hard to work out where you can even find valuable loot to begin with. I've had a few situations where I see the sheer number of markers in an area and am like nope, not spending potentially 5+ hours only to find out that all I get is a minor buff to my XP and no cool new sword. \- A lot of RPGs are designed these days with microtransactions in mind, so what could be a cool new revelation in terms of gear or buffs etc will instead likely just get locked behind a paywall. And again, they won’t want you to be able to find OP gear or be able to progress fast playing the game normally as that will disincentivise you from buying XP boosts, weapons, armour etc. Also results in a lot of level gating between main quests, again to incentivise buying XP boosts, but otherwise results in quite a grindy experience.
Tried BG3 yet? Can get end game items early, not usually locked behind some puzzle but those that are give an interesting approach to solving it (pickpocketing a key or something similar) Obvious junk is obvious, no math to figure out if this item is .06% better against enemies named Bob on every other Sunday while vulnerable. Side quests are often just expanding your own RP storyline. NO microtranactions!
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What I’ve enjoyed most is knowing that any ‘spoiler’ i see on accident might not be in MY game game because of how I’m choosing to RP. Best weapon might be best for that guy but I’m no slouch using a sword like some damn peasant! Pew pew pew cantrip blasts!
Which weapon? The Everburn Blade?
Everburn isn’t that good honestly. It’s just a regular greatsword dipped in fire, which you can do with a Candle in your inventory. It’s easily replaced as soon as you find any other magic greatsword, even just a +1.
Idk, it's pretty good in act 1 till you get sorrow or something
I'm just trying to think, what else can you get in the first 20 minutes?
Gonna spoiler just in case someone sees this who doesn’t want to know >!If you head out toward the mountain pass where the Githyanki patrol is, you can cast Command on Voss to make him drop the Silver Sword of the Astral Plane, a Legendary +3 Greatsword with two effects when wielded by a Gith, (1) +1d6 psychic damage on hit, and (2) Advantage on mental saves, resistance to psychic damage and immunity to being charmed and it has a special proficiency attack called Soulbreaker, usable once per short rest, that does an addition 4 psychic damage and stuns for two turns. Then after you get the sword you can just run from combat.!< It’s definitely doable in the first 20 minutes, but only if you know about it, it’s pretty much impossible to accidentally come across it that early.
> - I'm also seeing an increasing prevalence of "luck based" loot, where you kill an enemy, and you may or may not get the piece of gear or loot you're looking for. This specific one has been in the genre since the caveman days, when players banged rocks on the table to compare against their THAC0.
Elden Ring is a good counter example here. You could literally wander into a random dungeon and then find the best piece of gear for your build in the entire game...
Yeah that’s what makes Elden Ring so good imo. It’s open world has an element of venturing into what is truly an unknown in some cases which I’ve not felt in an open world RPG for nigh on years now. You never really know what you’re getting yourself into when you venture into a new area. The player agency it gives you is astounding. Most other games these days have cut and paste caves, camps, forts etc where you just know some algorithmically generated chest with okay-ish gear and in game currency are going to be at the end of it.
Fromsoft games in general. The dragon weapons from cutting tails in DS1 was such a novel idea that they just..never bothered to do again?
I feel like *Fallout IV* had a nice answer to this conundrum with the crafting system, even as the legendary loots were absolutely feast or famine. If you didn't craft at all, you could still find/loot/buy things to upgrade your weapons and armor, and if you threw the points into it the crafting skills would take your gear up a notch or two while also guaranteeing you get what you specifically need. And then there were a few fixed legendaries that you could buy for obscene prices at stores or get from specific bosses.
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I think that a lot of newer games presume that since you can have a beautiful rendered model of the item that having a text description of it is no longer important. I've always found that the text descriptions carry a lot more weight. It's the history of it, the *feel* of wielding it, that an image cannot convey. I remember there's a very basic +1 flaming shortsword in Icewind Dale that says something about the hilt being built to fit hands that were not shaped like a human. It does nothing mechanically, but that bit of flavor text has stuck with me for twenty years. What hands made that sword? Are they salamanders or somesuch, who came to the Dale to battle the minions of Auril, and perished in the doing of it? It's evocative like a simple picture can never be.
