Min-maxing only affects others in a competitive environment, and it always will since competition will naturally gravitate toward the easiest to employ and most effective strategies to complete the goal and win. Which is what min-maxing is, really; just being efficient.
Video games with stat systems, online role playing games specifically, tend to turn into competitive games even if there is no PVP to be had. This is due to party composition, mostly; why take a less-than-perfect mage when you could take the perfect mage? When loot and numbers come into play, people get nitpicky, mean, and gatekeepy. The problem is that taking the less-than-perfect mage has no impact on content completion other than their damage numbers are slightly lower and it might take an extra minute to kill a boss; does this minor difference justify being denied a spot in a party? I would argue: no. Some would argue the opposite and I wouldn’t want to play video games with those people.
i never thought i’d see ragnarok reference in lemmy. i always go back to that game once every 5 yearish. they really dont make games like that nowadays.
imo min maxing only starts as a problem when you can share your build to the masses, we dont really like seeing something done for less than the absolute max efficiency. even in games that dont have much build (ffxiv for example) people still blacklist certain jobs or ‘build’ even though it only have like couple minutes of difference between clear times. sites like fflog or wow equivalent are cancer.
on the other hand. if you make every silly build viable it makes the game really easy and may not cater to many people.
imo the solution might lie in other aspects of the game like social and other unorthodox content, but im not sure if any dev is willing to make such a risky system.
ffxiv does a decent job at limiting this type of player behavior in that the director has publicly stated parsers/logging are prohibited, enshrined it in the code of conduct, and has been outspoken about his disapproval for parsing culture.
“it’s a tool for bullying … 100% confident in that … if we implement a (parser) we know that there will be group invites like “prove you can do xxxx DPS” and we never want that to happen.”
I think another aspect of min maxxers not liking “casuals” is that if you didn’t research your build to know to use the min-max settings, you probably didn’t research other things. Are you also going into the encounter blind? It’s a team effort and people want to maximize their chances of success.
Maybe a group of non minmaxxers can clear the content, but they have to play better than the group of minmaxxers, because the extra output makes up for technical mistakes made.
The other problem with min-maxing is that when a big chunk of users do it, content needs to be scaled for those users. Said content is then very difficult or impossible for people playing more casually, which feeds into the elitism loop and potentially makes more people into min-maxers.
this is super problematic when you’re DMing for a tabletop campaign. I had a campaign where one player’s character was a good deal stronger than all the others. Maybe it wasn’t a result of min-maxing alone, but also of good stat rolls and it just so happened that the build this player picked was very strong. But it was always super difficult to come up with enemies that could threaten the strong character while not being at risk to 1-hit kill the weaker ones.
I sort of saw it coming when I looked at the character sheets, but didn’t want to make players change anything about their characters. But maybe a good DM (or good game designer) can anticipate this really well and make it so the strongest and weakest characters aren’t that far apart?
I’m not a DM, but yeah I think you must have options. From having the enemies try to gang up on what they perceive as the biggest threat (admittedly, this could go wrong a lot of ways), to contriving story reasons to give the weaker characters better gear or buffs to bring them up to the same level… to just rolling with it and letting that one guy be strong, balancing the encounters against the median player.
None of them are ideal but I feel like I might try a combination of subtle buffs for the others with the “roll with it” option.
Of course also as a DM you can – and perhaps should – just explain the issue to your players so they might understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. Your primary job as DM is to help everyone have a good time, after all. :)
This is pretty much how I (tried to) handle it. And also talking about it openly. Luckily the players are all mature enough to just laugh it off. (That strong character was a bit lacking in the mental department, and since it wasn’t such a combat focused campaign it also evened out somewhat. The great merits of tabletop being more than the hack & slay that most of its computer game adaptions are. :)
For exampe Larian’s game before Baldur’s Gate 3 was Divinity: Original Sin 2. In that game you had starting characters like an undead, with a skull for a head, or a lizard man. This creates so many questions, like if there’s maybe an entire population of skull head people, or if they’re some sort of lich that regular people will be suspicious about etc.
BG3 is of course set in the Forgotten Realms itself, which you could see as something of a “baseline” for western fantasy, and many people are familiar with it. Calling the setting “unoriginal” or generic might sound like a devaluation, but it’s not meant as such. (I guess it’s debatable wether the NPCs and story are original, but most people seem to agree they’re interesting and well made.)
In reality it’s of course a matter of license, and not a 100% creative decision. But Original Sin 2 is critically acclaimed and yet it often seems overlooked. I can’t help but think that if it had been set in the Forgotten Realms but had otherwise been the same game, a lot more people would have played it, because they would have instantly felt at home in the setting.
