Fatnerd rage incoming: Diablo for consoles.

[Stark]

I guess that's why people keep saying 'building game around this reward structure is bad' and 'xyz game doesn't do it and is fine'?

By OCD, for OCD. A creed to live by!

[GuppyShark]

Not sure I'm following you Stark - are you saying that Skyrim is built around a 'loot everything' reward structure? Because gold seemed to become largely meaningless anyway.

[Stofsk]

When you place countless crap in the game for you to find, you create a system where players feel like they need to pick that trash up to sell it or make use of it later.

The fact that gold becomes meaningless later in the game doesn't really matter, because the underlying mechanic remains in place. They'd do a lot better if you actually couldn't loot everything all the time.

I'm mostly approaching this from Oblivion's standpoint, but knowing Beth nothing would have changed in Skyrim.

[aieeegrunt]

The way Rage did it was hilarious; a single click will basically loot the entire room/shelf, and gets presorted into ammo, crafting materials, and "useless junk" that is also a one click sale item.

[Julhelm]

Most RPG's more or less force hoarding since since vendors pay fuck all for anything you sell whereas their prices are uniformly inflated and for some reason NPC's never seem to walk around with anything more than pocket change.

[GuppyShark]

When you place countless crap in the game for you to find, you create a system where players feel like they need to pick that trash up to sell it or make use of it later. They'd do a lot better if you actually couldn't loot everything all the time.

So because some people are stupid and counter-productively obsess about how to maximimise their pretend money returns on loot without considering the opportunity costs of getting better loot instead of wasting their time with vendor trash, this is worse than an anti-immersive system that tells you "Sorry I know you want that axe but we decided not to let you loot the axe that's lying right there on the ground. Because otherwise halfwits would waste their time running around Skyrim trying to sell it for a pittance instead of playing the game we made."

Ugh, when I say it like that it actually makes sense - and I don't like it.

vendors pay fuck all for anything you sell whereas their prices are uniformly inflated and for some reason NPC's never seem to walk around with anything more than pocket change.

"I have too much liquid capital and the merchants have responded to me flooding the market with vendor trash by paying me less for it #adventurerproblems"

[Julhelm]

"I have too much liquid capital and the merchants have responded to me flooding the market with vendor trash by paying me less for it #adventurerproblems"

No I'm saying the games encourage hoarding by design because they just drop worthless loot instead of actual cash.

[Stark]

Not all RPG loot-trucks are OCD fatties; some have just been trained by RPGs into this behaviour. Its pretty trivial to not build the reward structure around money. Its particularly amusing that games that avoid it (like JA2) actually give you something interesting to do with all the sub-tier equipment; give it to your army. Shit, even Fable lets you mail it to your buddies!

Its a laugh because you could say that they drop useless vendor trash instead of money because nerds complained that a wolf having three pounds sixpence was 'unrealistic'.

[Stofsk]

Heh that reminds me of the time I massacred mudcrabs in Oblivion, and would occasionally find one who had swallowed a gold coin (I guess that's the rationalisation).

[Executor32]

I still find those in Skyrim. Wolves, sabre cats, and bears, too. Gold on Nirn must be tastier than Earthly gold, I guess.

[Tolya]

Purple, I think you should look up what does RPG stand for. It does not stand for "Back Pack Simulator". It is actually a "Role Playing Game". I grew up on pen and papers and that is why I might have a different opinion on how a cRPG should look like.

[DudeGuyMan]

Blizzard started out as a console developer and, as was pointed out, Diablo 1 got a console release all the way back on PS1. So did Warcraft 2.

Also:

[Stark]

If only anyone needed hipster webcomic to reiterate their point, their day would be made I guess????

You'd think they'd gather information around the way people use UIs and even at the most primitive end, how long people spend looking at UIs (especially the inventory). Shit, a simple 'auto-drop lowest dollar/kilo misc items' button would probably reduce the time people spend staring at the endless list of paint brushes in their inventory. :v

But I mean this assumes Bethesda actually tests their software, which is probably being generous.

