Damn it, stop making me rich!

[Savagezion]

Wow, some people take themselves too seriously/dont understand the meme. And as many have said before, its a difficult problem that people are quick to point out, but cant offer solutions.

The thread is offering a solution. Bethesda said arrows were going to be more powerful but harder to keep in stock. However, they are abundant and dirt cheap if you ever would need to buy them. My archer sells arrows for 0 gold to merchants. Potions are only mildly scarce because they aren't sold by the bushel at vendors. However, they are often just lying around in great number in caves. There is so much money available in the game, it is a viable strategy to train your levels with cash.

Bethesda's economy model is wonderful compared to Rockstar's. "Thanks for stealing a car, here's $50,000. You want to buy my nightclub for $2000?"

The solution is to quit making costs so low and then throw money at the player so that they can use it to solve everything. You want to do that? That is what "Easy mode" is for. Many "hard" modes out there today just mean baddies with more HP and hit harder, which can be entirely solved with health potions which you can usually buy with the ungodly amounts of money thrown at you as well as superior gear. This negates the purpose of even having a hard mode as "Easy" is just extreme overkill in these situations.

 

[Right Hook]

It's how you play and the difficulty you play, I have a friend who is level thirty in Skyrim, not on a hard difficulty and yet he has little gold, one house without any upgrades and a wife that has gone missing...it's funny how it somewhat reflects his real life.

 

[Fijiman]

I am an absolute pack-rat in games like the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series. The way I play, by the time I've got about 30-35 hours clocked in I'm usually very well-off as far as money goes and I usually have plenty of extra supplies lying around my house. However, because I'm a giant pack-rat, I don't mind having lots of extra stuff unless I'm actually carrying it.(I hate non-removable quest items that weigh even a few pounds) I also have to agree with your point on Bioshock. I love the game, but it was constantly switching between me either having a full wallet and plenty of supplies to scrounging for every dollar and bullet I can get.

 

[VoidWanderer]

And that's the big problem with Computer RPGs.

As a DM for pen and paper ones, I have no problem with dicking players over with money (Thieves Guild, or taking advantage of their distractions). With CRPGs you can't really do that, because the story is set in stone, there is no true fluidity. Sure it may bend depending on morality, but that's a whole other problem entirely.

This is why I prefer games with player housing and not the silly Fable stuff either. Great money sinks and you feel good looking at your house fully decked out... I do anyway

 

[hazabaza1]

OT: it's an age-long problem of designing an RPG for both the casual and completionist crowds. People who don't do any sidequests/exploration deserve to have a fair chance at winning the game, and people who do all the sidequests will find the game easy because, well, otherwise you'd be screwing the people on the other end of the spectrum. Of course, as was mentioned, Dark Souls doesn't do this. But does Dark Souls even have any sidequests to begin with? It's a fairly linear game designed for a hardcore audience, and it's not a "pure" RPG to begin with.

If you try to meet all the side characters and covenants and follow their stories, I suppose that could count, but I certainly understand where you're coming from.


OT: Nier had this problem in massive amounts. The first half or so of the game you were piss-poor, and buying a new weapon was a proper investment. 60% in or so, and all of a sudden, you could buy stacks of the best healing items with pocket change.

 

[deidara]

Meh, I don't mind being rich. I have self control, if I want a challenge, I'll make a challenge for myself. And if I don't, then great I can buy whatever I want.

 

[illas]

Dark Souls (again) old friend. Dark Souls does it right.

But I agree with you, and this all stems into the challenge of a game. An unchallenging game will persist on making things easier for you to continue along right to the end, and a challenging game strips you of these extras and leaves you with the bare necessities.

After Dark Souls, I don't want to play half the games I have because they are so overwhelmingly generous.

Ditto.

Dark Souls has make it quite difficult for me to take past and present Triple-A titles seriously. Particularly, I find the gap regarding tolerance for mistakes to be massive.

OT: I wonder if one played Skyrim realistically - ie: not searching every jar/chest/corpse - how the money Vs ability to spend it ratio would work out.

