Tetris needs a role
Shooters are finally embracing the RPG, we hear. Ken Levine is somewhere shrugging his shoulders. But there’s nothing special about shooters that invites the RPG. A game like Rock Band could use a few role-playing elements, right? It already has them. You gain money, clothes, vehicles, and fans as you conquer all of corporate music.
The problem is, they’re inconsequential. We say money and clothes don’t matter in life, but in Rock Band, they really don’t. They don’t change the experience – they just move it along by unlocking things. If there’s one thing games don’t need, it’s locks.
The fans and clothes are simple props. They’re exterior to the experience. They’re just making the game more mathematical.
That’s not the case in BioShock. The RPG elements have been intertwined into the fabric of the experience, and it’s more fun for it. Rock Band could do that, and it’d be better for it too. Legend of Zelda could do it, or Burnout, or hell, Tetris.
RPG elements should be embraced as mechanisms to connect all the separate experiences of a game into one. Every performance a player nails in Rock Band should be part of one seamless gaming experience. You could call it a metagame, but it’s more than that.
It’s the milk the cereal floats on. It’s the glue holding the pieces together. It’s the binding of the book.
I think you are really on to something with this idea. Hopefully developers will realize that all games have you playing a role in one sense or another. The more the game encourages you to effectively play that role, the more immersive, fun, and rewarding it is. Well said Brad.
Yeah, exactly. I think if developers really think about how to use RPG-like elements in a game, there’s no reason it can’t feel like one big experience in a similar way playing a game like Oblivion or Mass Effect does.
Those games use player-controlled characters that rarely leave the screen to do that, but there’s other ways to do it. It’s all about assigning an identity to the player, and having that identity evolve and change as the game progresses.
Puzzle Quest was very interesting for this reason. The seamless fusing of a Bejeweled like game with RPG elements made it a lot of fun to progress through the game. Knowing the puzzle you were solving were going towards something besides a point total, really added to the experience. I agree with you 100%.
Yeah, Puzzle Quest is a perfect example. It shows just how compatible RPG elements are with other game genres. It didn’t complicate the game, it didn’t slow it down, it just made it more fun.
I agree completely. Dan is right on with Puzzle Quest — I’ve never had so much fun playing a puzzle game. I sunk more hours into that game than most of my store-bought games.
RPG elements in games isn’t a new thing, but you surely wonder why it isn’t more prevalent. Instead of a a feature to set a game apart, it should be standard.
Well said, Brad.