The Case For Grinding in RPGs

[ssjdkcrew]

The only time grinding is fine with me is a time when...well...anything would be fine with me; when it's fun.

For example, I just finished Saint's Row IV (you should go play it if you haven't; I'll wait here....you done? Good). I found myself running all over the place doing all the mini-missions because they were fun and hilarious. What I was doing WAS grinding (doing a bunch of little actions that don't advance the story in order to become stronger) but they were FUN to do. That's the big variable that so many "grinding" games forget; if I'm not having fun (or getting some kind of emotion besides "fuck me I'm so freaking bored"), then you have failed at your game.

That however is where the definition of "Fun" messes with grinding. What I find fun is going to be different from you what you find fun is going to be different than what my Dad finds fun is going to be different from what a ten year old girl is going to find fun...

I think you've just outlined the difference between good and bad grinding. Good grinding asks something of the player, or involves them in some way. I suggested two types, but I'm sure there are others.

That is the fallacy of most MMOs, instead of giving me gameplay I'll enjoy for hours on end, they make you level for hours on end.

This seems to imply that leveling is not enjoyable. I disagree.

I played Metal Gear Online for 4 years every week because it had the best gameplay of any online shooter, not because I was trying to get something.

Right. You're not trying to get anything, so there's no sense that your character has improved or gotten anything new for his efforts. My point is; this is a loss, not a gain.

I quit playing Mass Effect 3's multiplayer because I was literally just playing to earn money to buy card packs to get new characters and items. If the game would've just given me the stuff I wanted from the start, I would've played the game longer than I did.

If the game would have given me everything from the start, I wouldn't play it at all, because half the fun of a game is in what you can accomplish.

My kind of rule guideline for grinding is that it is OK if you are grinding of your own intention. Like if you replay the same map in COD over and over because you like it, or because you want to get really really good at it. The problem comes in when your grinding because the game wants you or is forcing you. Like when you have pay over and over again to get access to the content that you really find enjoyable.

Sort of. I'm okay with the game making it harder on those who don't grind for improved strength or character skill, but in terms of content grinding, I generally agree. Grinding should be about the character of an RPG, not about game content. Game content is an accomplishment of the *player,* not the *character,* which takes you out of the illusion, and if you're going to do that, why play an RPG at all?

Basically if a game requires that I grind, like some of the harder old school RPG's, I just put the game down. I don't have time for that shit anymore. Same reason I've stopped playing most mmo's since I was in high school. I've got to much to do, and I want to do more with that minimal time than fill up a bar.

"Filling a bar" would be an example of a bad way to grind. Good grinding involves the player in other ways, while also allowing them to repeat the same kinds of tasks for bonuses/strength/level-ups.

I'm speaking of grinding only in the broadest sense of "doing the same thing many times to make your character improve."

As for MMOs, I've never really gotten into them. Too expensive for too little payoff.

I mean if you enjoy grinding, more power to you.

Yup. That's me.

There are two sides of the coin when it comes to grinding, in my opinion. First, there is the more conventional form of grinding - the stuff you find in RPGs more often that not, where you need to grind to increase stats to continue the game. Second, there is 'grinding for mastery', essentially, where the grinding is done to increase one's skill at the game, rather than the hard numbers in the game itself.

I find the first form of grinding to be a tool used to create the illusion of progression where there is, in reality, none. This isn't a problem, really, but all too often is grinding used as a main part of a game, rather than being allowed to simply compound true skill-based progression. The second form I find to be laudable despite the title of 'grinding' because I think when a game is testing the player in some way it should be testing them on skill, rather than arbitrary numbers or time spent.

It is harder to implement a proper difficult curve, however, so developer's can often find themselves leaning on the conventional grinding for their game's progression.

I've never thought of that second form as grinding, nor do I see that there is any lack of progression to conventional grinding. Your character progresses from doing a small amount of damage, to doing a larger amount, or perhaps they learn a new move, or can jump higher now, or maybe they run faster, or cast spells better. It's an "illusion" only in the sense that the entire game world of an RPG is an "illusion," so I guess I'm not sure why this wouldn't be progression. Please explain.

Grinding irritates me; mostly because it tends to serve as padding, because, "Whoops! We've put the boss fight that ends the this character's/story arc in too quickly! Oh well, the players will make up for our lazyness!", which tends to be the case in a lot of examples, but if it's done because I just want to be safe, even if walkthroughs and in-game hints tell that that I'm safely leveled, then I'll do it because I'm a neurotic bastard.

