(logo chiming) - [Falcon] Roleplaying games allow us to inhabit characters
with a level of detail most games don't let us. But sometimes, they don't make them right. Starting off with number 10: when there's no way to skip cutscenes or advance text boxes automatically. So RPGs are a wide-ranging
and varied genre, but one constant in all
of them is the cutscene. Even if they're short,
if you're playing an RPG, 9 times out of 10, there's
gonna be cutscenes, and more often than not, there's gonna be a few pretty long ones. And even if they don't have
full-blown cutscenes in them, there's gonna be at
least a lot of dialogue. Like, a good story is really
important for a great RPG, but if you're playing through the game a second or third time
and you just don't care, then being forced to watch the sometimes extremely long cutscenes can be a big chore. It's especially bad when you
die right after a cutscene and you're forced to watch it again because you can only save
before the cutscene starts. It's something that, I mean, it's not inherent to
every single cutscene, but sometimes, that's how the chips fall. And it's definitely less of
an issue with modern games. Like, most RPGs nowadays give you some way to skip cutscenes now. But there's still a lot
of games that don't, and while it's not quite as annoying as not being able to skip cutscenes, the fact that many RPGs
don't give you the option to automatically advance text
boxes can be really annoying. The only input you've
got during these scenes is just press X to go
to the next text box, and these things can go
on for a really long time if you're playing a
really long-winded RPG. It's just the game forcing you to keep your hand on the controller, even though you're pretty
much doing nothing. A lot of RPGs give you the
option to auto-advance, so it only makes the
ones that don't do this stand out all the more these days. There's really no reason not to have these basic features
appear in an RPG anymore, and it totally sucks
when they're not there. At number nine is boring,
forced grinding sections with no way to speed anything up. This is an issue that has plagued RPGs since the very beginning of the genre, and the fact that it's
still an issue makes it seem like it's probably always
gonna be a problem. You know what we're
talking about here, though. You're playing a game,
everything's going smoothly, and then you get to the boss. You've been fighting every
enemy that popped up, you feel like you're about
the level you should be, but you fight the boss, and
they just totally crush you. Like, not even close. No, you can't just go somewhere else. You're locked into the dungeon or it's a totally linear game, so your only option is to
run around, beat up monsters until you get strong
enough to take the boss on. That's it. Newer RPGs have tried to do things that make grinding less annoying, like letting you speed up
battles so they go by quicker, which is a nice solution
that should appear in some form for every
turn-based RPG out there. But there's still a lot
of games that don't. You're forced to slowly level up by killing hundreds of chump enemies just so you can get strong
enough to beat the boss. Now, obviously, RPGs should be challenging to at least some extent. For a lot of players, just steamrolling through everything
wouldn't be a lot of fun. But there's parts of games where you pretty much have to grind and that's your only option, and that just straight-up
sucks every time. For more skilled players, the grind might not be as necessary or even necessary at all,
but a lot of the time, that sort of thing requires understanding the sometimes really
complex systems of an RPG, stuff casual players might not know about. Like, grinding isn't
necessarily even a bad thing on its own, but at this
point, there's no reason why developers can't put in
some way to speed things up. It's a simple feature that
can take some of the tedium out of an RPG. At number eight is awkward
or overly complicated menus. If you're playing an RPG, you're gonna be spending
a lot of time in menus. That's just part of the game. You're sorting through equipment. You're leveling up stats. You're checking the available quests. You're looking at the map. You spend so much time on
menus that it's kinda shocking how many games don't have very good menus. And we don't mean every game. There are a lot of recent games that are much better about this. But there are enough bad
or annoying ones out there where developers are still
making all the same mistakes. One of the worst we can remember is the "Mass Effect" console menu, which is just a total mess. Trying to sort through
items was such a pain because it was a big list that
you'd have to scroll through. But "Mass Effect: Andromeda's" menus, you think, ah, new generation, benefit of learning from
mistakes of the past, starting from scratch, new
series, new everything. They managed to make them worse, though. Just trying to navigate through all this stuff is a huge pain. Another recent RPG with
a baffling menu system I can remember is
"Xenoblade Chronicles 2." Like, there's so many
nested options hidden around that it makes doing some fairly
basic stuff really annoying, and if you quit the game and come back to it after a few months, you're completely lost
looking at this stuff. In general, menus in
games are getting better, unless you really hate
virtual mouse navigations, which a lot of games are doing now. But a lot of developers seem to make a lot of seemingly
easy-to-fix mistakes when it comes to UI design. At number seven, when
they don't make it obvious that a boss fight is unwinnable. Like, this is a convention
that's here to stay. It's a staple of certain RPGs,
