Over the past year or so, I’ve been having
my wife, more philosophically known as the lady I live with, try out a handful of video
games in order for me to get a better understanding of what they are like for people who don’t
spend much time playing them. Through these informal experiments I’ve
examined many barriers that exist for new players as well as the unique ways people
unfamiliar with typical game conventions and mechanics attempt to interact with them. And while she has certainly started to develop
a basic understanding of what games are like and how they work, there are still a lot of
genres that she is completely in the dark about, and I want to see how she approaches
them. So to continue her gaming education I decided
to run another informal experiment, this time by having her jump into the wide world of
roleplaying games, which turned out to be a little more complicated than expected. The RPG genre encompasses a ton of different
kinds of games; from turn-based, to action-based to actually roleplaying-based. On top of that, there are many titles that
have RPG elements like experience points, leveling, loot systems and role-playing that
aren’t considered RPGs for one reason or another. It gets a bit muddied, especially when you
consider that a fair amount of people define an RPG as a game where players assume the
role of a fictional character on an adventure, which, as it turns out, could be pretty much
any game ever. So, I aimed to go with a sampling of relatively
iconic titles (and also just ones that I like a lot) that represent some of the major types
of RPGs, those games being Pokemon FireRed, Child of Light, Divinity Original Sin 2, Disco
Elysium, Outer Worlds, Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, and so that I could put
Sans in the thumbnail, Undertale. Along with being examples of some of the major
kinds of RPGs, I also chose these games because each of them start off quickly, making it
so my wife didn’t have to sit through an hour of cutscenes and 5 hours of tutorials. Sorry Persona 5 fans. It’s nothing personal. I’ll talk about your game someday, I promise. Like always, I sat back as a relatively silent
observer, only giving advice when it was clear that our marriage would be in trouble if I
didn’t. So, this is how it went. Before beginning this experiment, I conducted
an incredibly professional survey to determine which RPG would be the best starting point
for my wife, and by professional survey, I mean asked people on Twitter what RPG they
would have a non-gamer start with. And a surprising amount of folks responded
with Undertale, which I found interesting because I think a big part of what makes Undertale
so special is how it toys with and subverts typical RPG tropes, so my instinct was that
it would be a terrible place for a non-gamer to start as they wouldn’t be familiar with
what the game was subverting. So, obviously that is what I had her start
with, and it actually had a small payoff within the first couple minutes when Flowey explains
how the player can gain LV, an abbreviation most players would assume is for level, but
as that hasn’t been reinforced for her, she called out the punchline without knowing
it was even a joke: Lady: Love? Is that love? Gain a lot of love? Oh. Raz: There you go. She knows games. Lady: Wow. A lot of these little things went over her
head, which as I had guessed, led to her not appreciating the game in the same way I and
tons of other people did. For example, where I found it funny that Toriel
solved all the puzzles in the ruins, she found it boring and felt like she was barely even
playing a game. Also, during my first playthrough I thought
it was interesting that I could solve encounters through means other than combat, but she found
those interactions to just be incredibly strange: Lady: When does it get fun? Raz: Keep… Lady: I offered a frog a compliment...and
I won. As she didn’t really know what to expect
from RPGs in general, she was just confused on what the game was trying to do. To her, it seemed weird and random for the
sake of being weird and random. As for how she chose to play, she didn’t
kill anything as that is how Toriel told her to play; that is of course until she got to
the actual fight against Toriel, and after trying to spare goat mom a handful of times,
she eventually got frustrated that nothing new seemed to be happening, and decided to
murder her. This part of it was similar to my first playthrough,
but the main difference was that after killing Toriel, I defaulted into the typical RPG mode
of killing most of the things I came across where she went back to how she played before
killing Toriel as it is what she was more familiar with. Ultimately, between Undertale’s humor not
exactly being her style and a lot of what makes it special being confusing to her, it
was a frustrating starting point. However, while she struggled to get invested
in the game itself, as far as understanding the basics went, she had little to no trouble,
and I think that comes from... Throughout these various experiments, navigating
play spaces while simultaneously needing to react to incoming threats with precise button
inputs has been one of the most difficult challenges for her. She hasn’t spent enough time playing games
to feel fully comfortable in those sorts of scenarios, so while these moments are often
exhilarating due to the threat of failure being just one pixel away, they can also lead
to a fair bit of frustration from failing. This wasn’t really a problem when it came