And if writers and artists have created an interesting world, I'd rather trek around that, exploring it and unintentionally getting levels as I go on. It's when develops space things evenly and the creative team is doing their damn job grinding isn't immersion-breaking, hard, or boring.

If you gain levels unintentionally, you might as well not be gaining levels at all. There's no mountain to climb, no wall to break through, no hurtle to overcome. You're just waltzing through the game like you would any platformer, except with the occasional number changing offscreen, that effects nothing of any substance.

What I'm talking about is not laziness on the part of developers (I've run into that on occasion too, and I agree with you that it's a pain in the neck when I see it,) but rather, a sensation of personally going through the greatest story-type of all time; namely, you try, and you fail. You struggle to get better, come back and succeed. Without the failure and the struggle to improve, success is meaningless.

Artificial play-time padding is pretty much always bad, at best the devs just can't do basic math (e.g. Skyrim's advancement system where it actually bugged the game by causing leveling skills with no impact on combat to increase combat difficulty) and at worst because they're actually skinner-boxing you (any game where NPCs and encounters auto-scale to match your skill level).

Agreed. I disliked most things about Skyrim, and I *hate* level-scaling enemies with a passion.

Grinding _can_ be used somewhat legitimately in games with fixed-challenge encounters to reduce frustration by allowing a means of giving yourself an extra 'edge' if you're just not good enough to play the next section at its intended rating, which was the original intention of level-based systems to begin with.

Well, that's what I'm saying I want. That kind of game.

Generally a game is only considered properly balanced in terms of the difficulty curve if you can more or less play straight through if you know what you're doing, with no more grinding or random encounter stuff than you'd incidentally occur in the process of walking the overmap, etc.

Considered by who?

This is why RPGs have started to move away from the old D&D system (which was what it was because it was a derivation of tactical games where a simple numerical power metric is useful) and into skill-tree systems where you unlock new abilities and the fights become more complex or different more than _harder_ in terms of gear-check/level-check. Dark Souls is a good example of this, it has levels but they're mostly about unlocking new abilities and you can go through the entire game completely legitimately leaving 3/4 of the stats at starting levels.

Well, as I said, I still think metrics have their place, in the sense that the Elder Scrolls series uses them, but I also think it's cool when you can unlock new abilities by training a skill (something that Oblivion sort of toyed with.) However, the problem that I find is that often, even this ability tree mechanic feels completely unnatural, because, like D&D before it, it consists of the formula of "do whatever you've got to do to get your level-up, then pick what bonuses you'll get arbitrarily at level-up time."

I don't think the D&D formula is the best by any means. Still, I understand what it's meant to simulate. A person has been studying for years to become a cleric, so when they gain further experience, it will be experience in their chosen field. It makes sense and I get it.

I like the sense of working towards skill-based upgrades even more, so long as the work is somehow associated with the upgrade (again, see my point about TES and QFG, where, again, it's quite clear what they're trying to simulate) but as I said, the skill tree choices are too often made arbitrarily at level-up time, rather than needing to be worked towards, and that's not the right approach. It's immersion-breaking, because it's not a simulation of anything real or real-like.

One game that I thought did this pretty well, (even though I don't think it was a good game,) was Final Fantasy 9. You could equip items that would allow you to train in new techniques, and when you mastered the technique, you could use it without having the item equipped. Granted, this makes no sense from a storytelling perspective, but at least you have to commit some effort to earning the things you want, and stay on the same tack for a while. The game asked something of the player, and therefore, the accomplishment felt meaningful.

 

[Therumancer]

My basic attitude is that most people simply don't have the patience or want to put in the time. It's not a matter of "I'm an adult and have other things to do" that's an excuse, because honestly as a kid you probably had even less time when you get down to it. It's a desire for immediate gratification, and I can sort of understand that. There is nothing wrong with people wanting immediate gratification from games. Grinding and games that involve it, are aimed at
a different kind of audience. The problem is of course a game industry intent on not willing to create games for different audiences which of course leads to increased clashes among gamers over basic ideas like this due to knowing that the industry is not going to even try to cater to all major audiences.