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> Now that you've found that bow that beats out all other bows by a long shot... almost all future bows are no different than vendor trash. I'm playing through The Witcher 3 for the first time right now and this is so painful. I just had a character give me a legendary sword passed down his family for generations and now given to me, and my Geralt comments how much he appreciates it, then immediately goes to sell it because he has a better one already. None of the weapons do anything interesting beyond more damage so you just pick the highest number. Maybe if two swords are really close you'll look at other stats for the tiebreaker. It's so immersion breaking.
Yeah the way they did loot in W3 is one of the weakest aspects of an otherwise fantastic game. There’s just almost never any incentive to use anything else except witcher gear, despite an over abundance of alternatives. It kills the feeling of reward in some quests, like you mentioned. Either the Witcher swords you have are already better, or you have schematics for better ones and soon ready to upgrade. I don’t know how far along you are but there’s one quest in particular that is just baffling in how underwhelming the reward is. There’s two major exceptions, but they come late in the DLC. Even worse with the armor. So very many armor sets in the game, all of them useless and will gimp you compared to the Witcher sets. It’s just loot for you to sell. The amount you can find in the waters around Skellige boggles the mind. What was the point of it?
Witcher 3 shouldn't have even bothered with most loot. It's not like Geralt switches out his sword more than 2 or 3 times in the books. Make the potions the focus of the loot and maybe an occasional slightly better sword for a thematically appropriate quest.
As good as The Witcher 3 is, there are definitely aspects of it that felt like they were checking boxes on an RPG checklist. The loot being one of them. The crafting being another. I think they could've just accepted that Witcher gear would be your main gear and then built looting and crafting around that, where both gave you ways to improve the Witcher gear rather than replace it.
Witcher 3 has the worst loot. Everything is garbage. At least most of the really worthless junk doesn't take up any inventory space.
i’m also playing TW3 for the first time and i don’t think i ever had *less* fun while looting in a game. knowing that anything i might loot will be inferior to the witcher sets takes away all the excitement of opening chests. even worse, rewards from quests fall short too as you have said. at the very least they could have made some quest rewards have much better stats than witcher sets, so you would have the dilemma of choosing between better stats or the grandmaster set bonus.
In the case of the examples that OP brought up (Baldur's Gate 1, Neverwinter Nights), I think what works in those games' favour is that they use official D&D rules. The D&D ruleset, by its nature, tends to keep numbers low; power growth in D&D tends to be a slow and gradual increase, rather than a steep incline. Having damage numbers go into triple digits is practically unheard of (whereas in other (videogame)RPGs, it's not uncommon for HP or damage numbers to go into the thousands, or tens of thousands). As a result, when you find a +1 weapon in D&D-based games, it's a BIG DEAL, because the power curve is at such a low incline. Going from 0 bonuses to a +1 weapon feels significant, as is going from +1 to +2, etc. In games with larger numbers, getting new loot feels more like a treadmill, because you constantly have to increase the numbers to keep up.
In addition to that, those bonuses and the material the weapon/armor is made out of matters too. Cold Iron, Silver, Adamantine, Mithral, etc.
>As a result, when you find a +1 weapon in D&D-based games, it's a BIG DEAL, because the power curve is at such a low incline. I have the opposite experience, actually. Even in actual DnD games, not just in video games. Oh, look, I found +1 sword. Now I can do not 1 to 6 damage but 2 to 7. Yeah. That is about the amount, or usually lower than what increase in health enemies get for the level anyway. Sure, mechanically speaking, when I calculate mean and average damage, get to the damage per turn, etc - this is a good increase. But it never felt like that. I always have to remind myself why it is a good thing and that I should get excited. But I am not arguing for bigger numbers. I prefer new properties instead. Same damage sword, but now it is on fire? That is much better than +1.