to the majority of RPGs she played. Unlike more action-oriented titles she’s
tried in the past, the gameplay in most of these came down to navigating through a menu. She had time to consider her next move—to
really think through what the best choice in any encounter might be, which didn’t
lead to the same kind of stress she felt while playing other games, making it far easier
for her to understand how to interact with each given title. Instead of needing to remember which button
did what and reacting with the proper quick input, most times she got into a conflict,
the games laid out exactly what she could do. When she did fail, it came from her own bad
choices instead of a lack of ability, which she still found annoying, but at least felt
fair. The only title she really struggled to understand
how to play was Divinity Original Sin II. The game has tons of different systems allowing
players to interact with environments and other characters in countless ways, but since
it has so much going on, she could barely do anything without triggering a tutorial.The
amount of information she was getting hit with was overwhelming, causing her to be annoyed
and just not want to play it anymore. Lady: There’s too much information in this
game. I didn’t sign up to read a book. However, while for the most part, she had
an easier time with things, she also found nearly all of the RPGs she played to be pretty
boring. She did appreciate some of the strategy that
came from battles as well as little mini-games within combat, like the bullet-hell stuff
in Undertale and Child of Light’s disruption system, but for the most part, the gameplay
itself didn’t pull her in that much. With the turn-based titles, there weren’t
really that many things for her to consider, and she actually found herself missing those
high-octane moments where she was always on the edge of failure. Lady: Like, how is this fun? Raz: I don’t know. Lady: Like, genuinely. My adrenaline’s not pumping. Raz: Is that the only good thing about games? Lady: It’s not working my brain. Raz: What do you mean? Lady: I’m just throwing compliments at a
frog! This probably has more to do with her personality
than her inexperience with games, but I do think it’s interesting that the genre she
found easiest to learn ended up being the one she had the least interest in so far. In fairness, most RPGs take awhile to really
get going; like, I’ve been told a handful of times that despite putting 5-10 hours into
a game, I hadn’t actually even started it yet. The reality is though most non-gamers aren’t
going to have the patience to just wait for it to get good, especially when that may take
a dozen hours, and while my wife does have enough patience to deal with me on a daily
basis, she has no interest in playing a title she finds boring for hours on end just to
reach a part where it gets more engaging. Unsurprisingly she much preferred action-oriented
RPGs because they were more stimulating. As she has played some shooters in the past,
Outer Worlds combat was somewhat familiar to her, although she still ran into a lot
of the same old problems of struggling to move and shoot at the same time, making fights
a bit harder than they needed to be. Of all the titles she played, Final Fantasy
7 Remake had the best balance of providing intense gameplay while also giving her space
to think over her next move. Typically she would spam Cloud’s main attack
until she either got low on health or remembered that the ATB gauge existed, and then use the
menus to heal or do a more substantial attack. This gave her the chance to engage in exciting
and fluid combat while also being able to essentially pause during the battle to make
adjustments as needed, giving the benefits of menu-based combat without the downside
of it just being menus. Of course, being bored was not the only problem
she had with the RPGs she played; her frustration with them went a fair bit deeper. The biggest issue she had that mainly came
up with the turn-based RPGs were random encounters, which I imagine is relatively common for people
who play RPGs. At first she didn’t really understand why
they were even happening, making battles feel disconnected from the other parts of the game. As she started to understand them though,
she just found them irritating because they interrupted her with little rhyme or reason. Personally, while I don’t love random encounters,
I have grown numb to them over the years; it’s just something I’m used to, but that
numbness did not exist for my wife. Lady: Oh my god. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope Nope. Nooope. Nooooooope. Noooooo. Having any sort of knowledge about when a
fight would happen helped her a fair bit as it allowed her to feel like she had some sense
of control. For example, she found Pokemon far less frustrating
than Undertale and Final Fantasy 7 because random encounters only happened while walking
in the tall grass, so she had an idea of when she was in danger vs when she wasn’t. Her favorite approach to encounters came from
Child of Light, where the enemies were shown on screen and combat only started once she
ran into them or they ran into her. This gave her a sense of power over what was
going on even though she found herself in combat just as often. I have always been a bit of a random encounter
apologist as it's what I grew up playing, and I’ve sort of just internalized that
that’s the way a lot of turn-based RPGs are gonna be. From a development standpoint, it makes sense
why developers would use them; it saves tons of time and processing power to not have to