When it comes to an RPG game, part of the point of "grinding" is that it simulates the adventuring and monster hunting adventurers are supposed to get up to, as opposed to just following the plotline. A lot of RPG fans basically want to have a plot present, but also want to basically just get involved in some basic hack and slash dungeon crawling when the mood strikes them within the experience. Furthermore part of the fun of RPGs is to see how badly you can break the game by providing a disproportionate amount of power to the game structure. There is a sort of satisfaction some people can't understand in say not following the plot as soon as you can, and then say one shotting the final boss after his lengthy intro. Some games like the "Disgaea" series are actually all about the whole "applying disproportionate power to the game structure" and make it a recurring joke in the series, sure you can just flat out play through the storyline if you want to, and it's not even very hard, on the other hand it also involves a lot of weird stuff in the game that can only be discovered by trying to "break" it and then find out "oh wow, the game developers actually thought of that" and providing absolutely obscene things to overcome... a sort of game within a game.

With the recent "Divinity: Original Sin" one of the big complaints about it is of course the lack of ability to grind, and this the lack of ability to max out your favorite character tor play with all the toys. One of the first complaints about it (despite it's success) was how the monsters stay dead, and how some of the challenges seemed kind of arbitrary as the difficulty largely depended on how much you optimized your characters along very specific lines, which sucks in a game that basically invites you to screw around with a lot of different things. You can't say select a skill, decide "hmmm don't really like that" and then go grind some more to pick something else and un-gimp a character in a game where monsters are finite.

To me the trick to making grinding work is to make the game complex enough where your gaining things constantly. I think a big part of the problem with grinding is the move towards simplification. There is a huge difference between say slogging through two hours of fighting in order to get a single level up and a trivial increase. On the other hand if level ups are fast and furious, but there are thousands of different things to raise, experiment with, and fool around with, it can actually become fairly addictive.

The size of games also matters to some extent as well, take the recent review of Darklands, a game world of a size and depth you rarely see nowadays. That game DID involve a lot of grinding, but the grinding happened as you played, and there were almost always things to strive for. In "Darklands" for example there is no central plotline, your just a band of adventurers out to make a career for yourself, and all kinds of things are happening through the kingdoms. Of course this is also misleading, because in Darklands there are actually at least 3 (I think 4) central plotlines, to find and defeat the Knights Templar, to Find and Destroy The Witches Black Mass (and cripple witchcraft through the lands), and to slay The Dragon (note the "the"), all of which are things hinted at and woven through the game. Once you completed all of those major plotlines you could be considered to have "won" Darklands as almost all the lore and little hints came down to those big events. The point being in Darklands there was always something to be moving towards. The one downside I felt the game had was your characters aging, which could sometimes lead to you literally playing a game
multi-generationally.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

That is the fallacy of most MMOs, instead of giving me gameplay I'll enjoy for hours on end, they make you level for hours on end.

This seems to imply that leveling is not enjoyable. I disagree.

If the gameplay isn't fun, the leveling isn't fun.

I played Metal Gear Online for 4 years every week because it had the best gameplay of any online shooter, not because I was trying to get something.

Right. You're not trying to get anything, so there's no sense that your character has improved or gotten anything new for his efforts. My point is; this is a loss, not a gain.

There were skills to level and things to gain. For example, you had to play Survival/Tournaments to earn reward points to buy new clothes from the shop. I played because the gameplay was the best. The extra stuff gained were merely cherries atop the sundae.

I quit playing Mass Effect 3's multiplayer because I was literally just playing to earn money to buy card packs to get new characters and items. If the game would've just given me the stuff I wanted from the start, I would've played the game longer than I did.

If the game would have given me everything from the start, I wouldn't play it at all, because half the fun of a game is in what you can accomplish.

What you can accomplish is beating the all waves on Gold difficulty with a good squad of players, not farming Geth over and over to earn money just to buy card packs so you can then play how you really want. ME3 MP should've at least had a store where you could buy what you wanted instead of it all being luck-based.

 

[Jolly Co-operator]

Doing nothing but fighting monsters over and over again (the laziest and regrettably most common form of grinding) is irritating and tedious. However, I don't mind grinding if it has diversity and / or challenge to it. The best kind of grinding is the type that doesn't actually feel like you're grinding.

I think Persona 3 and 4 are excellent examples of this. Each day after school, you can choose to do one of various activities: Working a job, building a Social Link, fishing, going to the arcade, karaoke bar, cafe, or whatever dungeon area you'll be fighting in (I might be forgetting some of the possible activities, but you get the idea). Out of all these possibilities, the dungeons are the only places where you can actually fight monsters. Even so, everything you do feeds back to improving your character's ability to fight in some way. You're grinding no matter what you do, but it never actually feels like it.

Even in other SMT games where the range of activities is less diverse, I don't find grinding all that boring. This is for two reasons:

1.) The rewards feel worth it. The demons you can fuse are dictated by what level you're at, so each level up comes with a diverse range of interesting new demons you can now fuse, and I look forward to just seeing the designs.

