Design Discussion: Reducing Inventory Stress in Loot-Based RPGs

whiteafternoon wrote:

Also, do you think systems like these could create new problems? For example, making players rely too heavily on automated filtering, reducing item discovery, or making inventory management feel less engaging.

Yeah, that's what i think about it. It's like patching an initially bloated design with introducing even more complexity.

whiteafternoon wrote:

In many games, players seem worried about accidentally destroying potentially valuable items, especially when random sub-stats or affixes are involved.

If you want items to feel important, the only way is to reduce their number so their amount remains manageable.
If i have dozens of items in a bag, no one feels more important than others.

So, if it's really needed that i can pick up any useless object in a game, i would use two inventories. One for the important stuff like quest items or power ups, and a second inventory for all the garbage.
Though, that's still complexity bloat. So better just remove the garbage all together.

But that's just my opinion, and i'm somebody who hates any kind of GUI based mechanics in action games. Skill trees, quest logs, maps, character stats... even multiple choice dialogue... i hate them all. It's a lousy attempt of adding some depth, which is just an abstract game of stats, but isn't backed by the games actual world simulation. It's fake, boring, and overwhelming. I wish this trend would go away again in the future maybe.
Cutscenes are for movies, and stats are for board games. \:D/

JoeJ said:
Cutscenes are for movies, and stats are for board games. \:D/

lol, shots fired. But yeah, RPGs kind of “optimised” themselves into a dead end and now they can't get out. TTRPGs were always about going on an adventure, and combat was just a storytelling device, and stat sheets were just a crutch mechanic for implementing combat. They were never meant to devolve into mob grinders and item farming games. And now that's all they are. Only combat, only grinding mobs and farming loot, and a slight superficial sprinkle of an adventure story. As it is, the genre is basically dead, and it would be more accurate to call the genre Fantasy Combat Game, rather than Role Playing Game. And no matter what crafting or other mechanics you add, it doesn't change the fact that a pure combat game is just boring, because the actual combat in RPGs is usually quite unsatisfying as well, if you compare it to the old FPS games. If you're going to make it 99% about combat, then that combat should be why people want to come and play it. But RPGs have this weird promise of immersion in a fantasy world, and of adventure, that hooks people into it, but all they get is kind-of shallow and monotone combat.

The UI system is always tricky, and it's going to depend tremendously on the game. Lots of sort-by and filter-by options can be useful, but they can also be clutter.

There's also the risk that you create complexity where none is needed; just because a UI system can filter and sort doesn't necessarily make it a good idea. It's easy to accidentally turn a game into a giant spreadsheet of numbers, converting the gameplay into a numerical analysis. In any sufficiently popular game there are always going to be people who dig deep into those numbers, most people only give a cursory look at the stats, or just look them up based on the numbers nerds. If you start adding all those filters and sorting, it can make the game less fun for the masses while catering to the limited group who prefers the numbers, harming the game overall.

The "stats are for board games" has an element of truth. There are games built around tactics and numbers, where players can spend 30+ minutes figuring out the ideal move. Nothing wrong with that, plenty of popular games through the ages are primarily about all the analysis. Even in mainstream games, I remember the various Final Fantasy Tactics games, numbers-heavy and turn based that in addition to a story gave an opportunity for many players to apply their number crunching skills, while other players simply ran quickly through the story to quickly finish the game.

Know your audience. If you know your audience is looking for hack and slash, what you described is a terrible UI. If your audience is looking for data tables, spreadsheets, and calculators, what you described is useful to them.

whiteafternoon wrote:

filtering items with unwanted stats,

sorting by sub-stat importance,

highlighting “safe to dismantle” equipment,

and confirmation windows with quick item previews.

Path of Exile and Last Epoch solved a lot of this with item filters - players write rules that auto-highlight or hide drops by stat thresholds. It works because the rules are player-defined, not the game guessing what you want. The risk you mentioned is real though: filters that are too good turn the inventory from a decision space into a queue.

Alan Voren (PlayServ) said:
filters that are too good turn the inventory from a decision space into a queue.

it's not the fault of the filter, but the fault of the game's design, producing an incentive structure where if you had the means to do so, you would treat the inventory as a queue. The filter simply makes that design flaw more apparent by enabling the player to enact that final conclusion of the incentive structure. If the game wasn't entirely numbers-based (whether with or without RNG doesn't matter), then items wouldn't be judged according to a formula / metric. For example if a stronger item also required more mechanical mastery to use, that would introduce a lot of soft factors that vary from player to player, and also from situation to situation. Sometimes, an encounter is so challenging and stressful that you can't use an item that requires too much precision in its controls. Like when you get swarmed by tons of enemies and constantly have to re-target other enemies or something. Or when you have to be busy performing other actions, you might want an item that is low-effort in its usage, to free up input bandwidth for other actions that the situation demands. In such a situation, the better item is the one that takes less effort to use, even if it has less DPS or something. Whereas in other situations, in a 1v1 fight against a boss, you want the item that allows maximum impact if you have the mastery.