Hey does anyone remember the people who claimed the tetris inventory added something to a game (that wasn't replicated by a list with a square limit)? I bet they hate every game ever having an auto-arrange button that instantly makes it irrelevant.

[GuppyShark]

or they could just not be retards picking up every piece of crap they encounter

but thats apparently the game's fault

[Purple]

Purple, I think you should look up what does RPG stand for. It does not stand for "Back Pack Simulator". It is actually a "Role Playing Game". I grew up on pen and papers and that is why I might have a different opinion on how a cRPG should look like.

I don't understand what you are talking about. It takes at worst 2-3 seconds to write down a single line for an item. And even when you go over to hundreds of items per session it's still no more tiring or time consuming than writing a medium-large post for the forum but without the having to think part. And if you use a pencil picking up duplicate items is as easy as erasing one number and writing down another in its place.

[Stark]

or they could just not be retards picking up every piece of crap they encounter

but thats apparently the game's fault

I don't think you understand how game design and reward structures influence player behaviour. If there is a benefit to doing something, people will do it. If you don't want them to do it, it is trivial to discourage. Next we'll hear that Oblivion's horrid skill system isn't the game's fault and doesn't make players play 'backwards' because 'just don't do it lol'.

But if it isn't a problem for you and you don't care, why don't you just fuck off?

[AniThyng]

I barely care about calculating optimal outcomes for loot/weight/value in Skyrim and I still have more money then I know what to do with. And I prefer it that way. if I wanted to spend my time on a spreadsheet I'd be at work.

Arguably the fact that after a while you end up with a backpack full of junk barely worth selling is a clue that you don't really need to pick it all up

The gist of Purple's objection to JA2's system really puzzles me though. The game is forcing you to make a triage choice, and you should make that choice heuristically and based on a combination of gut feeling, experience and maybe some quick mental arithmetic, not by recalculating a spreadsheet.

[Stark]

Its a bit of a lol that Beth can't get their head around moneysink curves tbh; every Beth game ever has been a river of money which is basically worthless no matter how much paid crafting or housing they add. People still truck around a fajillion items, many of which there is literally no reason to ever pick up and you have to wonder why its even possible.

I guess adding uselessness = realism or something. :V

JA2 gives specific mechanisms for dealing with moving great piles of loot; you get a car and a helicopter and all kinds, and the patch lets you just sell anything anywhere for 5% of cost (or something). You'd think a game like Skyrim would let you drop a 'goons look here plz' beacon, but that might diminish the do everything yourself you are special element so beloved in RPGs.

[AniThyng]

The whole concept is absurd anyway, there is nothing realistic about walking into a village and expecting the local blacksmith to want to buy your pile of 25 rotting swords reeking of death no matter how much money he has. I agree that it's "realistic" that you can loot whatever you want. But conversely it is also realistic that you glance at the loot available and conclude "eh, I just need his coins". Not "i must strip him of EVERYTHING."

Well, real life is all about doing repetitive mundane things on a day to day basis. I'm just glad I don't need to do the "tie shoelaces" and "put on tie" minigames anymore. "swipe card at petrol pump" is exciting though. Or not. Malaysia is price regulated so I don;t need to play "which petrol station gives me the best price but isn't too far that i spend more money getting there and back" game. Now *theres* a use for spreadsheets

On that note, I remember in Fallout 2 waiting for the casino to refresh its caps supply because I had posession of all the caps in the gameworld and for some reason still wanted more. In my defense I was like, 13.

[Stark]

I think that's what people are talking about. The fundamental idea of a sandbox built around 'interactivity' as openness (ie you aren't prevented from doing anything like steal all the cups or whatever) does not naturally lead to 'realism' or encourage the player to do anything useful. Outside of quests those junk items really are just junk, you can't use them, do anything with them, have any experience around them; they're inert useless crap that the game lets you pick up for no reason when 'one dollar' would have been functionally identical.

