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Comments
Reminds me of both Borderlands games. The first one had a "Weapon Proficiency" system where using a type of gun made you better at it, giving you certain bonuses as you kept using the guns, since it worked on a leveling system where getting kills made your proficiencies level up.
The second game replaced that with a "Badass" system where doing certain challenges raised your "Badass Rank" and you got Badass Tokens that you could redeem for small boosts to general things like gun damage, maximum health, shield recharge delay, recoil reduction, elemental damage chance, etc.
Come to think of it, given how randomized guns are in those games, the Badass system probably made more sense because you could get screwed over if you leveled up to a point where the only good weapons you could use were ones you weren't as proficient with. That's only speculation on my part, though.
The Weapon Proficiency reminded me of TES' system, but it also had a traditional leveling system, complete with increasing Health and giving you skill points.
The second sounds a bit better, but- actually, no, that sounds worse. Going to trade those Tokens in would be completely jarring, reminding you that you're playing a game rather than keeping you immersed.
Of course, I think the second way did work for Borderlands 2, in a sense. But it also sounds jarring.
Thing is, different systems work for different games. A traditional leveling system works wonders for Pokemon, for example; but that's because at all times, you know you're playing a game, and it doesn't try to immerse you.
Well, you redeem the tokens in the menu, if that helps. And it's not quite like a skill tree, because every time you go to redeem one, it gives you some random options of what to put the bonus into. And these are rather small bonuses, again: at the end of my first playthrough, I don't think I had a single total bonus that met or exceeded 3.0%.
Plus, Borderlands doesn't take itself that seriously, I think.
It's not that it's a skill tree that's the problem, it's that... seeing the stats and all that reminds you that it's a game.
But I can't comment on Borderlands 2, at least as an informed person, as I haven't played it, so I will refrain from stating one way or another.
Um... I am always aware that video games are video games.
And everyone is aware that books are books, and films are films, etcetera.
That does not mean that one cannot be immersed, and it does not mean that being reminded that hey, everything you're doing is just a bunch of pixels and numbers is a good thing, especially for immersive games such as The Elder Scrolls series.
Well, if you want something a bit more immersing, play Black Mesa or something like that.
Nah, I'd go to Skyrim.
It's not really immersion I'm arguing against, it's... the idea of being reminded that you're playing a video game.
And Borderlands is not even close to the biggest offender here. It's really very mild, in the long run. I honestly have nothing against Borderlands as a game, apart from minor annoyances here and there.
The immersion argument started because I don't agree with DYRE's notion that traditional RPG leveling systems works better than The Elder Scroll's. It doesn't really have a lot to do with Borderlands.
On the other hand, I've heard that Skyrim has a problem in that the world doesn't react or change to what you do. TotalBiscuit has called it "an ocean with the depth of a puddle."
Oh, that is a massive problem.
And the mechanics, while broad, are broken as hell, and really boring to boot- click to kill a bandit, turn, click to kill him, turn, right-click to kill him with a fireball for a change.
But the setting and the system behind it are both great ideas, and the setting is very solid on almost all fronts, except for how it interacts with game mechanics.
(EDIT: Never mind. I probably know the answer already and I don't want to have any more incentive to keep refreshing the front page when really I need to go to sleep.)
(EDIT2: Nova replied anyway, so... basically I said "I don't actually get what immersion is or why it's desirable.")
Immersion is, ultimately, an extension of suspension of disbelief. Suspension of disbelief, secondary belief, immersion.
It's what allows you to accept the differences between another world as presented and our own.
Immersion involves... not leaping into a game, but, well, it's hard to describe.
The phenomenon I have been talking about is where all three levels are broken; you are jarred out of that secondary world, and are reminded that you are, once again, looking on at the little secondary world from the outside world.
It doesn't mean that you forget that you're part of the real world, but it does mean that you... immerse yourself in it, I guess. It's sort of like the point where you stop thinking of it as "Click to attack a skeleton" and start thinking of it as "Killing a skeleton".
It is not always desirable, but in many instances, it is. Games that take place in a constructed world often want you to be immersed in the game, because they have spent a lot of time constructing their world, and they want you to experience it. Even games like Spec Ops: The Line don't work as well if you don't immerse yourself in it, because it loses emotional impact- you remember that you are just playing a game, rather than experiencing the world and narrative as the developer intended.
Games like Pokemon don't strive for immersion, and that's fine, because they are games that work quite fine on just their gameplay, not relying on the world to bring you in.
