I think it’s fine to have systems in place so players can decide they want to be optimal in one thing or another. Hell regardless of if any of us are fine with it this is going to be the case. It’s just how math works, there will always be a min/max option in a game governed by numbers.
but meaningful choices about the character itself to me results in character building that is more interesting than just doing whatever icy veins says is the best, or having to put up with the “If you aren’t top tier, you’re trash tier” mentality because it’s so easy to switch to the optimal setup for any given activity in the game.
Min/maxing is something that should come at a cost, not the default setting for the game.
Otherwise why even have talents? Why not just give us everything and balance classes around that?
I think the biggest choices as far as character building go is races, factions and classes. So as long as covenants will feel bigger than those then for me it’s the wrong direction when they are small reps that matters a lot less.
I mean FF14 did it, I don’t think it’s too terrible of a system.
And I would still call it an rpg, probably even more an rpg than wow if anything. The storytelling is way over wow.
I’m not saying that WoW isn’t a RPG if it has Covenants, what I’m saying that is that IF WoW is a RPG AND Covenents are in the game, then they need to be treated in a RPG way, which means you can’t just switch around to suit and end-game grinder need, that there are class fantasy/world/story rules that would disallow that.
But covenants are not alienated between each other as far as I understand else players wouldn’t be able to party together from different covenants. So there’s no reason to really lock them. Moreover there’s even less reason to lock power. If you have earned the power, do they really have a way to remove it from you? They’re just a bunch of passive/agressive dudes xd
If you are correct about Covenants being acceptance story wise with members from all other Covenants, then there should be no penalty, story wise, to be able to move freely between Covenants.
There’s an assumed bias to them not being so though, based on the tropes of their Covenant fantasies. But I’m not in alpha and do not know the story, so they may be in a situation where for example the enemy of my enemy is my friend and so they all get along with each. /shrug
Covenant swapping defeats the entire point of an Rpg, choices are too be permanent .
Blizzard has always tried to do and made compromizes with dual talent specialization , Azerite armor respec cost. e.t.c the so called endgame community still whined though. There will be a consequence if they ever implement it.
Regardless of which one they go with it seems to be that Blizzard should make a choice and stick with it.
If choices about builds are supposed to be meaningful, then let’s make them meaningful. Otherwise, the choices are pointless and there’s not even really a need to have them in the first place. Just give us everything, balance around that, and make stuff like Covenants only offer cosmetic and story rewards that ultimately don’t matter to doing mythic content.
I don’t know as I would say that WoW and FF14 aren’t RPGs, but they certainly have a lot of room for improvement in some areas.
Or at the very least, in having interesting character building regardless of if it’s a RPG or not.
What is or isn’t a RPG is always something I’ve considered to be rather difficulty to solidly define anyway. Even the Wikipedia definition posted above is so broad as to be more or less useless.
Respectfully disagree, in that what a RPG is is very well defined from the time it came into existence.
What has happened over the years, and especially over generations, is that the rules of what makes a game a RPG has been relaxed, in the same way (for example) that a “Hero” class used to mean something very different before Blizzard decided to call DK’s a hero class.
Over time, definitions get sloppy and disintegrate, but its not that the original definition is bad/false, but just ignored. The Wikipedia definition is very detailed, its just being ignored from time to time in conversation.
It’s not really as detailed as you think when you get into it. To look at how well it applies to another game:
I play the role of Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist in the fictional setting of an alternate Earth.
I act out that role within the narrative of an experiment at a top secret research facility gone wrong, resulting in aliens appearing and a government cover-up.
Actions taken within the game will fail or succeed depending on game defined rules about the action(weapon bullet spread, damage values, health values, etc.)
Now I’m describing the game Half-Life, which is a first person shooter and has never been described as a RPG.
The problem is that taking the literal definition of “A roleplaying game” is that almost EVERY game is a game in which you play a role. Even the few things added by your Wikipedia definition just amounts to “A game in which you play a character with a story”.
You could try to argue there’s no character development beyond finding new weapons in Half-Life, but would adding perks really make that game a RPG?
Would XCOM be a RPG just because you can customize your soldiers? I certainly don’t consider it to be one.
The definition of RPG didn’t get sloppy over time. It was never terribly well defined in the first place.
It’s one of those things that most of us can probably look at a game and tell you if we think it’s a RPG or not, but I’ve not really seen anybody able to come up with a good definition that doesn’t include a bunch of games they’ll tell me aren’t RPGs.
A well written reply, and made me think a bit, thank you for replying.
