CSE Game Design Lab

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RPG vs Action study

Posted by on March 15th, 2010 · Uncategorized

Knowing that Action games and RPG games has lots of element, we decided to focus on the ‘battle’ part of the gameplay. After a bit of research and discussion, we found that each genre has a specific characteristic on the battle side of the gameplay. First, we will elaborate the elements that are commonly found in each genre.

Elements of Traditional RPG (example: Final fantasy, Dragon Quest, etc) :

  • Level ups and experience
  • Skills or magic for the characters
  • Money and resource are important
  • Usage of items (both usable items and equipable items)
  • rely heavily on tactics or strategy (finding enemy’s weakness, finding different set of ways to defeat enemy)
  • quests
  • slow paced gameplay (especially the battle)
  • some games have a heavy customisation
  • Information gathering is very important and beneficial for success in the game
  • recruitment of party members (not in all games)

Elements of Traditional Action games (double dragon, street fighter, etc):

  • Rely heavily on motor skills
  • Fast paced game
  • Has a set/unchangeable damage and hit point for every characters (the damage done by each characters and the amount of damage that could be taken before they die never changes from the beginning of the game untill the end)
  • Requires different kinds of tactics ( how to kill the boss or the enemy character)

Nowadays, however, the line between action and rpg games  seems to blur, as now RPG has plenty of action element, and action games has a lot of RPG elements. Action games incorporate a few ‘level up’, items, and equipment system into the game (God of War, Chaos Legion, Devil May Cry series, etc) , whilst some modern RPG uses a fast-paced battle system that relies on the user’s motor skill (Tales of Series, such as Tales of Abyss and Tales of Vesperia, Rogue Galaxy, Kingdom Hearts, etc).

However, after  a few discussion, we found that there is a clear line between the 2 games right now, which are:

Modern RPG :

-No matter how action-like their battle play is, in the end it doesn’t require as much motor skill as action games in general. If we have a pretty high level, it is fairly easy to beat the enemies. Also, high levels or equipments are necessary to beat the enemy. For example, on tales of the abyss games,  failure to gain level means low status, making us landing a constant 0 to 1 damage to the enemy with hit points of 150,000.

-On some games, strategy element are still highly employed such as the element system (water beats fire, fire beats wood, etc).

Modern Action:

-The opposite of modern RPG, no matter how high the ‘level’ of our characters are, good motor skills are still necessary to be able to beat the game. Also, level ups are unnecessary in most cases, to successfully beat the game ( as long as we have good motor skill).

From our findings above, we decided that the balance between motor skills involvement are the most important aspect in the study of both genre.

Our main study and our thesis main topic is to find an element inside both game that acts as an on and off switch between action and RPG. For that reason, we will be designing a game that has 2 settings: one for action and one for RPG.

We will be designing a computer game that uses a wiimote and it’s nunchuk as the controller for playing the game. The game itself will be a pretty simple hack- and-slash game, with RPG elements, such as levels, experience, status, hit points and magic points. The game itself will be using a 2.5 d visual, and has some action elements in it such as jumping, blocking, etc.

We will be play testing the game and see how people react to both. In the end, we are hoping to be able to get a feedback on whether our settings for the game is successful (meaning we found 1 or more specific setting that acts as a divisor between an action and an RPG game).

We are currently not sure what the settings are, but we do have 1 idea in mind. The idea is to create a Hero Level/ Enemy level ratio settings in the game.

The idea comes from playing an RPG game titled Final Fantasy 8. The game follows a pretty standard traditional RPG, however, the Bosses level is matched according to the mean of the party’s level. So in the game, if we increase our level, the boss’s level will increase as well. It is possible to beat the game at level 10 (starting level: about 6 or 7) because of this.

So we were thinking to develop the game in this manner. For action, we match up the level of the enemies to follow the main character’s, whilst for RPG we don’t use that kind of ratio, but we have a specific  level for the enemies. Working the ratio with maths will hopefully bring us to be able to create a balanced setting for a perfect hybrid between action and rpg game.

Any comments, suggestions or critique are highly welcome.

One Comment so far ↓

  • Guy

    In The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, I was extremely frustrated to find that the monsters that I was fighting levelled with me. It defeats the entire purpose of levelling up if it makes you no stronger than before.

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