So, immersion is not always desirable, but it is desirable in many cases.
Dyre pretty much summed it up, I think. The issue with the TES system is that it locks you into a "gameplay loop", where doing a certain thing incentivises doing more of it, but also deincentivises doing other things. It's a great idea in theory, but in practise, I don't think it makes a very effective character-building system.
It's not that difficult to pick something new up. By the time you're really good at anything, low-level training is comparatively cheap.
The scenery thing is not like in TES, but like you said last page, you do get experience for doing something.
I disagree. Rather heavily, in fact.
From a gameplay perspective, perhaps this is true; wielding a sword and shield tends to make you not ever swap to a two-handed sword, ever. It may not be the best character-building system ever.
However, it works with the game in a way that no other RPG system I have played yet does. It makes the world more believable.
It's hard to articulate. Playing with a certain style does tend to make you not want to play with another style, because that one style does get better while the others stagnate, yes. However, what I find to be more important than that is the ability for me to forget that I am playing a game- for me to stop thinking "Oh, I need to kill several enemies so I can go up another level", and for me to just play.
I guess what I'm saying is... exactly what I said before. The way that it is implemented is kind of dumb, but what they are trying to do is a step in the right direction; stop making the character's strength an abstraction, and integrating it directly into the playing experience and making it work in such a way that it makes sense to the player.
I just don't think that the game encouraging you to use fifty different types of attack is all that important compared to letting you sink into the game.
You don't just randomly get experience, yes, but the point I was making was that it doesn't make any sense as an abstraction. You're not getting any more experienced at something, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to get EXP for it.
It's the type of thing that is only a very minor annoyance and doesn't even really blip on my radar, and I only mentioned it as an aside that I thought might get people to think but not really comment on.
I get what you're saying -- TES uses the system is does because it wants to create convergence between what you observe as a player (narrative) and what you do in the game (gameplay). And for what it's worth, it succeeds at that convergence. It's not the only game that approaches this kind of thing, though -- only the most direct.
One example might be Mount & Blade, where your weapon proficiencies rise with the use of different weapon types. But one significant difference is that, in addition to this, you get to spend weapon proficiency points to upgrade any weapon skills you like when you level up.
Perhaps an even better example is Demon's Souls, where you spend souls to upgrade your statistics. This is important because the entire world has gone "undead" or "phantom", and now the souls of the deceased have become currency. So you absorb those souls to empower yourself artificially, eventually exceeding the boundaries of human potential. And as you might expect, hunting for souls doesn't lend itself well to being a good guy at all times -- in fact, the game forces you to do something pretty nasty in order to attain completion, for the sake of harvesting a particular Demon's Soul.
That said, I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with the standard ways doing things, at least in theory. Experience is a good enough abstraction of general ability, and choosing where you put your points allows for finer character control. And in a practical sense, you put points into things because you want to use them, so you therefore will. It's not the 1:1 lineup TES has, but I think the additional control over how your character is built justifies it.
Saw that coming.
But, no, that's not what I'm talking about.
Look, even The Elder Scrolls kind of fails at this, because they have a level up system that directly takes you out of the game. But...
See, it's this that I'm complaining about.
Experience is an abstraction. It is not a natural part of the setting.
In Skyrim, to level up, you have to open the menu and select the 'level up' option. When you are doing this, you are taking yourself outside the game, and instead looking on, seeing the game from a mechanical perspective rather than as a part of the setting. It reminds you that yeah, this is a game, everything here is just numbers.
I haven't played Mount and Blade, so I can't comment on it, but Dark Souls is much the same. In order to advance your character, you have to sit at a bonfire and view a stats screen, then decide which stat you want to increase.
Yes, these systems allow you more mechanical control over your character, but this mechanical control comes at a cost- and that cost is reminding you that yes, you are playing a game, and everything here is just pixels and numbers that you can manipulate at will.
The praise I am giving The Elder Scrolls at the moment is because it gets rid of this cost in its general play. Yes, Oblivion and Skyrim have general level-up things, and bluh, that is annoying. However, for most of its play, you are being given the chance to control how your character grows from a mechanical perspective, in a way that blends almost seamlessly into the general narrative. It does not jar you out of the game in order to give you that control.
Now, TES is wonky as fuck with this. However, if it balanced the system, then it would be a very, very good system for immersive RPG's to use.