In the skull/lizard person example, can you extrapolate on why “this creates so many questions” is a bad thing? Is the goal to have no mystery in the games, and somehow this makes the game better? I am not following.
As to why Baldur’s Gate 3 is more popular than Original Sin 2: they’re both made by the same developer, which has always been a smaller, lesser-known studio; Baldur’s Gate 3 piggy-backs off the success of BG1&2 before it, which were both created by different developers and both games were critically acclaimed during the CRPG boom. Divinity has always been a niche series, partially due to the small studio’s lack of advertising and smaller budget, but when you piggy-back off an already highly successful series, you would expect a higher adoption rate; which is exactly what we see with BG3.
In the skull/lizard person example, can you extrapolate on why “this creates so many questions” is a bad thing? Is the goal to have no mystery in the games, and somehow this makes the game better?
Mainly it can be overwhelming during character creation, when you have so many things you’re not familiar with. It might be that you don’t know what your characters race is about (i.e. the skeleton guy), or when a game gives you cryptic stats where you have no idea how they influence the game. Things like that.
I’d say a good type of mystery is, when you’re familiar with a setting and its characters, and then something unexpected happens and you’re wondering why. But that requires a baseline to be established. Which requires either that the player spends some time with the setting, oooor: if the setting is so generic that it’s familiar to begin with, it has its merits too, which I’m arguing for. :)
A good example, though not a game, is the manga / anime Frieren Beyond Journey’s End. It basically starts where the most generic fantasy story would end: A party of heroes, including your typical cleric, elven mage, dwarven warrior have defeated the evil demon lord and are returning from their journey. Because it uses so many established tropes, you immediately have an idea about what the story leading up to the first chapter would have looked like. The interesting things are then how it goes on from there.
Divinity has always been a niche series, partially due to the small studio’s lack of advertising and smaller budget, but when you piggy-back off an already highly successful series, you would expect a higher adoption rate; which is exactly what we see with BG3.
Valid points with the lack of advertising. BG3 also had little advertising, but it got such a lot of word of mouth, it overshadowed all of that. It’s hard to say what would have happened if it had been almost the same game, except without the DnD license. I’d tend towards saying that if it wasn’t Baldur’s Gate 3 and not DnD either, but something very close in rules and setting, it could have piggybacked—not of the established name, but off the tropes that these names (DnD, BG) have established.
I think I understand what you’re getting at, that having expected archetypes make a smoother entry into the game itself. The fantasy setting is just an excuse to use certain game mechanics.
But what if you want new mechanics? What if instead of mana, you want a consumable item like runestones? It’s going to be harder to fit that in the pre-established tropes.
Additionally, there’s no reason that “spending so much time explaining things” has to be a negative. After all, world building is a fundamental part of storytelling.
That’s a good example. Do runestones exist in any game? I’m not familiar with the term, so from the word itself I wouldn’t think of a consumable item. I’d say if you want consumables, make them potions or scrolls. It’s probably pretty clear that potions are one-time use items, but you would expect them to have an effect only on the one who drinks quaffs them. Then we have scrolls, and without any gaming knowledge you probably don’t expect a scroll to vanish upon using it…? But so many games, like everything DnD based, or the Diablo series, have scrolls as consumables for spells. It has become like a shorthand, so I’d say that whenever possible it’s better for games to go with these things.
I agree with you that world building is a fundamental part of storytelling, and if done well it can be entertaining. But when I try to think of examples, I’m thinking about Disco Elysium and such, i.e. not fantasy settings. I guess the risk is high that it starts to feel like a load of exposition (if done wrong), and in many games it’s ultimately… pointless? For example in Dragon Age, if I remember correctly, elves were kind of an opressed minority. But the game never had any nuanced takes on the idea, other than “racism is bad”. So I wonder what’s even the point of changing this up.
The only example I have for runestones would be RuneScape, which uses runes as a way to cast spells. Each spell has a defined cost of runes, varying between elemental and catalyst types.
And at least for RuneScape, runes have become a sort of core to the entire magic discipline, with lore behind their discovery and creation, and eventually spawned a skill to create these runes (runecrafting).
