Poll: Who here actually wants RPGs to get easier?

[Kahunaburger]

I think that the resurgence in the roguelike genre and the popularity of stuff like dark souls tells us that quite a few RPG players would appreciate additional difficulty.

 

[Verzin]

The classic D&D RPGs that follow the rules strictly at low levels are just a nightmare. One hit and you can be dead, every attack is crucial and a single strike decides everything.

Unfortunately those don't make for fun play, they are just luck. You have next to no abilities so your strategies are significantly less than what they will be later, so it's just chance on some encounters. I don't care for that at all. A game should become more difficult over time and the beginning should introduce you to the gameplay and let you develop what works and what doesn't. Old school D&D games violate this.

I'm quite happy for them to introduce sliding difficulty bars (which most RPGs have) and put one up at some extreme level to satisfy you, but for me? No. I like challenge but some of the older games were pointlessly binary with life/death where if you went the wrong = certain death. Or having 6 hp and a single attack from an axe deals 1d8. No skill there, just load/reload/reload/win!

I love the classic D&D RPGs. I mean...sure.. a ancient crippled goblin with arthritis and a crossbow could kill a level 1 party, but it encouraged a healthy fear of things. Anything could kill you.
Made it all the sweeter if you got a few levels and some equipment. oh Hi bandits! Your filthy arrows mean nothing to me now! Die! Die!

 

[Evilpigeon]

RPGs get boring for me when I lose the element of fear. I never bother to grind or min-max and I tend to play on harder difficulties yet so often I'm not afraid of my enemies and then, because I feel immortal, I lose any immersion in the world or characters and just breeze my way through the game till I get so bored that I stop playing.

The whole point of an Rpg is the progression from useless to competant (and, through God mode if you happen to feel like level grinding) I want to be able find challenges that my character just isn't up to, I want to have to dig through all that junk in my inventory in a desperate search for anything that will give me an edge in the more difficult fights, I want to actually have to make use of the strengths and weaknesses of my class.

The best moments in rpgs for me are the ones where you've gotten yourself right up shit creek and now you have to try to forge your own paddle using a toothbrush, a coffee cup and whole lot of duct-tape. It's rare that you get a really great experience without a great big challenge to rise to.

 

[Signa]

I'd like to see games move backwards...away from the broadening of appeal. Games used to have target audiences in mind with design aimed at niche groups of fans. The net result was that while fewer people might have bought a particular title, those games are to this day legendary titles and sadly reminders of a better time.

Games now are solely mass-market appeal. "Dead Space" took survival horror and made it an action game. "Mass Effect 3" took a sci-fi RPG and turned it into a cover-based shooter/interactive movie. It seems that all you need to do now to make a AAA game is take an action game of any sort, add minor RPG elements and you're done.

Games need to get back to being tough, challenging and involve a little work to get good at. I'm simply not interested in bland, easy, consolised games.

Hell, I'd like to see that in all forms of media, because broadening is happening everywhere. But yeah, fully agree with your post. It would be nice if they'd make at least SOME games that appeal to us instead of everyone. Right now, it's all games for everyone, and now it sucks.

 

[twohundredpercent]

I don't care really. Though I think grinding is mad ghey and boring. Even though in some games it's fun to go around attack enemies to test new shit out.

 

[wooty]

This is why I still prefer games like Zelda or Final Fantasy. They dont have difficulty settings, if your not good enough to beat the enemies/bosses then piss off, practice and earn it.

Not that I dont like other RPG's like DA or Mass Effect, its just that it isnt worth playing the game on any setting lower than Hard if you ask me.

 

[imperialwar]

As a long time gamer and long time RPG fan I can honestly say I dont mind either way, but what I want more of is ROLEPLAY. A more character driven selection of typically spoken interactions. If I'm playing an Orc Barbarian with low INT then my speech options should be limited, and thats saying that the character even speaks common. Maybe even limiting me to talking to my own kind and a distinct story there in. Maybe during character creation we can choose a personality set and not just worry about our charisma score. If i choose cocky, sometimes I rub people up the wrong way. If I choose quiet and polite maybe the pub drunk could pick on me as he feels I'm a bit soft.

This being said I played WoW for 6 years and have owned every Final Fantasy game up until 10, and thats even including playing FF4-6 in japanese on SNES with a convertor.
WoW died for me when they took a humongous dump on their own Lore by effectively allowing all races to play all classes ( Cataclysm ). Dwarf Mages ? ah no, no thats not supposed to happen. Night Elf mages ? considering all arcane magic elves became blood elves or Naga, that's not supposed to happen either.