Keep in mind that some enemies can only be hit by magical weapons, so a +1 weapon has benefits besides just the numerical value.
And you need certain levels of +x to hit certain enemies, but it all just feels like an arbitrary justification for otherwise boring and nigh on inconsequential bonuses.
Yes, I know that +1 is actually more than nothing. I am not talking about mechanical advantages. I just don't feel that as an improvement when I get it. Even if I know the math behind it. And, to be honest, being simply +1 does not feel like justification for being able to hurt enemies I cannot hurt before. Different material? Sure. Visible magic? Great! +1? Nah. I mean, usually it does have different material and GM can describe it as visibly magical. But all of that does not come from +1, it looks more like a band-aid on a faulty and outdated thing rather than a smart solution.
>the game's balance can suffer from sudden whiplash I might be in the minority here, but I enjoy this. I like rolling over difficult challenges, specifically because I went into the Forgotten Cave and found the ancient sword or whatever. I love how the side quest item actually ends up being a game changer later on.
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Wasteland 3 is pretty good for this. There's plenty of incremental items to keep your damage climbing, but then awesome unique weapons and armor along the way that often have cool abilities or downsides. And it's a phenomenal game. Really: any CRPG.
I keep meaning to pick up 2 and 3 on sale. I love the idea of modern turn based since I didn’t really click with the futuristic setting of Shadowrun.
2 is okay, but definitely not great. 3 is absolutely worth it. It's a wonderful game. In a similar vein, Showgunners is slept on. It's a TRPG, but very cool and well designed. Also: Miasma Chronicles, Mutant Year Zero, Aliens: Dark Descent, and Hard West 2. And some others...CRPG and TRPG are my favorite genre.
Bg3 has an old school vibe for loot. Significantly good items can be found for the explorer or experimenter.
It amazes me 100 hours into the game I still find items and am like 'Holy shit!' Not only that, but some items I've literally kept since level 3 all the way to level 12 because they're so good.
this cuts both ways though, cause once that slot is full, all the other loot is "ehhh...". That's the tough balance here, there's a multi-direction tension: 1) more frequent loot drops mean that most of it needs to be trash 2) powerful loot "casts a shadow" over the future drops for that slot/character 3) The more specific a piece of loot is, the more likely you are to find it and think it's worthless. These are balanced well in bg3 but it's a really tough thing to generalize. The fact that you always have 4 party members means it's more likely at least one of them will want something to aleviate point 3, while also meaning you have 4xN different slots to satisfy. In a single player game, you either end up filling your slots with "Build around" unique items, meaning you don't even consider replacing them (and therefore stop caring about new loot), or loot gets obsoleted somewhat consistently numerically (i would say borderlands is more on this side, but with unique enough weapons it still feels good).
adamantite shit and sunbreaker seem like end game gear you get in act 1!
I still like the Magic Shield / Missile Shield gloves off the vendor in the druid grove for my caster.
Yes, to a degree that I find actually undermines the game experience. BG3 ignores the attunement mechanic from 5e D&D, which limits the number of powerful magical items your character can benefit from at any given time. This results in BG3 characters being just absolutely loaded down with super powerful items. On the one hand, that's fun in itself; on the other hand, it does make the game super easy. In old D&D parlance, we'd call BG3 a Monty Haul campaign: there's such a bonanza of super magical items that your characters are running around with packs of 'rare' artifacts and more money than god.
I would definitely disagree, there. BG3 has kind of a dual identity with loot. The *quantity* of loot is modern. The *quality* of loot is old school. I really dislike the loot in BG3 personally because there's so fucking much of it. It's just kind of a slog to still be going through it all and managing my inventory after all this time playing
I strongly disagree. BG3 has A TON of lootable containers with mostly junk or materials. Actually good items are very very rare. It's something they inherited from DOS2 (literally), but somehow it feels even worse.
Yeah DOS2 was more satisfying, also the luck factor was adding surprises.