In regards to exposition becoming pointless in certain instances, personally I love just pure exposition. Even if it doesn’t directly amount to something in the game, it lets me feel more a part of the world, politics, and general atmosphere of that universe.
the use of the word “better” is always problematic because you then have to explain how you define “better,” which you did; then you have to justify it, which you did; but it has become entirely subjective during this journey. the hurdle is truly justifying why “tactical gameplay” or “character interaction” has more value than original world building, which is nigh impossible.
considering this is computer games, you could make the argument that gameplay rules all, but doing shooty-shoots-at-bad-guy can happen regardless of setting, it’s all about mechanical fidelity and input-response feedback at that point; the setting is not relevant. if someone plays a computer game primarily for its unique setting, then the uniqueness of the setting becomes the prominent value judgement for that individual; that person would be disappointed if the setting was just a DnD-rip, for example.
i do think there is merit in your viewpoint from a general perspective; to appeal to the masses, using familiar tropes helps ease the average player into a comfort zone. but too much reliance on this idea of “familiar is better” stifles creativity. you could argue that unique settings should be left for novels/etc, but i think computer games should push boundaries, and the idea of what constitutes a computer game changes every day. you could argue that a non-DnD setting falls into the realm of “scifi” as well, but this is a semantics game; genre labels are typically vacuous, functioning only to give a potential audience some general understanding of the material they’re about to engage with.
that being said, i can’t think of many “fantasy” settings that don’t borrow from Tolkien on some level. even the example i was going to use to counter your point, Morrowind, has a setting heavily inspired by Tolkien; albeit, very far removed and unique with elements of Hinduism thrown in. i don’t think this validates the theory that sword/sorcery settings are “better,” only that it validates the theory that human beings have a hard time being truly unique. even Tolkien was heavily inspired by the Norse Volsunga Saga. it’s like a long game of telephone.
Ah yes, Morrowind! I’d say Arena and Daggerfall felt a lot more generic in how they presented their world. So Morrowind was the third game in the Elder Scrolls series or 5th if you count the two spinoffs. To me, Morrowind feels a good bit different from established fantasy tropes, but it also builds heavily on the prior, more generic games and their established world and mechanics. If you look at the Elder Scrolls series from that point of view, it gradually eased its players into the more exotic setting of Morrowind. I’ll make the claim here that if the previous Elder Scrolls games didn’t exist, Morrowind would have been even more of a hidden gem than it already is.
Yes, Morrowind is a good example of an exotic setting done right. Such simple things like having giant mushrooms for trees are effective at creating a foreign atmosphere without having page long explanations of dark elf gods and rituals (even if these can be found in the game as well)
i immediately think of the inverse. spoilers for very old games.
spoilerconsider Shadow of the Colossus. admittedly, it’s been a while so i may be misremembering some points. but, the premise of the game is you play as a young man intent on reviving a sacrificed girl; he is a mute named Wander. giants roam the land (‘colossi’) and, from the start, Wander is tasked by a disembodied voice to slay these colossi to revive the girl. as you ride horseback through the land slaying these colossi (who are just wandering around peacefully): the colossi fall with exaggerated groans of sadness, the land becomes a little darker, and your character’s appearance changes somewhat. it’s revealed that the disembodied voice is actually a demon who was ripped apart and scattered across the world (or something), and these colossi seal the demon’s disparate parts. by the end of the game, Wander has slain all the colossi and revived the demon, and consequently Wander is seen a demon himself and sealed. the demon kept to their word and revived the girl, however. a shorter example, in Oblivion there’s a Fighter’s Guild quest in which you’re tasked with infiltrating a rival guild (“The Blackwood Company”), and during this quest The Blackwood Company drugs you up with the sap of a hist tree and tasks you with “slaying some goblins that have taken over a village.” you slay the goblins as they request, but after the drugs wear off you it’s revealed that you slayed an entire village of innocent people; the hist sap only made you see goblins during the act.
i like these examples of games subverting your expectations and turning you into the villain. it’s a form of empathy – either feeling “sorry” for the character, or inversely: thinking they’re a fool and thereby feeling like a fool yourself – but it’s more visceral because even the player is not in on the joke until the computer game reveals it to them.
I’d probably feel sorry for the protagonist who was being tricked, but not feel like I was deceived or fooled. At least not if there was no other option for me as the player, except not to play.
In the Oblivion quest you mentioned, do you know if there’s another way to solve it? A way to not get fooled? Because I think as the player, the big difference is whether after the reveal you feel like the quest forced you into doing something, or if you think “I should have seen that coming”. The latter case will probably make the player feel foolish as well.
you have to engage with the first leg of the quest and kill a few goblins; eventually they ask you to go into the homes and kill the goblins inside, at this point you can refuse.
“Now on the ground, assist the other company members in killing all of the goblins around the settlement. You may notice that the “goblins” don’t really behave as expected: they do not attack you and appear broadly harmless.
Once all the goblins in the exterior are dead, one of the other Company members will tell you to clear out the houses as well. If you start to suspect what is really going on, you don’t have carry out this order. If you instead run far enough from the settlement, you will be relocated to where Modryn is and may continue as described below.” en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Infiltration
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