Damn it, stop making me rich!

[Ironman126]

I believe there was a mod floating around somewhere on Nexus that made weapons, arrows, and potions appear much more rarely then they originally do.

NINJAS!!!!

But yes, mods, mods, and more mods. Mods for everything. Mods for cool new weapons. Mods for cooler armor. Mods for making all those cool new toys nearly impossible to find. There is a solution. Unless you aren't playing on a PC. Then I pity you a little.

 

[dvd_72]

Have you taken a look at Metro 2033? I find that on the ranger difficulties I am allways scrounging around for ammo because even if I have more than enough for a particular encounter, you find so little that every little bit helps.

Hell, at the very end, after picking up every single round I could find I had to resort to my knife towards the tail end of the game. Now that was interesting all the way through!

 

[rayen020]

play turn based strategy games? those tend to make you work for your resources. unless you choose the economic strong race. but then you're making your own bed.

 

[Wolfram23]

Yep, not very good game design. But then again, I don't think it's easy to balance. On one hand, that overpoweredness is often what makes a game so awesome by the end, but on the other hand a game like Skyrim is supposed to stretch on for a long long time and it removes a lot of the fun.

The solution of course would be to scale drops and prices based on what you currently have, and difficulty.

 

[laggyteabag]

I find this problem a lot on games like assassins creed too, when you start the game you sit there and decide whether to spend those hard earned Akçe/Florins on a sword or some armour, or making Ezio look even more badass. But by the middle of the game you own enough shops you get 20,000 Akçe/Florins every 20 minutes, and you own all of the shops, weapons and armour so all you can spend it on is ammunition for your crossbow/gun or medicine/poison, and you don't even need to do that because most enemies have a load of ammo/medicine on their corpses!

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Snip

This is a major problem I had with Bioware games in particular. Starting with Knights of the Old Republic, it has become obscenely easy to get way too much coin too fast. In KOTOR, all you needed to do was win the Tatooine Swoop Race circuit. That would give you roughly twenty thousand credits, enough to last the whole game.

Mass Effect would end with your cash flow being in the millions.

Dragon Age was a bit harder, but once you got twenty sovereigns, you were golden. (pun intended)

Dragon Age 2 made even this a joke, where you would be capped out for all the gold you'd need by the end of act one.

The only Bioware game that made me feel strapped for cash was Mass Effect 2, because there you couldn't sell items back. You had a limited pool of cash, and if you wanted everything, you had to plan it out very methodically and use proper equipment to get the discounts.

 

[Lawnmooer]

Yeah... Amassing wealth is too easy sometimes...

In Skyrim it is so very easy, I don't even fully loot corpses anymore (I take only things that weigh 1 or less which is normally just potions and gold) but even then I end up with over 50k gold, all the houses fully furnished and nothing to buy (Then again I rarely buy anything in that game, only smithing materials, arrows and occasionally spells) since I can normally find or make better items. I play on Master difficulty all the time (And have done since my 6th character) I even try constraints such as "I will only use bows" and "I will not craft anything... At all" and I still end up stupid powerful and rich.

Fallout 3 and NV it starts off quite well (On the hardest difficulty + Hardcore mode) looking around for Stimpaks and ammo as well as desperatly trying to find a weapon that will do some real damage. Then after a while (Just picking up things that weigh 1 or less again) I end up with enough money to buy every item at all of the vendors 3 times over, have more Stimpaks than I'll ever need to use and have enough ammo to fund several wars (Both sides of them).

Titan Quest... I'm currently running around with over 700,000 gold and the only things to buy are potions which cost 150 each. I also have picked up over 200 of the sodding things and rarely have to use them (I don't get hit often)

Terraria started off with me feeling out of my depth, I couldn't fend off the Zombies and Demon Eyes that came out at night, my home was tiny and any minerals where hard to find. Now I have over 250 platinum, full sets of all the armour in game (As well as all the basic weapons) my house is fully populated and all I have left to do is farm enemies until I get the items to summon the 3 hardmode bosses. I've done all this by just exploring the one world I've played in.