particularly ones from Japan. They just love this stuff, and in concept, I'm
obviously not against it. But there's a difference between a good and a bad unwinnable boss fight. You gotta know what I'm
talking about here, right? The game pits you against an enemy that's intentionally way
tougher than you are, and you progress the
story by losing the fight rather than winning. This sort of thing happens
in a ton of old RPGs and still shows up in games
like "Bravely Default 2," and it's not so bad when the boss either appears very early
in the game or mechanically, it makes it very obvious
that you can't beat them, like making it so that
you only do 1 damage to the enemy or something. But sometimes, games
want you to lose a fight, even though it doesn't feel
like you're that outmatched, so you end up wasting precious items trying to win an encounter that's designed not to be winnable. It can be fun to throw an unwinnable boss at you early in the game that, if you grind a ton, is actually beatable. Sometimes, they throw a secret ending behind stuff like that, and that's cool. But certain games just give
the boss an I WIN button that they just hit at a
certain point in the battle, and I don't really love that. Unwinnable bosses can add
some drama to a game for sure, but when they're not
telegraphed very well, they can be really annoying. At number six is
out-of-control level scaling. Like, level scaling in general is kind of a dirty word
when it comes to RPGs. There's a lot of players
who hate this mechanic when it appears in certain games. Basically, how it works is that as your character gets stronger, the enemies get stronger to compensate. For certain games, this sort of thing can actually kinda keep
a game entertaining and make it so enemies
don't become total pushovers at any point, but on the flip side, it makes it so that everything can and often does just feel the same. When there aren't occasional
spikes in difficulty and everything is just a flat curve, it can make a game feel boring and samey. But level scaling is at its worst when the system is fundamentally flawed. Probably the most obvious example is "Elder Scrolls: Oblivion," when the level scaling system will, if you level up a little bit too much, turn enemies into brick walls of HP that are really tedious to take down. "Fallout 3" has the issue
to a lesser extent as well. Later games in the series for
both are way better about it, but man, were all those
radscorpions annoying to deal with after a while in "Fallout 3." You're actually just making the game harder for yourself gaining levels, which, I mean, incentivizes you not to. This sort of thing is
frustrating to deal with, on top of just not making
a lot of logical sense. Gaining experience should
make your character stronger instead of making everything
else stronger, right? You're the canonical hero
who can beat up a god, but random enemies are
smacking you around with ease like you just started the game? It's just dumb at a certain point. At number five is tons of
unnecessary and confusing systems. If there's one thing
that RPGs love to have, it's a ton of unnecessary,
overlapping systems, like cooking, crafting,
a random point system that gets you mostly pointless rewards. Ah, blah, blah, blah. This, I mean, I don't
even need to get into it. You know what I'm talking about. And some of the time, this stuff can actually
be a fun diversion, and we don't necessarily have anything against it automatically. But some games really go overboard with how pointless and annoying it is, like the whole settlement
system in "Fallout 4," which, while cool more often than not, doesn't really get you anything and can easily be ignored if you want to. It's potentially a
massive part of the game, but in practice doesn't really add much to the experience for most players, other than the fun of
making your own house, which, it's fun. But having to constantly
babysit settlers is a drag, and there is where it really
starts to feel underdeveloped. So many RPGs have some kind of cooking system and crafting system now, and I guess they're sometimes useful. You can put hours of time into stuff and get basically nothing
back in return, though. In a lot of games, it's just plain easier and better to buy weapons in store rather than bother with crafting at all. It's not always bad,
but it's another example of RPGs trying to put more
stuff into their games, regardless of quality. The mistake is thinking
that this stuff adds value for most players when most
will ignore it if they can. At number four is filler side quests. Some game designers must
feel there's some kind of, like, quota for game
content they have to reach, and I get it. We do see a lot of game reviews out there complain about not having enough content, but it's usually because the
content isn't satisfying. Like, a really short game
can be enough content as far as I'm concerned,
if it's satisfying content. Overcompensating by just loading your not particularly great game up with content isn't
the solution, though, because so many RPGs have a boatload of totally forgettable and
uninteresting content in them. Good RPGs, even. Like, for certain games, side missions can be almost as good as the main missions in a game. See "The Witcher 3" for that. But for every game that has
actually good side quests, there's 10 that have totally boring ones. We've all been there. You enter in a new town. There's tons of little exclamation points everywhere on the map. Every single person gives
you a little request. Get, like, five bear pelts or deliver some letter to somebody. "Oh, my lost love. Can you bring this letter to them?" It's like, why are you asking me? I've been walking all damn day! It's just really basic,
