Hacker News Reader

Comment by nvy | Hacker News Reader

If respecs are free:

You're playing a Sword & Board fighter type character, and Stealth isn't one of your class skills, so you temporarily respec into Thief, steal the MacGuffin, and then re-respec back into Fighter and continue on your merry way.

You're playing a Frost mage and this dungeon is full of cold-resistant enemies. So you respec to Fire mage to do this dungeon.

You're playing a low-charisma class and need to convince an NPC so you respec into Bard to pass the conversation check.

Why even have classes at all at this point?

View on HN

Let's turn that on its head:

You've focused exclusively on magic, and now you find yourself in a dungeon where you can either face a huge tanky monster that you can't possibly tank, or you must sneak past him, which - no - you can't do that because you didn't have the clairvoyance to invest in some stealth skills. Now you're unable to progress in the game.

You're a frost mage, and this required dungeon is literally impossible to finish because the boss at the end is 100% frost resistant. Oops. (Actually, this kind of reminds me of the perils of speccing full frost sorceress in Diablo 2)

You're playing a low-charisma class and the only way to progress in the game is to convince an NPC to cooperate, so you spend hours and hours and hours reloading the game, hoping for a natural 100 because that's the ONLY way you'll ever get a successful roll and get past this horrible part.

Why even play at this point, when your success is based on your luck in choosing "the right" skills to complete the game? Or you could use gamefaqs, and lose all the discovery aspect of the game...

You can make arguments like this either way to support your viewpoint, but at the end of the day, different people have different ideas of a fun time. As a game company, you'd be better served to listen to a wider range of gamers.

This seems like a bad game design

They both do. That's the point. You can make up any demon you want to destroy the opposing viewpoint, but that doesn't validate yours.

Games are about enjoyment, and different people prefer playing in different ways. Denigrating that play style as "wrong" or "impure" is just silly.

You're describing dead ends that reflect poor game design. Builds should feel different and may demand different player skill, but they should all be passably viable.

Your hypothesized devs should absolutely focus on fixing that broken foundation before slathering plaster over it with cheap respecs.

And I'm not arguing against respecs yourself; just with these "on their head" hypotheticals, which don't actually make the point they're meant to.

Please see my response to the sister comment. My comment was deliberately cartoonish to prove a point. Both the originally posited scenarios and mine are evidence of poorly designed games, but it's not solely the fault of the respec mechanic (or lack thereof). Anyone can knock down a strawman.

All your examples are of lazy, poor game design, just like the hypothetical game where respecs are free.

Yes, that was the whole point. See the sister comments.

I don't understand your point, sorry.

Make respecs costly or inconveniently placed. The goal is usually not to allow arbitrarily resets at any point in the game, but to allow you to optimize for what the game actually is in practice. It’s not at all rare to spec as a fire mage, and it turns out the game barely features ice monsters anywhere. Or you avoid playing a monk because they have too many drawbacks, but the game eventually throws equipment at you that eliminate most of those drawbacks.

But you usually have to make the specialization choice up front.

If it's costly it's similarly pointless. What if you respec but then all the game gives is ice monsters? Either way you gotta know the entire game to minmax. The point of playing as fire mage is to like being a fire mage even when there are no ice monsters.

> Why even have classes at all at this point?

Perhaps this is the actual lesson? Instead of artificial opportunity cost in the form of exclusive choices, why not provide opportunity cost in the form of time/money/etc investment?

You're a Sword & Board fighter in need of stealing the MacGuffin. Instead of magically undoing the choices that got you here, you go out and practice Stealth until you're able to heist the famed MacGuffin.

Admittedly, this system does actually provide less immersion, meaningful choices, etc., but IMO this can be mitigated almost completely by making skilling up much harder. If you still want to promote class/archetype-based characters, then just make your character's class reduce the amount of XP needed to level up certain skills. While you're at it, make having high skills also reduce the XP cost of similar skills. Someone who's really good with two-handed weapons will probably pick up one-handed weapons much quicker than someone who's never even touched a weapon.

And if this isn't enough opportunity cost for truly meaningful choices, then limiting the availability of XP (in certain sections of the game?) is also an option.

This is what skyrim tries to do.

But Skyrim is extraordinarily trivial and any spec/build/config can slap the game no problem. So it hardly works in favor of Skyrim.

I think that the real takeaway is that creating a game that uses these systems is very hard to create. In other words it is "trivial" because anything complex would be hard to program and make consistent and most importantly fun.

Maybe you could make it a part of the difficulty setting. I mean, sometimes you just want to roll over everything in your path and feel badass for a bit, and sometimes you want an actual challenge.

Maybe there's an indie game idea here. You play as a shape shifter type character, and the core game mechanic is morphing between tank/heal/DPS type roles to adapt to the challenge at hand.

Spoiler alert for an old RPG called "Sanitarium": https://store.steampowered.com/app/284050/Sanitarium/

It's been a very long time since I've played this, but it's one of the few games I actually played to completion. It featured this mechanic late in the game, where you could choose to become one of three "aspects" of your PC in order to overcome certain challenges. It was pretty basic, but it was a nice touch and made a lot of sense in-sotry.

If you're playing single-player, then why have any restrictions like this? Some players will enjoy the game more if they can avoid them, and others enjoy the game more with them. If the restrictions can optionally and easily be bypassed, then the game will be fun for both kinds of players.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com