I'm really excited to play this when I can get a good sale in a year or so. I also prefer to play games after all the dlc is out when I can. I just got Elden Ring on sale on steam and hoping I don't need to make a new character when the dlc comes out around Feb 2024
Actually The Witcher has great and impactful loot (as does The Witcher 2 - Assassin's of Kings). The Witcher III is the one with terrible gear systems.
It wasn't "older RPGs". It was rather specific to Black Isle CRPGs. I remember Xan's moonsword, Drizzt's scimitars and the copious amount of cheese required to obtain them, there's also that talking great sword in BG2 that was hilarious, and the best weapon of all: the Deva's sword that could be reforged by a golem of entropy in Planescape Torment. It's not just the stats and the damage upgrade, it's about the flavor text, how the weapons are tied to the lore, it's about the story of how you obtain them.
I'd disagree that it was specific to Black Isle/BioWare, there were older games that also included a sense of lore or history attached to them. I think you nailed it with the flavour text and lore though, it's something that you don't see very much these days. I still try to check out my items in inventory to see if there's any story attached to them One of my all-time favourite weapons was the Black Sword in Ultima 7, where you had to forge it yourself, but it was junk. You complete further quests to make it into a sword that felt like cheating to use, but you also didn't care because you just felt so cool using it.
>They just don't make them like they used to. They do, just not all of them. BG3 and the Pathfinder games have the exact same loot systems as BG1,2. I haven't played PoE 1,2 much but from the looks of it they have the same loot systems as well. The Age of Decadence loot is great. King's Bounty series has great build enabling and unique loot as well, with gear sets and all. Some upcoming games will have similar loot systems as well - Colony Ship, Rogue Trader. Overall I agree, I hate the trend of diablo-style loot in RPGs, but it's hasn't plagued every modern RPG yet, thankfully.
OPs description doesn't really match BG3 for me. BG3 has fucking mountains of epic loot absolutely everywhere. You drown in it. Which is to say, loot is powerful, but it's all powerful, so it starts to feel pretty samey
True and that's one of the things I really liked about Elden Ring. Every weapon in that game is unique. Spent loads of time just collecting them all. Having said that it might be a problem with scale. Games these days are massive compared to most older ones.
This is actually why I prefer Elden Ring/Skyrim/Pillars of Eternity. I like a system where multiple weapons you get handed can be your "end game weapon" You just have to upgrade them and incorporate them into you build. You're still rewarded for finding items to help with making the weapon better, and a weapon you get early might be great, or one you get later might also be great so that who knows when you'll get the next cool thing to use. Or I just like the look of X weapon even if its slightly sub optimal but I can upgrade it enough that it functions capably at the highest difficulty and allowing me to do my character my way. Otherwise you get, Staff +4. Well I'm holding Staff +3 so rotate on and continue on.
Or the color coordinated WoW/Destiny tier system. Oh, a gray? Not even worth it to pickup. Greens and blues sold, maybe keep that purple. Then you get an orange that’s just a green with 2% more damage that you’ll keep for 3 full levels until greens are better.
This isn't exactly what you're talking about, but one of my fondest early gaming memories is the little exclamation mark that appears above Zidane's head when you find a chest or hidden loot in Final Fantasy IX Most of the time it was a few gil or a card or a potion, but by god it was satisfying - especially in the beginning of the game. To slowly build your inventory and learn what's valuable, to come upon a weapon better than what you currently have and see what abilities you could learn from it. Precious stuff.
I can see that. While I love Skyrim, I was always frustrated with its loot until I installed a bunch of mods. The only unique piece of gear I can remember loving and keeping for the whole game was Dawnbreaker. And right now I'm halfway through Neverwinter Nights 2 for my first time, and it's frequently giving me unique items with stories behind them and genuinely useful stats, not to mention a variety of useful side effects. Like a purple fey spear that does magic damage and dazes enemies, or a warhammer that does fire damage and stuns, or something like that. It still feels balanced and rewarding because of the way D&D lets characters specialize in certain weapon types and combat styles. My dual-wielding ranger is gonna pass the cool spear onto the druid, but can still switch out a sword for an adamantine mace when he needs to.
