A look at RPG design (or, why WoW is great and FF sucks)
Last month, I read through an article at Gamasutra called Game Design Essentials: 20 RPGs. In it, the author discusses game design elements of influential RPG titles through the years. It was an interesting read, but something about it stuck with me. Compare his "analyses" of the following:
World of Warcraft
The Final Fantasy series
Mr. Harris, don't forget to wipe around your mouth when you're done sucking off Blizzard.
Seriously, though, why is WoW untouchable while FF is only sparingly given any sort of credit? He provides an almost completely negative look at FF while ignoring related criticisms one could make about WoW. Does anyone else see it? Well, it doesn't matter, 'cause I feel like a rant!
Let's start with some of his praise for WoW.
"What is the attraction here? Why is it that this game broken through the pop cultural barrier and gotten a South Park machinima episode? It is not an easy question to answer, actually. If it were, Age of Conan would be doing better in its fight for survival."
No, AoC is struggling to survive because of its piss poor condition at release, the slow pace at which problems were fixed, and the existence of major bugs a year later. Also, the specs needed to run it exclude a significant portion of MMO players. But in terms of game design, it is arguably superior to WoW in many ways, using familiar mechanics but improving upon them.
"If the game's systems weren't simple enough for an average player to understand then the game couldn't be as popular as it is now. "
Paraphrase: WoW is popular because it is easy and requires little skill to play. Have fun in the World of Mediocrity.
"Second, the game allows for a lot of flexibility in character design. This fits in with the accessibility in that, once a character reaches maximum level, he can start over with a different character and have nearly an entirely different experience."
Since when is having to start over offering flexibility? This could be said of any game that gives you different characters or classes to choose from. "You know, Street Fighter has amazing depth, because when you are done playing as Chun Li, you can then play someone else, like Guile!" Replayability isn't flexibility, buddy. Also, see below where he criticizes the Final Fantasy job system, which allows even greater flexibility without having to start over with a new character.
"And yet, for its accessibility, there is a surprising amount of depth here for player-vs-player combat areas."
Huh? WoW is all about frontloading and spamming your strongest skills every cooldown. There are very few strategic options distributed amongst the classes -- anticipating opponents, reacting, switching between defensive and offensive modes -- the existence of which I consider "depth" in a PvP environment. Warhammer Online puts WoW to shame, as does Guild Wars. And why on earth does he spend a third of his discussion of RPG game design talking about PvP, yet fails to mention raids, for which there is clearly more development effort?
Now, on to his clearly rational assessment of Final Fantasy games.
"Aped by countless game companies, stagnant and wallowing in its own cinematic pretensions. Seems not to know how profoundly goofy it has become."
Way to be fair and insightful an article about game design. But it gave me a reason to bitch about your hypocrisy between slamming FF and cupping WoW's balls, so game on! Immediately after this, he writes, "These things do not concern us here, but what does is its design..." Then why put in in the article? Just couldn't resist the urge to get on your soapbox? Some professional.
"Job system: does it make sense that a high level fighter be able to instantly become a wizard, or a dancer or a chemist, on a whim? "
Shall we discuss the impeccable sense that WoW makes? I'll throw out some details to chew on: class choice restricted by race; the inability to change class or multiclass; a limit on the number of professions one can learn; classes being unable to equip certain types of weapons and armor; soulbound items. Straightjacketing a character into one predefined set of abilities for their entire existence is not my idea of good role-playing. So why are arbitrary restrictions more sensible than arbitrary freedoms?
"Probably the most damaging influence it has wrought upon the JRPG field is Final Fantasy's complete divorcing of play mechanics from reality."
His criticism begs the question: what the hell is a talent tree in WoW? Why is this abstraction acceptable and a Sphere Grid isn't? Just because the talent tree was a convention from Diablo 2 doesn't make it any less arbitrary in an RPG like WoW. At least Square tries out different systems for character development.
Hell, I've made the "what the hell is a Sphere Grid" complaint -- mostly in pining for a job system -- but unlike the author, I thought about it a bit more open-mindedly. Let's do a little play mechanics visualization. Think of your WoW character as a progression of abilities in two dimensions, and what do you get? A long, straight line dotted with abilities at certain levels and a predetermined assignment of ability score increases. On top of this, you have your talent tree, which you can think of as a set of selectable abilities at discrete points (levels), the variety of which increases as you move along the line.
Now consider the Sphere Grid. It's also a two-dimensional representation of how a character can progress but not completely linear like WoW. It's basically a big, fancy flowchart of all the possible ways your character can develop, a graphic tool to make a complex growth system easily digestible. It still follows the same underlying idea as WoW's system -- kill stuff, get points, move toward new abilities and upgrades -- only the player has much more choice in how the character progresses.
What's my point? The notion of character progression through a series of discrete levels and mostly pre-assigned abilities is just as divorced from the game's "reality" as the Sphere Grid is. We see that convention goes unquestioned.