RmbRT wrote:

call the genre Fantasy Combat Game

How about Fantasy Hoarding Game or Fantasy Garbage Collection Game? A "Hoarder" for short.

RmbRT wrote:

For example if a stronger item also required more mechanical mastery to use, that would introduce a lot of soft factors that vary from player to player, and also from situation to situation.

But then you need the relation of mastery and item to be obvious to the player, without him needing to read stats in some GUI.

I remember a related experience with Elden Ring, the only Souls like i have played a bit. I really liked its fantasy world. But i died a lot and could not explore. So i read some article online about some very powerful sword in a dungeon nearby. I found it, and thought yeah - with that powerful sword i'll have it easy against enemies. But it turned out my new sword was not much better than my old one? Finally i learned from confusing GUI pages the sword would require some raised character stats i did not yet have.

How disappointing. So my next step was to install a cheat tool. Which finally worked. But it still took long times to kill those annoying enemies. So i could not resist to increase my power levels to the max and then the game became pointless and i stopped playing.

Well, i'm no RPG player, and for that it's quite a good game i remember well. But still - for those character stats to make sense to me, i would need something like this example:

I find a huge Hammer, but i can't pick it up. My character struggles. Obviously it's too heavy.
I run away and kill bears, climb up the mountain, run without a break. And i notice: My character has grown much more muscles it seems.
So i go back and yeah - i can lift the hammer up. I can use it as a weapon, killing dinosaurs.

Now one might say it's hard to come up with more of such obvious requirements for items.

But imo that's ok and even good, because that's also how we will avoid pointless items filling inventories.
It's hard to make only items which have true systemic options, so we won't have too many items in our game for sure. : )

JoeJ wrote:

How disappointing. So my next step was to install a cheat tool. Which finally worked. But it still took long times to kill those annoying enemies. So i could not resist to increase my power levels to the max and then the game became pointless and i stopped playing.

The game kinda sucked for you... so you cheated, which only made it suck differently... so you quit. And your a priori commitment to genre was close to zero.

I'm wondering if there was any design that would have been more appealing to you as a noob? You offer some suggestions...

JoeJ wrote:

And i notice: My character has grown much more muscles it seems.

You need visual feedback? Or you just want and hope for visual feedback?

I can think of a lot of reasons why "more muscles" is not something an animator is gonna give you. How many parameterizations on the art assets that would require. And how many outfits, could cover up all that hard work making the muscles. And the species variations. Just doesn't seen like something you can realistically ask a human animator to cook up for you in a 3D game. An AI prompted on the fly, well maybe, but I can imagine plenty of QA problems with that. Not to mention expense / business model. The future of "big farm" AI in games is uncertain.

You could certainly have your 3D avatar do something more obvious like get bigger or have more parts glom onto it, but that won't be appropriate to all games. Lotta dungeon level designs, don't think those designers are gonna be too happy about handling arbitrarily large avatars. Although maybe if it's constrained from gnome to D&D style giant, it could work. Giants could do certain things, gnomes could do certain things...

JoeJ wrote:

But imo that's ok and even good, because that's also how we will avoid pointless items filling inventories.

The genre term for players picking up everything in sight is muleing. As in, loading up a pack mule full of stuff. I'm not sure how far back the term goes, and it might have its origins in pen and paper RPG. AD&D 1st ed. had encumbrance rules, but people often ignored them. Fast forward to Dungeon Siege, and the devs clowned the problem with a literal mule carrying all your stuff.

You can prevent muleing by just saying, there's only so much stuff you can pick up. Whether that's item square footprints in an abstract inventory, or actual weights. Plenty of systems have done both. The problem is, do the devs stick to their guns and keep the player poor? Or do they allow the player to behave as a moving truck. Especially when magic items like Bags of Holding are available and incentivized.

Is the player kept on a manageable progression, or do the devs go crazy and basically use items as a way to sell art assets? Strong pull towards the latter, which destroys any game design.

bvanevery wrote:

The game kinda sucked for you... so you cheated, which only made it suck differently... so you quit. And your a priori commitment to genre was close to zero.