populate every screen with enemies. In turn, this makes it easier to have more
encounters and enemy variety because designers don’t need to worry about having as many
art assets or figure out how to visually space out enemies. From the game design side though, they feel
archaic and in most cases are something players tolerate instead of enjoy. Again, I understand why some games still go
with them, but seeing how they operated through the lens of my wife who got visibly annoyed
everytime one happened has shifted me to be pretty anti-random encounters. I think I’ve been okay with them, because
I was used to them, but that isn’t a great reason to keep something around. I hope more RPGs go the Child of Light route
as time goes on, but at the very least, if a game has random encounters, it should do
the Legend of Dragoon thing where there is an indicator that goes from blue to yellow
to red, letting the player know a battle is coming. Another aspect that she struggled with was
not knowing how much health enemies had. It certainly was a minor nuisance, but it
did make it harder for her to feel engaged. With FF7 and Child of Light, she couldn’t
always tell how well or poorly she was doing, so especially with longer fights she spent
most of the time wondering if she was doing something wrong until it ended one way or
another. A similar thing happened with the battles
in Undertale, primarily when she was trying to make peace. There isn’t a progression meter that says
how close the player is to being able to spare a monster. Instead it uses text to indicate if something
is working or not, which is a cool approach, but she found it a bit annoying because again
she didn’t have a grasp over how well something was working or how close she was to winning
until it was over. Of all the turn-based games she played, she
appreciated pokemon’s battle system the most because she could see approximately how
much health her opponent had at all times which made it so she knew if she was on the
right path during battles. Having all the information laid out in front
of her actually made things more intense because she could always see how close she was to
victory or failure. That knowledge led to her taking risks in
battles and sometimes even getting a little too greedy in a close fight. Lady: I don’t even need to heal. Is this the last one? Raz: He had two Pokemon. You’ve killed one, yeah. Lady: Risking it for the biscuit. OH MY GOD. THAT WAS SO EMBARRASSING! While I don’t think a game not having enemy
health bars is a flaw of any sort I have noticed that non-gamers do a lot better when the feedback
they get from any given action is clear and defined, because it is common for them to
have a fair bit of doubt over whether or not they’re doing things correctly. So far I’ve mostly focused on the combat
side of things, as that was the core of the majority of titles she played; however, a
few games did actually focus on roleplaying, and it was really interesting to see how it
gave her a different perception of failure in video games. In the past, failure typically came from dying,
the punishment of which was needing to replay a section, but when she ran into some sort
of failure while roleplaying, it led to actual consequences, like being forced to kill a
guard after failing to talk her way out of a situation or being forced to kill a whole
bunch of guards after not being intimidating enough, or, worst of all, making Kim Kitsuragi
disappointed: Lady: Take it back. Take it back. Can I go back? It wasn’t the kind of failure she was used
to in games, and due to that prior experience, it was her immediate instinct to want to redo
things in the hopes of getting a better outcome. With that said, unfortunately the settings
and general weirdness of the more roleplaying heavy games I had her try made it hard for
her to get all that invested in them. As it turns out, while it is one of my favorite
games in the past decade, Disco Elysium is not everyone’s jam:
Lady: What is this? Raz: It’s called Disco Elysium. Lady: Do I just keep doing this the whole
time? Raz: Just keep playing. Lady: Do I keep doing this the whole time? Raz: Just keep playing the game. Lady: Do I keep doing this the whole time? Raz: Just keep playing the game—what do
you mean this? Lady: Just listening to a creepy voice and
picking between 1-3 options. Raz: I mean, some could say: yes. Anyway, after working through the games with
actual roleplaying, my wife had a question about the ones that didn’t, and I imagine
it’s a question at the center of a lot of debate about RPGs. Video game genres are weird, and RPGs might
be the weirdest of them all. Like, RPG stands for roleplaying game, but
of the 8 titles I had her play, only half of them had any sort of meaningful roleplaying
in them. And it isn’t as if this disparity is new;
it’s how things have been since the beginning. The earliest video game RPGs were attempts
to bring ideas from tabletop games, most notably Dungeons and Dragons, into video games. As emulating roleplaying in a video game was
and frankly still is a very hard thing to do, in the early days developers focused on
stuff that proved less difficult to translate into a video game, namely the combat. So, turn-based fights with a character or
group of characters who level up as time goes on is what became associated with the term
RPG. As time has gone on, video games have been
able to incorporate more actual roleplaying elements, but even with that, many of those
