But, I LIKE this Cliché!

[tkioz]

The "Break into random people's houses and take their shit. While they watch, and even greet you kindly after you steal all their possesions and sell them for armor/items/money/crack." cliche is still going strong today.

Actually Dragon Age lampshaded that, in the elf camp if you ask the keeper for supplies he says "sure talk to the dude over there", first time around I went wandering, looted everything in the place, then went and spoke to him, I asked him for supplies and he informed me "it's in that chest over there... but you already know that" in such a voice I felt like a little kid again.

 

[pumasuit]

One of my favorite cliches:

In a room filled with hostiles, moving through he dialogue tree, and then choosing a reasonable comment that sets off the hostile leader, plunging the party into combat where the main tactic is "if it breathes, kill it".

I like these moments just because i enjoy going back to the last save and finding out if there was anything that could be done to avoid combat. Most of the time, it turns out that combat is inevitable. Hope you enjoyed all the health potions you had. You're going to need them.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

"Quick, we'll head them off at the pass!"

"Head them off at the pass? I HATE that cliche!"BANG!

Yeah, I spotted the reference

 

[mrverbal]

My favorite is the 'massive quantities of random chests/barrels/cupboards which have valuable stuff which no-one except you ever thought to pinch'

Take fallout 3: You're in a post apocalyptic world in which people scavenge for food and drink and such. But no one except you is smart enough to go up to that old coke machine and steal the juicy coke inside.

 

[bakonslayer]

Main char is ALWAYS asleep at the start

This shows that the main character has NOTHING better to do with his life. He was a lousy slack before you took over his life! This one is probably my favorite.

 

[CounterAttack]

Here's a list for you all that will trump anything you can think of. Beware, it is ridiculously long, and all of them apply to at least one game you know.

http://project-apollo.net/text/rpg.html

 

[Ryuk2]

Those are good chiche's you wrote down, but what about the bad ones? I'm sure there is a lot of bad ones.
I hate this one ''Do I Have to do EVERYTHING Around Here?''. For example, in Mount&Blade (half baked RPG game by somebody with low budget) you don't have to do everything. If someone's attacking a castle, you can join, but you can just wait and do nothing. When somebody is attacking you can attack back, but you can order your troops to attack while you do nothing. In one quest you have to train some peasants so that they could defend themselves against bandits.
When I'm doing everything completely alone, i feel like I'm an idiot. If i can take all the bad guys all by myself, why can't others defend themselves? What's the point of having charisma and dialogue choices if i can even tell them to help me?
Wouldn't it be good to have ''charisma'' to actually DO something? I want a game where there is an option to talk your way out of most situations, but you would have to put all your experience point's in charisma, and you probably wouldn't get a lot of stuff.
And i hate caves and tombs.

 

[Ryuk2]

Agressive rats.........why do rpg-rats have such a thirst for blood....if rats were as agressive IRL as they are in oblivion we would surely perish.

Well, because the first RPG's started with the weakest enemy - a rat. It probably was for giggles, but every other RPG just copies it. I like it, it's a weak enemy, you can start of as a pest killer.

 

[Elementlmage]

Do I Have to do EVERYTHING Around Here?

"Welcome to our town, stranger. The king has been poisoned, the well is contaminated, the princess has been kidnapped, the drawbridge is broken, the fields are overrun with wolves, we lost contact with the monastery, the merchants are all squabbling about something, the dock workers are rioting, the inn is infested with rats, there are undead in the graveyard, one of the ships is under quarantine, there's a curse on the temple, several town guards are taking bribes, an evil mage has been kidnapping young women, a supply shipment is over a week late, the Duke hasn't been acting like himself lately, a bad minstrel is annoying people in the town square, goblins have moved into our sprawling sewer system, widow Creekjoint has lost her cat, a priceless artifact has gone missing, and we've got an entrenched criminal organization that we're all too chickenshit to fight. If you could fix all that we'd be much obliged."

"Uh... hi?"

Two words: The Witcher (enhanced edition)...