"What AP is supposed to represent has never been adequately explained. "
Fair enough. Then what are Honor Points? What are badges and emblems? How about Battleground marks? Answer: they are metrics invented for distributing player rewards, and they are not explained either. Grind some instances or PvP, then go buy a reward of your choice. Sound familiar? Except with AP, you're enhancing your character through abilities and not gear.
Still, what do AP represent? If this guy knew what he was writing about, he'd understand the difference: generally, experience is gained from defeating enemies, while AP is gained from what you do during battle. They are different things because the former leads to overall growth (character level) while the latter marks progression in a specialty (job abilities, weapon growth, etc.). How can one write an article on game design and not see that this is a consequence of system in which character development can be achieved through changeable jobs or specialties?
How you can quantify experience has never been adequately explained in games, either. Once again, level-based progression is a convention from D&D that no one questions, even though level-less game systems like GURPS make more sense for role-playing.
"Increasingly in JRPGs, awards and points are bestowed more for the role they play in the fill-in-the-blanks design template, where spending time in the game makes characters more powerful, rather than even pretending to be depicting processes that could happen, even in a fantasy world."
Players rewarded by spending time in the game? Isn't that the underlying concept behind WoW and MMOs in general? Consider raiding: you are rewarded for playing through the same content over and over. In a role-playing sense, what is realistic ("even in a fantasy world") about not getting experience past level 80 or how, every week, all of the denizens of a dungeon suddenly reappear as if you hadn't massacred them a few days ago? How about crafting? Your success is measured by how much time you spent repetitively making goods and not by how talented or intelligent your character is. And Achievements? Now there's a "fill-in-the-blanks design template" that is divorced from the character's existence in the world (again, in a role-playing sense).
"And yet, due to Final Fantasy's massive popularity, the tendency to tack on a strangely-named "system" has spread out to the whole of JRPGs. . . . These games have turned into a strange amalgam of things that Gary Gygax would not have recognized."
I get what he's saying here. It'd be like if you had monks and samurai running around with barbarians and paladins (all classes from AD&D). Or if there was some unexplained universal force that compelled people to act according to one amongst nine specific categories (alignment). Or if humans could decide to change their focus, but only once, and could never resume their original track (dual classing), while elves could pursue multiple paths, but only all at once or never at all (multi-classing). I could go on, but we all know that D&D has always been a "strange amalgam" of arbitrary game design decisions.
Phew. I must sound like an awful FF fanboy, but don't get me wrong -- I can see faults in those games too. I also am not a blind WoW-hater; there are a lot of game elements in it that I think are well done. I just hate seeing WoW so lauded and escaping any criticism while FF is bashed for not toeing the line of D&D-derived conventions. And it's fun to rant. Rawr!
World of Warcraft
The Final Fantasy series
Mr. Harris, don't forget to wipe around your mouth when you're done sucking off Blizzard.
Seriously, though, why is WoW untouchable while FF is only sparingly given any sort of credit? He provides an almost completely negative look at FF while ignoring related criticisms one could make about WoW. Does anyone else see it? Well, it doesn't matter, 'cause I feel like a rant!
Let's start with some of his praise for WoW.
"What is the attraction here? Why is it that this game broken through the pop cultural barrier and gotten a South Park machinima episode? It is not an easy question to answer, actually. If it were, Age of Conan would be doing better in its fight for survival."
No, AoC is struggling to survive because of its piss poor condition at release, the slow pace at which problems were fixed, and the existence of major bugs a year later. Also, the specs needed to run it exclude a significant portion of MMO players. But in terms of game design, it is arguably superior to WoW in many ways, using familiar mechanics but improving upon them.
"If the game's systems weren't simple enough for an average player to understand then the game couldn't be as popular as it is now. "
Paraphrase: WoW is popular because it is easy and requires little skill to play. Have fun in the World of Mediocrity.
"Second, the game allows for a lot of flexibility in character design. This fits in with the accessibility in that, once a character reaches maximum level, he can start over with a different character and have nearly an entirely different experience."
Since when is having to start over offering flexibility? This could be said of any game that gives you different characters or classes to choose from. "You know, Street Fighter has amazing depth, because when you are done playing as Chun Li, you can then play someone else, like Guile!" Replayability isn't flexibility, buddy. Also, see below where he criticizes the Final Fantasy job system, which allows even greater flexibility without having to start over with a new character.
"And yet, for its accessibility, there is a surprising amount of depth here for player-vs-player combat areas."
Huh? WoW is all about frontloading and spamming your strongest skills every cooldown. There are very few strategic options distributed amongst the classes -- anticipating opponents, reacting, switching between defensive and offensive modes -- the existence of which I consider "depth" in a PvP environment. Warhammer Online puts WoW to shame, as does Guild Wars. And why on earth does he spend a third of his discussion of RPG game design talking about PvP, yet fails to mention raids, for which there is clearly more development effort?
Now, on to his clearly rational assessment of Final Fantasy games.
"Aped by countless game companies, stagnant and wallowing in its own cinematic pretensions. Seems not to know how profoundly goofy it has become."