aren’t even considered RPGS. Games like Life is Strange and pretty much
anything Telltale ever made are entirely centered around roleplaying elements and almost no
one would characterize them as RPGs because they don’t have elements like combat or
leveling. What’s harder, is everyone is working from
a slightly different definition of what an RPG is. It’s a genre that is hard to define, and
if you try to pin someone down on a specific definition, they’d probably say they can’t
define but know one when they see it. And this got me thinking a lot about how confusing
the way we classify games must be to non-gamers. It’s another part of the language of video
games one has to learn in order to understand what to expect from any given title, but it
isn’t the most straightforward thing because a genre’s name isn’t always an actual
indicator of what a game is like. We’ve created these very specific labels
for games in order to better differentiate them, which makes sense because it helps give
a clearer picture of what to expect. It is just hard to describe what a game is
like to someone who has little to no reference of what games are like. And reference is how we typically try to describe
things; so many genre names come from other titles, like metroidvanias and soulslikes. This isn’t to say that the way we label
games is a problem; it’s mostly just that in my efforts to try to explain to my wife
why RPGs are called RPGs, it reminded me that language is weird, and as the language of
games specifically is so relatively new, we are pretty much establishing in real-time. Terms are constantly being retooled and expanded
upon, and while it can lead to petty arguments like the difference between roguelikes and
roguelites, it has helped us communicate within the hobby a lot more efficiently. But at the same time, it acts as another barrier
for inexperienced players to try to overcome in order to understand games. It’s the sort of problem that doesn’t
really have a solution other than being open to teaching inexperienced folks in a kind
and understanding way; however, it is worth keeping in mind that the way we talk about
games now could cement terms and ideas that are commonplace in 20-30 years, regardless
of how much sense they make. So, let’s not come up with anything too
stupid, okay? My main takeaway with this experiment is that
RPGs, primarily ones focused on turn-based combat, are one of the easiest starting points
for inexperienced players as they mostly just rely on reading skills and don’t ask for
too many complicated inputs; however, chances are that someone who doesn’t play tons of
video games isn’t going to be as interested in them because they are probably looking
for something a bit more exciting; at least that has been my wife’s experience. As a whole, this experiment has been the hardest
I’ve done so far because the throughline of RPGs isn’t as clear as I thought it was. Really in this experiment where I was hoping
she’d experience a roleplaying game, I feel like she barely did because the barrier of
entry was either too high or too weird for her. So, I guess that means for the next experiment,
I’m gonna have to go with something a little more custom and move out of the realm of video
games for a bit and take it back to pen and paper… Raz: So the first thing we gotta do is pick
your class, and then we can kinda figure out everything else to mesh with that well. Lady: I’ll be an archer. Raz: Okay, you can be a Ranger. Lady: Ranger. And I’d like a pet bear. Raz: Okay, a pet bear. Named? Lady: Honey. *Laughter*
Lady: What? Raz: Yeah, I mean that sounds like a good
bear name! Lady: I know! Hello. It’s me Razbuten, the bag guy. Bag. Bag? Bag. Bag. Do I say bag weird? As some of you might know, I am a part of
Nebula which is a streaming service made and owned by us creators. It gives us a place to post our work without
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watch their favorite creators like Jacob Geller, Superbunny Hop, TierZoo, and me? Maybe? All ad free. In turn this allows us to experiment with
stuff we make like more niche topics that wouldn’t do well on YouTube and extended
cuts of video. For example, the Nebula version of this video
ends with a montage of clips from my wife’s playthroughs instead of this ad. And what’s even better is that we’ve partnered
with this video’s sponsor, CuriosityStream in order to offer what is maybe the best deal
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only get access to the thousands of incredible documentaries on their site, but you also
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good documentaries on pretty much every topic you could imagine. I just watched one called the Joy of Winning
that is all about methods to calculate consequences in order to then get what you want. It’s a really interesting exploration of
mathematics and game theory, and instead of utilizing what I learned in any sort of meaningful
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this video. For all of you still here. Thanks! I appreciate your support and viewership. Also, this channel made possible because of
my patrons, so thank you to everyone who supports over on patreon. And a special shout out to the honorary bagbuten,
Elfinrez. I appreciate ya. All right, that’s all from me. Have a good day and or night and I will see
you in the next one. Lady: HOOOOO. That’s how it’s done. Raz: True! Lady: First time, crushed it. Raz: First time? Lady: Yeah, you’re gonna delete the footage
from the last time and this is the first time. Right? Right? Yeah?