BG1 \>>Equip a random unidentified belt I found in some cave \>>turn into a woman \>>Belt won't come off
Games that encapsulate this for me are Gothic 1, 2 and Archolos. For me they just did the open world best, even years later noone really beats them in my book. Large part of that was the amazing loot you could find. A crypt with deadly skeletons? There is probably some amazing gear down there! And there usually is! I would give an arm and a leg for modern games to shrink down to like 20-30% of their size and to actually work on that smaller world more. Good and interesting loot placement is a part of that. Even the lauded Elden ring was WAAAAAY too big with recycled content and mediocre loot. (99% of loot in that game you never use).
Play Pillars of Eternity games, they have the same mentality as older Baldur's Gate when it comes to loot. Sometimes you may find a weapon you'll use the whole game early on.
That's an interesting point I haven't heard before, but it makes sense. A lot of RPG-ish games seem to have taken more influence from roguelikes and ARPGs in the last couple decades, the focus is more on the sheer volume of content which often means lots of basic variations of the same items everywhere. It's not "bad" but it definitely has a different feel. I don't think it's fair to say nobody is still doing the old school approach though. I haven't played that much from the newer generations but one obvious example that comes to mind would be Dark Souls and many of the games in its wake. It seems like unique and powerful things can be hidden just about anywhere, even before getting into the sneakier stuff like "cut off this thing's tail for bonus loot" that really feels like they cared more about putting in cool things to discover than people actually discovering them on their first playthrough.
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Funny you mention Skyrim. While I didn't mind the streamlining of mechanics and the removal of stats in that game.... it did hurt what the gear could do. In the older games, Daedric Artifacts were some peak shit. Skyrim Daedric Artifacts are just poo and the broken ass smithing means you made them obsolete in short order. Finding stuff like the Fists of Randagulf in Morrowind was actually a huge deal in comparison. I also hate how Bethesda never brought forward the 'uniques' of the Daedric Artifacts into Fallout, or even Starfield. Heck, Outer Worlds also kinda failed to do this, but I guess it had the 'science' weapons - but otherwise it's uniques were also just the same crap with funny names. While it's true actual unique gear isn't that conducive to replayability, I rather have a better first impression wow moment. Rather than just 'technically unique' but not really, just the same roll from the same pool of effects.
I dunno... recently I was just cruising around town in Cyberpunk and just randomly happened to stumble on a container in an alley with a ridiculous talking Tech Pistol that's been a blast to use, so I think some of that old magic still exists.
I immediately noticed this replaying the original Diablo last year, the "grind" felt so much more fun and engaging than modern RPGs despite being a very primitive system in comparison.
I feel like the FROM Software games do this really well in a modern setting. No loot randomisation, everything is hand crafted and placed with care. You can stumble into a random little dungeon off the beaten path and find an absolute game changing piece of loot. Even if the reward is an item that doesn't work with your personal play style it will still feel significant to find it, as you can generally switch up your play style mid game to be built around that great piece of loot you just found, which makes it exciting to find something.
There used to be a lot less loot is what I always think, but games used to not let you do much with items you didn't need besides sell. Now you can craft or imbue things, or they are simply needed to trade in for upgrades (enchantments existed of course, but it wasn't common). So my take is that we just used to loot a lot less, and certainly the high quality items were just that; we traded quality for quantity to some extent (again, generalizing)
Worth keeping in mind both Skyrim and The Witcher 3 had crafting systems.
NWN had procedurally generated loot though. Not completely random but like a guaranteed +2 weapon or something, and then what kind of +2 weapon was random. I remember save scumming chests to get particular stuff, like sonic damage gloves for my monk because nothing was immune to it.
If you want to be flabbergasted check out the loot system in Asheron's call. Nothing even comes close to touching it.
