A few weeks ago I finished the Dragon Age : Origins extension Awakening. I enjoyed the trip, a bit less than Mass Effect 1 or 2 but it's not the subject of today's post.
During my journey through these games I felt something was missing. In fact empowering my character through outfits is an important part of the fun I get while playing an RPG. And more than that I like when gears help me to customize my avatar's aspect and to improve the way I like to play the game.
What I definitely didn't find with Dragon Age and Mass Effect equipement was :
- Empowerment
- Aspect customization
- Gameplay orientation
And above all this points : diversity and choices !
Now I'll try to analyze why.
Empowerment
Playing Dragon Age, the items I found wasn't very powerful.
As a result the pleasure to equip a new item was not really present. Moreover underpowered gears didn't give me the will to find better ones. And sadly the boost of power I should have when equipping a supposedly great piece of equipment from one of the most powerful boss was null.
In Mass Effect equipment was even more secondary.
I found only a dozen armor pieces. Weapons and upgrades was obtained via recipes; requiring resources and forcing me to play a repetitive mini-game on each planet I cross during the game. And aside from some damage upgrade or new weapons, the entire system wasn't very engaging and improvement was nearly imperceptible.
Aspect customization
I'll be short one this one, visual customization was very poor in Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Most of the gears had the same visual pattern declined with some very light variation. Clearly I didn't play to admire my avatar awesome outfits; particularly with Dragon Age Mage. On this precise example I remember myself finding only three different robe design.
To be fair, I want to congratulate the Mass Effect 2 colors customization feature which did a great job to palliate the lack of armor design styles.
Gameplay orientation
This point is the most important to me because it's not only related to Mass Effet or Dragon Age.
However the problem is huge both in Mass Effect and Dragon Age where equipment never appears helpful enough anyway the game is played.
So I think we agree that having a lot of powerful gears with great visual style is useless without well designed statistics. In fact item statistics should help players to strengthen their choices and their way to play the game.
Now lets illustrates my point with some examples.
I'll start by introducing you to the "you can do everything" item breed : +10 Force + 10 Dexterity +10 Damage +10 Critical Chance +10 Dodge.
If you are a rogue you want it, if you are a warrior you want it, if you are scout you want it... only a kind of mage doesn't want it ! Good Swiss knife anyway, but what if I want the Rambo knife, without the useless stuffs ?
As I said, for me, good items should help the player making choices and improving the way he likes to play the game.
So instead of the previous items, let's make three gameplay oriented ones :
- +10 Dexterity +10 Critical Chance, for a fast and agressive character
- +10 Force +10 Damage, for an average melee oriented character
- +10 Dexterity +10 Dodge, for a quick and hard to catch character
And voila now you have three items instead of one, each of them helping the player to define his own game style. Moreover I could also compensate the lack of the other statistics to have this items even more appealing.
Of course, this is not perfect, and I'm not a fond of Critical Chance, Damage and Dodge kind of statistics because they should obviously be respectively calculated by Dexterity, Force and Dexterity.
Anyway that's far better than the elemental resistances statistics which make no sens in most RPG. They could be useless like encountered in Dragon Age or artificially used to create new needs for equipement in World of Warcraft.
This point is the most important to me because it's not only related to Mass Effet or Dragon Age.
However the problem is huge both in Mass Effect and Dragon Age where equipment never appears helpful enough anyway the game is played.
So I think we agree that having a lot of powerful gears with great visual style is useless without well designed statistics. In fact item statistics should help players to strengthen their choices and their way to play the game.
Now lets illustrates my point with some examples.
I'll start by introducing you to the "you can do everything" item breed : +10 Force + 10 Dexterity +10 Damage +10 Critical Chance +10 Dodge.
If you are a rogue you want it, if you are a warrior you want it, if you are scout you want it... only a kind of mage doesn't want it ! Good Swiss knife anyway, but what if I want the Rambo knife, without the useless stuffs ?
As I said, for me, good items should help the player making choices and improving the way he likes to play the game.
So instead of the previous items, let's make three gameplay oriented ones :
- +10 Dexterity +10 Critical Chance, for a fast and agressive character
- +10 Force +10 Damage, for an average melee oriented character
- +10 Dexterity +10 Dodge, for a quick and hard to catch character
And voila now you have three items instead of one, each of them helping the player to define his own game style. Moreover I could also compensate the lack of the other statistics to have this items even more appealing.
Of course, this is not perfect, and I'm not a fond of Critical Chance, Damage and Dodge kind of statistics because they should obviously be respectively calculated by Dexterity, Force and Dexterity.
Anyway that's far better than the elemental resistances statistics which make no sens in most RPG. They could be useless like encountered in Dragon Age or artificially used to create new needs for equipement in World of Warcraft.
What could have been done ?
- Empowerment : To give a great boost in power through equipment at some key moments through the game journey. The game would have been a bit easier from these moments, but tweaking enemies toughness to match this new power a bit later in the journey could have conclude the trick and give the player the will to find more powerful gears to feel powerful again.
- Aspect customization : I understand the cost behind more visual and aspect customization. Anyway there's a balance to find between cost and taking the power of identification through visual customization off the player's hands. So the solution seems obvious, strengthen outfit and weapons design style and create more of them.
- Gameplay orientation : To create more engaging gears that help specializing avatar the way talent trees do and to avoid the far too polyvalent items; this seems to be the easiest way to give equipment more impact on gameplay.
To conclude, I think that gears, outfits, equipement, etc, should be given more attention in modern RPG; in fact they are still a great part of the fun and pleasure the players await when playing them.
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