29 | ⚧️♀ | gamedev + chef | seattle


OblivionLoading
@OblivionLoading

Merchants don't like it when you insult their heritage, clothes or building, and will charge you higher prices for their goods.


nex3
@nex3

This is actually such a perfect encapsulation of the Elder Scrolls experience. The pursuit of a kind of "realism" that's constructed entirely independently of any concerns for game design or player motivation. You can insult a merchant because you could in theory do that in the real world, and they will get pissed off at you inasmuch as that's expressible through game mechanics. The question of why a player would ever want to do this is totally irrelevant; these games see the idea of role-playing as a kind of simulation rather than part of the challenge of accomplishing the goals of the game. It's almost an admirable purity of purpose, at the same time as it's also totally deranged.

There's probably a contrast to be drawn here between this approach to the idea of "role-playing" and the Japanese industry's focus instead on intrinsically aligning your mechanical actions as a player seeking to beat the game with the role the story is asking you to play, but I'm not enough of an RPG gamer to elaborate further than that.


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in reply to @nex3's post:

yeah at risk of making an overly sweeping statement, Japanese media in general seems less concerned with realism/verisimilitude/canon whereas those are some of the highest valued elements in Western media

There was an articulation I really liked once that illustrated how tabletop RPG's were popularized in the East and West at similar times- and thus inspired similar generations of game designers independently. However- the methods of execution on how to encapsulate those experiences were significantly different in those environments of developers and reiterated among contemporaries to a sharpened edge.

The general articulation was something to the effect of "Japanese developers focused on telling a story, and allowing players to express themselves through mastery of complex systems- Western Developers focused on players creating a story through abstract systems, and express themselves through mechanical freedom".

I feel like I see this even today- with JRPG's being games that ask the player to learn, master, and engage with intensely deep systems- often times arbitrarily- as the point of engagement. Meanwhile the purest form of the western RPG ends up being the Immersive Sim: which can be grossly simplified as "a collection of systems that tell the player to "Figure it out" while a story unfolds around them."