I'm wondering if there was any design that would have been more appealing to you as a noob? You offer some suggestions...

Yeah, actually i try to play RPGs again and again since many years, but they rerely work for me. The only one i have (almost) finished was Fallout 3. I have treated it like an FPS game which worked. I could completely ignore all the stats and details in GUI pages and still normally play the game in the way i wanted. Which means the game holds it's promise in terms 'do what you want' or 'play how you like'. But i fail to analyze how this game differs from other RPGs which i always stop playing early due to a lack of motivation, including Fallout 4 or Starfield which follow the same formula.

For a suggestion, let's take this:

RmbRT wrote:

Sometimes, an encounter is so challenging and stressful that you can't use an item that requires too much precision in its controls. Like when you get swarmed by tons of enemies and constantly have to re-target other enemies or something. Or when you have to be busy performing other actions, you might want an item that is low-effort in its usage, to free up input bandwidth for other actions that the situation demands. In such a situation, the better item is the one that takes less effort to use, even if it has less DPS or something. Whereas in other situations, in a 1v1 fight against a boss, you want the item that allows maximum impact if you have the mastery.

Sounds like RmbRT is thinking about a good way to design meaningful items for a RPG.
And i guess such examples exist in RPG games. But they were designed following inspiration from pen and paper games, where the sword suitable to kill some boss has more 'strength' or 'magic' than other swords, turning into a powerful 'item' of desire.
The outcome is: We perceive the value of some item from reading it's abstract numbers of stats. The item itself doe snto tell a message. Only the description about the item does.

I don't like that. And i deeply wonder, because action game have long figured out the batter way. Which was completely overlooked when action and RPG were merged to the one and only modern genre.
I talk about power ups, e.g. in Super Mario or Quake.
I see a blue glowing powerup in the distance. I'm curious and run over it to get it. It activates isntantly, and i notice it covers my whole body into blue glow. And then i notice i became a total killer machine. I can kill all enemies with one shot. Wow, what an excitement. Let's kill them all as long as the quad damage lasts.
Same with Super Mario power ups. I pick them up and immideatly notice the change, the new ability i have. And i can use it right away.
No need for a description. And i do not need to pause the game into text mode to use my power up. I stay in the game, and it remains an action game, without a need to think about numbers or math behind some sparkling particle effects.

Imo, merging RPG and action game is a good idea. But replacing well working action mechanics with inferior RPG mechanics trying to achieve the same thing is a mistake.

The difference might look subtle, but the design process is very different. RPGs are designed on paper. Action games are designed by implementing ideas and testing how much fun they are. And that's the only way, since design on paper can not represent any form of action. Action is realtime simulation, and you can only experience this buy interaction with said realtime simulation.
RPGs constantly get this wrong, leading to complexity bloat but not fun gemaplay. And it seems nobody cares because everybody else does it wrong in the same way.

bvanevery wrote:

You could certainly have your 3D avatar do something more obvious like get bigger or have more parts glom onto it, but that won't be appropriate to all games. Lotta dungeon level designs, don't think those designers are gonna be too happy about handling arbitrarily large avatars.

Indeed. My way of thinking does not allow the 'infinite variations and combinations of effects cause from applying +1 or -1 to various stats'. So it may feel restricted to the RPG designer, or to the PoE player who spends years on optimizing his character build.

But to me the RPG approach does not work for RPG either, because the changes from +/-1 are way too subtle i would ever notice them. I lack the patience to play for 3 ours jsut to conclude 'wow, maybe because i have increased my strength by +1, i have now killed 6 deer instead just 5 as usual in 3 hours'.
Actually, i have never experienced any change from stats in any RPG game. Never.
I'm just no RPG player. I only draw some inspiration from the genre. I'm interested it its promises of 'do what you want, go anywhere, play as whom you'd liek to be, ...' and all that. I like the promise, but not the outcome i currently see.

bvanevery wrote:

The genre term for players picking up everything in sight is muleing.

Hehe, i have never heard this term. But at this point i notice: Only RPG player require their own dictionary of terms to describe their beloved genre.
All the other players just have fun. ;D

Well, i guess it has to do with my background and environment. I have never seen people playing pen and paper RPG. I know this only from movies. I have never seen a 'choose your own adventure' book either. Did not know they existed until recently. My first RPg was probably Ultima on C64 as a kid. But i was thinking: What's that shit? I could code this crap myself in Basic. The characters teleport from one tile to the next and do not even move smoothly. This a low brow game made by amateurs.

