An RPG that hides all the stats and all of the math. It gives no tutorial or instructions. You’re basically just expected to figure it out.
Of course the game would need SOME cues to give the player a sense of direction. More damage done to an enemy causes more blood to spurt out. Enemies slump more and more the less life they have. Your character changes in appearance as their stats change, such as growing muscles.
And of course the game would use logical relations. Hammers have a wider damage spread than daggers. Blades are better at critical hits, while blunt weapons knock people around.
But even the map and quest log are gone. You’re actually expected to break out a pen and paper to jot them down.
Of course, the internet being a thing players would most likely start a wiki to try to reverse engineer what’s going on, but I think that would be part of the fun.
Sound a little bit like the older Elder scroll games. Sure they had you using points of reference in the game to find stuff instead of way markers.
Personally i wouldnt playa game like that. Mainly because im a lazy gamer…
but im sure there are pleanty of people who would love a more realistic hardcore roleplay style game like that.
See it all the time in moddign where people tweak the game to make it more life like and remove all the gaming crutches we are used to.
The only things I’d change would be to give the player character a compass and a watch to calculate their travel time and direction. Apart from that, it sounds good.
Some of these concepts remind me of Dwarf Fortress. One example being the lack of a quest log. Dwarf Fortress instead has a rumor system and you have to determine where the correct destination is based on those rumors.
How about JOURNEY (Jenova Chen of ThatGameCompany)? Feedback is important. However you give it, it’s a pre-requisite for learning, for connecting actions to outcomes, and for flow. In journey, you have a neck-scarf that shows your health. It’s the only stat.
Gigi
PS - Quest logs help to create clear goals (another pre-req of flow).
How would the player know it’s a critical hit, or that hammers hammers have a wider damage spread? Visual and aural feedback?
(For @Not_Sure ) How would you provide feedback in place of a quest log? NPCs constantly reminding you that they need tasks done and/or frequent gameplay events? (If dragons are constantly attacking, causing the villagers to flee, the player will eventually get the idea that he should stop the dragons.) Sandbox world with no quests?
The concept appeals to me, but story, setting, writing, and implementation would be bigger factors in deciding whether to play the game or not.
I agree. It’s much more immersive, too. I think that’s the gist of Not_Sure’s original post. In other words, how appealing is a game that provides feedback within the game world (blood spurts, body postures, etc.) rather than externally through stats, HUDs, overlay text windows, etc. Clearly it’s appealing enough to make games like Journey successful. Can you sustain that style through a deeper, more-complicated RPG? I think that’s a tough question.
I’m thinking audio cues for crits. Like different sound effects.
As for quests, I think that I would make it so that every quest you encounter is taken up automatically and then unfolds as you further your encounter, and eventually reach a conclusion.
The quests could be a grab bag of explicit quests: “Could you take care of these bandits? I’ll pay you handsomely!” To the vague: “Does anyone know what happened with Greg? Haven’t seen him in days…”
I’ve actually been thinking about something like this recently (in the vein of a pokemon game). The problem is games don’t handle qualitative properties well, or maybe traditional systems don’t handle them well.
As far as combat goes, Dwarf fortress and Rimworld are probably the best examples where vital, life-sustaining organs having been irreparably damaged (i.e. the person’s brain is now missing) or blood loss is what kills people. In Rimworld, the main ranged weapon stats are accuracy, range, and rate of fire, and it makes since to have these stats available when in RL you can find these sorts of stats of a firearm. The way Dwarf fortress handles weapons is probably not ideal, but at least it’s intuitive. Edged weapons rely on the materials’ ability to create a sharp edge, making steel the best of the real world materials, while blunt weapons rely on the materials’ weight (explicitly it’s density I think), making silver the best of the materials you can normally make a weapon out of. None of that in DF is conveyed outright to the player.
Arguably you lose a lot of the choice and decision making that people come to expect out of an RPG. Any choice the player makes should just be preference. If the player chooses a weapon, it should be because it fits their play style, not because it’s secretly, statistically superior. That might just be the most important. The stats shouldn’t be secret, they should be irrelevant. Anything special about a weapon should either be easily intuited by look and use or come with enough flavor text that screams “IT’S SPECIAL.”
Sounds horrible. I did some old RPGs where you had to do a hand drawn map. It was very easy to mess up. And of course regular map making techniques like triangulation were unreliable due to depth culling and LOD and the like.
Breaking weapons right down to straight dps numbers becomes boring. But so does no numbers at all. You would expect an experience swordsman to be able to judge a good weapon, by it’s feel and heft and balance. I shouldn’t have to go kill 10 goblins to figure out my new sword isn’t as sharp as my old one. I can just test the edge with a finger. Numbers simulate this fighters intuition.
Obviously that would be something I would want to avoid.
I’m thinking more or less having visual cues that aren’t immediately understood, but you can get a general idea.
So a weapon would have a couple things that you can determin from it. The weapon type (Axe, Mace, Dagger) which would be the model, the material (Iron, Steel, Mithril) which would be the material, and the quality (crude, sturdy, fine) which would be shown as a overlay of scruffs that is less apparent with higher quality, and finally you could imply special stats or effects with jewels, glows, or particals.
So from those four thing you would need to learn how they differ and what it means to the weapon. Daggers are fast and have high crits, while hammers knock people around.
Then the material would alter it. Steel is lighter that iron so it’s better for blades, but iron’s weight adds to strength bonuses.
Of course this means that the game wouldn’t fair well as a Diablo clone, so no going from ~60 DPS to ~5,000,000,000 DPS.
But your fingers give you “dull” or “sharp”, not 1 or 100. Games can be made without numbers but they need something to replace them. Players are simply used to having the numbers. Oddly enough, my fans make me promise all the time to never add numbers. lol Numbers are there, of course, but they want them hidden.
In the context of this game idea, I could envision the player avatar examining the blade and smiling, maybe doing a couple graceful test swings, if it’s good sword. If it’s a bad sword, the avatar could look at it with a scowl, shaking his head. For me, that’s as good as displaying a text window that says “50 DPS, +2 To Hit” but more immersive.
First issue is this makes weapon choice one dimensional. Second issue is this means that players now need to discern where on the spectrum from crying in poverty to majestic boner the weapon happens to be on (because how can anyone really figure out which one is the infinity +1 sword without being at full mast?).
Just because there are options, that doesn’t mean there is an actual choice. If you can definitively say that this is the best sword, there isn’t a choice so don’t pretend like there actually is one.
The ideal case here is you hide stats because they aren’t needed. I get the feeling though that the intent is to hide stats to be obscure, which I’m gonna say means you’re just being a dick.
No…we are hiding numbers to improve immersion in a game for role players. Anyone who thinks we are “being a dick” won’t want to play the game anyway. I am sure others have reasons for doing so that improve their game. You could have said exactly what you meant…which is probably, “I feel that hiding numbers is a choice made by the developers to punish the players.” Instead, you insulted us with language.
I get your point…but that is because your players care about numbers. It might be hard to believe, but not all do and in fact, among our fan base, the vast majority find the lack of numbers as one of our greatest features. Gamers are as different as developers are, you know.
It needn’t be one-dimensional. If flames run down the blade of a magic sword, you might assume it’s particularly good against ice creatures but not as good against lava creatures. And through experience, you might find that some items work better than others in particular situations, rather than reading a box of text that says, “+5 vs. ice creatures”. In a way, this is more realistic than mere published numbers.
My favorite part is that the players won’t be saying “I can sell you a sword that is a 99!”