View From the Bottom #8

In the eighth “View From the Bottom” feature on RPG Vault, Spiderweb Software’s Jeff Vogel continues to tell us why he hates fantasy role-playing games.

You are at one end of a hallway. Your goal, be it a treasure, a boss, a pretty hat, a hug, whatever, is at the other end. To earn it, you need to expend a certain amount of time basically killing the same few easy monsters repeatedly to get to it. This is called clearing trash.

It’s stupid.

Multiplayer RPGs have tons of this. Before you can fight an exciting boss and collect treasure, you have to pay a time tax wading through a bunch of trash. And, while everyone hates it, it doesn’t get better. For a while, the best World of Warcraft raid dungeons had very little trash, and it was all designed to be interesting and different. This is a thing of the past. Now, if you go to the forums to read discussion of the new expansion, you’ll find endless reports of hours wasted in trash-clearing tedium.

But single-player RPGs have plenty of this too. So many of them fall prey to what I call Long Corridor Syndrome. At a certain point, late in the game, you can tell that the developers ran out of time, money and ideas, and all you find are long, straight corridors filled with monsters and nothing else of interest. All those funky encounters and interesting quests that grabbed your attention at the beginning? They’re done. Now, you just have to pay your dues until the game lets you win.