People seriously complain in games like this where people DON'T drop everything they have, even though the logical result of a) spawning badguys and b) loot-all = EVERYONE IN THE FUCKING WORLD HAS POWER ARMOUR SETTING DESTROYED.

The sad thing is if you wanted a game like the game Beth tries to make over and over and over again, simple shit like 'hey boys go get everything out of that cave and sell it to fund our gang/army/movement/plot' should be obvious. Whole layers of play built around economies and communities and how the player interacts with that ... are just some of the things that have no place in a shitty sandpit. Imagine if the player loot-dumping changed prices and changed the way people equipped themselves? TOO HARD DO ANOTHER RANDOM FETCH QUEST

[Tolya]

It might surprise you to know that there are people out here (me included) who absolutely detest having to drop or not pick up items and just watching our loot waste away. The most egregious example of this was Diablo 1 that actually had your gold factor in as an item. So if your inventory was full you could not pick up a single coin more. Seriously? A god dam coin weighs so much you can't carry it? Fuck that.

Supply an argument other than "I like hoarding". Hoarding only needlessly bloats the game. As someone here pointed out, it is a system of rewarding players on the basis of how much stuff theyhave picked up and sold. It does not care about the story, immersion, character development. It does not care how, as a character, you have impacted the world. It is just lazy game design. If hoarding keeps you glued to the screen I say that your expectations toward RPG games are quite low. Game tells a story, just like a book. Have you ever tried writing a short story? It's not about introducing as many elements as possible and presenting the world as realistically as possible. The biggest challenge is to omit as many things (even leaving some things to your imagination) as possible while keeping the story compelling and interesting. This is the part that is sometimes forgotten in RPG design.

I am not playing the game to experience the hardships of running a mobile pawnshop. Realism is good only if it adds immersion, because it uses concepts and objects which are familiar to you in the real world and therefore makes it easier to suspend disbelief.

Yes, the whole process could use some automation. That much I can agree on. Like the system I suggested to allow you to remotely sell items you pick up immediately if you don't like them. You can even justify it by saying that the party members not currently with you run off to the shop and sell it.

But if something is annoying and can be so easily automated, maybe it doesn't need to be in the game in the first place? For example: in Baldur's Gate you had the D&D mechanics (along with dice rolls) displayed in the console. More modern games have hidden that stuff from the player and for a good reason: it is boring to see your combat resolved on the basis of stat crunching. Then again, there probably are people who would welcome a mechanic that would let you roll your dices manually in each turn. But the rest of the world would be bored because it has nothing to do with RPGing.

Limited money merchants accomplish nothing. The only difference is in the amount of time you need to find people who will take your trash off your back.

That sounds horrific. Not only do I have to drop most of my loot and thus waste resources I could have otherwise used but I have to constantly evaluate and reevaluate what to keep and what to drop. Every time I kill something I would have to sit down with a pen and paper (or alt tab to excel) and calculate the projected value of selling it at the nearest merchant in order to get the optimum gold income in the end. All the while I would know that the optimal outcome is the one denied to me. How can you even play the game with all that frustration happening in the background?

If your fun is dependent on the amount of gold stacked in your character's inventory, then you should try games like Capitalism. Because if you play RPG's for loot, then you kinda miss on the entire point of role playing. I've been to a couple of P&P Warhammer sessions where organizing loot took 30-40 minutes every time. It was boring and it was just shitty GMing.

Try playing Mass Effect, KOTOR or say Dragon Age. Or if you don't like Bioware try just about any RPG game on the market and see normal non "realistic" vendors. Than it won't be annoying to you.

Ah, "if you don't like our country, you can just get out!" type of argument. Don't be an idiot. Say something meaningful other than "if you don't like it don't play it". Because I have never said that I dislike the game in general. I have had great fun playing Skyrim, but it could be made better.

Furthermore, you seem obsessed with loads of loot being a bad thing.