Maybe it's now too late to get into it. I really want to play NetHack for example. And i have Cave of Qud. I'm very interested, and will never delete those games. But i will never play them either. Because sadly their interfaces are terrible and overcomplicated as fuck. I will never understand RPGs.

JoeJ wrote:

I see a blue glowing powerup in the distance. I'm curious and run over it to get it. It activates isntantly, and i notice it covers my whole body into blue glow. And then i notice i became a total killer machine. I can kill all enemies with one shot. Wow, what an excitement. Let's kill them all as long as the quad damage lasts.

Ok, I get that the feedback to the player is strong, about what the effect is. Not every effect should be modeled as a bunch of light flashes and video game tunes suddenly wafting over you though. Let's say an item makes you more stealthy, well you're really not gonna know unless you go stalk and kill something. Perhaps you could have NPCs tipping you off that something has changed, because you startle a lot more people in regular public interaction, but this still isn't the kind of unsubtle and immediate feedback you're interested in.

The game has a causality model of what's going on. Question is, does the game do a good job of communicating that model? Does it violate the model? You've noticed that small changes in stats, don't help communicate anything.

Also if I've got 10 different stats and they're all slightly changing, how do I know which one was responsible for my victory? Stats like "move faster" are noticeable, but you can only increase that so much before the game becomes seriously imbalanced. Most games don't really wanna be The Flash superhero simulator.

JoeJ said:
I don't like that. And i deeply wonder, because action game have long figured out the batter way. Which was completely overlooked when action and RPG were merged to the one and only modern genre.

Just to be sure, I just looked up ARPG on steam and even Path of Exile and Diablo count as that. Alongside Elden Ring. The definition of RPG at this point is completely diluted, and if a point and click game is already an action game, then is a non-Action RPG turn-based? I think both RPG and Action RPG as terms have been devalued completely.

TTRPGs could not involve mechanical mastery, hence the need for stats, and levels for a sense of progression of mastery over time. But somehow the only takeaway computerised RPGs had were levels and stats. Metroidvania games actually have a good power progression: you start out with no powers, or maybe one or two, and as you progress through the game, the demanded mastery increases, and more powers get unlocked. And the game demands that you ever-more skillfully and creatively combine those powers in your arsenal in order to progress further. As far as I know, those games don't have levels or stat sheets or even item drops like in an RPG, yet they do just fine without.

bvanevery said:
You need visual feedback? Or you just want and hope for visual feedback?

The muscles are not the point. Rather, you want some kind of hints from how the character performs that tell you how strong he actually is. For example how many hits he takes to beat some enemy, or how loud some splat sound is when he performs a strong hit, or how strained he seems when carrying something (posture, and how encumbered the animation looks). You don't need to grow your character model out of proportions, you simply need to convey the sense of strength he has, in all actions he takes that involve strength. Climbing, lifting, carrying, hitting, shoving, etc..

JoeJ said:
No need for a description. And i do not need to pause the game into text mode to use my power up. I stay in the game, and it remains an action game, without a need to think about numbers or math behind some sparkling particle effects.

Great way to phrase it. A game should not be essentially text mode, if at all possible, unless that's explicitly the style you want. Text mode is a bad crutch in graphical games.

JoeJ said:
Imo, merging RPG and action game is a good idea. But replacing well working action mechanics with inferior RPG mechanics trying to achieve the same thing is a mistake.

True, if you merge the current state of computerised RPGs with action games, it will still be bad. The namesake of RPG is role playing, aka adventuring, especially long-term adventures. As opposed to adventure games that have a more fixed story that you explore, role-playing games are about player freedom on your journey, expressing yourself with the actions you take. Combat is just one storytelling device for easy tension and stakes (at least if combat actually has stakes, which is why I prefer permadeath design). RPGs completely devolved into combat spreadsheet simulators and grinding simulators. Gamifying work failed, but workifying games succeeded.

A proper RPG needs you to be able to explore its world freely and solve puzzles with your abilities, and it must offer lots of adventure opportunities. I personally would define an adventure as a journey with uncertainty of success, personally meaningful stakes (= emotional relevance), and where you grow by overcoming challenges and doubts, and conversely, need to grow in order to overcome them. In a TTRPG, the game is much more complex and has many more dimensions than just combat. There is inventory & money management, talking to NPCs to learn about the world, planning to go on journeys, traps in dungeons you need to avoid, risky monster encounters that you need to manage properly, and also you need to heal yourself, as wounds don't auto-heal in a minute, so receiving accumulated damage over time is actually lethal. And getting into the good graces of some NPC is important if you need to earn his trust in order to receive confidential information that is required to figure out how to solve a problem, or maybe you need to earn his active support for something you are trying to do, etc..

