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[Holey Moley]

Holey Moley Website System Administrator Offline

look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology

Holey Moley says,

Playing Dark Souls lately... after decades of playing games, I am beginning to have doubts that all games benefit from the "stats" approach to play.

In From' you have two main games (as far as I am concerned) in King's Field and Armored Core.

In King's Field you are a lone adventurer. A person on an adventure. And in Armored Core you are a pilot, and a mechanic of sorts, it's a vehicle simulation really, even though mechanically it is near identical to King's Field if you think about it, since the vehicle is an anthropomorphic robot.


Once you add stats. Especially the huge amount of stats sported by a game like Dark Souls. The game almost becomes a bean counting simulator. This (http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/show/extra-credits) got me thinking about so-called depth vs. complexity.

I call the Souls games incredibly shallow. They totally lack depth IMO. Compared to the King's Field series namely. But a certain kind of gamer seems to think about depth in a completely other way to this. They see depth as an act of accounting. They are obsessed with pushing beads around an abacus. This is not the traditional values of all other forms of story telling media for sure. You can call that game play depth instead of artistic depth I suppose...

That said. It still begs the question. Is an adventurer an adventurer or an accountant? To me this is an immersion killer. But a pilot of a futuristic engineered vehicle on the other hand is by all means an accountant. In my mind this just goes to the simple logic that the game mechanics should fit the game's presentation.


If I am a primitive adventurer I have no so-called stats. The only stats are the numbers of arrows in my quiver, the coins in my purse, and inventory in general. And I am not just of the mindset that stats are unrealistic or unfitting. I am actually wondering if they do more harm than good in a human scale adventure...

If you can't tell which equipment is better by looking at it, observing the performance, and if all else fails seeing what you can get for it, then the optics for that item are probably all wrong.

In the first KF game it was very difficult to work out the stats of anything. There was one stats screen that you had to exit out of and go back into the equip screen, make a change, and then mentally compare it to the previous stats which you hopefully remembered. I don't know if even that screen was really necessary.

And really if the stats make that much of a difference in a lone adventurer game then the game must be totally exploitable, and if nothing else easily broken by stat progression.

Most of all the focus on stats reduces the player to a nerd. That's what you want in Armored Core, but its the antithesis of a heroic adventurer.

Deemphasizing stats also has the effect of emphasizing appearances. So a player is more likely to choose the equipment or whatever options that they find most stylistically appealing instead of reverting to the most base instinct of sticking to whatever yields the highest stats.

Finally should the player really be allowed to distribute experience points or whatever however they want to across a spreadsheet? Or should their stats simply progress based on the action performed repeatedly in the game? And does the player even need to know where those stats are at any given time?

I would rather know that all of that sword swinging has made me a better sword swinger than have to look at a bunch of obnoxious numbers.

And if your sword swinging is not good enough to get you to where you need to go, then probably you should not be going there just yet.

Even in Armored Core there are things that should really be unknowable. You cannot really quantify the quality of your armor once it is compromised.

I mean think about it. Wouldn't it be more fun if a game manual told you what kinds of materials exist in the fantasy world. Then you could look at the item and judge by the amount of the materials that are visible how effective the item ought to be? And if its not obvious then that is either on the game designer, or the difference should be so negligible that it comes down to the player's own stylistic preference.

The text in the item's description could sum up the PC's estimation of the equipment's value. Perhaps if the game had a knowledge stat like KF3 the PC's estimation could improve over time. The status screen could simply reflect in text form the nearness to expiration, if it could not be made apparent by the player's mannerisms.

I don't know, I am just at a place where I am overwhelmed by all of the stats. They don't feel appropriate, and I've never seen a game that has ever attempted to just do without them.

Formerly "Holy Diver" ("Holy") [Holy will be back as soon as I'm back to full form]

[Holey Moley]

Holey Moley Website System Administrator Offline

look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology

Holey Moley says,

I was thinking. Maybe one problem with stats is just the precision of them. A person cannot detect their fitness according to some precise number. But you do have a general sense.

I think the grade system used in many From' games is a pretty good model for this. Alternatively you could just use a fuzzy number, so instead of A B C you have 1 2 3, which you can arrive at simply by scaling the actual stat by some arbitrary value. So that 99 HP is divided by 10 so that you have 9 HP for sure, for a scale of 1 to 10. The point is you don't know precisely where you are between 90 and 99, so there is a degree of fuzziness.

Likewise you can tell when a stat is getting better. So comparing two things you could have blue A -> red A for a downgrade, even though you don't put a precise figure on it. You could also use a segmented bar to represent the grade graphically.

For the most part I think even this is clutter. But you do need to know a few things that may not be able to be visually apparent. The grade of the player's health or whatever. The grade of equipment where the equipment also has health or whatever.

Equipment affinity is probably best left to optics, but you might want to grade that too. Perhaps a special NPC could provide this service both with respect to equipment and the PC's development.

Things that can be readily measured precisely such as weight and reach should probably have precise stats. It's hard to think of more examples such as this unless you are in a futuristic game like Armored Core in which all parameters adhere to a precise specification.

Formerly "Holy Diver" ("Holy") [Holy will be back as soon as I'm back to full form]