Are RPGs Hard?

[FalloutJack]

Final Fantasy games are time-consuming.

Persona and SMT games are hard. Like...I've been surprised by people telling me it's hard when I got my mind into the mechanics of it quite well. In that sense, I had to conclude that I'm pretty good at RPGs and that other people are right about the difficulty level.

 

[Fidelias]

Try playing Mass Effect on insanity. At the start there are nameless goons as tough, if not tougher than you.
As with all game genres, there is great variety.

But Mass Effect is very... Shooterish and there's no where you can go to grind so it's not really something you can use as an example for all RPGs.

I'm sick of people saying "Mass Effect isn't turn-based = no rpg!!!" A game is an RPG because it focuses on plot and characters, not because of the battle system. Yes, there are a lot of turn-based RPG's, but that has nothing to do with a role-playing-game.

Also, plenty of RPG's are hard, just like plenty of shooters are hard. You can't make a sweeping statement of "RPG's are easy" when you have games like Resonance of Fate and Mass Effect to prove otherwise.

 

[Vern5]

Only if you don't refrigerate them.

*sigh* Really? >.>

If you're playing an RPG that is fun, then you wont notice how hard it is.

That's right. I can make constructive posts, too

 

[Zantos]

I find things easier when I enjoy them, as do most people. Problem I find with RPGs is that I hate the characters in a lot of them. This ruins my enjoyment thus I find it harder. Or at least I'm less patient with it. In Halo games I will replay a single level over and over until I get it right, whereas Dragon Age I died about twice and didn't bother to pick it up again. I'm playing Halo on a much more difficult setting, but in many character based RPGs I find them harder to complete just because I find it harder to enjoy playing.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

Try playing Mass Effect on insanity. At the start there are nameless goons as tough, if not tougher than you.
As with all game genres, there is great variety.

But Mass Effect is very... Shooterish and there's no where you can go to grind so it's not really something you can use as an example for all RPGs.

I'm sick of people saying "Mass Effect isn't turn-based = no rpg!!!" A game is an RPG because it focuses on plot and characters, not because of the battle system. Yes, there are a lot of turn-based RPG's, but that has nothing to do with a role-playing-game.

Also, plenty of RPG's are hard, just like plenty of shooters are hard. You can't make a sweeping statement of "RPG's are easy" when you have games like Resonance of Fate and Mass Effect to prove otherwise.

Ah come on ME is not that hard. At the start maybe but once you get Spectre weapons the game is a joke. No more than the rinse repeat Aura-Meltdown-Rezokuken broken formula of FF VIII. It is definitely a RPG but a focus on plot on characters if only part of being a RPG(Although that is not what I am disputing here as I believe a level and dynamic stat system along with a degree of exploration is required for a VIDEO GAME RPG). The only truly hard part is the fight for Liara. Even then only on Insanity - Spectre Gear/High stun lock perks.

OT: RPGs can be hard but if you need excessive grinding to win you probably aren't doing it right. Well right is not the best word but you could be playing strategically better. You should be able to beat a boss at least 5-10 levels ahead of you unless they have some lame ass moves or attributes then a tad more grinding is acceptable.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

Go beat Wizardry IV and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and tell me they were easier than Kingdom Hearts because they were not real time.

 

[Swaki]

Some of them are, true grinding can make the game easier, but excessive amounts of time spent playing the same game will make it easier no matter what, few people just pick up a fps/rts/fighter/what have you and master them, and its rare that grinding is any fun so its not something i do, i mostly see it as a alternative to simply quit the game when you face an obstacle you cant handle, i have tons of games i have quitted playing despite enjoying them because i got stuck (SMB comes to mind), if i quit playing an rpg its because i don't have fun.

So yeah rpgs can be hard but mostly include ways to make the game easier.

 

[ValentineUK]

Some RPGs can be difficult in a sense. Some require you to use strategy and tactics to win fights, some require you to spend time to train your character(s), some even screw you if you can't hit a certain button/combination of buttons fast enough. So it all comes down to what you are/aren't good at doing in games.

