RPG Inflation: From Zero to Hero

There’s a great article up on Hooked Gamer on RPG Inflation. The author isn’t referring to the price of games but to the tendency of RPG to level characters up ever more quickly. It’s hard to swallow a character, even a prodigy with a destiny, rising from rudimentary skills to god like powers in a few day’s time.

The are RPGs that manage to pull this off, such as The Witcher and Lost Odyssey, where the main character has suffered a trauma and is basically relearning or remembering skills he once possessed. In other games, the character leveling doesn’t just break suspension of disbelief, it shatters it completely.

The author suggests that characters need to be more human so that players can relate more to them and imagine themselves as their fantasy avatar.

Be thankful that in Real Life, henchmen can be counted on to look out for their own self-interests when the chips are down, otherwise we would most definitely need that Champion of the Empire hero to sally forth on our behalf — and in Real Life, such heroes do NOT exist.

And that, I guess is my ultimate point: at least try to make even fantasy games to have a passing relationship to Reality. Yeah, we all groove on the sense of accomplishment as our characters rack up the experience points. But when we’re dealing with these massively inflated numbers, the chasm between Me and Fantastic Me goes from the Grand Canyon to that void between galaxies. That is, I identify much, much more with a character that could be _me_ if I shed a few pounds, improved my reaction time somewhat, developed a comprehensive database of general knowledge, etc. Make THAT character succeed, and I go “YEAH!” But when my character is just short of godhood and he succeeds, I go, “Ho hum. Wonder what game I’ll play next.”

This is one gamer’s opinion. I’m sure not all of us agree on this. I find more satisfaction from a game when I get more than just tallies of total kills. I like characters that are fallible and have something to fight for other than destiny. However, I also play to take a well deserved break from reality so don’t make them too much like a day at the office.

via Hooked Gamers