I remember a day when old RPG games had either a level cap or a definite ending. From Pool of Radiance to Secrets of the Silver Blades to Final Fantasy the game had a final boss or stage and often had some type of level cap. Today, gamers don’t want it to end, they’d rather have the option to wonder around aimlessly or completing minor quests in order to soak up every ounce of money they spent on the title.
Now even Bethesda is saying “we’ve learned our lesson” from the whiplash of ending their game title and capping levels. Gamers want to go back and re-try content they missed, they want to run side quests and talk to everyone in the world they want to grind themselves to Ăźber powerful levels and become a god in their fantasy world. Can you blame them?
You can’t really blame them for wanting to maximize the content, although it’s slightly more evolved than RPG’s of old. Perhaps it was World of Warcraft and other MMORPG’s that brought us to the stage in life where we all want to squeeze every last RPG dime out of the title. As a kid I wondered the world of Hyrule and covered every tile of graphical color, burned every bush, bombed every stone looking for all the content. However, even Zelda had an end with scrolling credits – you didn’t just land on a platform with your master sword and a dream.
Other titles have used level caps to limit you and draw you into the next release of the game. This was popular in the D&D world because the game is designed to target specific levels of difficulty. They may only allow you to gain level 10 because the enemies are no tougher than level 13, allowing the challenge to be good but not overwhelming. If they allow you to get to level 50 they’d have to design the game so all the enemies grow powerful along with you — that’s not always a desired result.
Final Fantasy is a popular franchise that typically allows you to grow infinitely powerful depending on how much time you want to spend repeat killing the same enemies. Gamers aren’t always into the grind, they just want to grind “enough” to make the challenges a little more do-able.
Today, however, with larger storage capacity, larger development teams and the desire to build more value into your gameplay experience titles have dozens of side quests and sub-plots that are totally optional. The result of so many sub-quests results in a player who is much more powerful at the end of those quests compared to a player who sticks to the narrow path of the main plot. So, games much grow dynamically challenging to keep the fun per dollar high.
Do you like your RPG’s to have a definite end and a high but capped level?
@Street Fighter X Tekken DLC will never come to Xbox 360
I get Dan’s point, placing the DLC on the disk is like dangling a carrot in front. And yes, since the DLC is already distributed, then why not get some money out of it?
@Vivendi finding few buyers for Activision-Blizzard
Thing is, the game industry is quite tough. Spending N billions to buy a piece of it is quite a risky bet. Miss-manage it and you’re never going to recover the investment. So I can understand why nobody is rushing to buy.
As from the potential buyers point of view, Vivendi desperately needs money. Play your cards right and you can get Activision-Blizzard at a nice discount đ
@âWouldnât be surprisedâ if more aggressive PC games start to appear
Hitting a Diablo 3 home run: good luck. It’s hard to do for any platform, not just the PC.
Erm, no cycle detected on my end, always KB and mouse here.
@Grand Theft Auto V will support planes and jets, wonât have beta test
Not a fan. Loved Mafia though.
@ Question of the Week.
I was going to say ‘No’ initially, but I saw the hardware specs, so it’s a ‘maybe yes’ now. Android is hackable, it has a USB port so ….
Gearbox: âWouldnât be surprisedâ if more aggressive PC games start to appear: For the record, I got excited as soon as I heard you say that Borderlands 2 would have drag-and-drop inventory, because Borderlands’ huge number of items and weapons makes it a pain to navigate through the inventory with the consolish setup it had. Other than that, all I got that Gearbox was placing a huge bet on the PC, and telling everyone how great it will be to be a PC gamer.
@OUYA: Good for them for tons of funds, but this can also be the point where a Kickstarter goes horribly wrong. Seriously, from what I understand they pretty much said “we’re going to try these bunch of different ideas together and see if they stick”. Let’s hope they’re successful and manage to create a great platform.
@QOTW: Probably not. I barely play Android games, and I doubt any huge games will be on the system before anyone knows how successful it will be.
And yes, Gearbox are looking for headlines: http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/07/24/randy-pitchford-plagiarism-is-rife-in-the-industry