 

[Akihiko]

It varies honestly. If it's a linear rpg without any enemy scaling, generally it is as hard as you make it. If you didn't bother with random battles, and therefore was underleveled, then it could be very tough. On the other hand you could constantly grind and sail through the game. Of course you do get outliers like Demon's Souls, and certain Shin Megami Tensei games which aren't necessarily hard, but are extremely unforgiving. Most wrpgs now contain difficulty levels and level scaling, so you end up never having to rely on 'grinding' to get past challenges, and you can also set how tough you want it.

 

[Nieroshai]

About the "final" fight, here's something Final Fantasy 7 and 10 did: the "final" boss came AFTER the ultimate boss, as a showing that the hero finally obtained the power and will to overcome the end. The true final boss in FF7 wasn't Shirtless Sephiroth, it was Safer(Seraph?) Sephiroth, while Shirtless was just a playable cutscene meant to make Cloud look epic. Same with Yu Yevon at the end of ff10. Yevon was a joke meant to show you had conquered your foe and had nothing left to finish him off, while Jecht was the real final boss.

 

[WorldCritic]

It depends on the RPG. Some RPGs are time consuming like you said and if you level up enough even the final boss can be made into your little *****, but some RPGs stay difficult no matter how much you level up. Legend of the Unemployed Ninja was a major offender for this since even if you were level 99 the later dungeons could be next to impossible without the very best equipment and strategies.

 

[Vern5]

Only if you don't refrigerate them.

*sigh* Really? >.>

If you're playing an RPG that is fun, then you wont notice how hard it is.

That's right. I can make constructive posts, too

I wasn't sighing at how it wasn't helpful, but at how terribly bad it was xD

I know. But it just seemed so natural.

 

[Mosesj]

It sometimes varies, the hardest rpg game I've played is odin sphere. That game's almost unforgiving on hard

 

[Therumancer]

Are RPGs hard? Like, are they difficult?
I remember I got into a flame war about how Final Fantasy VII's final boss was not difficult, mainly because (In Cloud's Mind) you could do nothing and kill Sepharoth. Seriously. Do nothing and Cloud will counter the attack.
But some guy misunderstood and said that it was beyond difficult. All the hours of work he put into the game to build up to level 80 or something.
Then I came to a conclusion.

Most RPGs are not hard, but rather time-consuming. And it feels like the difficulty of a Role-Playing-Game is easily diminished by hours of grinding a character. If you do, any boss or enemy is a breeze to just plow through.

Like, hard RPGs are only really RPGs with enemies that have levels close to your characters. But you can easily even the odds.

The only real hard RPGs are the ones where the battles are real-time like Kingdom Hearts or Dark Cloud. Even if you are at a high level, a fast boss or a delayed reaction could mean death.

Feh. Wat do you think?

Edit: Didn't add poll options before posting. My bad.

Well, I don't consider Kingdom Hearts or Dark Cloud to be RPGs at all, but that's a whole differant discussion.

It largely comes down to the RPG in question. Most introductory level or casual RPGs are pretty simple by their very nature. I consider most JRPGs nowadays to fall into this catagory as there is more of a focus on the storyline than any really deep gameplay mechanics.

Difficult RPGs are ones that involve a lot of statistics and which require a detailed knowlege of how they all interact with each other, beyond the simple "use an enemy's weakness against it" mechanic. In general you'll find that these are the games where a lot of casual players will look at them and go "WTF, this thing is like an ultra-jumbo sized spread sheet with 20 sub menus for each trivial thing".

Like any game though, with time you get good at them, and they become considerably easier.

While at best a mid-weight RPG, just earlier today there was a thread from a guy who was intimidated by Fallout 3 simply because it was a sandbox and there was no clear "taken by the hand" set of directions once you leave the vault.

Length and dedication do come into play with games, however I do not think that simply being very long or requiring incredible amounts of patience have anything to do with the actual difficulty of a game.

I'll also be honest in saying that while neglected somewhat today, one of the elements that made a lot of classic RPGs hard, was not only the stats, length, and gradual character development, but also the focus on exploration and puzzles. See, in old games like the original "Might And Magic" a big part of the challenge was to explore the entire world, map it as you went, and find the clues you needed to solve problems. You'd for example find gold and silver messages in the various castles, that had to do with the eventual solution to the game's overarching quest which is simply to "discover the secret of the Inner Sanctum" which is in the center of the Astral Plane. You had to find the messages, and then figure out what they meant and what to do with them on your own based on your other explorations.