Well the reason why Half-Life is a FPS and not a RPG is because it lacks the character development, as you stated. However it DOES share some aspects of a RPG, the world building, and class fantasy. I definitely agree with you on that.
The Wikipedia description talks more about the initial definition of a RPG when it was just really a table top game mechanism, and before PCs. But if you read though it it basically has 1) you living in a ‘world’ and have progression and 2) character growth in said world. Those two points are at the core of what a RPG is (vs a non-RPG).
While I still stand behind what I said earlier, that the definition is truly grounded, but gets ‘flexible’ over time as people interpret them with different levels of adherence, I do overall agree with you about it being “in the eye of the beholder” to some point, except for the two major points I described in the last paragraph.
I think the core of the problem of the definition of RPG is that it includes a lot of things that a RPG ought to have, but having them doesn’t automatically make you a RPG or even a game that has RPG elements.
World building is inherent to telling a story, not necessarily to being a RPG even though a RPG needs a setting for your character to have a story in.
I wouldn’t even say Half-Life shares aspects of a RPG. It’s just a FPS that wanted to tell a story, and any video game will be in part determined by the rules of the game because that’s just how software works.
On the other hand if we use “a form of interactive and collaborative storytelling” that is also listed on Wikipedia as what the original authors considered it that pretty much puts the requirement in a RPG that the storytelling has to be branching because if I don’t have input on the story then it’s not collaborative and by that definition, it’s not a RPG.
Half-Life would not be a RPG by that definition because no matter what choices you make you always go through the same series of story events.
That does however mean that most MMOs aren’t RPGs, and a pretty good chunk of jRPGs aren’t real RPGs either.
and it gets even messier once we start talking about turn based tactics games that have combat that is mechanically very similar to how combat in tabletop RPGs like D&D works.
I think a lot of games today are both RPG’s and end-game grinders, although I wouldn’t call progression through Mythic raiding a “grinder” since you’re not churning through boring and mundane content for low % drop chances on something you want. There’s more challenge involved with higher rewards that have better % drop chances.
I think Covenants will be a lot more than just a minor % difference and will certainly matter for people that push heroic/mythic/high-M+.
In the end - if a system is made to allow for change, nothing prevents RP-style players from playing the game in a more permanent fashion. Many of them have already commented on this - and even though the system being restrictive doesn’t get in the way of how they would want to play the game, they’ve expressed how they don’t like how other people get punished. They realize that others having the option to play the game how they want wouldn’t get in the way of their personal preference for playing the game.
Basically a player state where you are just churning up against a wall with minimal and non-changing content, since there is no other new content on the other side of the wall. Not sure what word to use to describe that state, so I use ‘grind’.
Not trying to be derogatory to players with that term, just trying to describe “the end of the game”, content wise.
Yeah I’ve always gone with “progression” content - since that has the highest life-span of all PvE content.
M+ can even be “grindy” since there’s no ceiling, but the affixes changing each week helps mitigate it a bit.
I guess “end game content” is subjective to the players’ preference.
If all they wanna do is M+, then " end game" is 20+ keys. If they want to PvP then 2100+ rating is their end-game. If they like raiding, then it’s “cutting-edge”.
But none of those would technically fall under a “true/pure” RPG. When you die, you can rez. When you kill a boss - it’ll respawn in a week. When you kill each other, you can jump right back into arena and battle it out again. A true RPG would be more akin to the “hardmode” Diablo II style of play - which imo, is horrid and definitely not worth paying for.
If WoW is a RPG, then I would totally disagree with what you wrote.
If WoW is a MOBA-like (bear with me realize that term does not fit 100%), then I would totally agree with what you wrote.
From a paying customer point of view, if you are paying for a RPG, then end-game is NOT progression. If you are paying for a puzzle engine, then it IS the progression.
WoW really needs to decide what its identity truly is. And for the record, I prefer the “win-win” scenario, so would not mind WoW being both. It does seem though that these days its less of a RPG and more of a puzzle engine.
BTW, in “real” RPGs you can be rezzed, from table top RPGs to computer game RPGs. And I would not call Diablo a RPG if I compared it (for example) with Divinity: Original Sin 2.
It’s a bit silly to try and add “meaningful” RPG choices to an online game that people sink hundreds of hours into and also play competitively. WoW has too much tightly tuned high-end content to force players to constrict themselves in this manner.
Picking renegade option in Mass Effect is fine and fun because a run only last 20 hours.
Yeah this is where I’m at as well with this. Choices that impact gameplay to such a degree doesn’t really work in an MMORPG that has tight content on the mid-high end that also has rewards tied to completing certain tasks that go away once the next patch drops.