Phatose on 15/8/2008 at 22:22
Right. Those are all very interesting, and completely fucking irrelevant reasons.
None of which does anything to support your original claim that cRPGs are more grindy then jRPGs, because to most of our eyes, the jRPGs is twice as guilty. They forgo even the primitive attempt at emulation of the DM/PC interplay that cRPGs do, instead the computer tells you exactly what your character did, and if you don't like it, too fucking bad. Then it turns around and the only time you have any real effect on the game is when you're in the lubed-up excel orgy that is jRPG combat. Or jRPG equipment/level/materia/job/buttfucksphere menu character twinking. So the jRPG doesn't even fucking try to get that interplay, and you're stuck in Bob's house o' numbers to boot.
In short, what the fuck are you smoking?
Trance on 16/8/2008 at 00:30
you guys are cute
a flower in hell on 16/8/2008 at 05:47
Nah I'm not saying it's a GOOD thing. I'm just saying it's the defining characteristic of role-playing games as a genre. When the game does feel like an Excel spreadsheet (WoW theorycrafting looks like college calculus sometimes) there's something wrong.
DaBeast on 16/8/2008 at 07:33
Quote Posted by Schattentänzer
What the fuck am I smoking? What the fuck do you think you're talking about? Stats are just a tool to project the mechanics of a virtual world, yet every "RPG" ever created plays a lot like Excel:The Calculating, jappo or otherwise. Somewhere between Zork and Oblivion things went batshit and accountancy-addicted munchkins convinced developers that an RPG needs stats to be one. Bullshit.
Classic adventure games are closer to RPGs than stuff like WoW ever will be.It doesn't matter how well the world or story is worked out, if I can't beat an RPG by simply playing a role (of my choice by preference) without having to worry about a stupid
gameplay mechanic, it failed.
Edit: I expect the first CRPGs I can accept as such sometime after the first successful Turing test
I made a similar argument back when Bioshock was announced. Basically I said that to play a role you don't need stats to tell you how good you are at something, that in shooter games you adapt to a weapons recoil yourself and by putting points in prettied up spreadsheets it may have let to feel an amount of control in terms of character progression, it just pulled me out of immersion or something.
And I was shat on by some old school nerds who stand by the banner of an RPG isn't and RPG without stats, anything less than stats is just like any other game. For example, in pac-man you play the role of a yellow thing that eats white things and fuck around the screen for a bit.
I'm currently going through NWN2 and just like every other rpg I've played, bar FF 7 and 8, despite all their efforts to give the players choice in how to shape thier characters I always feel forced to make a decision, like I was told that if I kept doing w/e it was I was doing, like telling a guy "I was happy to help" instead of "there better be a reward" that I couldn't continue being w/e class or type of something I wanted to be. It's a bit more complex than that but you get the drift?
Koki on 16/8/2008 at 08:54
Quote Posted by DaBeast
I made a similar argument back when Bioshock was announced. Basically I said that to play a role you don't need stats to tell you how good you are at something
But you need choice and consequences, something neither Bioshock, nor jRPGs, and most certainly not adventure games(Per Schattentänzer's argument) have.
What the fuck, people?
june gloom on 16/8/2008 at 09:21
Maybe it's because it's almost 5:30 in the morning here and my brain has devolved into 4chan mush, but I'm just not seeing how that's in any way relevant to what DaBeast was saying.
Yakoob on 16/8/2008 at 18:17
Heh, it's funny how you guys are arguing over a concrete definition of an abstract concept.
a flower in hell on 16/8/2008 at 20:14
Quote Posted by Yakoob
Heh, it's funny how you guys are arguing over a concrete definition of an abstract concept.
I'm not arguing at all. I'm only explaining that the reason developers do a certain thing is because it makes their products sell. Simple economics. If people didn't want this kind of game, they wouldn't buy it, and in turn nobody would sell it.
