Why do so many GREAT RPG's worsen in late game?

[Nifft Batuff]

Because at the beginning you can still fantasize a good game.

 

[Wayward Son]

When you have a decent power progression in your game, it makes the early game more satisfying as you find threats that used to take you out in the early game are easy in the middle game, while new threats are still challenging. In the late game, however, you either have outclassed everything or you reach a point where the new threats are still challenging but there’s not enough content to justify leveling up to a point where they’re reasonable. Other option devs have is to artificially create difficulty through hp bloating enemies. Which leads to boring combat.

 

[Tavernking]

Most players only play the start of your game. Have you seen steam achievements for completing an entire 40 hour RPG? Always less than 20% of players actually complete the game. Someone prove me wrong!

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Most players only play the start of your game. Have you seen steam achievements for completing an entire 40 hour RPG? Always less than 20% of players actually complete the game. Someone prove me wrong!

Probably about half of the games in my library had their achievements bug out halfway through and stopped recording or incorrectly didn't reward me achievements for beating it tbh.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

When you have a decent power progression in your game, it makes the early game more satisfying as you find threats that used to take you out in the early game are easy in the middle game, while new threats are still challenging. In the late game, however, you either have outclassed everything or you reach a point where the new threats are still challenging but there’s not enough content to justify leveling up to a point where they’re reasonable. Other option devs have is to artificially create difficulty through hp bloating enemies. Which leads to boring combat.

Enemy variety goes a long way to help with this. Thinking back on the two games I recently played with an increasing, rather than decreasing, difficulty curve(King Arthur: A Knight's Tale & ATOM RPG), a good part of the difficulty was kept by gradually introducing new enemies that could curbstomp you & had new abilities/required new tactics.

 

[JarlFrank]

It was even referred to as Dead City dlc IIRC.

Atom Team traditionally has pretty barebones endgames, just look at Seventh Heaven and 'Northern Invasion' in Trudograd.

Seventh Heaven was such a disappointment. After all this trouble to get admitted into the place, I expected there to be one or two areas of at least the size of the other districts. But no. Two buildings, which are basically just one because one is empty and the NPCs from the other relocate to it after a story event. No content at all beyond the main quest. Nothing to explore. It looks nice, sure, but where are all those high society big cats I've been told about all game? Why can't I go in their homes and do quests for them like I could in every other district of the game?

What a letdown.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Seventh Heaven was such a disappointment. After all this trouble to get admitted into the place, I expected there to be one or two areas of at least the size of the other districts. But no. Two buildings, which are basically just one because one is empty and the NPCs from the other relocate to it after a story event. No content at all beyond the main quest. Nothing to explore. It looks nice, sure, but where are all those high society big cats I've been told about all game? Why can't I go in their homes and do quests for them like I could in every other district of the game?

What a letdown.

otoh, Trudograd was an expansion that became too long and costs like $10 so I'm not going to be overly harsh towards it.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Games are often too long. The devs shoot their load with the early+mid game and run out of ideas and money toward the end. Unfortunately having an inflated play time is seen as a virtue both by publishers and many gamers, quality be damned.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I'd like to see some games in a more episodic format of 10-15 hour long campaigns with an overarching narrative tying them together.

 

[JarlFrank]

I'd like to see some games in a more episodic format of 10-15 hour long campaigns with an overarching narrative tying them together.

Yes. I want the RPG equivalent to pulp fantasy magazines, rather than every RPG trying to be a LotR-sized epic. Give me a series of 10 hour rip-roaring adventures rather than one bloated 100 hour game.

Also makes it easier to deliver choice & consequence because you can branch out more due to the overall shorter length.

 

[Wayward Son]

Enemy variety goes a long way to help with this. Thinking back on the two games I recently played with an increasing, rather than decreasing, difficulty curve(King Arthur: A Knight's Tale & ATOM RPG), a good part of the difficulty was kept by gradually introducing new enemies that could curbstomp you & had new abilities/required new tactics.

Or you could end up running the Fallout 2 method of doing this where you introduce a late game enemy that’s everywhere in the last three hours of the game and they one shot you regardless of armor.

I'd like to see some games in a more episodic format of 10-15 hour long campaigns with an overarching narrative tying them together.

Honestly me too. I was saying recently that I think 20 hours is the sweet spot of game length where I can actually justify replaying it and even finishing it lol.

 

[Lord_Potato]

Games are often too long. The devs shoot their load with the early+mid game and run out of ideas and money toward the end. Unfortunately having an inflated play time is seen as a virtue both by publishers and many gamers, quality be damned.

I'd take a shorter game with reactivity & replayability over a longer game without these features most of the time. That's why I'm looking forward to Space Wreck and Colony Ship. However devs seem afraid that players who only play the game once won't feel satisfied with such an approach.

 

[Lord_Potato]

Yes. I want the RPG equivalent to pulp fantasy magazines, rather than every RPG trying to be a LotR-sized epic. Give me a series of 10 hour rip-roaring adventures rather than one bloated 100 hour game.

