I’ve long been a critic of experience point / levelling systems in RPGs because of this. They optimise for wanting to be a sociopath. The guy who slaughters everything possible becomes the most powerful. I found Vampire: Bloodlines an interesting alternative, in that you were rewarded skill points for finishing quests, and you’d get the same reward whether you slaughtered everyone, snuck through, or any other way of solving the problem.
As for side quests, I guess the problem is that the developers spend an enormous amount of time generating them all, and don’t want to see that time as essentially wasted, especially since a large number of people don’t do them anyway. Considering just how expensive a modern AAA game has become to create, it’s hard to imagine you could persuade RPG developers to punish people for undertaking side quests, even if it does lead to the ridiculous situations where you’re supposedly racing against time to save the world/galaxy/universe, but have time to help every kitten stuck in a tree on the way.
I’ve long been a critic of experience point / levelling systems in RPGs because of this. They optimise for wanting to be a sociopath. The guy who slaughters everything possible becomes the most powerful.
I noticed something similar. A while back, I figured that a game’s quests didn’t technically require you to kill, so I tried to play the game with a pacifist character—basically, set up so he can’t fight, but has skills in persuasion and sneaking around. But for some reason, the game forces you to fight even when the storyline doesn’t literally require it. (The game was Morrowind.)
I had a related experience with Knights of the Old Republic. One of the storyline quests is to “sneak” into the enemy’s base and steal a special item. I took that literally and used my rogue’s special abilities to sneak past all the enemies, and even pilfer the special item undetected, but then that triggers a scripted dialogue with a guy near it and makes you fight a boss. Turns out that “sneaking in” means openly fighting a dungeon of monsters in the base...
I even tried the pacifist approach in … Hitman 2, where I would try to kill the target by tricking other enemies into to shooting him dead.
(I went through a pacifist phase, if you couldn’t tell.)
I’ve long been a critic of experience point / levelling systems in RPGs because of this. They optimise for wanting to be a sociopath. The guy who slaughters everything possible becomes the most powerful. I found Vampire: Bloodlines an interesting alternative, in that you were rewarded skill points for finishing quests, and you’d get the same reward whether you slaughtered everyone, snuck through, or any other way of solving the problem.
As for side quests, I guess the problem is that the developers spend an enormous amount of time generating them all, and don’t want to see that time as essentially wasted, especially since a large number of people don’t do them anyway. Considering just how expensive a modern AAA game has become to create, it’s hard to imagine you could persuade RPG developers to punish people for undertaking side quests, even if it does lead to the ridiculous situations where you’re supposedly racing against time to save the world/galaxy/universe, but have time to help every kitten stuck in a tree on the way.
I noticed something similar. A while back, I figured that a game’s quests didn’t technically require you to kill, so I tried to play the game with a pacifist character—basically, set up so he can’t fight, but has skills in persuasion and sneaking around. But for some reason, the game forces you to fight even when the storyline doesn’t literally require it. (The game was Morrowind.)
I had a related experience with Knights of the Old Republic. One of the storyline quests is to “sneak” into the enemy’s base and steal a special item. I took that literally and used my rogue’s special abilities to sneak past all the enemies, and even pilfer the special item undetected, but then that triggers a scripted dialogue with a guy near it and makes you fight a boss. Turns out that “sneaking in” means openly fighting a dungeon of monsters in the base...
I even tried the pacifist approach in … Hitman 2, where I would try to kill the target by tricking other enemies into to shooting him dead.
(I went through a pacifist phase, if you couldn’t tell.)