Games thrive on abstraction, though. Hell, real life thrives on abstraction. Take the smallest grinder and the finest sieve, and pass the universe through them; then find me an atom of justice. Yet we behave as though there's some kind of natural order in the world to be adhered to. But the truth is that we construct a lot of concepts as a means of understanding our lives and finding our place among the crowd, many of them entirely fictitious outside of our collective belief. Justice only exists because of a widespread social contract that dictates we act in accordance with it as a concept, even if we don't all agree on the details.
Games tend to leave out a lot of the mundane legwork of real life, in any case. If you want to speak of removing abstraction, then games based on a medieval setting would have us going through bureaucratic process after killing a drunk who came at you with a knife. Or they would contain hours of tiny experience drains during training and the possibility of permanent death. The way level-up systems work is a compromise based on removing the mundane aspects of life so we can focus on adventure with a customised character.
Another thing to consider is where, exactly, you drawn the line between abstraction and "natural", and at which point character management removes one from the game. I think what you ask is impossible, because the systems we're used to are abstractions designed to keep things moving and relevant to the content of the game already. And again, there's no lack of abstraction in games. My pet complaint about abstraction, of course, is how most games ignore existing material on real swordsmanship in favour of gameplay systems that are familiar. So where do we draw the line between "good" abstraction and "bad" abstraction? And perhaps these are subjective? Metal Gear Solid 2 has some notable examples of willfully removing the player from the game in service of its discussion.
Okay, I'm getting kind of frustrated at you missing my point each time, so this will probably be my last response, else it will start leaking into my posts.
Games thrive on abstraction to a degree. However, just as there are bad forms of abstraction, there are good aspects of abstraction.
Some games do thrive on abstraction- games which rely heavily on mechanics and do not care about getting you involved in the world so much, such as Pokemon, do fine showing you the stats. However, other games, such as The Elder Scrolls series, do not do well with the same.
A large part of it is, of course, suspension of disbelief. The inherent nature of media requires some level of suspension of disbelief; we must believe that the world presented exists, we must believe that people can really shoot fireballs, we must believe that Detective Johnny Smith really exists. Okay; that's fine. It's kind of something that you just have to put up with. Sure, my mage can shoot fireballs out of her hand, and ten-tonne dragons can fly.
It's that same suspension of disbelief that allows you to ignore minor details in video games. Things like people being able to walk the length of a continent (or even just a territory within that continent) without requiring a rest, food restoring health points and not otherwise being required, being able to carry thousands of gold coins in your pouch and not worrying about the weight; people generally do not mind suspending their disbelief at these sorts of things.
However, the difference is that these elements are all still part of the narrative experience. Your suspension of disbelief allows you to ignore these things because they still fit within the world, and they would be annoying otherwise.
I have no doubt that a game could successfully pull off an abstraction like this and retain immersion. In fact, that would be a pretty awesome game. However, I cannot count how many times I have played a game- Skyrim, Dark Souls, Dragon Age: Origins- where I have immersed myself within the game, only to suddenly come to a level-up screen, and be suddenly reminded that oh right, it's just a game, and then had to build that immersion back up afterwards.
See, as you say here:
That is just not true.
The suspension of disbelief is responsible for removing the mundane aspects of life. The level-up systems of traditional RPG's is jarring and immersion-breaking.
And yes, I am aware that I sound fucking stupid arguing about immersion so much, so don't bother pointing it out.
A system like The Elder Scrolls maintains exactly this; a way to customize your character to your liking based purely upon your playstyle. However, it does this behind the scenes, allowing you to customize your character to your liking without jarring you out of the game to do it.
Okay, there. I have stated my point as clearly and as eloquently as I can.
It is bad form to drop out of a debate like this, but if I continue, I am only going to grow more frustrated at both you and myself, so I am leaving now.
Now, for a joke:
Looking for a Part-Time Library Assistant
Must be able to work weekends
9-2
17 coins an hour
Level 9+ characters only
Must have at least 14 Intelligence
Warrior classes need not apply
I think I'm going to spend this entire bag of sour cream and onion potato chips on this one assignment.
Welp, the Campbell-approved Evil Dead remake is coming to theaters next year.
GMH - that sounds like it will leave your stomach feeling all nasty and gross and you rolling on the floor clutching your abdomen in pain and cursing the world that molded you into a person who would make such a choice.
Has the K-pop fandom always been this oddly vain?
(Butterscotch bar+milk+cornstarch)+(different sorts of fruit)=god-tier dessert
It was mystifying how...hypocritical it seemed from the outside. And how little self-awareness they seemed to have.
It was Fantastic Baby, wasn't it?