boring crap, though. JRPGs are still pretty lousy
with this kind of quest design, but a lot of Western
RPGs can be just as bad, like "Assassin's Creed
Odyssey" and "Cyberpunk," one of which I would
call a really good game. The other is all right. Both are filled with
meaningless side quests that send you to clear out
a small base or something. That's, like, it. And we can't forget those
awesome radiant quests in Bethesda games. At least those are pretty easy
to ignore, most of the time. Making games is obviously a tough business and making side content can
be a really thankless job, but because it's the stuff
people are most likely to miss, when a game puts in the extra effort to have some optional mission actually be interesting and fun, it really adds a lot to the game. In our opinion, a lot of RPGs could cut, like, half of the side quests and most people wouldn't even notice. That's how little they add. And a lot of companies seem
to just make this mistake where they think that more equals better, even though a lot of players just think all this junk is tedious. At number three is saying
your choices matter when they actually don't. Part of the most
appealing thing about RPGs is the ability to play
a character your way. Like, you play the role however you want in a roleplaying game. You can choose to be good
or evil, and the expectation is that those choices
actually mean something. Players want to be rewarded for playing the game
the way that they want, so one of the worst
mistakes designers can make is to make it so the choice
doesn't matter at all, especially when player choice is such an important part of the game. I don't think anyone's really
upset when the princess says, like, "But thou must" in "Dragon Quest" because those games aren't
really about making choices. But with something like "Mass Effect" where a lot of the things you can do have severe consequences on
the story and characters, taking the player's choice
away in the end of the game, the conclusion, sucks. This is one of the hardest
things out there to get right, too, because adding real choices
to a game is really hard, and it only makes creating a game exponentially more difficult to do. But if you're telling players that what they do in a game matters, then you kinda actually have to make it feel like it matters. At number two is beginner's traps. Probably one of the best but
also one of the worst things about RPGs is character creation. There's nothing worse than
spending a ton of time building your character, only
to actually start the game and play for a long
time before you realize, you don't like what it looks
like, you did something wrong. Like, maybe the stats are wrong, you got the wrong skills to start with, the entire class is subpar, whatever. You fell into the beginner's trap, and RPGs can be some of the worst games out there for this kind of thing. Of those hundreds of possible options you've got to create your character, you might as well just
scratch out of half of them because they're useless
compared to everything else. Of course, you obviously didn't know that. There was basically no way to know that unless you ended up falling into the trap. Sometimes, you get lucky and
pick a class that's good, and sometimes, you don't. So many mistakes go into making these kinds of beginner's traps. A lot of games just don't
explain themselves very well, and a lot of other games
are just unbalanced so certain character choices are unintentionally much less important. The worst is when the game gives you the option of auto-generating a character, but they give you a crappy
character no matter what. In some games, you just can't
win unless you go online and see how to build a character properly. It's not the worst thing
at the end of the day, but if you just wanna play
a game the way you want to, it's a big pain when you find out that no, that's not how you can play this game. That doesn't work. Try again. And finally at number one,
and this is a big one, there's a reason why we saved it for one: leaving in information that is just wrong. Like, there are mistakes,
like most of this list. It's mostly just bad game design. And then there are
mistakes like this mistake, which are literally actual mistakes that get left in the game. RPGs are really complicated, there's a lot of math that
goes on in the background, so the only way you can
really know what's going on is when the game tells you. But when that information is wrong, it can only make things more confusing. "Diablo 2's" character screen is notorious for providing incorrect information. It's so bad that there's an entire page in the "Diablo 2" wiki about it. A lot of the item descriptions
in the "Dark Souls" games are also inaccurate,
like the Tiny Being Ring from the original version
of "Dark Souls 1," which says that it regenerates your health when you equip it, but
what it actually does is increase your max health a little. Hell, in "Morrowind,"
there are certain NPCs that give you wrong
directions for certain quests, and remember, this is a game that doesn't have a waypoint system, so the only way to find
places is to follow these sometimes completely
wrong directions. There are so many more
examples of this out there, but you get the idea. These are really bad mistakes, probably some of the worst
an RPG developer can make, and yet, they still happen all the time. Because why? People are people. That's all for today. Leave us a comment. Let
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for watching this video. I'm Falcon. You can follow me
on Twitter at @FalconTheHero. We'll see you next time
right here on Gameranx. Right here on Gameranx.
