2002: The Year of the RPG

As the ever-receding form of 2002 fades slowly from view, I''m reminded of all the things, great and small, that this past year has brought to me. It was the year I got my first house. The year I started smoking in earnest again. The first year in recent memory that passed without any sort of major system upgrade, although I did manage to mod (ie., almost destroy) my case. But above all else, 2002 was, for me, the Year of the RPG.

I played a lot of RPGs in 2002, running the gamut from brilliant to dogshit. My Morrowind obsession killed an easy three months of the year, and the recent Tribunal add-on is eating up time at a comparable pace. I was treated to the mind-blowing genius of Planescape: Torment, and the mind-numbing crappery of Dungeon Siegesnooze. The Divine Divinity demo was quite engaging - that one's still on my "gotta get" list - and the shareware title Geneforge was a pleasant surprise as well. Much ado was made about Arx Fatalis, which turned out to be a flawed but nonetheless enjoyable game. Most others were similar; enjoyable, worth playing, but imperfect in one way or another.

It's been a lot of RPG'ing, and it made me realize something today: I can now say, with some degree of authority, that I know a thing or two about RPGs. I've been there, done that, got the Dragonbone cuirass. Which isn't to say that I'm Lord British or anything, but perhaps Count Canada isn't out of the question.

In thinking about all the time I've spent playing these games, it occurred to me that in RPGs, more than perhaps any other genre, success or failure really lies in the details. Shooters can do well with pure run-and-gun simplicity (check out Serious Sam if you don't believe me), sports games work with well-established rules and boundaries, strategy games are primarily management and number-crunching, but RPGs, ideally with depth and open-ended gameplay, live and die in the minutiae.

Don't believe me? Ask yourself this: what, over the course of an entire game, pisses you off more - an especially tough fight with a particular creature, or a clumsy, aggravating inventory system? Fact is, gamers can put up with difficult, frustrating challenges in their RPGs, as long as the game itself is simple and convenient to run. Take that away, and you'll drive gamers more nuts than 100 Prince Demogorgons.

And yet, even after all these years of stunning RPG successes (and failures), game designers more often than not somehow manage to bugger up what should be the simplest and most obvious aspects of their games. They're not broken per se, they just don't work as well as they should. For the most part, these functions should be transparent to the user, things they do without even thinking about; when the user does have to think about them, something's not right.

Fortunately for the industry and gamers everywhere, I'm not only devastatingly brilliant, I'm also generous with my intellect. Therefore, allow me to present a short list of things RPG designers everywhere should keep in mind while they're busy bringing their big ideas to digital life.

Inventory Management

The inventory should be easy to view, easy to access, and easy to manage. Click, there it is, click, move your shit around, click, it's gone. Simplicity is the order of the day here; one need only look as far as the Baldur's Gate series (or any Infinity Engine game, for that matter) to see how it works. Equipping and dropping items should be intuitive, and should most definitely [i]not[/I] require reading the manual. If a player has to go to the manual to figure out how to change from silver to poison arrows, something is wrong.

Mapping

You would think this would be pretty straightforward, right? Sadly, this is probably the one area that is most thoroughly and inexplicably fucked up when it comes to RPGs. The best map system I've ever run into was in - get this - Ultima Underworld. That was ten years ago, kids. It was a clear, easy-to-follow map, you could look at the maps from any level you'd explored (rather than just the level you were on), and most importantly, you could easily make any notations you wanted anywhere on the map. That was incredibly handy. Need to remember a particular spot in the level you're exploring? Mark it on the map. I honestly can't understand how we've come through ten years of RPGs since then, and have had to put up with ten years worth of shitty maps. It's not like making a good mapping system is difficult - check out Underworld and then rip off what they did! Christ.
And along similar lines, if the RPG you're developing has a lot of enclosed, maze-like areas, give us a mini-map. A decent one, please, that sticks up in a corner somewhere so we can see it while we run around endless dank hallways. The original release of Arx Fatalis included no mini-map, and since the game was essentially one huge-ass maze, it was insanely frustrating. Want to see how a truly good mini-map works? Play Diablo 2 for awhile. Best mini-map in the biz.

Journals

Role-playing means questing. Questing means doing a bunch of shit for useless ingrates who can't be bothered to get off their ass and fetch their own brushed silver pitchers. And typically, you'll have several of these on the go at once, at least some of which are going to be drawn-out multi-parters that nobody with any sort of day job will be able to keep track of. Therefore, we have journals. The problem with journals is that they tell you what the game thinks you need to know, when the game thinks you need to know it. The game is usually wrong. Some journals kind of half-assed work (Morrowind, especially with the Tribunal add-on), and some are as useless as tits on a bull; I have never seen a truly effective, complete, computer-generated journal.
The solution is simple. It's fucking obvious!
User-generated journals. Have computer-generated journal entries if you like, but give players plenty of blank space somewhere to write their own notes. This is not a difficult thing to do; if you can program a good RPG, you can program a decent in-game Notepad. I have a few small notebooks around here I use for taking notes about the games I'm playing, one of which has stuff in it going as far back as Eye of the Beholder 2. It works well enough, but they're also easy to lose, and I dunno about you, but my "4:30 AM dungeon-crawl" writing isn't always the easiest thing to read. User-created journals should be as commonplace in RPGs as Magic Missile.
And speaking of journals (I'm actually spending more time on this one than I'd intended, but the more I think about it, the more pissed off I get), make them easy to navigate. It shouldn't be a fifteen-minute chore to look up a journal entry I made three weeks ago. Consider the outstanding Morrowind: I have almost 600 pages in my journal. If I want to flip back to page 3, I've got a good twenty minutes of mouse clicking ahead of me. Why can't I just flip to page three? Being able to look up preset keywords isn't good enough; players should be able to access entries directly, by page or by date. The whole point of a journal is to make it easy to keep track of what we're doing in the game. So make it easy!

Simple stuff, right? Three points. Three basic concepts. Three things that, when executed properly, are virtually transparent to the gamer and yet make a huge difference to the overall game experience. And three things that are screwed up in one way or another far more often than they should be. Everything in the above list has been pulled off successfully in one RPG or another at some point over the years, but designers just don't seem to be able to recognize and follow up on what works. I'm not saying I want every inventory or every map to look the same in every game, but when you've got something that works - like the Underworld map - why fuck with it?

It may be that when designers are hard at work on their latest creation, the sweeping details of their story and characters distract them from taking care of the little things. Not necessarily fatal to the game, but a failure nonetheless. Designers need to realize that just because something may seem insignificant on the drawing board, it can have a big impact on the final product. As gamers, it's up to use to remind them; if you play a game with a shitty map, drop the developers a note to let them know. Tell them what you don't like about it, and what you think would work better. It may not do you any good for the game you're playing, but maybe you'll see something better the next time around.

(And any developers reading this, send me an email and I'll let you know where to send the royalty cheques.)

Email if you dare!