So, if you made an action RPG, you would want to retain as much as possible of the adventure role playing vision, while inserting a lot of action into the game design, for example by having lots of fighting, but that doesn't have to be the only source of action. And those action elements would also have to be designed so that they aren't just point and click like Path of Exile or Diablo, but highly immersive in their controls. Through the control scheme, you want the player to feel like it is him who is doing the roundhouse kick and throwing fire balls. Which means you want controls for detailed movement and other actions, and the game needs to require skillful use of those controls. Soulslikes with their dodge rolls and parry controls are one example of how that could be done, Metroidvanias are another example.

JoeJ said:
My first RPg was probably Ultima on C64 as a kid. But i was thinking: What's that shit? I could code this crap myself in Basic. The characters teleport from one tile to the next and do not even move smoothly. This a low brow game made by amateurs.

LOL. Yes, those RPGs were quite primitive graphically.

JoeJ said:
Hehe, i have never heard this term. But at this point i notice: Only RPG player require their own dictionary of terms to describe their beloved genre. All the other players just have fun. ;D

[…]

But i will never play them either. Because sadly their interfaces are terrible and overcomplicated as fuck. I will never understand RPGs.

Good observation about how poor the state of RPGs is. They can live entirely on the promise of going on an adventure, even if they don't really deliver, and haven't done so in decades. And people still buy them for some reason. They don't deliver engaging control schemes, user interfaces, or game mechanics. It's literally just about power tripping over how high you can get your spread sheet numbers.

JoeJ said:
But to me the RPG approach does not work for RPG either, because the changes from +/-1 are way too subtle i would ever notice them. I lack the patience to play for 3 ours jsut to conclude 'wow, maybe because i have increased my strength by +1, i have now killed 6 deer instead just 5 as usual in 3 hours'. Actually, i have never experienced any change from stats in any RPG game. Never.

You're supposed to perceive the change by looking at the stat sheet. And you're supposed to trust that this will be reflected mechanically in the game, too.

JoeJ said:
I'm just no RPG player. I only draw some inspiration from the genre. I'm interested it its promises of 'do what you want, go anywhere, play as whom you'd like to be, ...' and all that. I like the promise, but not the outcome i currently see.

That is the mission statement of RPGs, and has been neglected for decades. MUDs tried to capture that aspect of RPGs but then died out because they were text-based, and they couldn't be complex enough in their simulation because computers at the time had too little RAM, and they were online games, meaning all that game state for hundreds or thousands of players had to run on a single PC somewhere. And I think the MUD genre hasn't really been attempted since its early death, so nobody knows what the possibilities are on modern hardware, and with graphics instead of terminals, and with real-time / action controls. I'd love to see it.

bvanevery said:
Let's say an item makes you more stealthy, well you're really not gonna know unless you go stalk and kill something.

You could have the player get shrouded in blurry shadows that emanate from his character. If that doesn't scream “shadow stealth” then I don't know what does. Or you could fade his colour saturation, or play with transparency.

bvanevery said:
The game has a causality model of what's going on. Question is, does the game do a good job of communicating that model? Does it violate the model? You've noticed that small changes in stats, don't help communicate anything.

Any mechanic in the game should be expressed via visual or audio cues if possible, or some kind of mechanical feedback, unless explicitly want to hide the mechanic from the player (can't think of a reason right now).

bvanevery said:
but you can only increase that so much before the game becomes seriously imbalanced. Most games don't really wanna be The Flash superhero simulator.

But that's what games are already doing. You can be so strong that one hit can destroy hundreds of low-level enemies at once. This is the broken power progression of computerised RPGs that entirely focused on stat sheets and nothing else, and which degenerated into “it's only fun if the number goes up to ridiculous levels”.

bvanevery wrote:

Let's say an item makes you more stealthy

In that case you could use an effect to make the character almost transparent. : )

But i agree such flashy effects become less practical with increasing realism. Realism makes many things harder. I have just finished Quake 4, and i noticed there were no more power ups in this one. They removed the feature in favor of showing some more realisitc kind of Call Of Duty marine characters.

However, another interesting observation comparing Action game and RPG is:
In an action game the power up applies to the player and gives him another experience.
In RPGs the stats only affect the avatar, and the player notices the effect only after some analysis over time, i guess.

