Role-Playing Games have become an integral part of in modern day game designs as some form of RPG element becomes integrated into other genres such as action games, strategies, racing, sports, and even puzzle games. It is most likely due to the acceptance of RPG elements within familiar genres that might be more easier to pick up and play as opposed to pure RPGs where a lot of planning, research, reading, and extraneous tasks might be taken. The thing is, people who like RPGs enjoy all the elements of character growth, story, research and planning. But as time has passed, the key elements of RPGs have been mis-interpreted and has created a spiral of different evils within our games. What was once played by a certain group of gamers is now one of the most popular genres in the market that reaches out to players of all ages.
Source: Youtube Channel machinima
Grinding / Farming
There were (and still are) many aspects of RPGs that I loved: Story, music, learning new abilities, gaining new weapons, creating your own characters and watching them grow in strength, and of course fighting monsters. Since the early days of Japanese RPGs, such as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, players were required at some point in the game to "grind" a little before being able to progress through the story. Back then, it was exciting seeing your characters getting strong enough to one shot enemies with any attack after fighting a few battles. But over the years, grinding became synonymous to RPGs because of how frequent it appeared in every RPG that released. To make matters worse, some games made farming for an item mandatory which made the grinding last longer. Grinding is when a player is subjected to fighting the same spawn of enemies in order to gain enough experience points to level up or become strong enough to handle the difficulty that lies ahead and sometimes it becomes a monotonous task that becomes more of a chore than playing a game. Farming is when a player sets out to find a certain item or material in order to fulfill a quest or create an item by killing a certain spawn of enemies over and over until an enemy drops it. Put these two together and you'll spending 80% of your time repeating this crazy cycle of grinding and farming with the other 20% with some story, a few instances, and maybe some special events and Player versus Player if you have the right equipment for it (for online RPGs). MMORPGs follow this suit in all the free ones that are released nowadays (with the exception of a few games). Grinding and farming isn't always bad in RPGs, but it stops feeling like you're progressing through the game when it's the only thing that you do in the game. Even traditional RPGs feel painful to play when it requires hours upon hours of fighting the same spawn of enemies to prevent getting killed immediately when stepping into a new area (I'm playing the DS remake of Final Fantasy IV and am enduring it now). Pokémon is also another RPG series notorious for its grinding and farming due to the amount of time it takes to get in and out of battle while leveling up. Phantasy Star Online didn't feel like a grind when setting out to do so since the player had to progress through a level in order to fight the monsters. The same goes for Demon's Souls. It's pretty exciting when grinding and farming in moderation for games and suddenly finding a rare item or gaining new levels and abilities that empower your character, but some RPGs really do take Grinding and Farming a little too far and loses its entertainment value. (Note: One of the main reasons for many free MMORPGs for doing so is to keep players on the game for longer durations and to give them an incentive to buy items that lessen the grind. It's not always true, but it is largely due to the free-to-play marketing system).
Passive Game
This doesn't pertain to action-RPGs like Vindictus or Dragon Age as much, but there are a lot of RPGs where the player really doesn't do much. A lot of console, turn-based RPG battles usually require the player confirm to attack enemies the entire time. Pair this up with grinding and all you'll be doing is pressing that confirm button for several hours while walking left and right to encounter the next enemy. For top-down, point-n-click RPGs, you might end up clicking an enemy and then sit there and watch the enemy get killed. This is what I call the "Passive Game" where the player is watching more than playing (I'm not sure if there's another phrase the gaming community use, but that's what I call it). This can also be applied to any story driven game where you might end up watching cut-scenes or listening to a dialogue for 10 minutes (or in rare cases an hour. The Metal Gear Solid series is awesome, but you gotta admit that some cut-scenes are amazingly long). Bioware gets around the "passive game" problem by implementing a good/bad meter to their RPGs by choosing certain dialogues to influence that meter. By doing so, the player is still interacting with the game even when the game is telling its story through dialogue. As for the first two examples, certain games will set the combat up in a certain way so that the player has to plan, think, or interact beyond just simply attacking in order to win a battle. In the Pokémon series, not all attacks will defeat any opponent. This forces the player to know the different types of elements there are and plan out what abilities to actually use in certain situations. For top-down RPGs, Diablo or Torchlight requires the character to move through a dungeon since enemies do not spawn after being defeated. Enemies in those games also requires the attention of the player in terms of proximity, skills to use, and making decisions on the spot when being mobbed. Trying to click on an enemy and waiting for them to die could lead to a lot of deaths in harder difficulties. It's mainly the games that don't require that much interaction or thinking that bugs me (and those that don't like grinding too). I remember playing Maple Story when it first came out. It would take forever to level up, and grinding usually meant sitting on a platform an enemy can reach and holding down the attack button. I heard it's a lot better now, but I really think I should stay away from that game from now on.
