I remember games like Shining Force and Final Fantasy III where all you had to do to pick equipment for your characters was to visit the weapon and armor stores in each town and buy the new gear. There was no confusion or additional complexity-just hand over some money and get items that did more damage or added more armor. Games like Baldur's Gate took it a step further by adding additional effects to weapons, such as fire damage or the infliction of poison. However, it was still pretty easy to figure out if the new sword you found was better or not.
I began replaying Final Fantasy X last week and what a difference. Items by themselves don't add anything, instead they have slots where they can be upgraded. So, for instance, you can get a sword that has four slots for potential upgrades and fill each of them with various abilities. These can range from adding bonuses to magic damage and healing, physical damage, armor values, immunities to certain damage types, and a slew of much more confusing abilities like SOS Nulfrost, which gives character protection from frost damage if their health drops low enough. This may not sound that confusing in this format, but then consider that many fights with bosses and other enemies in the game cause items to drop with various combinations of these abilities. Additionally, you can add them yourself to items by using various ingredients found in the game. So, toward the end of the game you may end up with around 10 weapons to pick from and it becomes incredibly difficult to figure out which one is best out of the list.
I usually end up ignoring the gear entirely because it doesn't make much of a difference anyway-but it's the idea itself that infuriates me. Since when is it fun to have to spend 15 minutes browsing through all the possible enhancements for items? You need a strategy guide to figure out the optimal choices and it's just a needless complication to my fun.
World of Warcraft is another game with many options for upgrading equipment. You can enchant many of your items with different boosts, add gems to items that improve them, and make other upgrades as well. This makes acquiring a new weapon or piece of armor, which used to be a joy for me in games like Baldur's Gate, a pain because I now need to go find out what items I have to dredge up in order to enchant and gem them to make them more powerful. Unlike Final Fantasy X, you actually do have to do this too, don't think you can skip out of enchanting and gemming your gear. You'll get kicked out of groups if your gear doesn't have every possible buff.
This concept is progressing beyond RPGs to other types of games, like FPS. Every single weapon in Call of Duty can have attachments added to them, ranging from different weapon sights to grenade launchers to an underslung shotgun. At least these are easier to figure out what they do, but I still don't like to see this trend spreading to more and more games. Do we really need every games for every genre to have a ton of customization options?
Keep things simple. It's fine to have new items, everyone loves getting rewards for beating bosses. But make them easy to figure out and for god sakes, stop adding complex systems that require collecting 50,000 insect wings from around the world to marginally boost their effectiveness. It makes it a lot easier for game balance if you don't have to account for all of the buffs that players will add to their items in addition to the item's regular statistics.
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