LogFAQs > #977642940

adjl posted...

Losing gives you a baseline to compare yourself against. When you later become powerful enough to beat the thing that beat you before, you feel a greater sense of accomplishment than if you just beat it outright.

Maybe if these scripted losses were happening early in act 1. It's usually around the 2/3rds mark into these rpgs. And as for being narritively limiting, it's a game, that IS narritively limiting. You cannot (or should not) tell the same kind of story in a game that you would in a non interactive fiction. It'd be like if a teacher just gave out only 0s on the mid term because it makes a better comeback story when you study hard enough to ace the final exam.

A game is testing the player, if the player never fails, the player should never be punished. In an rpg, the player takes the ROLE of the character and thus punishing the character is also punishing the player.

Every jrpg I can think of that has these autolosses could have written things in a way that explores the same themes without forced losses or at the very least, don't make those losses a direct loss at combat. Have it be something like hostages or something tragic happening when the player isn't around to protect them.

adjl posted...

You've gotta take some responsibility for that yourself. You know full well that games aren't (and never will be) balanced around 100% completion and whatever power level that gives you, especially in games that are relatively open-ended and let you go off on wild adventures before advancing the story. You should expect that doing so is going to give you a power level that's inconsistent with the story. If you don't like being more powerful than the story expects you to be, don't deliberately seek out every available optional power-up opportunity before advancing the story.

Then who is that option for? If you expect players to not do 100% of the side content, then just cut down the side content amount until the average player does complete 100% and you can stay consistent with the narrative. Instead you leave players like me in an annoying middle ground where not doing everything feels bad but then doing everything leads to dissonance with the story and also feels bad. At the very least, you can make the higher difficulties factor in doing all the side content. The game I was just playing and complaining about does indeed have multiple difficulties as do most rpgs I can think of.