Save the World, but Pay Up First

I’ve been playing a lot of Pirhana Bytes Risen, their new RPG that’s sort of a spiritual successor to the Gothic series. The Gothics (and Risen) adhere to the philosophy that some parts of the world are just off limits until your character becomes more powerful. It’s “open world” in that you can go practically anywhere, but you’re likely to get killed if you go into the wrong area until you’re capable of handling it.

I tend to prefer this to the Bethesda RPG philosophy, in which it doesn’t much matter where you go, the enemies are all roughly your level, though I certainly enjoyed Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Fallout 3. But there are silly tropes that exist in all computer RPGs that are really jarring.

Like buying stuff.

The majority of RPGs have some kind of shopping experience. This allows you to dump all the loot you pick up and sell it for whatever passes for money, then buy stuff you do need. No computer RPG with a trading system I’ve ever played gets it right, though. Note that I’m talking about single player RPGs, not massively multiplayer online RPGs, though my limited experience with those games also reveal flaws in the buying and selling of goods.

It seems like each RPG has its own set of issues. For example, take Mass Effect from Bioware. I’ve played all the way through Mass Effect four times – more, probably, than any other story driven game I’ve ever played. I thoroughly enjoyed the shiny, science fiction milieu that the designers created.

But buying and selling stuff was needlessly difficult. The user interface, for example, was problematic. Worse, though, was the simple fact that loot became less and less valuable over time. You rarely found something useful dropped by an enemy in the second half of the game, and you almost never found anything good to buy, either.

Risen has its own set of problems. You have infinite capacity to carry everything you ever pick up. I suppose you could abstract that as a sort of D&D bag of holding, but that’s not really the problem. Having a weight limit sometimes adds a set of problems that can be interesting to solve – do I keep this new item? Will it be critical later?

But let’s accept the “bag of holding” idea.

It’s late in the game. I’ve just found out from one of the main NPCs that the very existence of the human race is in doubt. (This isn’t really a spoiler – most RPGs have some such dire predicament at their heart.)

Now, you’d think that, with the fate of the species in doubt, that all my compatriots I’ve lived and work with over time would do everything to help me. My teachers would teach me what they knew. My superiors who were in the know would supply me with every possible resource. After all, the end of the world might be at hand.

But no. I go to one of my teachers, and he wants hard cash for teaching me. The people with spells, scrolls and magic potions want gold, too. The heck with the human race – the retirement fund is much more important.

WTF?

I’m sure there are better ways to abstract these sorts of things. In Risen, you do need to have experience points to learn new stuff. I can accept that – I haven’t garnered the wisdom or hard won practical experience to appreciate arcane knowledge. But give me all your health potions, baby, because I’ll need them in my fight with the forces of darkness.

Nope, sorry, only hard cash for useful stuff.

What was that phrase? “For want of a nail…”?