I consider Planescape: Torment the best CRPG ever made. (Though it is admittedly insane to compare a story-centric game like Planescape with system-centric games such as roguelikes.)
Also, I promise that if I post again in this thread, it will be about grinding!
I’m… mixed about this. It’s definitely a trend in certain indies, and I can totally see the motivation, but I think there’s some substantial loss involved.
My personal style with a lot of games is that I like to have time to sit back and consider long-term strategy while playing, rather than having to pause the game lest I do something that shuts me out of a bunch of strategies. And I like to get attached to my empire or my character or whatnot. The more quickly the game can be completed, the less opportunity there is for that to happen. Shortform roguelikes and things like FTL tend to end up being committed to the idea that your character/s are interchangeable pawns. I want enough time to get a feel for characters, and for the powers at my disposal, before the next high-stakes development changes it all around again. I want periods where the plot moves more slowly. (Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean grind; I’d rather have hand-crafted side-treks. But that puts authors in the position of having to expend lots of energy on totally optional content.)
(Re: Baldur’s Gate, I think it’s a love-or-enh kind of game. It bored the hell out of me, but I can’t effectively critique it, since as a consequence of the boredom I can remember basically nothing about it except for Chosen One Performs Hero’s Journey To Save Generic Fantasy Kingdom From Mystical Big Bad, and the barbarian with a hamster. This is a step up from Neverwinter Nights II, which lacked a hamster.)
Planescape is very good indeed. Part of that is to do with it being based on a campaign world that’s very good indeed, and partly it’s because of its focus on story content. Mechanically, it’s not the best game in the world: both combat and travel are kind of fiddly and awkward, and the most interesting NPC party members are also the least mechanically useful. And the graphics are showing their age, obviously. But it has a top-notch soundtrack.
Any game that has a barbarian with a hamster - “Go for the eyes, Boo!” - is an instant classic and you’re clearly lying to yourself if you think otherwise. (BTW that was Baldur’s Gate 2, not 1.)
I recently played some Fallen London, because the action doubling caught my attention. Also, it was a long while ago that I last played it, and time had dimmed my memories of exactly how awful the game’s design is.
Really, really awful.
I spent most of two days writing short stories. Not real short stories; just abstract items called short stories. They’re not even about anything. Here’s how the game play works.
In the first phase, you need to create pages of manuscript. You do this by choosing from several actions. One costs 5 actions points, and always gives you 5 pages of manuscript. Another costs 4 action points, but there’s a chance that it fails. There are also some ways to spend only 3 action points and some resources. Since your action points are only limited by how long you wait around and how often you log in, there are no serious tactical or strategic decisions here. It’s just a matter of whether you are impatient enough to take some risks.
Once you have enough pages of manuscript, you can start editing your story. Here you have a choice between a simple edit and a daring edit. Both can raise the “potential” of your story, but the simple edit can only raise it to 25, while the daring edit can raise it to 75 or so – in little steps of 2 or 3, I think. The daring edit has a smaller chance of success, though the only price for failure is that you lose a page of manuscript. Of course, you can get more pages of manuscript by spending more action points on making pages of manuscript …
… in other words, we’re looking at GRIND spelled out in extremely blatant letters. There is no serious decision here, ever; nothing that has to do with either skill or story; nothing that requires thought or daring or imagination. To get to a certain potential, you need exactly one thing: enough patience and logging in to make enough manuscript to do enough edits.
Once you reach the potential you need, you get to choose how good you want your story to be. The higher classes of goodness require more potential; and there’s also a chance element involved. (So that the question becomes: do I take this risk, or do I GRIND even more in order to lower the risk of failure?) If the dice fall in your favour, you’ll have written a high-quality short story.
Again, that story is not about anything. It doesn’t express anything about your character, or about you. As far as I could determine, the only thing you could do with it is sell it, and use the money to buy other items. Items that might improve your scores so that the next time you write a short story, it all goes a little faster, and you need to grind a little less!
This type of game design makes me want to smash my head against something hard. It rewards only one thing: stupid, dull, repetitive persistence. Fallen London continually tries to lure you in with the promise of “stories” – it introduces characters, places, plot elements – but these never actually become stories. They just function as a little colour to make you forget that you’re wasting your time on a game that consists of grinding, grinding, grinding, a continuous and never-ending attempt to increase the value of dozens (maybe hundreds) of variables by clicking on the same links again and again. Add to that the action point system that is expressly designed to make sure that people need to play the game all the time (to be efficient, you need to log in every 3 hours), and you have an evil piece of software that was apparently written to make your brain die.
Those are my feelings about grinding. I’m sure Fallen London is not the worst, but it’s nevertheless really, really bad. Or am I too harsh? Is there something beyond the grind? Is there ever a legitimate purpose for grinding?
I think you’re too harsh, because I enjoyed Fallen London more than that.
This is not to say that you ought to enjoy it, but if your explanation is that I had a stupid, dull, repetitive time and only thought I enjoyed it, then we’re going to have a hard time talking about games.
EDIT-ADD: You know, I think I’m going to skip answering the obvious follow-up “What did you enjoy about Fallen London?” I leave it as an (optional) exercise.
I also enjoyed Fallen London quite a lot in some ways. (In others, not so much.)
I think so. I’d never seen anything like its storyline when it came out, and I can’t think of anything that matches up to it since. (The Mass Effect trilogy comes closest, for me.)