Traversing
This isn't as big of a problem for most games until MMORPGs started to become more popular. In MMORPGs, the play field really does feel like a world of its own because of how massive it is. It's an amazing experience when playing games like Shaiya, Fly For Fun, or Perfect World and being able to see all the mountains, trees, and flying through the air. It emulates a feeling of freedom (even though it virtual and fake). The problem occurs when the game requires a player to go from one side of the world to the other...on foot (or air, depending on what you're playing). The problem is that some places take 5-10 minutes (maybe even longer depending on which game you're playing and how far the destination is) to reach an area and the player may not run into any action along the way. A lot of Chinese MMORPGs went as far as adding an auto-routing system so that the player can click on the destination and watch (or not) their character run over there for 10 minutes. In World of Warcraft, airborne travel can take a while (I'm not sure how long it takes to get somewhere now since I haven't played the changes within Cataclysm). I've had players leave their character traveling to another city for 20-30 minutes while they do battle against me in League of Legends. This adds more to the idea of playing a "passive game" when the player can't really do anything but watch their character traverse to their destination, and worse if they have to take control to get there. A small journey is fine, but running a marathon in an RPG takes too much time out of what the player could be doing such as fighting a boss or running through an instance.
Dedicating Time
This one is definitely arguable. What scares gamers about RPGs is the time and effort it takes in order to play through or even play well in one. Console RPGs generally range from 20-80 hours depending on the length of cut-scenes and how long one took on grinding, farming, or doing optional side-quests. This is to get through the story and perhaps finding the secrets within the game. With online RPGs such as Phantasy Star Universe or Demon's Souls, players can go anywhere from 50-1000 hours (I kid you not, I spent over 1000+ hours on Phantasy Star Online Episode 1 & 2 playing...offline!). This is spent leveling (character levels can reach 200+), farming for rare equipment, finding all the secrets, experiencing all the different pathways, playing with other players and going against each other. Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) range from 100-5000+ hours depending on how it's set up. Most MMORPGs are open world, ever-changing, and highly interactive (or it should be) games that players hang around in to fulfill quests, complete stories, interact with other players in conversation (yes, it happens all the time), run through group instances, and competing against each other in large battles. It is because of the sheer amount of time that players spend on RPGs (usually MMORPGs) that the media likes to point out all the problems people have in their lives because of it such as having an anti-social life, anger issues, malnutrition, broken relationships, and negligence to responsibilities. For other games, they may not want to dedicate their lives on playing for such long durations on a single game. For me, there are games I feel that it's worth placing the time in playing the game if I sincerely enjoy it (not because I want to get to the next level. I love my free MMOs, but I simply can't dedicate my life to them). Currently, my RPG of choice is Demon's Souls and I have 45 hours logged in so far. I'm hoping to get around playing Final Fantasy XIII (and I bought it when it came out too...).
There are a ton of other things about RPGs that players will probably bring up such as the generic RPG structure, griefers, gold farmer's chat spamming, etc. but it would take quite a while bringing all that up right now. Although I've listed these topics as Videogame Common Complaints, some of them have reason and are justified when looking deeper into the problems of a lot of our RPGs. I'm sorry I didn't add more videos for this post, I couldn't think of any interesting videos to post up. Watching someone grind in-game can be just as boring as having to grind in a game yourself, so there wasn't any point for me to put you readers through that agony.
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