2.) It's actually challenging. Even if I'm in an area where I feel relatively comfortable, there's still at least a chance that I'll be killed. The games are known for being quite difficult, and if you make a mistake, even against somewhat weaker enemies, it can snowball into a defeat.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

My basic attitude is that most people simply don't have the patience or want to put in the time. It's not a matter of "I'm an adult and have other things to do" that's an excuse, because honestly as a kid you probably had even less time when you get down to it. It's a desire for immediate gratification, and I can sort of understand that. There is nothing wrong with people wanting immediate gratification from games.

It's not about instant gratification. It's about removing the Skinner Box bullshit from the game. I played The Last of Us a couple weeks back and I think my completion time was ~25 hours (over 20 for sure) because I took my time. I was enjoying the game the whole time. There was no finding a room with a certain enemy and killing them over and over again to get them to drop something. There's no way you have more time available as an adult than a kid unless you don't have a job.

When it comes to an RPG game, part of the point of "grinding" is that it simulates the adventuring and monster hunting adventurers are supposed to get up to, as opposed to just following the plotline. A lot of RPG fans basically want to have a plot present, but also want to basically just get involved in some basic hack and slash dungeon crawling when the mood strikes them within the experience. Furthermore part of the fun of RPGs is to see how badly you can break the game by providing a disproportionate amount of power to the game structure. There is a sort of satisfaction some people can't understand in say not following the plot as soon as you can, and then say one shotting the final boss after his lengthy intro. Some games like the "Disgaea" series are actually all about the whole "applying disproportionate power to the game structure" and make it a recurring joke in the series, sure you can just flat out play through the storyline if you want to, and it's not even very hard, on the other hand it also involves a lot of weird stuff in the game that can only be discovered by trying to "break" it and then find out "oh wow, the game developers actually thought of that" and providing absolutely obscene things to overcome... a sort of game within a game.

The main reason, from a game standpoint, that you don't start with everything in an RPG is because it would overload the player at the start. You get a new skill and you are able to experiment with it for awhile before getting your next skill. Thus, you learn how all the game's skills/abilities/spells/etc. and mechanics work little-by-little. Too much time before getting the next thing is poor pacing. Just like if an action movie had all the action at the start or the end. Being able to "break" the game is a sign of poor design as RPGs are supposed to be balanced. Since when do RPG fans want to just get involved in fighting when the mood strikes them? Because most RPGs you fight more than anything else so if you like RPGs, you must like fighting, which is one of the main problems of the genre. RPGs don't actually require battle.

With the recent "Divinity: Original Sin" one of the big complaints about it is of course the lack of ability to grind, and this the lack of ability to max out your favorite character tor play with all the toys. One of the first complaints about it (despite it's success) was how the monsters stay dead, and how some of the challenges seemed kind of arbitrary as the difficulty largely depended on how much you optimized your characters along very specific lines, which sucks in a game that basically invites you to screw around with a lot of different things. You can't say select a skill, decide "hmmm don't really like that" and then go grind some more to pick something else and un-gimp a character in a game where monsters are finite.

You can respec in Divinity. There's plenty of optional content to get more EXP if you want.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

I think a good case can be made for grinding, on the basis of two things that it allows a game to do, which no other gameplay element allows for.

1. Simulated training.

Bruce Lee one said that he feared not the man who'd practiced 10,000 kicks once, but rather, the man who'd practiced one kick 10,000 times. Well, the same is true when training oneself in anything. Any skill, in order to be mastered, must be practiced over and over, and if one does so, one distinctly improves in it. Imitating this factor of skill or character improvement in a natural way (rather than, for example, buying new skills at the local shop, a-la Spider-man 2,) is going to involve repetition, to simulate the repetition that would be involved in *actually* training that skill. That's what everybody means by "grind."

Video games, remember, are a form of art, and if art is going to imitate life, we've got to let it have the freedom to not be immediately and instantly entertaining for every single second of the game, but that said...

This does beg the question of why you would want to simulate training though. Maybe in the GTA San Andreas sense where it doesn't have a huge impact on the gameplay and anything that does can also be acquired through normal gameplay.

In a fantasy or sci-fi RPG I don't see the point. A certain amount of suspension of disbelief is already in play, so why arbitrarily introduce some realism that also makes the game more tedious?