*Sigh* I wish that games would either make it somewhat challenging to make money or give lots of things to buy throughout the game (Demon's Souls and Dark Souls do this quite well, since you use the same resource for both Exp and for cash and can end up losing everything you have if you die before touching your bloodstain. Also there are quite a few things to buy, new spells and miracles, upgrades for weapons (Both buying some of the resources and using souls to upgrade aswell), extra stat points (AKA leveling up) buying consumables (Which aren't easily farmed in these games))

 

[Twilight_guy]

Would you rather a game provide you with too much or have a deficiency in resources? Let me answer for you, you want a game balanced on the side of too much because a game balanced the other way becomes litterally unplayable if you happen to not get everything as oppose to to becomeing easier down the line and nobody wants to search the land for every last doo-dad to contiue or manage resources hyper judiciously because screwing up once means resetting. Imagine an RPG where one bad battle means having to co reset. I dont care if there are save points every 10 minutes, do you want to reset every-time the game's random number generator throws a 1?

 

[TheCommanders]

I have a brilliant solution to this problem. I'm incredibly paranoid that no matter how hard whatever challenge I'm currently facing is, the next one will be much harder. As such, I may at some point late in the game have near limitless resources, but I'll be too petrified to actually use any of them. For example, in skyrim I'm always terrified too purchase anything with my mountains of cash, because who knows, the next merchant might have something I like better! Ahhh! Or all the potions in pretty much every fantasy rpg ever that I refuse to use because the next boss might require them more. Consequently, I tend to think games are way harder than they are, and end boss fights are almost incomprehensibly easy.

NOTE: This playstyle is not recommended for the sane.

 

[omicron1]

The problem is having the strength of Hercules and backpack space for an entire armory. It makes enemy loot possible to claim completely and, in combination with the high numbers of enemies regularly thrown at the player and the price curve for equipment necessitated by your average player's bulging wallet, makes it nigh-impossible to keep the player from gaining money at a fantastic rate.
Some possible ways to combat this:
* realistic inventory. Keep the player from walking off with an entire army's supplies on his back and you make loot a much less broken idea.
* realistic economy. Why should grocers buy your old armor? Why should smiths be willing to take fifty swords off your hands?
* money drains. Food and repair are good examples of this; mount & blade-style wages another. Balance player power with costs and you may well keep his coffers reasonably low.

At the same time, letting the player gain power for money is a reasonable goal. Just don't make it too easy.

 

[AdmiralMemo]

In Star Trek Online, I've got energy credits out the wazoo, so I can pretty much buy anything I want off the Exchange, except the ultra-rare stuff. I typically force myself to rely on my mission rewards and the drops, though, which makes the game more challenging. Only when I get stuck (like dying over a dozen times on the same mission) do I either loot the Fleet Bank or buy from the Exchange.

 

[Limecake]

I think this is more of a case of the general population that play these games than an actual flaw in the game design.

For example the first time I played through Resident evil 4 I walked through the whole game without much trouble. The second time through I played with my roomate and he seemed to enjoy using all the best weapons when it wasn't the time to use them.

this lead to some interesting scenarios where we literally had no ammo for any guns.

 

[DestinyCall]

Beyond resource scarcity and low value re-sale prices, I wonder if taxes could be a workable way to curb excess loot hording. I'm thinking something along the lines of an occasional mandatory fee incurred by the player that removes a percentage of his current accumulated gold. The idea would be to encourage spending money rather than hoarding it up, with the end-goal of preventing the player from accumulating an overabundance of riches. The game economy should have a decent selection of low and high level cash sinks - stuff that gives minor or temporary boosts, cosmetic changes, and non-gameplay focused items, to spend your cash.

