What's up with RPG respec?

[GoldenAxer]

What's up with these role-playing games where you can respec your skills and attributes if you pay a bunch of money? Isn't that antithetical to role-playing?

I see it like with me saying, "Hey, I spent too much time studying computers in school. I don't like it now. I wanna be reborn as an Olympian with like 25-inch biceps." Then some lady in a purple robe says, "Okay, that'll be $1,200."

What's that about? Isn't that the antithesis of role-playing? Hey guys, wait, I decided I'm not a dwarf anymore. I'm a half-elf and half-dragon now and I can start breathing fire through my ass and mouth and also my dong although the dong hole is very small so it only makes a little fire. You can't change everything on a whim!

I really think game designers are offering this respec feature for their inability to make the game fun against all possible options... or catering too hard to people who complain too much regardless of the options.

Updates

+1 y

I was a professional game developer originally if people got me confused for gamer. Whatever strong opinions I have on game design, that I seek to challenge, aren't like some little thing I intend to do nothing with but something that has real application to my life.

Updates

+1 y

I am one of those who like to stick close to analog realms, like PnP, tabletop, wargames, etc. I just think it's safer, perhaps. I don't know how to design a fun game that people won't have fun with so much if they're reduced to doing things like manually rolling dice. It is, at the very least, too ambitious for me to venture too far beyond that. I know there's a huge market for games that go far beyond that... but so too is there a market for augmented breasts. I don't like augmented breasts.

[jshm2]

No, it's progressive and allows devs to make money and players to get the game they want. To use your example. "I decided I'm not a dwarf anymore. I'm a half-elf and half-dragon" if it means you'll continue playing the game, then why the hell not? Better to allow, than lose the customer.

Also, why the hell are you gatekeeping this anyway? It's only a fucking game, grow up and find a better hill to die on..

[GoldenAxer]

That's true. I'm a little bit impractical though! I was a game developer originally by trade if that alters any of your perceptions of me. I think as a gamedev, we kind of have to have strong opinions even if they don't align with the mainstream just to be able to find any market. We try to target too many markets at once and miss all of them.

[GoldenAxer]

So I've found with designing that I kind of need to be more strongly opinionated than I really am. It's like I want to insist on making that horror movie an R rating instead of PG-13 as something you might relate to. But at the same time, I want to hear the most logical arguments for a PG-13 horror movie so that I don't risk getting my head too far up my ass that I ship a product that no one else likes.

[GoldenAxer]

That analogical hill you cited was the whole mountain that I built my entire life and career, so to speak. I got out of the game industry but if we're talking about customers, then the analogical PG-13 horror film is far superior to the R-rated one in box office sales. And I got out of gamedev and switched to VFX just around the time that the whole concept of widening profit margins as much as possible became popular around the late 90s when I worked on MMORPG that was starting to sell items and gears to players for money... That "worked", and actually extremely well, and still does if we're looking at the sales figures along with DLCs and shipping games not quite ready for early access and so forth. But I didn't want to be a part of it when it started shifting that way. So I switched to VFX which raises fewer questions of what makes a good product.

[GoldenAxer]

Anyway, sorry for rambling. I got impression that you thought I was a gamer rather than gamedev. If you ever played a game called Fallout 2, I worked on that one in the past along with Mechwarrior 2 before I switched to VFX industry. My strong opinions that I'm seeking to challenge are ultimately with the desire to retire one day and get back into gamedev, not like your average gamer who revolves his whole life around playing games in the spare time.

[Anonymous]

It shouldn't be done in table top games but I can see the need in video games. Like if a certain skill set was nerfed or the requirements for a skill was changed. However you shouldn't be able to change race or class, if you pick an Elven mage then you stay an Elven mage

[GoldenAxer]

Multiplayer/online games make quite a bit more practical sense to me in allowing respec since those games will likely generate many complaints from users if they're imbalanced in any way where one character build is clearly superior to another in almost every way. Those often seem as though the players are somewhat competing to discover and create the most powerful builds while the devs scramble to nerf the ones that are too overpowered.

I could at least sympathize a lot more with the designers in simply handing players a respec option to minimize the number of complaint-generating nerfs and buffs applied in hindsight after the game ships as so many players scramble to try new builds in ways where they can immediately compare the effectiveness of their build against another player.

I often think MMORPGs, in particular, have to be somewhat RPG-lite (if we our idea of an RPG revolves around very interesting and permanent choices) by practicality since -- aside from the strong practical desire to offer respec -- there's also a strong desire to reset changes to the world. For example, if such a game were to allow players to assassinate a king, instead of having permanent consequences to the world, the king might simply resurrect and respawn after a time period, or perhaps some new, robotic, generic sort of procedurally-generated successor to the kingdom will spawn in his place rather than one carefully designed. Otherwise, it would require far too much never-ending development work to constantly create new content to replace the content that online players permanently change/destroy.

[GoldenAxer]

Where things started to seem bizarre to me is that I started spotting strictly single-player offline games that started offering respec around the 2000s, as though they were taking inspiration from what I consider design compromises in multiplayer games.

I think an offline game is suitably balanced enough without players competing and comparing themselves to each other provided that no build is too underpowered so as to make the game near-impossible to complete, and provided that no build is too overpowered so as to make the game a boring cheese-fest. I think that's a far less ambitious goal and perfectly feasible to achieve without resorting to providing respec.

Then again, I might be stuck too much on a personal conception of what makes a game appealing as an RPG. I often think of it as a game that offers a series of choices to the player which are interesting and difficult to choose because of their consequences and weaved into the way the story and their character unfolds. Ideally, it would feature a dungeon master who can improvise and tell a story the way a human DM can in response to the player choices, although we're still a bit far from having the AI to do that

Lacking that, I think allowing elaborate and constant character progression choices can become a big part of what makes a video game lacking that human DM interesting as an RPG. Yet I think it becomes much less interesting and tied so much to the story of a character if, say, a warrior whose combat experience allowed him to master spear-fighting but lacking experience with a bow could suddenly reset and become a master archer overnight. His acquired skillsets start to feel to me like much less a part of who he is and more like clothing he can freely wear for a while and discard.