So my solution to the RPG flaw ? P+P RPG's. I loved WoW in its early days and have the P+P version.

 

[somonels]

I do... if they continue with the StorytellingRPG mentality that took over in the 2Ks. They should just remove all gameplay sections and make movies or things like Darkstar One.

RPG is, has never been, about storytellings, protagonists, narratives for me. It has always been about tactical tabletop style of play. The GM and storytelling were there to make it interesting, not as a defining attribute. RPG is about mechanics, not fluff; more numbers, more charts.. nrgh.

 

[Paladin2905]

I think that it is important to note that difficulty comes in two different forms: the "this battle is difficult and will require intricate planning and use of different tactics" and the "if you don't have one character under the zombie effect for some reason we'll kill you and start you off 1 hour ago (I'm looking at you, Yunalesca)".

One form (challenge) we do need more of, I miss controlling six people individually and working their skills together because no individual was strong enough. Those always made for fun and fulfilling battles.

The other form (bullshit arbitrary difficulty) can go off and die. That is what makes me sad when playing games.

It all comes down to one thing for me, if something happens in a game- I should know why. When arbitrary bullshit difficulty slides in and loses me the game, that ticks me off. When I breeze through a game by just clicking attack a bunch, that ticks me off. Fulfilling is a varied and intelligent gameplay experience, and I haven't seen that nearly as much since older RPG titles like the infinity engine series came out.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

The simplifying or "streamlining" of gameplay mechanics in order to make a game more accessible can be a good thing, however do I want to see games get easier and thus have any and all challenge removed? Fuck no! I think we've already gone too far in that direction.

 

[Operation Genesis]

Well, I'm uniformly terrible at all video games, so if they make it easier that's fine by me. I'd say that Fables 2 and 3 were too far in that direction, though. I would like dying to at least be a possibility...as long as there's a decent autosave feature.

 

[Baron_Rouge]

Well, this is just my opinion, but I think RPG's are good in terms of difficulty at the moment. I'm not a gaming veteran exactly, but I have been playing video games since the days of the PS1, and I love modern RPG's. When I want a game that won't show mercy and won't tolerate mistakes, I have Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. When I just want to get absorbed in a beautiful world without being killed at every turn, I have Kingdoms of Amalur. There's a good variety of RPG's out these days to cater to a wide variety of tastes, but you severely limit your audience and risk frustrating a lot of gamers when you make a game crazily or unfairly difficult due to poorly explained mechanics and seemingly arbitrary nuances like some old-school RPG's have in spades, by the sounds of it.

I don't want a game that will kill me because I haven't taken the time to memorize every strategy and learn the weaknesses of every single enemy, and I don't want a game that makes use of archaic and needlessly complicated mechanics. Amalur, Dungeon Siege 3, and even Borderlands were all fine RPG's in my opinion and it was because they were accessible. When I want something harder, I'll switch to Dark Souls or Deus Ex, but modern, "dumbed down" RPG's have a place in this world, and I enjoy them a lot

 

[Kahunaburger]

RPG is about mechanics, not fluff; more numbers, more charts.. nrgh.

I don't think that an RPG can't have a heavy emphasis on story, but I would like to see more attention being paid in RPG games to the mechanics. There's really no excuse for taking an action game, slapping an extraneous leveling system on it, and calling the result an RPG.

 

[Jfswift]

I don't know about dumbing down but sometimes I'd like to see the removal of grinding.

 

[Last Hugh Alive]

I don't want RPG's to get easier necessarily, I've accepted that they're generally just not for me. It happens.

 

[juyunseen]

My problem with a lot of older RPGs is not that they're difficult, but they're not well introduced. I tried playing the original fallout, but I just can't figure out how to play the damn thing.
Things being simpler and more accessible is a great thing.
It isn't dumbing it down if the newer RPGs tend to be easier to play and get into.

That all said, I like difficulty, and I don't grind in most RPGs in order to keep the difficulty up.

 

[Kahunaburger]

There's a good variety of RPG's out these days to cater to a wide variety of tastes, but you severely limit your audience and risk frustrating a lot of gamers when you make a game crazily or unfairly difficult due to poorly explained mechanics and seemingly arbitrary nuances like some old-school RPG's have in spades, by the sounds of it.

There's a difference between a well-designed, difficult RPG and a badly designed RPG where the difficulty stems from dealing with the design flaws.

 

[Robert Ewing]

I'm a firm believer in all RPG's being hard, long winded, and open ended.