Ideally, the "tax" should be integrated seamlessly into the story or game-play somehow. For example, your character might have a wife and children back home and he regularly sends home part of his income to help his family. You could even have a "magic mirror" or something in your inventory which lets you check-up on your family. Over the course of the game, as you hit certain money mile-markers, the family home could change and improve to reflect the positive effect your contributions are having on their quality of life. This feature of the game could even be integrated into the game's skill tree .. with traits like "family man" increasing the percentage of income sent home each payment cycle or "dead-beat dad" dropping the family contribution. This would allow players to adjust the game experience to their liking, if they find the tax unpleasant or enjoy giving to their virtual family.

Another option in the RPG genre might be including more "basic needs" into the equation, like what was implemented in Fallout NV and certain old-school RPGs. Eating, sleeping, thirst, etc. The timescale of the game world might need to be tweaked so it doesn't get too annoying, but encourages the player to spend money on inns and taverns or buying supplies so you can build a fire. Your character would incur penalties that affect game-play if he neglects basic needs and get a boost to attributes after a good night's sleep. It would still be tricky to balance - you wouldn't want to make it too hard for the player to satisfy basic needs or it would become frustrating and possibly even unplayable. Later on, you could provide higher priced foods/services that would satisfy the character for longer periods of time at the cost of much steeper rates, trading gold for ease of use.

 

[esperandote]

Silent Hill Origins. On my first playthrough i managed to get to the final boss without firing a single shot of the assault riffle (you heard me right, assault riffle in silent hill) and I also had plenty energy drinks so a just stood there in the same spot shotting my assault riffle and taking all the damage the boss threw at me and i just healed and recharged till it was dead. Lamest boss fight ever.

 

[Muspelheim]

Agreed in Skyrim's case... After a while, it's less about having the resources as just using them for the hell of it. I've got a nice flat in Markarth and still more than enough gold for spare horses (mine tend to die alot... *Ruffles Hjalmar VI's mane*) and some good enchants on my armour, if I feel that I need it.
I'm still doing the dungeons and the quests because I feel like it. But I'm more like the eccentric hobby-archaeologist noble now, as opposed to a newcomer carving his name in history against all odds. I still have fun, but I would probably would have appreciated my wonderful d0rf-flat and my horses more if they'd been a bit harder to earn.

But then again, the best rewards for me are the ones I sort of blundered in to. Like Wabbajack, my souvenir from my teaparty with Ol' Man Cheese or my cute Argonian husband. So I'm still not -entirely- sure if it's the scarcity of resources that makes or breaks a game.

In some games, it does. Like Stalker, where a huge part of the atmosphere was about feeling outmatched, with tinfoil armour, a Kalash older than you and desperate for some baked beans. But in other games, hoarding resources is really rather secondary. It's useful to have, but it's not something the experience hinges on.

Of course, in Skyrim's case, a hardcore mode-styled mod would certainly be welcome. Eat to not starve, warm up by fires to not freeze, spend time with your spouse to not misuse your Dremoras... There's fun in that type of gameplay, too, I'm sure.

 

[Epona]

I just don't understand this attitude. "WAH! I made good choices and now the game is too easy, change the game developers!"

You may as well be saying "I leveled up to 99 on Final Fantasy VII and Sephiroth was too easy. WAH!". Well no shit, don't level up to 99 next time.

 

[Savagezion]

ESC > Settings > Difficulty > Master

Here's an idea, drop a load of cash. Give yourself a limit to the amount of money you can have at one time, make a mod?

playing it on the PS3, so no mod, and I don't know what it is, I'm programmed to pick up everything in RPG's, then I repair guns and armour, then pick up spares, and repair them....
basicly my characters all have OCD!

1st world problems....

Game developers probably don't know how to solve world hunger either. While we try to figure that out, how about they work on correcting a problem in their field?

This is a valid complaint against game design. World hunger and child abuse isn't related, its a cop-out tactic.

OT: I agree completely. Most games try to peg the player as the underdog going against the odds, but the games tend to end up having the player have the odds heavily stacked in their favor due to extremely abundant resources and a poor economy model. Unless you are playing an economy style game, the economy hardly ever gets any attention in game design.