 

[Noone From Nowhere]

The only catch-all non-explaination that needs to be said of the traps which still work after centuries without maintainence: "It's Magic!" or rather "Enchantment!"

One that you didn't touch on which was in Dragon Age: Origins as well as in many other RPGs since they first came into being-- the implacable Unstoppable Legions of Darkness who really wouldn't be that much of a problem with modern weapons technology.

Guns and missiles would have made short work of the DarkSpawn and the ArchDemon before the Blight even began, possibly because there would be a Blight-Detector handy. One could probably have nuked Merunes Dagon in Oblivion, as well.

 

[Twilight_guy]

Nobody else is every trying to save the world. There going to let a band of teens do it while they stand around and parrot the same few lines over and over.

The best treasure is always at the very end, right behind a giant boss that always seems to waiting for you to come.

No matter how many generals of evil you kill or how many cities you save, nobdy knows who the hell you are.

The hero always wields a sword but his supporting crew can wield guns, axs, staffs, and shoes or anything other odd and end.

Everyone, even if they live in a magically sealed off cave in the negaverse, accepts the same currency. They also usually have very similar prices on goods.

Your map never has anything listed on it until you visit that spot dispute the fact that it often has a picture of the location beforehand.

 

[Tales of Golden Sun]

A cartoon I saw in my youth subverted the trap cliche`. Rather than guess where to stand and for how long to avoid the firey balls of impaling spear doom, they were able to locate the service passages the engineers used to perform routine maintenance of the death machine and simply walked around.

Haha, brilliant. This should be done in RPGs.

 

[Lawbringer]

The unusual loot you pick up from enemies and I think World of Warcraft must be the worst for this. Right, that's the small army of rats dealt with, let's see what we've got:

10 x rat meat (pretty standard for rats, really)
6 Gold pieces (rather unusual for a rat to carry currency, but what the hell...)
Shimmering necklace of protection (clearly broken seeing as I'm looting your corpse, and when were rats into accesorising?)
Barbarian's huge axe of destruction (Were you wielding this against me? If so, why did no-one think to say anything? If not, where were you hiding this? The mind boggles...)

 

[Lerxst]

My favorite - Meeting the Big Bad Boss several times throughout the game and instead of ending it with one quick stab to the neck, talking to them like an idiot and letting them proceed with world domination so that you can fight a long, drawn out battle with them when they become 100 times more powerful.

 

[UtopiaV1]

"Do i have to do everything around here?"

Wouldn't it be kinda neat if there were other bands of adventurers wandering around the land doing quests as well. The player need never see them, but if u choose to do one quest, complete it, then head back to the quest-giver, and try to do another, they could say "Oh that? Some other guys cleaned that up." Then it would encourage multiple play-throughs, and make the player think very carefully about whom to help.

I think that's a neat idea. Anyone else think so? Also, funny article, here's a piece of pie...

 

[Zagzag]

The Ancient Well-Lit Tomb with Traps that Still Work:
Although its not an RPG in Uncharted 2 you go through several dungeons filled with broken traps and machines, especially in the Nepal level

Spoiler

when you try to pull a lever to lower a bridge the counterwieghts break off and smash the bridge, forcing you to find another way across. This level has almost too many examples of machines not working after hundreds of years to count.

 

[Irridium]

The "Break into random people's houses and take their shit. While they watch, and even greet you kindly after you steal all their possesions and sell them for armor/items/money/crack." cliche is still going strong today.

Actually Dragon Age lampshaded that, in the elf camp if you ask the keeper for supplies he says "sure talk to the dude over there", first time around I went wandering, looted everything in the place, then went and spoke to him, I asked him for supplies and he informed me "it's in that chest over there... but you already know that" in such a voice I felt like a little kid again.

Yeah, true. But a few times I would wander around places, go into inns and just take what was in the chests. My lockpicking was really high so I got into pretty much everything that didn't require a key.

 

[TheBlackKnight]

What about the "Lets foreshadow a difficult boss battle, by letting the beast scream and growl and you hear it from far away".

See Firekraag dungeon in Baldur's Gate 2 && Tower of Ishal in Dragon Age.