2. Satisfaction of payoff for work.

In real life, one often does tedious work for hours at a time, only to find that, in the end, there's no really satisfying payoff. The virtues of persistence, and even exceptional talent, are often rewarded with a mere lack of being fired, or at best, a 1 dollar raise, that works out to be less than you were being paid before, somehow.

Video games, however, have the chance to offer something better. They can reward persistence and hard work with an incredible payoff, and a great sense of accomplishment. Indeed, this long-term satisfaction is even deeper and more rewarding once obtained, because it was something you were looking forward to, and when it happened, you were pleased that you accomplished it.

None of this justifies that work being tedious though. Long and challenging is better than arbitrary and repetitive, which is what most grind amounts to.

Many people fail to appreciate this second factor, including some folks on certain youtube videos, just because it's not the same as instant gratification, but I've played games that are thrill-a-minute games (Prince of Persia; the Sands of Time, for instance,) and while they do offer a kind of fun, that fun is over when it's over. Accomplishing a long grind gives one a feeling that one has just overcome a great obstacle, and in better cases, that feeling can last well beyond the moment when you put down the controller/mouse.

Why do you need a videogame to give you that? If you want the feeling of overcoming a great obstacle, tell yourself you won't get any food until you do 1000 pushups. Or that you can't go on a holiday until you've folded 300 paper planes. Or that you won't get to watch a football game until you've kicked 1000 goals.

 

[RandV80]

Recently, the subject of grinding in RPGs has come to my attention; that many modern RPGs seem to be trying their best to excise grinding entirely, and I think that this is certainly a topic that deserves discussion.

Grinding, like all game elements, can be done very well or very badly. If done badly, as in, for example, early Phantasy Star games, it can come off as just repeating the same action over and over with very little payoff in exchange for doing so. On the other hand, it can be done well, as in Kingdom Hearts, allowing the player some freedom of motion during the grind, or as in Shining Force; with the gameplay during the grind involving real strategy, which must be carefully-considered. "The Elder Scrolls" manages both of these on some level, combined with allowing you to grind individual skills, which can be improved in a training-like way, and in my view, "Quest For Glory"; one of my top 5 favorite game series of all time, did it even better.

I remember the grinding in Phantasy Star II. It wasn't imposed on you though. You could continue to progress until enemies were too hard to progress --- that is when you generally knew when to grind before you continue. What has happened is the attempt to make RPG's " COD-ified" as I like to call it; Fixed levels usually around 20-25 in which things are generally linear in the progression of the game that is designed to seem long but really, its just a fast game anyone can sit and play. ( and mash buttons)

Question for those who mentioned Phantasy Star II, did you play the game with the map guide book? Now Phantasy Star II started out the typical way JRPG's did back then, in that when you first start the game you have to grind a little in the starting area before you can move on in the game. I have fond memories of the game but every time I ever played the game I always had the handy guide book on hand. So just a year ago I saw the Phantasy Star Games in a Genesis collection on Steam and decided to give it another go, this time with the challenge of beating it without ever using a map.

And you know what happened? Not once did I ever have to actually stop and grind. By tackling the massive maze like dungeons naturally, diving straight in, finding my way around, retreating when low in health/supplies, then heading back with a better understanding of the layout, I was always a high enough level to tackle any new area and had enough money to purchase the new equipment. Also the more in depth approach gave me the opportunity to try out all the different characters and have a flexible party.

Looking back the problem with the game is that the childish mind wants things easy, and PSII had the biggest hardest maze like dungeons out of any JRPG. Rather than take the challenge, it's much easier to grind it out on the world map where you're always close to a town and never in real danger, until you're strong enough to breeze through the monsters in the dungeon. Ideally with a guidebook in hand that gives you the map so you can head straight to all the chests & then the final objective. That or with the guide book you can make your way straight to the end without leveling ahead of time, but then the next town/dungeon over your party is under leveled and poor so you have to stop and grind.

Unfortunately on my playthrough I never did quite finish it... made it all the way to the last dungeon but proceeding to the first level always caused the game to crash. Oh and I did have to cheat once, in the Dezo spaceport for the life of me I couldn't find the 4th exit. It may not seem like it at first but a dungeon that's designed so you can wander in circles and has 4 different exits you need to find is particularly cruel.