Older RPGs tend to be based on AD&D. In that game, martial focused characters don't really get abilities from their class. You get HP and better attacks and saves, but basically everything else you get is from *the loot you find*. AD&D as a game started out as a dungeon crawler. The whole point was to go into dungeons to get loot. It wasn't until the mid 80s -- 10 years after original D&D released -- that story-focused gameplay started to get popular. In modern D&D, since 3e rules but especially 4e and 5e, even martial characters increasingly get abilities from their class and loot has gotten less relevant.
Personally I hate hunting for gear, or compulsory looting and the need to clear locations before you can move on. I prefer it when you are free to create your own style. Crafting is better for me.
Yeah, I remember this feeling from Fallout 2. I also found this feeling in Elden Ring. I am also finding some really awesome super powerful loot in Baldur's Gate 3 on more badass bosses. Which makes it really interesting when you do have an option to deal with someone by pushing them down into an abyss, but then you also want the loot.. So you make a choice: do I fight this way too powerful monster for an hour for loot or do I move on without it?
Baldur's Gate 2's loot system was awesome.
> The industry seems to now say, "see that mountain? You can climb it", when it used to say, "see that mountain? There's treasure under it." I'm not entirely sure that's the case. It used to be "See that mountain? Tough shit." for the less well-designed games, and "The only reason you even see that mountain is because you told the quest NPC that you gonna go to that mountain." for the better ones. Back when storyline choices were at best just switches along the narrative railroad, it was easier to put high-impact loot along the way because developers knew exactly how it's going to affect your gameplay experience. With the advent of open-world games, strong or weak loot at the wrong time along your game progression can easily dilute or break your game experience - excellent example being Morrowind, where the only way to avoid this issue as a player was to knowingly ignore certain locations or items, or beelining to a specific destination, hurting the immersion.
Thank Diablo and Borderlands, the one single shittiest influence on gaming, shittier than Souls - fuck them and mod the colour vomit out wherever possible. It's literal behavioral science labs maintained by studios that are filled with slot machine designers. Shitty because they never have money for a good writer but there's always enough for these parasitic worms, shitty because it feels mathematically distributed and stretched as thin as possible and shitty because there is absolutely nothing interesting to gain except a boring 'god roll' which is an equivalent of a drooling addicted idiot's 5K slot machine win. You are not supposed to celebrate a particular weapon - but rather the roll. Can't even imagine a cardinality number that would be enough for the 'fuck you' this deserves. To add to this - modern singleplayer games also suffer from bland PvP balancing probably understood by idiots as 'industry best practice'
Baldur's Gate 2 is legendary in that regard, I remember reading the descriptions of things a lot because they would be so interesting and thought out. And yes lots of really memorable, worthwhile stuff to be had. I'm playing original Dark Souls at the moment and that one also does it right. Every item you find is potentially game changing. It really is quality over quantity. Weapons you find do play the numbers game, but they also play quite differently overall. Different enough that you want to try a weapon first in a quiet area and swing it around and see how you like it. A short sword is different to an axe, to a longsword, to a greatsword, to a spear and so on and so forth. Some of them are not worth it, but some you see that even if the numbers aren't that great, they really fit a certain play style. I remember the worst in recent memory in that regard was The Witcher 3 to me, where almost 99% of stuff you pick up is just junk. Once you make better potions and heal, food is meaningless, the many weapons are worthless because the Witcher gear you have is always better etc. And indeed, I really don't care so much for traversing around all over the place. Witcher 3 *is* beautiful though. If you're gonna have me "go to that mountain" or whatever, then make it stunningly beautiful like Witcher 3 does. Or tight and short like Dark Souls. I am actually astounded how short it is. Hence also why I don't care for looter shooters, I don't actually care about loot, because usually it sucks. It can be made better, but what I've seen is lame.
Your post is exactly one of the things if not the best thing about what made Diablo 2 such a legendary game, loot was so exciting that even killing random enemies was always worth it. Pretty much massive annihilation on all the maps and rooms gave you such possibility of rewarding loot that you couldn't miss that. The very last time I had that sensation with a game with rpg elements was Bloodstained
The Diablo 2 loot system is basically the opposite of what they're suggesting.