At the time that game came out, cluebooks were just that, they provided clues, as opposed to walkthroughs. Today very few people have the abillity, or the patience, to puzzle thorough things like that. The entire point of a dungeon might be to find something scrawled on a wall that has relevence to something in another area.

Another good example from the first Might and Magic would be the town of Portsmith, which is under the thrall of a succubus queen. She'll take out any male character in your party instantly if you find her, and in addition at every intersection in the random encounter laden town, every male in the party is drained, making it a serious chore. So unless you happened to be playing an all female party to begin with, how do you solve this problem? Well let's just say there is no clear cut solution presented, but there is a dungeon under the town that if you explore it you'll find a fountain that will reverse genders. Not especially complex, but it's something that involves exploration and trial and error, especially seeing as nobody walks up and says "hey the Succubus queen is behind a secret door through that series of small rooms, and ummm by the way before you fight her you should really go into the dungeon beneath the town for some gender bending because she paralyzes all men instantly when the fight starts".


RPGs are not for everyone, basically if your the kind of person who seriously looks at them and thinks of Yahtzee's joke about combat involving two people taking turns kicking each other in the shins, well then the genere is not really for you, and honestly if turn based combat bothers you, chances are your not going to ever really find yourselve involved in many serious RPG experiences, because at it's core RPGs are all about things being resolved by stats. While it's possible to have an RPG that works in real time, to be honest it mostly occurs nowadays in the context of an "action RPG" which is an oxymoron, because as soon as your abillity to manipulate the controls starts to resolve the conflicts it ceases to be an RPG.

I don't think many people ever considered "Final Fantasy VII" to be very hardcore, or at least not many serious RPG players. It's mostly praised for it's story, and characters, which were far more revolutionary at the time than now. It's battle system was also very pretty and flashy for the time, however like a lot of casual and introductory level games, the game rapidly turned into a matter of simply deciding which overpowered attack you were going to use to crush the latest group of enemies. Your big reward being to gather new and more exciting methods of overkill.

Now Final Fantasy VII, and other games in the series, did get SOME cred due to some totally optional side events that existed to demonstrate a mastery of the game's mechanics. Things like Emerald and Ruby Weapon, in Final Fantasy VII are examples, however it's noteworthy that in solving those puzzles it was mostly just for the bragging right, as nothing you could gain from them was worth the effort, especially seeing as by that point you were so powerful that you could wipe out the game's actual final boss by sneezing on him.

I'm a bit tired, so apologies if I'm not stating all of this properly.

 

[Azrael the Cat]

What you're referring to is actually a relatively recent (last 10 years - yes, when you've been gaming since 1983 that's recent) phenomenon where games generally have removed all trace of mental challenge and tactics. It isn't that crpgs are inherently easier than twitch games, it's that twitch difficulty is the only one allowed these days, which means that crpgs (which traditionally had a strong tactical subgenre) no longer have any means of being difficult.

For some examples on how crpgs could be difficult back when games were 'allowed' to have tactical challenge, and developers weren't afraid of losing the guys who refuse to read or think:
- take the early crpg series that the jrpg genre was inspired by: Wizardry - it's a western series but the Japanese are still doing clones (as in (a) literally remaking the originals over and over again with upgraded graphics, (b) still making games of that style with updated graphics, and (c) the combat system still influences jrpgs to this day). The main challenge in Wizardry was logistical. If your party wiped, death was permanent and in the early parts of the series the game overwrote your save in that scenario. The only way of retrieving a wiped party would be to level up another party and send them down to fetch the corpses of the original guys so they could be resurrected at the temple. Death being quick (traps, monster abilities) and not resolvable by quickload meant that this wasn't a game that you grinded. It was a game where you planned your journeys in and out of the dungeon, trying to get in and out with efficiency.