Way to be fair and insightful an article about game design. But it gave me a reason to bitch about your hypocrisy between slamming FF and cupping WoW's balls, so game on! Immediately after this, he writes, "These things do not concern us here, but what does is its design..." Then why put in in the article? Just couldn't resist the urge to get on your soapbox? Some professional.
"Job system: does it make sense that a high level fighter be able to instantly become a wizard, or a dancer or a chemist, on a whim? "
Shall we discuss the impeccable sense that WoW makes? I'll throw out some details to chew on: class choice restricted by race; the inability to change class or multiclass; a limit on the number of professions one can learn; classes being unable to equip certain types of weapons and armor; soulbound items. Straightjacketing a character into one predefined set of abilities for their entire existence is not my idea of good role-playing. So why are arbitrary restrictions more sensible than arbitrary freedoms?
"Probably the most damaging influence it has wrought upon the JRPG field is Final Fantasy's complete divorcing of play mechanics from reality."
His criticism begs the question: what the hell is a talent tree in WoW? Why is this abstraction acceptable and a Sphere Grid isn't? Just because the talent tree was a convention from Diablo 2 doesn't make it any less arbitrary in an RPG like WoW. At least Square tries out different systems for character development.
Hell, I've made the "what the hell is a Sphere Grid" complaint -- mostly in pining for a job system -- but unlike the author, I thought about it a bit more open-mindedly. Let's do a little play mechanics visualization. Think of your WoW character as a progression of abilities in two dimensions, and what do you get? A long, straight line dotted with abilities at certain levels and a predetermined assignment of ability score increases. On top of this, you have your talent tree, which you can think of as a set of selectable abilities at discrete points (levels), the variety of which increases as you move along the line.
Now consider the Sphere Grid. It's also a two-dimensional representation of how a character can progress but not completely linear like WoW. It's basically a big, fancy flowchart of all the possible ways your character can develop, a graphic tool to make a complex growth system easily digestible. It still follows the same underlying idea as WoW's system -- kill stuff, get points, move toward new abilities and upgrades -- only the player has much more choice in how the character progresses.
What's my point? The notion of character progression through a series of discrete levels and mostly pre-assigned abilities is just as divorced from the game's "reality" as the Sphere Grid is. We see that convention goes unquestioned.
"What AP is supposed to represent has never been adequately explained. "
Fair enough. Then what are Honor Points? What are badges and emblems? How about Battleground marks? Answer: they are metrics invented for distributing player rewards, and they are not explained either. Grind some instances or PvP, then go buy a reward of your choice. Sound familiar? Except with AP, you're enhancing your character through abilities and not gear.
Still, what do AP represent? If this guy knew what he was writing about, he'd understand the difference: generally, experience is gained from defeating enemies, while AP is gained from what you do during battle. They are different things because the former leads to overall growth (character level) while the latter marks progression in a specialty (job abilities, weapon growth, etc.). How can one write an article on game design and not see that this is a consequence of system in which character development can be achieved through changeable jobs or specialties?
How you can quantify experience has never been adequately explained in games, either. Once again, level-based progression is a convention from D&D that no one questions, even though level-less game systems like GURPS make more sense for role-playing.
"Increasingly in JRPGs, awards and points are bestowed more for the role they play in the fill-in-the-blanks design template, where spending time in the game makes characters more powerful, rather than even pretending to be depicting processes that could happen, even in a fantasy world."
Players rewarded by spending time in the game? Isn't that the underlying concept behind WoW and MMOs in general? Consider raiding: you are rewarded for playing through the same content over and over. In a role-playing sense, what is realistic ("even in a fantasy world") about not getting experience past level 80 or how, every week, all of the denizens of a dungeon suddenly reappear as if you hadn't massacred them a few days ago? How about crafting? Your success is measured by how much time you spent repetitively making goods and not by how talented or intelligent your character is. And Achievements? Now there's a "fill-in-the-blanks design template" that is divorced from the character's existence in the world (again, in a role-playing sense).
"And yet, due to Final Fantasy's massive popularity, the tendency to tack on a strangely-named "system" has spread out to the whole of JRPGs. . . . These games have turned into a strange amalgam of things that Gary Gygax would not have recognized."
I get what he's saying here. It'd be like if you had monks and samurai running around with barbarians and paladins (all classes from AD&D). Or if there was some unexplained universal force that compelled people to act according to one amongst nine specific categories (alignment). Or if humans could decide to change their focus, but only once, and could never resume their original track (dual classing), while elves could pursue multiple paths, but only all at once or never at all (multi-classing). I could go on, but we all know that D&D has always been a "strange amalgam" of arbitrary game design decisions.
Phew. I must sound like an awful FF fanboy, but don't get me wrong -- I can see faults in those games too. I also am not a blind WoW-hater; there are a lot of game elements in it that I think are well done. I just hate seeing WoW so lauded and escaping any criticism while FF is bashed for not toeing the line of D&D-derived conventions. And it's fun to rant. Rawr!