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Comments
I gotta admit, the every-encounter-is-a-significant-challenge thing sounds like enough to turn me off the game alone.
^^, ^ Those are both selling points for me >.>
I just don't like the idea of having to expend significant amounts of effort any time I want to do anything in the game. -shrug-
Well, that applies to every MMO ever, too, only the stuff you have to do every time you want to do anything in those tends to be boring.
I don't think MMOs fall under the purview of "Challenging"
I would utterly utterly hate open-world anything (or hell anything with a sufficiently large overworld) if it didn't feature some easy way to get across large swaths of it. Removing it for the sake of ~*IMERSION*~ does not make a game better or more difficult. It's simply adds unnecessary amounts of time in between getting to the fun parts.
That's part of the charm; I haven't done very many quests that were just "kill X of Y", and most quests are very expansive. It makes every trek feel like a dangerous journey into the unknown, and on a timer at that, because night is coming. Unlike TES, where the travel element becomes more trivial as the game progresses, the travel becomes more intense and dangerous as you move further from your base of operations. It's one of the few games where quests actually feel like, well, quests. In most fantasy games, the tasks you're given are very trivial and easy, but Dragon's Dogma demands preparation and consideration. You won't be back in the city for a long time, so make your items count, hire the right pawns and kit yourself out appropriately.
^ It really does add to immersion and fun, because the world is so dangerous in its own right, especially at night. So it's a test against time as well as a test against the elements. Everything comes together as a whole to provide an experience that, while more demanding, is also intensely rewarding. The world isn't as big as Oblivion or Skyrim anyway, and that's precisely because you have to walk across it. But it packs that distance with a great deal of tension and makes it a considerable factor in its own right.
There's no metric for game design. It's not a science nor an art, but an alchemy. I would say that article points out a very reasonable and very clever way to go about things, but it's one of many legitimate approaches.
I was talking about having to spend a lot of time on stuff whenever you do anything.
I don't think immersion is the reason to remove it; though if a game does do that, it's a bad idea. If the main challenge of the game involves fighting your way through the world, though, fast travel would pretty much ruin the game.
why did i even type this
^I was actually referring to grinding more than to traveling.
Yes, but that really doesn't address the complaint.
@INUH: That's the thing, for every moment fighting your way back for your reward might be fun, I can think of a dozen different situations where it would be mind blowingly annoying.
^^Well, my point is that while the grinding mechanic is arbitrary and dull, traveling can actually be interesting in a well-designed game.
^That's true; it all comes down to designing the game to complement the travel.
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^^^, ^^^^ In most cases, I feel that Dragon's Dogma succeeds in that regard. Night and day aren't just aesthetic, but influence the kinds of enemies that appear and heavily impacts visibility. You might finish your quest to find that night has fallen, or your quest might go on halfway through the night only for day to break and offer relief when you're on the road back to town. The time element is really well implemented. You can also get single-use items that teleport you back to the main city, which are useful for quests that take you to very remote locations.
Okay, so, how about them guilty pleasure games?
I'm pretty open about every game I like so... I don't have any?
TOR is better than most MMOs (I didn't mention it, keep in mind), though it does still have a lot of "kill x of y," which is grinding as a quest.
Okay now we're talking. If you get some sort of mount down the road and I'll look into this game.
I wish there was a way I could play Dragon's Dogma without actually, like... spending money on Dragon's Dogma. Because there are seriously ten thousand better ways I could spend my money, and yet I want to play the game just for a few hours so I can be sure that it sucks. (well that's not the only reason but...)
Given that who's the publisher of DD, I'm trying to stay away from it and their other games so I don't give them my money.
I would still prefer 'kill x of y' to 'near any other option provided within RPG's for quests'.
And none of this is saying anything that makes the whole every-fight-is-a-challenge thing sound less annoying, but whatever, different strokes or something.
The teleport items are very uncommon and I don't think there are any mounts. That said, you can buy the teleport items ("ferrystones") for 20k coins from a black market dealer. That's prohibitive when you first enter the city, but it's pretty reasonable when you've found your feet as long as you don't want to teleport home after every outing.
No mounts, as far as I know, and probably for the better. They'd damage the sense of danger the foot travel thrives on.
The issue is basically that RPGs only generally provide a small array of standard options for this kind of thing. It doesn't change that "kill X of Y" is uncreative, boring and fails to enthrall.
I thought the concept of a guilty pleasure was not something you necessarily hide from people but simply something you like for rather personal appeal reasons rather than because you perceive any quality within it
-shrug-
It's plenty entertaining to me.
^^ Well that's... weird. Otherwise what's the point of the "guilty" part?
Oh well. If that's the case...
...
Ape Escape 3? Even though it's kind of not nearly as good as the previous games in the series, it is the only one where you can be a magical girl, so... >.>
Triggerheart Exelica? There are plenty of better shmups available, but mecha musume = moe moe kyun?
Sakura Wars ~So Long, My Love~? Because Rika is mai waifu?
I dunno.
By the way, I'm not saying Dragon's Dogma is necessarily for everyone, but the "flaws" pointed out here are necessary components of the experience in context of the whole. That is, fast travel is a game design choice rather than advancement, and has to exist in context. For instance, it works in TES because the world is so mind-bogglingly huge, but it's not in Mount and Blade because a huge part of the game is dealing with the dangers of the road, much like Dragon's Dogma.
That's fair enough, but put yourself in the shoes of a game designer and think about what you might want to provide for an audience. Most game designers want to offer combat, but that doesn't necessitate making a quest based on killing X of Y -- those enemies can simply be obstacles on the way to a more interesting objective. Even fetch quests are better if they're well-constructed enough. What if you had to defend an outpost for X amount of time rather than go out and kill a bunch of enemies? You'd still get the combat, but the context would much better support an interesting experience because there's the illusion of more being at stake.
@Nova: It's entertaining if killing shit within the game itself is fun.
>Ape Escape
Oh, my, yes. Mind you, I've only played 2 and 3. I tend to enjoy those games a bit more than I should. But I'm all for catching monkeys. The fact that 2 had voice actors from the original Pokemon anime didn't hurt either.