 

[PatrickXD]

A game that sort of fixed this problem for me was STALKER. Sure, they still throw too much stuff at you, but the weight restriction was harsh until you reach end game gear. It was also way easier to get myself in the feeling of 'Pickup what I need to survive' as opposed to 'Pick up everything'

 

[x EvilErmine x]

I think I've been doing it wrong then, in Skyrim the most gold I've had at one time is about 10K Septims...but then I don't generally do the whole loot everything in sight thing. I only get loot from chests and non human enemys. The only time I take anything from a human corps is if it's a quest item or something like that.

Though i did brake the bank in the first Mass Effect game, I had so many credits that the game just said nope you cant have any more money coz we have ran out of numbers. So it was a little bit of an understatement when i started the second one and got a bonus for bringing across a rich character. I was like no shit, I could have bought the citadel.

EDIT

Snippy

...Snip
OT: I wonder if one played Skyrim realistically - ie: not searching every jar/chest/corpse - how the money Vs ability to spend it ratio would work out.

It does have a significant effect, I'm level 37 and it's still daunting economically to buy stuff like sole gems and what not from merchants.

 

[VeneratedWulfen93]

You should try Metro 2033 on one of the Ranger-difficulties...I played it on Ranger Hardcore. No crosshair, no HUD unless you toggled it, you get ammo at 1-3 rounds at a time (though I freaking swear I never found 3 rounds at once..). And the ammo is never enough. You only get a few chances in the game to buy some ammo and guns, and the currency is military-grade ammo. That just happens to be the most powerful type as well, meaning that you actually need it to survive tough parts of the game.

I often found myself running around with a knife, despite the fact that I was careful to only shoot one bullet at a time and aim for the head. Great game, great story, amazing atmosphere.

With that said, I completely agree with you. I hate having too much shit thrown at me that does nothing but make the game less challenging. I hate having too many potions especially, and not just in Skyrim. I play through Kingdoms of Amalur right now, on the hardest difficulty, and 95% of the time I don't need anything but health potions. And hell, I don't even need those 90% of the time.

I did that also but I just stockpiled shotgun ammo for the heavy automatic shotgun and after the library the rest of the game is a breeze.

 

[Cyrus Hanley]

I'd say that I spend ~90% of my time in Fallout: New Vegas just managing my inventory - going back and forth between my apartment in Novac and the places I visit to dump all the crap I've collected, maintaining weapons and armour that I collect solely for sale, and travelling around Nevada trying to find a vendor to sell all my stuff to.

Not that I'm complaining, I just find it amusing to be sitting on 30,000 caps and enough food and water to last me 'til the next nuclear war. Getting shot in the head was probably the best thing that ever happened to my character.

 

[Skulltaker101]

M-M-M-M-Monstersnip

mafia: city of lost heaven had you at one point loose all your money and clothing due to an assassination attempt by burning your house to the ground.

i think mafia 2 had one of this events, too.


i once played a Space flight simulator (forgot its name) where you also lost all your credits.
i could deal with starting with nothing again in mafia but when i lost all my credits in this space flight/combat simulator i was close to fist fighting my monitor.

what i am trying to say is that there is a damn thin line between feeling its okay to lose everything and thinking that the dev of a game are trolling you into grinding for hours again, making their game longer.

and i think this line is too risky to implement in a game for developers.
plus they want you to feel like 'you're the man' and that you have archieved something no other could do.

and they don't really expect that you will pick up everything

which almost everyone does.

Wasn't a fun old game called Tachyon: The Fringe, was it? I know that at one point there you lose all of your money and shiny ships and get given what is essentially a flying bucket and get kicked out of civilized space. Happens pretty early though, so I don't think it has the same impact.

I would appreciate a game that acts like an RPG, but has mechanics similar to an MMORPG, the principal difference being the careful level-scaling that can only be accomplished by people with the same mindset as whoever came up with the Lives system for old arcade games...that of a "Keep them playing, because the more they play, the more money we get!" attitude.

 

[Zydrate]

I think New Vegas did it well. No matter how rich I got, thousands of caps still went to ammo, fully-repaired guns to replace my crap (While keeping the deteriorated versions to repair), implants, and ammo again.
I've been broke at max level while still remaining well equipped. THAT'S a proper balance.

 

[Wolfram23]

It's amazing how few games have a wallet than can only hold a certain amount of Rupees money.

 

[TimeLord]

Pokémon is a good example of this. Money is a completely pointless thing and you can always buy everything you need with no difficulty.