 

[RandV80]

Also I'm not really commenting on grinding here, but the earliest JRPG's started with a number of elements to them. Towns, world maps, random battles, branching caves/mountain paths/etc, dungeons, and so on. The way I always thought of it was that towns were a sanctuary that gave you a place to relax, world maps were something you can explore, and dungeons were challenges to overcome. While some of it you could label a waste of time and could be streamlined, if you go to far in that direction you end up with something like FFXIII - walking in a straight line fighting a carefully allotted number of random battles and sitting back for cut scenes at properly timed intervals. In my opinion that's just as bad as the early genre grinding.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Dark Souls is mainly about finding "your" weapon and leveling that up all game. You don't get enough resources, without grinding, to level up a bunch of different weapons. The only difference between Dex/Str characters is that one hits harder but swings slower, I bet both do approximately the same amount of DPS. A "rogue" in Dark Souls plays no different than a standard fighter. The limited play styles in Dark Souls was really disappointing.

Then make a character that starts with magic. Make Int or Fth your primary stats. Hell, grab a pyromancy flame. That requres no stats. Any character can use it.

I had a Dex/Faith character. The magic was underwhelming for the most part, there's like no control spells (Dragon's Dogma has awesome magic for example). I couldn't really play a rogue either, the game kinda forces you to play melee. You don't get enough spells to use magic as your main attack through a dungeon. The pyromancy not requiring a stat is pretty dumb. You can have a full fledged melee character with the pyromancy flame leveled and be a better character than an equally leveled mage. Imagine how broken DnD would be if a magic class's magic wasn't tied to a stat. Dark Souls doesn't have very good RPG mechanics at all.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Also I'm not really commenting on grinding here, but the earliest JRPG's started with a number of elements to them. Towns, world maps, random battles, branching caves/mountain paths/etc, dungeons, and so on. The way I always thought of it was that towns were a sanctuary that gave you a place to relax, world maps were something you can explore, and dungeons were challenges to overcome. While some of it you could label a waste of time and could be streamlined, if you go to far in that direction you end up with something like FFXIII - walking in a straight line fighting a carefully allotted number of random battles and sitting back for cut scenes at properly timed intervals. In my opinion that's just as bad as the early genre grinding.

No one is saying to walk in a straight line, which FFX already did but people loved that anyways. In those early JRPGs, you walk ANYWHERE (outside of town) and you have to fight every few steps. I remember in FFVI, you had to fight enemies in a burning house when you are trying to go in there and save people. The horrible mechanic of random battles made exploring so time consuming. Say you want to explore some corner; well, you have to kill enemies on the way there (that's fine), but you also have to fight enemies on the way back (when you just fucking cleared a path). Unless, you actually got something awesome, it was just a waste of time exploring. I played very few JRPGs because even as a kid, I knew all that shit was just basically Skinner Box techniques (even though I didn't know of the Skinner Box then) to prolong the game and nothing else. And the turn-based battles weren't even very strategic to begin with (as positioning didn't even matter), it was just a waste of time fighting a battle (again and again and again) you know you will win easily.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Nope.
"Grinding" is NOT good.
To debunk the two main points:

1) Training
First, simulation for the sake of completeness sounds nice on paper, but if you stop and think a bit, you will soon realize a whole slew of OTHER things most games omit. For example, not many games simulate bathroom breaks, and with good reason: Because it isn't wanted or necessary in a game.

If you insist on pushing the art angle, then consider this: over-simulation is just as problematic, because if a game is too much like real life, then it loses focus on what's important.

Second, the notion of "training".
At face value, training could describe two different things:
-i) Player capability
-ii) Character capability

I will concede a limited amount of grind might be useful for giving the player a "break-in" time for a complicated game.
However, it should comprise a minority of the players' time spent in the game, because once they have a feel for the controls and rules, challenge should arise.

Good games challenge the players' skill by changing the conditions of test, either directly (tougher jumping puzzles in a platformer), or indirectly (managing dwindling resources, like in an older RPG with random encounters).

Bad games only challenge the players' patience by forcing them to repeat an a test they have already completed an arbitrary number of times under the same conditions.

2) Satisfaction of hard work
This also sounds plausible, but again, legitimate challenge (or even a good story) also provide satisfaction, and with much less waste in design.

Skinner Psychology (especially when combined with a competitive element) explains the primary reason we allow ourselves to tolerate grind. As a tool-using species, it's instinctive behavior to appreciate and value payoff for effort beyond the immediate situation.

However, as someone who has considered and recognized the value of time-efficiency and who can distinguish between necessary and unnecessary work, grind is much less of a benefit in design, and is more of an obstacle.

More and more gamers are waking up and realizing this, while some developers are catching on.
Grind is becoming an outmoded concept; useful or acceptable in very limited quantities. But basing entire games around it is one of the cardinal sins of game design.