Hoping someone who has no prior experience in RPG to enjoy Undertale is like wanting someone who has no experience with American pop culture to enjoy Venture Bros.
Can she still be considered as someone who doesn't play games though?
I appreciate his wife for going through these experiments for our sake. I can imagine the experience to be grating to the nerves for a non-gamer. I was also surprised that she didn’t take to the genre as readily as I thought she would, as the more narrative focus of these types of games might think to have broader appeal beyond those who might typically call themselves gamers.
Raz is also right in that the term RPG in video games has gotten so diverse and diluted as a genre that it is nearly meaningless by itself.
While she generally found RPGs boring, her thoughts on Undertale pretty much matched mine and I'm a big fan of RPGs. "How is this fun? I'm just throwing compliments at a frog" + random humor not clicking
This felt more like 'What people who don't like games think of RPGs'. The comments about adrenaline and such were just offputting to me.
This gets me to think that traditional encounter-based RPGs are actually just not a very good genre. They mix together two contrasting modes of gameplay, combat and exploration, but without necessarily doing either of them well. This makes them like trail mix; going through them can be worth it if you like some of the stuff, but it's not as good as it would be to have a whole bag of one thing you like.
Think of how fun the exploration itself would be in an average RPG if you removed the battles; many of them would be a lot more boring. On the other end of the scale you have games like Paper Mario: The Origami King which would be much better by removing the battle system. Even when an RPG puts the enemies on the field instead of doing random encounters, in my opinion this only makes the dissonance more tolerable, it doesn't make the field gameplay much more engaging than it actually is. I think an example of an RPG that does do both things well is Etrian Odyssey, because of the mapping system.
I think that aspiring RPG developers who aren't particularly up to the task of making a good hybrid should consider that the potential for a polished game is much higher if they do one of the following:
The latter is typical for tactical RPGs, but there are not many such games based around traditional RPG battle systems (Some games like Pokemon or Paper Mario: TTYD have side modes like this). Which is a shame, because I think it would have a lot of potential to distill the specific things I actually like about traditional RPGs into an addicting gameplay loop, where the standard enemy encounters feel like "just one more battle" rather than "ugh, another battle". Off the top of my head I think of Slay the Spire and One Step From Eden as falling under this category.
Personally, I'd suggest Mass Effect 2 if I had to convince my girlfriend to play an RPG.
Simple story/writing (it's basically a summer action flick)
Simple combat (fps with auto-aim skills and automated squadmates) -- also can pause and play/queue if you prefer.
Lots of characters with different personalities (more known actors too such as Martin Sheen, Seth Green, etc)
Very simple gameplay loop go to x recruit y to build a team for final mission.
The only big con I can think of is the length of the game. My first time playing it.. it took me about 30 hours or so to complete and I've played video games for as long as I can remember. A first-timer might just say screw this and quit after a dozen hours.
What about the telltale games? They are more like a movie where you decide what happens next.