Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Complexity Trade-Offs and RPGs

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 2, 2012

I was showing a friend the GOG.COM trailer for Legend of Grimrock over the weekend, and I found myself trying to explain the appeal of the title in a world full of games like Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, the recent Fallout games, etc.  Since he isn’t much of a gamer, appealing to the nostalgia factor wasn’t an option.  I ended up deferring on account of the lack of time, but as a retrogamer and a defender of old-school style gaming, I figured I should probably take some time to make sure I have good answers.

A common complaint against old-school RPGs concerns their complexity. I don’t think that’s necessarily correct. Most of them were no more complex than today’s RPGs, though the cumbersome interfaces of the era (especially when mice were considered optional controls) and the necessity of reading the manual probably enhanced that perception.

And in the games styled after Dungeon Master, with real-time gameplay, the movement is tightly constrained (Scorpia, I believed, referred to the attack-dodge style as the “Beholder Two-Step”), I’d suggest the overall complexity is pretty light. Oftentimes, it felt pretty “gamey” (especially if you go back to the RPGs of the 1980s). And, unlike a game like Skyrim, what complexity there is is often right there on the screen for you to see.  Whereas in more modern games, so much has to be done at a lower level to deal with issues like depth complexity of the scene, animation, pathfinding in more open-ended environments, AI, etc.

As players, we see the removal of a constraint or the addition of a generalized feature as simple addition, and assume the implementation effort scaled linearly with the perceived improvement. In other words, we think, “Oh, you can do X now, which makes the game 20% more interesting and complex. Therefore it must have taken 20% extra effort to put that into the game.”

But the truth is that the complexity behind the scenes can increase geometrically rather than linearly. Going from 2D (or pseudo-3D) to full-on 3D gameplay was a vast increase in development complexity for RPGs. Some aspects of the art, I suspect, had to get completely reinvented in order to “keep up” – particularly game interfaces. But other aspects of the genre were actually simplified or constrained further to compensate – both from a desire to simplify design and development, and to benefit the player who might feel task overload with the more complex environments.  So we often end up with tighter scripting, more linear environments, simpler puzzles, and yet still have combat that too often feels very chaotic, random, and button-mashy.

So it really comes down to a trade-off. You can have a game that tries to do it all (but will be unlikely to be appreciated for all that effort), or you make your trade-offs on one side or the other.  Older CRPGs made one trade-off, mainly out of necessity. Newer RPGs, no longer constrained by technical necessity, have gone in other directions but have had to make trade-offs in other areas of complexity.

But it is nice to go back and re-evaluate some of those trade-offs. I think the Grimrock guys have recognized that while the old “Dungeon Master” game style was less realistic and more ‘gamey’ than, say, Dragon Age: Origins, it was still a lot of fun. And maybe there are some new things to be done with the game style today that weren’t (or couldn’t be) done twenty years ago.


Filed Under: Design - Comments: 5 Comments to Read



  • Anon said,

    “I think the Grimrock guys have recognized that while the old “Dungeon Master” game style was less realistic and more ‘gamey’ than, say, Dragon Age: Origins, it was still a lot of fun.”

    I think you hit the nail on the head here!
    LoG apparently is a game and not a simulation. And it is of course not a “movie” like so many games where the player loses control for a significant amount of time (nothing against movie-like games but you know what I mean).

    It is even more so a game than the venerable Dungeon Master because the latter strived to be the best simulation possible at the time while LoG is *intentionally* primitive in some ways.
    Limiting player movement to “field steps” and 90 degree turns? Check!
    Merging a four-player party into a single person viewpoint? Check!

    Again, not judging one game over the other – merely stating what I see.

    And of course there’s nothing wrong with “game-like” games: There are, after all, many thriving indie platformers that look and feel like the retro classics (but often adding a new twist or two).
    And in fact as an older gamer myself I often think back to a time where the gameplay was easy to grasp but often difficult to completely master. A time where games recorded your progress with score points and not megabytes of savegame files.
    Today, many games seem like work – even if it is sometimes very comfy work with automaps, player logs or diaries. Yes, one can disable the direction marker in Skyrim to make the game a bit more difficult, for example, but the fact remains that it was built into the game.

    A few days ago I read a forum post where a gamer complained that he lost “all his work” because the game crashed on him.
    Well, if he would have played a “real game” he would simply had sat down and played it again. It wouldn’t have been “work” for him – just fun…

  • Jackson Lango said,

    “But the truth is that the complexity behind the scenes can increase geometrically rather than linearly. ”

    A great point, but I think you mean exponentially?

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    Well, if the geometric factor is >1, then it is an exponential growth curve… 😉 But I think I had 3D geometry on the brain when I was wrote it, and so that term was the one that came to mind.

  • WhineAboutGames said,

    “Well, if he would have played a “real game” he would simply had sat down and played it again. It wouldn’t have been “work” for him – just fun…”

    Not necessarily – losing an achievement tends to suck no matter how much fun the process of getting there is. If you’d just gotten somewhere awesome that you’d never been before and were about to record a super mega high score and then the game crashed, you’d *still* be annoyed. 🙂

  • Anon said,

    True, especially if you lose missions or entire campaigns but that’s not my point.

    It’s how we perceive most games today and while, yes, older games had less bugs (that could crash a game without the player being responsible) than modern, often more complex games the progress in a game is for some people only “work”.
    Because of the linearity of many games some players get angry just because they have to do something *twice*.

    Imagine that: Doing something twice when older games made you repeat something until your fingers bled.

    Repetition isn’t necessarily bad, though, especially when you can get a higher score the second time around.
    However, with many games today you don’t get scores – you _only_ have to reach the end of the level and then start at the next with full health etc. In other words: It doesn’t matter how you reach the checkpoint – the game only cares that you do.

    That’s the difference:

    If I fail because of something and can get a better score I’ll try again (if I’m interesting in such games).

    If I fail in a game where it doesn’t matter how I play – only that I reach the end – I don’t have a secondary objective (the first objective still being fun) which in turn reduces my fun as I won’t tolerate repetition.

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