Peace
I know this is a type of boss design (most commonly found in Japanese RPGs) but it is one I personally hate. It is the polar opposite design philosophy of what Metal Gear used to be, which was more puzzle-oriented, like Zelda. Metal Gear bosses used to be about learning patterns, exploiting weaknesses with specific weapons, crippling the enemy to give yourself an advantage, etc. The bosses in Peace Walker swing completely in the opposite direction, into stat-driven endurance battles. This is where the Monster Hunter influence goes too far, reducing Metal Gear to a straight-forward grind-fest.
I love the Pokemon stuff, the kidnapping and army building, but in some ways it was better in Peace Walker's predecessor, Portable Ops, when these elements were simply a meta-game laid over a core game that was still recognizably derived from classic Metal Gear. While it’s true that Portable Ops marked the first time bosses lost some of their puzzleiness (mostly as the result of letting players design their own arsenal) they never required grinding to win.
Unlike in Peace Walker, weapon and tool development in Portable Ops was holistic, not incremental. In other words, items did not have various "levels" of power or effectiveness. You didn’t have to “upgrade” your rocket launcher to make it do more damage. A rocket launcher was a rocket launcher, and you either had one or you didn’t. Sure, there were the RPG-ish elements of needing scientists to build weapons, and what they created and how fast they created it were based on a rudimentary stat system, but once you had an item in the field stats didn't matter. It was about which weapons/tools you had, not what “level” they were.
I can't stand the way Peace Walker scales difficulty by scaling enemy statistics. This essentially means the only way you progress in the game is by scaling your own statistics. It’s less about how good you are and more about how many fucking rations and supply markers you have, so you reach a point where you outlast the enemy simply because you put endless hours in the game. It's the kind of game design that devalues learning and skill in favor of not having a life.
If there was any doubt about Peace Walker’s "damage sponge" difficulty philosophy it is proven by how the game omits any and all permanent effects that might give players a strategic upper hand. Setting anti-tank mines or blowing up a fuel tank only stops land vehicles “temporarily” even though they should in all rights stop them permanently. It’s clear each boss is designed not to be “too easy” for players who want to pound away on it with their snazzy guns. Since everything has hit points now it’s just a matter of hitting bosses—anywhere—until they go down. This is a far cry from the tank battle in Metal Gear Solid 1, where one grenade would disable its treads and another down the top hatch would finish off the gunner. The main challenge was getting close enough to the tank to do this, and the fight was perfectly interesting, logical, and satisfying.
Unlike in Peace Walker, weapon and tool development in Portable Ops was holistic, not incremental. In other words, items did not have various "levels" of power or effectiveness. You didn’t have to “upgrade” your rocket launcher to make it do more damage. A rocket launcher was a rocket launcher, and you either had one or you didn’t. Sure, there were the RPG-ish elements of needing scientists to build weapons, and what they created and how fast they created it were based on a rudimentary stat system, but once you had an item in the field stats didn't matter. It was about which weapons/tools you had, not what “level” they were.
I can't stand the way Peace Walker scales difficulty by scaling enemy statistics. This essentially means the only way you progress in the game is by scaling your own statistics. It’s less about how good you are and more about how many fucking rations and supply markers you have, so you reach a point where you outlast the enemy simply because you put endless hours in the game. It's the kind of game design that devalues learning and skill in favor of not having a life.
If there was any doubt about Peace Walker’s "damage sponge" difficulty philosophy it is proven by how the game omits any and all permanent effects that might give players a strategic upper hand. Setting anti-tank mines or blowing up a fuel tank only stops land vehicles “temporarily” even though they should in all rights stop them permanently. It’s clear each boss is designed not to be “too easy” for players who want to pound away on it with their snazzy guns. Since everything has hit points now it’s just a matter of hitting bosses—anywhere—until they go down. This is a far cry from the tank battle in Metal Gear Solid 1, where one grenade would disable its treads and another down the top hatch would finish off the gunner. The main challenge was getting close enough to the tank to do this, and the fight was perfectly interesting, logical, and satisfying.
Given how excellent the simple puzzle-logic of Metal Gear boss fight have been in the past, it feels dumb for Peace Walker to simply abandon all of it in favor of straight-up RPG stat-grinding. The better fights in the game—the PUPA, the ZEKE fight, and if you choose to try and stealth the vehicle bosses—retain some of the old Metal Gear strategic thinking. When it comes to the later bosses, though, it’s so stat-heavy and grind-necessitating the game feels more like Dragon Quest than tactical espionage.
I always loved Metal Gear’s reliance on tools with discrete uses rather than stats with incremental effects. This is what put the series in the same category as Thief and Hitman—all superb games about using sharply-defined tools to make decisions in a richly simulated world. Peace Walker
This isn't to say stats always work against strategic decision-making. It depends on how they are implemented. When they seem to exist only to augment things like health or damage they do. But when used in other ways they don't. Metal Gear Ac!d, the short-live Metal Gear spin-off series released on the PSP some years ago, indulged RPG conventions without undercutting this sort of tool-decision-making. It's hard to imagine anything more RPG-ish than Ac!d's turn-based, card-based combat system. Yet I have to confess that—when put side-by-side with Peace Walker—both Ac!d games manage to express the strategic thinking of classic Metal Gear in a way Peace Walker seems to totally lose sight of.
