Telling Stories: Be afraid after all
Fear is one of the most primal motivators of human beings. It’s so important to roleplaying that I’ve talked about it before.
Of course, that article was all about the experience of fear, and there’s more to fear than that. Fear is a complex beast, multifaceted, snarling, and dangerous. To really understand fear, you have to understand not just what it does to your character, but all of the advantages it brings along with it. You need to understand how your character can use fear. You need to really understand the power of fear.
Because fear is a potent thing, a driving force, something that keeps us running and moving even when all reason dictates we should give up. Fear cripples us and at the same time enhances us, lifts us up and knocks us down. Fear is powerful. Let’s talk about making use of fear, investigating its power, and understanding how the greatest thing that you can do is start really playing into the idea of fear.
Challenge Accepted: That’s not a challenge
I hate to make it seem as if I’m kicking a game on the way out, but if there was ever a poster child for some of this…
I probably don’t need to tell you about fake difficulty; we all know what that is by now. It’s one of those concepts that’s been held over in design for years now, a crutch that games use both unintentionally and intentionally. Forcing you to sneak past rows of enemies you could dispatch in moments is an intentional use of it, a game that just isn’t coded very well and winds up with difficult controls that hamper your experience has sort of stumbled onto it. You might think this article was meant to be about that.
It’s not.
While we all know about the telltale markers of fake difficulty, we don’t talk much about the elements of challenge that don’t actually qualify as challenge. These aren’t relentlessly cheap, but they’re also not really something that’s hard to do so much as they’re bulking out actual challenges with filler. If difficulty is meat and fake difficulty is something vile substituted for meat (tofu, maybe, since I don’t like tofu), these are water. You can inject a bunch into anything and fill out the size, but the actual content remains about the same.
Telling Stories: With my weapon
Let’s kick this column off with a rhetorical question. Why did Final Fantasy XIV and WildStar both tie character classes to iconic weapons?
You could say it’s for ease of itemization, or for transparency in play, but I think the real reason is much simpler: weapons say something. We associate certain traits with weapons. They’re not just tools, they’re symbols, part of the language by which we understand our characters and their capabilities. An entirely different message is conveyed if your character is wearing a sword or a gun on his hip, after all. Human beings (and, presumably, almost-human beings) have an attachment to our weaponry.
This is a rich vein in fiction, of course, and most games go the extra mile by having several weapons with names and points of origin. World of Warcraft is awash in notable weapons, Final Fantasy XIV has Relic Weapons, Final Fantasy XI has Mythic Weapons, Guild Wars 2 has Legendaries, Lord of the Rings Online even lets you raise a weapon as a specific legendary item. It’s a fertile ground for roleplaying, and it’s well worth exploring what it could mean to have a special weapon or two… even if those weapons aren’t useful because of their power.
The jack of all problems
Well, now we can all be mildly useless but balanced against one another’s uselessness.
Every single game that allows you to build a character how you want lets you build yourself as a jack-of-all-trades if you want to. In many Final Fantasy games you’ve got the Red Mage, a master of both offensive and defensive magic while being a deft hand with a sword. Dungeons & Dragons has traditionally had options like Bards or (in the old days) multi-classed characters. Kingdoms of Amalur‘s loose class system lets you have a character who’s pretty good at lots of things and derives benefit from having dabbled all over. The idea is that you’re not as strong as a specialist, but you can always do more!
Pretty much no game has ever made this work.
The problem is that every single game with a true jack-of-all-trades either winds up with a dramatically overpowered character or a completely useless one. (Or a character that specializes in something after all, which makes the character/class not truly a jack but just a flexible character outside of the specialization.) It’s a seductive idea, obviously, but it just doesn’t work out from a balance standpoint, and we need to get away from that in design.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 