 

[Grimh]

To me grinding is just that, tediously grinding your face against a brick wall in an attempt to eventually break through.

It's the neverending grinder slowly turning, crushing whatever falls down into it in a monotonous, effortless and unengaging manner, you sit there turning the wheel for what feels like eons as your soul is being pulverized by the monolithic, ceaseless tedium of you given task. The dark engine of despair lethargically ravaging the very core of your being, leaving only a broken shell in total ruin.

To me grinding should be excised from this world never to be heard of again.

Just to be clear if it is the least bit engaging I don't consider it to even be grinding.
Playing CoD: MW or ME3 multiplayer isn't grinding to me for example.

 

[Smooth Operator]

No grinding is never a good thing in entertainment, it's just lack of content. Yes we can make animal/human brains believe it's the thing to do with the simple Skinner Box principle. Give people a small reward for each time something is completed and they will be so compelled to do it all reason will be set aside just to get that next reward, and then the next, and then the next,...
It is certainly a very interesting observation of our brain, but it is none the less a principle that traps people in an infinite loop of pointless tedium... no part of that is a good thing.

Since we don't have a way to populate an endless game space those shortcomings will still need to be filled in with padding, but that does not make padding good design.

 

[The Random Critic]

This stuff isn't really as black and white as people think

For example, in ME2, I considered doing that crummy space resource collection mini game as grinding cause it's pretty banal. (Since you do need it to get the perfect ending)

While I couldn't say the exact same thing as redoing those special high level maps in PoE because I enjoying doing them. (Risk and reward, you need to pay attention to your surrounding, etcetc) Same thing probably apply to WoW along with most MMO with an end game content. (Or anything with WoW like quest design anyway, since the quest system is streamline enough the leveling up is basically given to you right in the face)

It also depends on the speed of that "grinding".

DS for example, you can get most of your character build up and running under 20 minutes if you know what you are doing.

And no level of grinding/magic can save you in DS if you don't know what you are doing.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

I'm of mixed feelings. Grinding used to mean exclusively fighting battles in RPGs or other games with levelling systems to become powerful enough to survive the next dungeon or boss. Now it's used as a catchall for any less-entertaining task not related to the story.

I can enjoy some grinding in RPGs when the benefits are readily apparent. Where you can gain new abilities or equipment with just a little bit of time investment, or if there are newly explorable areas or side quests that not only make you stronger, but develop NPCs.

However, mandatory grinding is always something to avoid. All of my favourite RPGs require zero grinding if you are a good enough tactician. You can grind if you want to make the upcoming battles less stressful, but it's never required of you. In other words, it's a more time-consuming way of turning on easy mode. You call it training and satisfaction of payoff for work, but it's not really the player who is practising, but the character(s) they are controlling. Unless the player is actually practising with game mechanics they're not yet completely familiar with, but in most RPGs that's not really something you need to worry about since their controls and mechanics are usually fairly straightforward. Also, games should never feel like work. To me, my games are the payoff for a hard day's work, and they themselves should not be work-like.

 

[happyninja42]

This stuff isn't really as black and white as people think

For example, in ME2, I considered doing that crummy space resource collection mini game as grinding cause it's pretty banal. (Since you do need it to get the perfect ending)

Yes but did you feel it helped the game experience at all? Everyone I've met hated that part of the game. It took them out of the feel of the game. And also broke the flow. It's hard to justify that you are in a mad dash against a clock, which when it runs out the universe is doooooomed ermahgerd!, when you stop at every freaking planet to slowly....slooooowly scan every inch of them for some minerals.

It also depends on the speed of that "grinding".

DS for example, you can get most of your character build up and running under 20 minutes if you know what you are doing.

And no level of grinding/magic can save you in DS if you don't know what you are doing.

Well if it's 20 minutes, I wouldn't call that a grind. That's basically just a learning curve training period.

OT: In my opinion, grinding as defined as "hours of time spent doing repetitive actions, in order to be of appropriate strength to take on the next boss the game put in front of you" is a sign of poor design. To keep the player engaged in the story of the game you made, you need to have the advancement match the pace of the game. If I spend 20+ hours simply leveling up, but in game, the time between the last storyarc moment, and the next is almost instantaneous, then it pulls me out of the tension of the game. Final Fantasy 10 did this a lot, in fact most of the FF games I played did. But I mean, you have some big fight with a bad boss, and he does some epicly evil shit to the world!! We have to stop him right away!! Oh wait, nah let's go run around the Thunder Plains for 15+ leveling up first, I'm sure he'll put his plans on hold until we're done.