The curious detail on this is, if i play RPG i might eventually do so because i want to take the role of somebody else. I might wanna know how it is to be a hero, a king, or a thief, good or bad guy, whatever. But my choice of class affects mostly my avatar, how it looks and what abilities it has. My experience as the player does not really change that much.

But if i play action games, and i get a quad damage or a blue shoe and a hammersuit, my experience changes a lot. My playstyle changes too, completely. It becomes a different game, giving me much more variety than what i get from RPGs.

I think RPG designers could learn more from action games than the other way around.
But maybe that's just me, since i just prefer action games anyway.

bvanevery wrote:

Also if I've got 10 different stats and they're all slightly changing, how do I know which one was responsible for my victory? Stats like "move faster" are noticeable, but you can only increase that so much before the game becomes seriously imbalanced.

Yeah, that's another problem i do not have. (Classic) Action games don't use stats to represent abilities. They use player skills directly, which is ofc. much more effective, and does not need such communication to the player.

I see how this simple approach may feel less ambitious, just too simple, or even boring to the RPG fan, who expects to be empowered from the game, rather than by himself.
But it is what ti is. You play the game, not the guy you'd want to be.

JoeJ said:
The curious detail on this is, if i play RPG i might eventually do so because i want to take the role of somebody else. I might wanna know how it is to be a hero, a king, or a thief, good or bad guy, whatever. But my choice of class affects mostly my avatar, how it looks and what abilities it has. My experience as the player does not really change that much.

This is because the world simulations in RPGs are not responsive & detailed/immersive enough to even be capable of reacting properly to your actions. All the things you listed as “who to be” in the game are social roles. But contemporary RPG's world simulations are too primitive on the social side. It's basically nonexistent even. It's not the wearing of flashy clothes and a crown that makes you a king, nor is wearing sword an armor what makes you into a chivalrous knight. If the society & social dynamic is not a fundamental part of the game's systems and simulation, then you can't actually role play, neither as a thief, nor as a good or bad guy, or as a king or knight. Because being a thief is not just about sneaking and stealing. You actually cause economic damage and if you are seen, even if not caught, you become a public enemy. The people who you stole from must be affected by the theft.

It's like those games where the guards see you and shoot at you, and then you hide behind a box, and a few seconds later, they go “ah… must have been the wind” or something.

This is why TTRPGs are still the only place to actually role play, so far, even with all their clunky pen-and-paper stuff. Because the DM can emulate all these subtle social things that are hard to put into numbers or think of ahead of time. He can give you satisfying and convincing consequences to all your actions, allowing you to stay immersed and emotionally invested. A program can never achieve the flexibility and adaptability of a human, but we haven't even tried to achieve even 10% of it. We just did the dumbest possible superficial thing that is barely convincing enough in the moment so that you don't immediately exit the game in anger.

So, if you play as a king in a contemporary game, your character simply wears the kingly costume and that's it. There is no actual impact to that.

JoeJ said:
But if i play action games, and i get a quad damage or a blue shoe and a hammersuit, my experience changes a lot. My playstyle changes too, completely. It becomes a different game, giving me much more variety than what i get from RPGs.

That's simply sensible design. If RPGs started to design properly as well, all contemporary RPGs would immediately stop selling, because of the sheer inferiority compared to a properly designed RPG. But since there is no notable competition, design-wise, everyone comfortably sells their sloppy design.

JoeJ wrote:

In that case you could use an effect to make the character almost transparent. : )

I didn't say invisible or physically altered, I said stealthy. I'm not interested in a visual universe where everything is glow glow glow and everything you do is tunes tunes tunes. Super Mario isn't some kind of one true art direction for the medium of video games.

It is reasonable to ask how one would handle such a thing in TV or film though. Is it filmable? Can it actually be depicted on screen? That's a fundamental question for screenwriting.

First off, it would probably be a substantial plot device, something the show puts a fair amount of attention into. It probably wouldn't be a random gizmo in a never ending sea of gizmos, as is likely in games. You'd probably be spending quality time with characters noting the consequences of the item. Dialog, reactions, acting. Stuff that game devs aren't that good at providing anyways.

So yeah, game devs often do flash flash flash ding ding ding. But we can aspire to other.

JoeJ wrote:

But i agree such flashy effects become less practical with increasing realism. Realism makes many things harder.

It's also the difference between comedy and drama. It's way easier to clown things. The problem with comedy is when you run out of jokes. With drama, you have to be much more careful about how you put the whole thing together. Or you'll get a comedy.