This isn't to say stats always work against strategic decision-making. It depends on how they are implemented. When they seem to exist only to augment things like health or damage they do. But when used in other ways they don't. Metal Gear Ac!d, the short-live Metal Gear spin-off series released on the PSP some years ago, indulged RPG conventions without undercutting this sort of tool-decision-making. It's hard to imagine anything more RPG-ish than Ac!d's turn-based, card-based combat system. Yet I have to confess that—when put side-by-side with Peace Walker—both Ac!d games manage to express the strategic thinking of classic Metal Gear in a way Peace Walker seems to totally lose sight of.
Even though Ac!d featured a "card deck", in which actions could only be "played" based on which cards happened to come up in your "hand", all these actions had discrete functional values, not arbitrary incremental values. Drawing the card of a particular tool or weapon meant you got to use that particular tool or weapon. Pistols, rocket launchers, etc. all had specific strategic values. It wasn't just about how powerful they were. There was no rocket launcher "+1" or "+2" because challenges did not scale primarily in terms of how much HP enemies had (like they do in Peace Walker). Like any true turn-based strategy game, the Ac!d series was all about, well, strategy. It was about how well you could out-think your opponent by seeing several moves ahead of them and using your resources accordingly.
I remember spending hours on some screens of Ac!d, just trying to figure them out like puzzles. I specifically remember a screen full of snipers perched on ridges, and having to figure out how to use my current card deck to sneak past them. It was hard but rewarding once I developed a successful strategy, the way any turn-based strategy game is. In this sense Metal Gear Ac!d recalled Front Mission, Vandal Hearts, or even the original X-Com—all turn-based strategy games where cleverness was more important than how high you had grinded your characters.
Metal Gear Ac!d was a PSP launch game, and at the time I remember Hideo Kojima claiming he was skeptical as to whether the real-time tactical stealth gameplay of Metal Gear would "work" on a portable platform, hence Ac!d's "experimental" turn-based approach. Ac!d was predictably criticized at the time for "not being a real Metal Gear game" even though most people admitted it was quite good turn-based strategy game. Portable Ops, in obvious response to this, was intended as the the first "real" Metal Gear game on the PSP console, and Peace Walker was even more hyped as a full-blown main series installment, even though in some ways Ac!d was more true to the concept of tactical espionage action.
Thinking about Ac!d again makes me wonder if Peace Walker's more frustrating battles would actually be fun if they were turn-based. Even if they were they probably wouldn't be as fun as Ac!d, because they'd still be just endurance tests, which is the least interesting type of strategic problem I can imagine. Two opponents hit each other until one of them dies. Brilliant. If I wanted that I'd play...
...well I wouldn't play Metal Gear, that's for sure.
...well I wouldn't play Metal Gear, that's for sure.
Posts
I have to quibble with your title. *bad* RPG elements or poorly integrated ones certainly harm good games. Your example "There was no rocket launcher "+1" or "+2" because challenges did not scale primarily in terms of how much HP enemies had" illustrates that. If challenges did scale primarily in terms of enemies' HP and player abilities scale primarily from more powerful (but essentially similar) items, that seems boring regardless of the genre. In a conversation with Chris Sims and Jeff Howard, the claim arose that routinely acquiring magic sword +1 (then +2, then +3 ...) has the effect of devaluing *all* magic weapons. They cease to be magical in any interesting way, rather diminishing a core element of a fantasy RPG. This is a quibble with your title, not at all with your critique. But having quibbled, for me, the question arises whether a well-designed, well-integrated RPG element might have benefited the game(s) in question.
ReplyDeleteMaybe a better title would have been "How RPG elements *Can* Hurt Good Games". I don't think RPG elements necessarily hurt good games, but they can depending on how they are implemented. You seem to be seeing an implicit "always" in my title, but I feel my argument provides the clarification of exactly what I mean. Titles, I feel, function better as provocative invitations to disagreement than accurate summaries anyway.
ReplyDeleteThe argument is more against a certain type of difficulty design than against RPG elements specifically. I personally just feel stats are abused as a concept an awful lot, and I often find games that do away with them to be more interesting. But this is not flatly true for all games, of course.
I like stats when they feel like a coherent abstraction of a coherent fictional world (like in Demon's Souls, for example), but not when they feel like they exist solely for their own sake, as conventions of a game genre. This is why it pains me to even call stats "role-playing" conventions because they aren't. They are a vestigial artifact of pen and paper games that don't necessarily contribute to a sense that you are playing a role. Stats are not "role-playing". Stats are just numbers.