If you want to have a leveling grind in your game, then put it during a time in the game, where there isn't a timed event to deal with. Give the characters some downtime, where there is no pressing need of their attention for something. Then i have less issue with it, but only slighlty less. But yeah, if you can't design the game where your characters are strong enough to fight the next threat without hours and hours of grind, you did something wrong.

In stories, movies or books, there is usually a small amount of Training Montage that the heroes go through, but it's usually a very short section of the story, not the majority of the game. And if I have to clock in more Grind Hours than Story Hours in your game, simply to finish your game, then there is something wrong there.

 

[Rattja]

I was about to go on and on about how it is a way to train muscle memory or whatever, but as I thought about it another thought popped into my head.
I don't actually think grinding is the problem, we are.
Yes it may be something to pad the game, but it has an interesting side effect.

See, whenever I look back at something, I try to ask myself why it felt like it did or why I liked it (or didn't).
When I first started out with my first MMOs and RPGs, grinding was what you did. Runescape, Tibia, Anarchy online, early WoW, most of your time was used to grind. Either to get materials, rep, exp or gear.
Thing is, at the time I didn't really mind at all, I actually were looking forward to go heckler hunting or farm mortigs for hours on end, but why?
The answer is rather simple, it was the people.
Whenever we grinded back then, we basically just talked about stuff while killing things over and over again. The game was more like a chatroom than anything else, just something to do while we talked about what the best sandwich was or whatever.
The grinding was boring yes, but because it was boring you started to talk with strangers and actually ineract with them.
Same with WoW, as it wasn't until we raided the same place for the 10th time on auto pilot with alts that the really funny moments happened.

These days the grind is all but gone, and I notice the effect it has. You just go in, get what you wanted and thats it, now what?

Just think about it for a moment. If you are working on something, and fully concentrated at what you are doing, you can't talk to the people around you about the latest episode of Game of Thrones right? But when you have done it 10 000 times and don't have to think at all, that's when you can actually get to know the people around you.

So I guess what I am trying to say is that grinding has no place in a Single player game, but in a MMO it actually should be there to force people to talk to other people.

But hey, that's just my thoughts about the matter.

 

[joest01]

This is why RPGs have started to move away from the old D&D system (which was what it was because it was a derivation of tactical games where a simple numerical power metric is useful) and into skill-tree systems where you unlock new abilities and the fights become more complex or different more than _harder_ in terms of gear-check/level-check. Dark Souls is a good example of this, it has levels but they're mostly about unlocking new abilities and you can go through the entire game completely legitimately leaving 3/4 of the stats at starting levels.

Dark Souls is a horrible example. You don't get new abilities in Dark Souls, your numbers just go up. You raise your Dex/Str to do more damage. You level your weapons to do more damage. You don't get new moves or abilities for melee characters. You can use the same strategy against every enemy in Dark Souls.

You get new abilities from finding new weapons and items. Most games will use a mixture of numbers and abilities. If you use nothing but numbers, then combat gets grind as you repeat the same actions over and over. Though if you use nothing but abilities, you make things more complex and it can some times be hard to tell what is an improvement what isn't. Some times you just want a nice conclusive this is better then what you were doing before.

Dark Souls is a good example in the sense that you can go through the game at base stats. Leveling is used more to accomodate play style than OP'ing your toon. i.e. in many other RPG you do not stand a chance against even level 10 monsters with a new character. Yet, you can pretty much walk around all of NG with an upgraded character, kill everything by looking at it, and never even get scratched. Dark Souls isn't like that. You will never need to "grind" a level to get past a section you are having trouble with.

As an aside, and to phoenix, (who btw is terribly biased in his opinion of Dark Souls, but who imho actually knows deep inside how much better the combat is than that in Amalur or Dragon Dogma) in Dark2 you have the ability to dual wield again, and at certain stats you get to power stance dual wielded weapons in all kinds of variations. Also the rolling iframes and distance depend on stats now. So your gameplay will change, not just your dps.

 

[Mirroga]

Are we talking about grinding for XP or simply any form of grinding in games (doing the same stuff over and over to get a reward)?

The only time I actually forgave any form of grinding is from Bastion. It was only a small grind to gain enough to buy something. Considering Bastion is a fast-paced hack n' slash with a lot of weapon combinations, grinding never became a chore.

IMO if a game makes you do tedious and repetitive grinding for at least 12 hours to make the game more fun and varied is doing something wrong. It robs you of both time and enjoyment.