Also makes it easier to deliver choice & consequence because you can branch out more due to the overall shorter length.

Spiders games are a solution for you. Most likely earlier titles,because Greedfall is already pretty bloated and lasts like 50 hours. Mars: War Logs however can be finished in 8-10 hours.

 

[ScepticCat]

I heard that old school's rpg developers usually make only a first level with quality, then they show it to a publisher, get a budget and spend all on cocaine, alcohol and whores. When all money is spent and date of release is coming - they finish last game for couple of night.

 

[Not.AI]

Because at the beginning you can still fantasize a good game.

There was an interview Warren Specter was taking from somebody years back.
And the interviewed party actually said that.

"Games are evaluated not for what they are - at first - but what they could yet be."
Words of deep, everlasting marketing wisdom there. He said it in reference also not to just one game but a series of games. People may remember and review a game 1 in a series as "Wow Amazing Best Thing Ever" whether it is or not if they merely expect game 3 in the series, if ever released, would be that great.

The first game in the series, just by existing, made it possible to make that prediction, and showing a trend to the possible third game in the series, and many people evaluate game 1 as if was game 3. "People remember the best and worst memories, some of which are not realities but expectations."

Spoiler

I just wrote a deepity, I think.

 

[Monocause]

Eg?

• VtMB is amazing till late Chinatown
• Pathfinder Kingmaker is great till Pitax and after Pitax, including the optional chapter is too boring
• Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous at the late chapter 4 becomes a endless slog
• Baldur's Gate 2 : Shadows of Amn is great till you return from Underdark, then becomes less great
• Gothic 2 chapters 1/2/3/4 are amazing but late game sucks
• Returning 2.0 mod made ch 5 a bit better with some cool areas and a undead mystery to solve and quests yet chapter 7, added by the mod is atrocious.
• NWN2 OC is good till the last dungeon
• NWN1:HotU, the last chapter is arguably the WORST part of the epic adventure
• Might & Magic VII : For Blood and Honor - After the second promotion quest, the games drops in quality a lot.
• Dark Souls : After Ornstein and Smough, the game drops in quality a lot
• Solasta : The end game fells a slog

There are exceptions to that ""rule"". Ravenloft : Strahd possession was amazing from the start till the Strahd fight. Gothic 1 is amazing from the "welcome to the colony" till the last fight in the sleeper temple. Dark Sun : Wake of the Ravager is amazing from the first minute playing till when you fight the terrifying Tarrasque at end game. Eye of the Beholder 3 has some really bad parts like UNDERWATER no magical fields but the late game is not that bad.

Why a significant drop in the quality happens in so many RPGs?

It's actually ridiculously simple - development progresses in a linear fashion in most cases ie early game gets developed early, endgame gets developed late. This isn't always the case, especially if your game is revolving around fe. procgen rather than a handcrafted world or follows otherwise unusual design principles - but note that none of the RPGs on your list are procgen games. All of them are handcrafted and ultimately linear adventures.

Beth games are an interesting point of comparison. You can find a ton of issues with their games but usually you don't get a big quality drop by the endgame like you do with the titles you've mentioned. Makes sense when you consider their games are following completely different design principles which means they're dealing with entirely different cans of worms during development. Overall quality level in Beth games is quite stable, but on the flipside "stable" means it's often predictably garbage, especially briefly after launch. See: infamous falling through the floor in Daggerfall, Oblivion's crazy AI glitches, Skyrim's wonky physics etc etc. These would affect you from the beginning til the end. In Bethesda games, the "end" story-wise is almost an afterthought that doesn't take a lot of effort either for the player or the developer. You could remove most of the main storyline from each of the TES games and they'd be mechanically functional and similarly enjoyable to what they are today. Morrowind is a small exception as the writers did some stellar work, but removing the MQ would have no impact on the progression and the mechanics.

By the time you start developing the final parts of the game when following a linear roadmap, you've typically already overran the budget, or are nearing the expected launch deadline. You realise that the scope of what's left would take fe a year to develop while you've got 5 months of proper dev-time left. This is still a pretty good scenario; I've witnessed situations where 2-3 extra years were needed and you had 2-3 months. Magic starts happening: people start crunching, execs, producers and leads freak out, cuts are discussed and considered, quality in general suffers because of the rush. Sometimes key people are laid off or quit because they can't take the stress any longer which is another major wrench in the gears. What seemed like a working machine turns out to be a house of cards which you repeatedly glue together with spit and bubblegum just to push out v1.0.

