Vanguard wrote:FromSoft games are good because how good you are matters 10x more than how good your character is
In the case of Dark Souls, there's still a few contradictionsSquire Grooktook wrote:Fromsoft games are good because they find clever ways to make all the abstract, statistical elements of your character meaningfully interact with the moment to moment gameplay and represents their growth as an adventurer through gameplay.
One is how utterly unstylish high level play is. Things like low level runs or no equipment runs or speed runs just look awful.
The other is that "optional content" yields the player a handicap, and will thus be avoided in high level play. Contrast with e.g. shmups where optional content (usually) yields the player great risk and higher score.
Sad but true.Vanguard wrote:This definition is the most useful because you can hear "RPG" and instantly know you're dealing with some no-skill grindfest garbage
Doesn't have to be that way. I've been asking myself the question "what's good about dungeon crawlers anyway?"
At its Atari 2600 simplest a crawler would be like you walk through a maze with a meter and every step lowers the meter a fixed amount. When the meter reaches 0 you go back to the beginning and it replenishes and lengthens (this is the "numbers go up" part).
Not very good.
A step up is you have a meter but with every step in the maze the game rolls a dice and figures how much to lower it, or in rarer occurrences even raise it a little. So now when you're running low there's a strong gambling aspect. This is basically Shining in the Darkness or the first Dragon Quest lol.
Still not good, but very addictive, which depending on your point of view might even be worse. So how can you make it good?
Well you make the meter complex (i.e. composed of parts) and configuring it a puzzle, which is the "key" to let you unlock new frontiers in the maze. It still grows every time you go back to the beginning like before, but *only* after making new progress (this is crucial, IMO, and almost never done).
Why have the meter expand at all? Why not just have it at its maximum (or any fixed amount, really) to begin with? Well it's a different puzzle. Using a more concrete example, configuring my level 6 party of 8 in LoT2 is not the same thing at all as configuring my level 80 party of 35.
So why have it grow monotonically? Why not just throw a random puzzle of this nature (meter of different maximum length and composition) at the player? Well I agree, partially, at least. Coincidentally JRPGs kind of started going down this path at the beginning of the 90s, where they'd stick you, the player, with n characters at x level and you'd just have to figure out how to make it work. Sadly they usually left the escape hatch open and let you go level them up and overcome your challenges that way. But anyway the reason why you might prefer monotonic expansion is that it better suits learning. If e.g. you just gave the player the full roster, 1 million money, and enough XP to hit level 100 in LoT2 at the start and a challenge that expected you to make full use of that they'd just spend hours and hours in the menus trying different things and eventually get bored. But at some point you do want to give them this kind of thing. Hence why monotonic growth isn't a bad thing.