- the main challenge was logistical. Need to build a party that mitigates risk between enemy instadeath attacks (resistances, counter-abilities), incapacitation effects (enemy casters with sleep spells, breath attacks that paralyze/stun/poison/sleep multiple party members, etc) and standard hp loss. Requires thought, not grinding, otherwise you'll soon be losing characters to instakills from enemy ninjas, or wiping when your overlevelled party gets pwned by a much lower level enemy group because they slept your front line and melee-slaughtered your casters due to your party not being prepared to deal with that tactic (just levelling up won't be adequate). And then the main thing - you have VERY limited mana/hp resources, even at high levels. There are traps that will take up hp and spells, monster groups that will drain your hp/spells, and worst of all traps designed to make you lose your way in the dungeon - teleports to rooms that look identical so that you don't know you've teleported, mirror rooms where moving north takes you south, pits that drop you down levels without you knowing where the stairs back up are - and getting lost is the worst possible thing that can happen to you (risk of running out of resources in terms of hp/spells, plus you don't know where to send your corpse-collection crew if the party wipes). Even at high levels, you can't hang around the dungeon with a 'I'll just stay here and grind my way through' attitude, or you'll find yourself stuck 7 floors down and with the stairs/elevator nowhere in sight, without the spells/hp you need to get past the monsters you'll encounter on the way back up, and no way of recovering those spells/hp where you are.

None of that is solveable by 'spending more time' - in fact 'spending more time' will just increase your chance of wiping.

The other way that crpgs used to be difficult was through tactical combat. Take as an example Jagged Alliance 2, from late 90s. You've got a party of merchs in the south american jungle, with various weapon/medical/technical/human-resources skills and stats, and an isometric zoomed out view of the map with fog of war. Getting shot, like in real life, is not something you necessarily recover from, even if you have a well-equipped and trained medic with you. If you just send your party absurdly walking forward into enemy lines, they will all be shot and killed within a few seconds - as in literally one or two-shotted, before they get a chance to act. As you'd expect from doing something so silly. Ok, now try getting a merc with decent sight, hearing and stealth to creep up in the shadows (you were sensible enough to wait until night before attacking superior numbers, weren't you?) and act as a spotter for the merc with the best rifle skill (if possible get him up on a roof, or a top story window). Use the spotter so the sniper can take out the guards without having to leave his roof, and (more importantly) so he's not firing his gun in the middle of the buildings waking all the enemy troops up. Get your other guys into cover (building to building is a good idea, clear the building, then take positions at the windows if an open firefight starts up outside).

If you don't approach things with that kind of an attitude, you'll wipe regardless of how levelled up your mercs are. It's a difficult tactical challenge like wargaming. You'll also need to be good at a meta-strategical level. You'll need resources, and this isn't some magical fairyland where you can get everything you need for the revolution from chests and enemy corpses. Capturing and holding one of several gold mines on the world map is a good idea - although that's probably going to provoke a major military counter-strike and there's no hiding your position from the enemy commmander when you're attacking a major operation like that (yes, that matters - there's units and armies moving around the world map that you can't see due to fog of war, and like in a RTS if the enemy knows your position then they can send forces over to attack you. Unlike a RTS you can't just crank out an army in response). But if you don't, you're not going to have the resources to hire, train and equip any revolutionary militia, and it isn't some silly magicland where your party of 6 mercs can somehow defeat the enemy army. So work out a strategy for taking a mine (admittedly, I cheese that by taking it, then vacating it and waiting in the next map square before the massive enemy counterattack arrives, THEN retake it while the enemy army are occupying it but sleeping - is actually easier than trying to hold the town against a force so large), then a strategy for training and deploying militia. You'll need to leave one of your mercs in place, hopefully with levelled up 'teaching' stat, to get the training going at a decent pace.

Then you'll need strategy-game style to work out a way of defeating a much greater force, while using your party of mercs to take towns, train militia, raid supplies etc etc.

Again, none of that is doable just by investing time. You need to think and act tactically, or you'll be wiped very very quickly, even if you've maxed out every merc in every stat (not actually possible in a single game, but anyway).

 

[mrhateful]

Well the last boss of BG2:ToB(exp) was very hard, it was first on my second play through that I managed to defeat it.