It is a bad thing, because when I find something like that in a Role Playing Game (notice the first two words), I have the feeling that the time spent designing the whole hoarding mechanic could be better used elsewhere. Like focusing on writing the script, make the story more compelling. Remove most of the loot or just make it zero-value garbage and suddenly you don't have to stop every 5 feet to pick up stuff when exploring a dungeon.

Games like Fable 3 don't care about inventory at all. You can focus on quests and the world, which is a good thing. Of course, Fable 3 is shit for other reasons, but the basic inventory system in which you actually carry stuff on you and not in a pattern buffer, is a very good idea.

[Vendetta]

Outside of quests those junk items really are just junk, you can't use them, do anything with them, have any experience around them; they're inert useless crap that the game lets you pick up for no reason when 'one dollar' would have been functionally identical.

I think the driving force behind making all the random gubbins interactable in Beth games is that having all that micro scale interactability tends to hide how limited the games actually are, it's easier to forget the epic battle of four guys if you're distracted by how you can play with every knife and fork in the gameworld.

[Anacronian]

I would be perfectly happy with an RPG that takes the Gears of war route - You find a weapon you ditch the one you are currently using for the new one.

No inventory.
No crafting.

just spend the time going adventuring, Earn money , Save the princess , Hire a assassin to kill that fucking bard at the inn..with a spoon a rusty spoon - all this accomplished without dragging around 43 broadswords and 22 silver daggers.

[S.L.Acker]

A limited number of weapons I would be fine with, though depending on the weapons I would support more. After all a guy with a quarterstaff (walking stick), hammer/mace, sword, sling (for small game), and a bow is hardly that encumbered. In a game sense, maybe 4 ranged and 4 melee slots. It would fit well mapped to the D-pad with a toggle button, or even some form of weapon select wheel.

[Akhlut]

It does not care about the story, immersion, character development. It does not care how, as a character, you have impacted the world. It is just lazy game design.

Limited money merchants accomplish nothing. The only difference is in the amount of time you need to find people who will take your trash off your back.

Those seem to be conflicting statements, there. Merchants don't have an unlimited amount of money in a real world sort of setting, so setting limits on that would increase immersion, to an extant.

However, I can also see the benefit of not making every fucking wooden plate in the game an object I can pick up and sell.

I guess at that point one runs into the problem of depth of immersion versus how fun it actually is; in practice, all I do is either fast travel to another town to unload my wares at a different merchant, or I just unload all the shit into a barrel at home, quest for a few days, and go back to sell everything now that the merchant has recharged their money. So, because of that, I can see a strong argument for just giving them essentially infinite money anyway, since they have it in effect anyway, just distributed over time instead of in one lump sum.

If your fun is dependent on the amount of gold stacked in your character's inventory, then you should try games like Capitalism. Because if you play RPG's for loot, then you kinda miss on the entire point of role playing. I've been to a couple of P&P Warhammer sessions where organizing loot took 30-40 minutes every time. It was boring and it was just shitty GMing.

And that's why when I GM, I have the loot for the players already lined up so they just have to distribute it amongst each other and write it down in their inventories. Most people aren't really fond of bookkeeping.

It is a bad thing, because when I find something like that in a Role Playing Game (notice the first two words), I have the feeling that the time spent designing the whole hoarding mechanic could be better used elsewhere. Like focusing on writing the script, make the story more compelling. Remove most of the loot or just make it zero-value garbage and suddenly you don't have to stop every 5 feet to pick up stuff when exploring a dungeon.

The writing team may not necessarily be connected to the development team that deals with making all the various ph4tl00tz in the game. I'd say it's probably more of a flaw from QA and developers rather than the story people, necessarily, as well as inertia, since the older games let you pick up such useless shit as tankards, plates, forks, and the like.

Which reminds me: I'm glad that Beth removed the goddamn carried alchemy equipment and just gave us a table. Don't have to worry about keeping track of that so I can carry more important shit, like all my potions and food so I don't get killed by the bandit chief with a dwarven battleaxe and his magician followers.