You've got to understand - this isn't a case of greed (usually). This is often the case of "if we don't push it out of the door within x months, this entire business is going down/everyone is going to have to go months without a paycheck" - especially in the case of mid-sized independent studios. Entire projects can get axed at this stage in case extra funding is needed but can't be secured. Securing extra funding often comes with a lot of fine print such as: we'll give you extra couple million dollars but we expect this milestone to be delivered in 2 months and if you don't deliver you're completely, royally fucked. Oh and PS we're taking a big cut of your sales profits as part of our deal so you better release your next game real quick to secure cashflow

Game development projects suck big time. They're incredibly complex and inherently volatile, very tough to successfully manage. You might think everything is going swimmingly and then a year down the line you realise all your work is useless and everything you thought was wrong, and you need to start from scratch (because fe. internal playtesting starts and 9/10 people fucking hate the game or a new technology quickly dominated the market and you need to refactor the crap out of what you've got to adapt). I've left the industry a long time ago because of that and can completely relate to big industry names who have moved on to shitty companies developing shitty products like Zynga. Love for video games is one thing but at some point you choose financial security, sanity and a chance at a work-life balance.

Mind you, things did improve over the past several years with the advent of stuff like EA, crowdfunding and generally digital publishing, but it's still quite fucked up - and ultimately I believe it will stay that way, as most video game projects is basically not enough people with not enough time and money trying to deliver something that's an engineering feat, good entertainment and sometimes even a piece of art. Only for a bunch of nerds to then shit on it because it's too woke/not woke enough/doesn't have quickscoping

 

[Derringer]

I heard that old school's rpg developers usually make only a first level with quality, then they show it to a publisher, get a budget and spend all on cocaine, alcohol and whores. When all money is spent and date of release is coming - they finish last game for couple of night.

That was the thing a lot of Californian devs did not even including older RPGs.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

There is also an opposite theory. Experienced devs suggest to start creating first the latter part of the game and to leave the beginning at the end of the development cycle. Why? Because your craft improves during development due to the experience you acquire by working on the game, and it is probable that what you create later is better too. Since games sell depending on the first impressions, it is better to create the initial part of the game when your craft is at its best.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

They just wanna get us in the van, they don't care where they leave us.

 

[MF]

I made a bunch of different endings for Titan Outpost, roughly categorized by three game lengths. There are two early endings, a bunch of mid-game endings and a couple of late game endings that require you to hit the time limit.

About 1% have reached a late game ending. About 20% never get to an ending at all. The mid-game endings are the most popular.

I put an equal amount of effort into all of them, except maybe one of the mid-game endings which is a bit deeper than the others.

I'm not sure what my takeway from this is yet. Probably that about 10 hours is fine for this particular game. Also that for the long endings, the game outstays its welcome for the majority of players. If I had to guess I'd say most RPGs are simply too long for their own good. Some people enjoy that. Most don't.

Although a lot of games suffer from getting worse in end-game, plenty of exceptions come to mind. Fallout 1 is fun throughout. Dungeon Rats actually got better towards the end. ToEE only picks up after a while.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

development progresses in a linear fashion in most cases

this isn't true tho
you don't need to do A finished to do B because you already (mostly, except for content altered during the implementation) know what A will contain
and as you get more modern with bigger teams, the team making B often knows nearly nothing at all about A. Which is why so many modern games feel completely disjointed with content that seems to not acknowledge each other at all.

e.g., I just playtested a game about a week ago that had the mid-game mostly finished, but the beginning/end unfinished(afaict)

 

[MF]

development progresses in a linear fashion in most cases

and as you get more modern with bigger teams, the team making B often knows nearly nothing at all about A. Which is why so many modern games feel completely disjointed with content that seems to not acknowledge each other at all.

Team size is a factor, no doubt, but it's mostly due to bad direction and oversight. Fallout 2 was one of the most disjointed games I've ever played and it came out in 1998.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

development progresses in a linear fashion in most cases

and as you get more modern with bigger teams, the team making B often knows nearly nothing at all about A. Which is why so many modern games feel completely disjointed with content that seems to not acknowledge each other at all.

Team size is a factor, no doubt, but it's mostly due to bad direction and oversight. Fallout 2 was one of the most disjointed games I've ever played and it came out in 1998.

It suffered a similar issue though due to revolving staff & publisher meddling.
Also, they managed to make it in about a year which is incredibly impressive.

 

[MF]

development progresses in a linear fashion in most cases

and as you get more modern with bigger teams, the team making B often knows nearly nothing at all about A. Which is why so many modern games feel completely disjointed with content that seems to not acknowledge each other at all.

Team size is a factor, no doubt, but it's mostly due to bad direction and oversight. Fallout 2 was one of the most disjointed games I've ever played and it came out in 1998.

It suffered a similar issue though due to revolving staff & publisher meddling.
Also, they managed to make it in about a year which is incredibly impressive.

Yeah that's certainly true. Black Isle was formed in the middle of all that.

 

[JarlFrank]

I'm not sure what my takeway from this is yet. Probably that about 10 hours is fine for this particular game. Also that for the long endings, the game outstays its welcome for the majority of players. If I had to guess I'd say most RPGs are simply too long for their own good. Some people enjoy that. Most don't.

I got some of the game's endings but never got to the long time limit related endings, because I had completed pretty much all the side content long before that limit would run out. So there was pretty much nothing to do for me for several in-game days other than wait, which isn't terribly exciting.

I think the problem with the long endings in Titan Outpost is that there isn't enough side content to make waiting for it fun.