It’s available via GOG for $9.99 - gog.com/game/planescape_torment
Writing short stories is a totally optional part of the game. You can do it if you want to get cash, or become a professional author - but there are lots of other ways to get cash, and you don’t have to be a professional author to progress.
I’m not saying Fallen London doesn’t have some seriously grindy bits. (In fact, I’ve effectively stopped playing because I have to grind stats in order to unlock content at this point.) But if you’ve chosen to play a grindy bit, it’s a much less effective example than if you’re forced into one.
I’m not looking for an effective example – I’m just describing my most recent play experience. Becoming an author sounded like fun. It sounded like meaningful character progression involving creativity. It wasn’t.
I did, of course, look at some other parts of the game, but they seemed to be basically the same with different names. I could try to solve cases as a detective. But doing so apparently doesn’t consist of uncovering clues and drawing inferences from them; it consists of doing the same action over and over again in order to increase some Progress stat. Wherever I looked, I saw the same design: doing X consists of increasing a value by taking the same action again and again. There’s generally some variety where you can choose between actions that have higher/lower chances of success, give more/less progress, costs more/less resources, and so on – but none of those are interesting choices.
If there is some part of the game that is not grinding, I’d be happy to check it out.
Obviously, that’s not my explanation.
I’m not sure I can find the answer to the optional exercise without some further hints, though.
I actually love FTL and other intense games that give you short playthroughs that require your full attention, but this is in no small part because I don’t have much time. When I had a lot of time, I preferred longer games. But with little time to spare, a game that gives you a fun, deep, challenging experience where you obtain a glorious victory or a gruesome death in 30 minutes is gold, and I love the fact that more of those keep appearing (probably the change in average age of the gaming population has a lot to do with this).
Of course for longer games there are lots of design alternatives to grinding. Not only side quests, even in linear games there can also be simply easier levels (without the need for grinding). The best designed games of all time, the Mario series, have plenty of examples of this. You have worlds with several levels inside each, so that typically the first levels of each world are relatively easy (although Mario games like introducing exceptions from time to time) and the final ones are harder. And no one would accuse the Mario games of being grindfests, because the easy levels are fun as well: they teach you new game mechanics (first levels in a world typically introduce something new that doesn’t pose much danger right there, is released against you in full fury later), they offer optional challenges (finding secret areas, jumping on enough Goombas in a row to gain a life, collecting all the big coins, etc.) and they let you show off your abilities before the next round of suffering in some lava-flooded castle with tiny moving platforms.
By the way, about the side topic of best RPG ever made… I think if we include roguelikes into RPG’s, my choice would be ADOM. It’s a really long and complex roguelike with lots of dungeon crawling but also a storyline with plenty of meaningful decisions. And it used to reward grinding somewhat, but it’s not necessary and now it’s becoming less rewarding with the latest changes that are being done from community feedback.
If we don’t include roguelikes, I think I’d be torn between Ultima IV and VII.
About Fallen London, I haven’t played but from what you say it sounds a lot like Farmville. If that’s the case, I share your feelings. That kind of things are not games, they’re pretty graphical frontends to a spreadsheet. A boring spreadsheet.
OOoooh, ADOM. Long time since I heard that name. I was addicted to the stuff.
I think I understand the difference, now, between grinding and game-play. Even if the game had you do a similar thing over and over to progress, as long as it had some aspect of detective work, that would not be a grind, but a way of getting into character. Doing something repetitive, with only the veneer of ‘detective-work’ pasted onto it, is grinding. Or, killing X amount of monsters to progress to another location, and slowly building the strength to overcome an enemy, is getting into character, whereas killing X amount of enemies for the same loot, over and over, would be a grind. Both look somewhat similar on the surface, but the ‘grind’ aspect is just monotony in between where you are and what you want. Game-play, even if repetitious, is fun in and of itself, as long as it requires a level of skill and character-building.
For example, the Batman games have some repetitious fighting elements, but the fighting system is fun and diverse enough that it doesn’t matter. The set-up for these fights are generally the same, but even though the set-ups are reused, they are still crimes that need to be solved – so build the character you are playing while in the game. Does this make sense?
After 10 years of development hiatus, it’s being improved again (after a crowdfunding campaign) and the new prerelease versions now have, among other things, (optional) graphical tiles and music… not a bad time to go back to the addiction 
Graphical tiles? Music? I feel betrayed. 
StoryNexus is deliberately using synchronous AJAX - this is a large part of why the interface feels so slow. The StoryNexus creators are receptive to getting feedback about their JS code, I’ve been meaning to do so, but thought I’d suggest it to anyone else out there. An hour looking through their code and pointing out problems would do a world of good.
Why? The whole point of AJAX is that it’s asynchronous.
Don’t get me wrong, I like FTL. I’d just like it about a thousand times more if the average playthrough was six to eight hours longer. And if most of that additional six to eight hours was taken up with complicated simulation of the crew’s social dynamics rather than more high-tension space battles.
…yeah, my tastes are pretty specific.
Note to self: add complicated simulation of social dynamics to bad poetry zombie maze game dedicated to maga.
I’ll hold you to that.
Consciously bad poetry can be delightful. I recommend playing Light of my Stomach purely for the horrible sonnet towards the end.
Cheated and read the CF transcript, I’m going to have to go for consciously awful. The tricky part will be making the complicated simulation of the social dynamics rhyme with everything else. It all has to rhyme.