Or rather, role-playing is not stats, seeing as stats CAN contribute to the sense you are playing a role. It's the mentality that any game with Level Ups "has RPG elements" which gets on my nerves. Castlevania, Role Playing, really? Is God of War also Role Playing, as you "level up" your blades?
ReplyDeleteIt's just a result of terminology ignorance, though you would think more people would be able to identify from the words "role" and "playing" when a games fits the label of RPG.
Your title is almost accurate, though, not in relation to the stats, but rather the damage sponge thing.
I mean, action games are ones where success is determined by your reflexes, strategy is down to your intelligence; I've always considered an RPG a game where success is determined by the role you play, rather then any personal attributes. That is to say, if two people are playing the same role, there chances of success will be exactly the same, rather then being down to how good they are at the game.
(I'm sure other people will have definitions, but stick with me)
So, really, the most RPG a battle can be is choosing to engage an enemy, then waiting whilst they fight it out with no player involvement.
Anything more slips into strategy-RPG or action-RPG territory. Would you agree?
So, yeah, it's probably the mentality of an RPG develop that brought this on, though it would be wrong to say it has "RPG elements".
I don't have much of a specific definition for "RPG elements". In this case, yeah, it meant stats, or rather a particular implementation of stats in regards to difficulty design. For me a "role-playing game" is any game that makes me feel like I'm someone else, that I'm making decisions the way an actor on stage would, not just as a gamer trying to optimize for success. How a game does that is really beside the point, as long as it does it well.
ReplyDeleteCan you claim that Half Life is an RPG, then, if it makes you feel like Gordon Freeman?
ReplyDeleteI read a fair definition a while ago which was basically if someone over you shoulder tells you to do something, and you can reply "No, my character wouldn't do that", you're role playing.
In the context of a game, though, which is all about winning or losing, pure role playing means you take on the qualities of your character and so your chance to win is down to their abilities rather then your own. You just make the decisions that shape the character into the role.
That's how I've always seen role playing games, anyway. JRPGs, for example, are terrible role playing games, even when they're decent adventure-strategy games.
Role-playing games (to me) shouldn't be about winning or losing. They should be about playing a role. (Games not not just about winning or losing.)
ReplyDeleteAnd Half-Life doesn't make me feel like Gordon Freeman because Gordon Freeman is nobody. He isn't a character. He's a camera and a floating gun.
"Role-playing" to me shouldn't even be a "genre". It's a type or style of play. I fully recognize that, for most people, "role-playing" means ability is located mostly in the character, not the player, but I think this is a very narrow view of what that phrase can mean. For me, it's often counter-productive to making me feel like I am X... because I'm not, am I... my character is.
Games that require learning and skill to do things--not just adding numbers to a spreadsheet--are the ones that make me feel like I'm playing a role. Thief makes me feel more like a thief than playing a thief class in Oblivion ever could.
Games are about winning and losing, otherwise, by definition, it's not a game, it's, I don't know, a toy, probably.
ReplyDeleteMost toys can be played as games, of course (I'm winning because my lego tower is the biggest it has ever been!), and many games can be played as toys, but when you talk about games, and game genres, that's the distinction you have to consider, in my mind, at least. That's the difference between Role Playing and a Role playing Game.
What's the difference between Thief and Half Life? Not mechanically, of course, I mean to say, what is the difference that makes Thief make you feel like a Thief but doesn't make Half Life make you feel like a human-resistance freedom fighter, or whatever (I haven't actually played Thief, so if you answer to that question is supposed to be self evident you will have to humour me)?
I answer a lot of these questions elsewhere on my blog. See some of my original entries (Games That Made Me) for some of these answers. But, like anything, they're personal and not terribly scientific.
ReplyDeleteAs for games having win/lose states... I mean, "game" and "play" are contested terms. Whether or not games have to have winning and losing depends on who you ask. I myself tend to feel games have "goals", otherwise they are simply "play", but you don't have to define games this way, and if you do you don't have to define "goals" exclusively in terms of winning and losing.
Thanks, I'll give those other entries a look. I was linked here from Critical Distance and from what I've read so far you seem like one of the more intelligent videogame bloggers. Good job :)
ReplyDeleteVery interesting article, I agree completely that RPG elements often dilute the "purity" of games that require technical skill and puzzle solving. The beauty of Contra and Battletoads is that everyone encounters the same game-- Level 7 doesn't get easier if you grind the Level 3 boss 20 times. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, a game beloved by many (including myself) also signaled the beginning of the end for the hallmarks of Castlevania's original formula. There aren't difficult platforming segments because there are no pits, and the bosses are barely speed bumps in the trip around the castle. The Metroidvania successors have had segments that require grinding, and in the recent XBLA offering, grinding for rare loot is most of the game.
ReplyDeleteI think part of this is my background in skill-based games and the fact that my ownership of a Genesis favored more technical games over my Super Nintendo owning friends, who went down the JRPG path of Chrono Trigger, FF6, and the gamut of sequels on successor systems.