With A Little Help From Some Strangers On The Internet

Min-maxing is a habit I've picked up from the various RPGs I've played over the years. It could be described as obsessive; to fully enjoy any game that involves character progression or multiple side-quests, I'm not happy unless I'm completely informed in the choices I make. To give you an example, I've played through Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR) twice, and before I'd even started each play-through, I'd already planned out how my character was going to level up, as well as how each of the party members were going to level up. That may not sound so unusual for a second play-through, but it's quite strange to start researching for a game that you haven't even begun to play at all. The result was that I breezed through most of the combat in the game, and by the end I had a character that perhaps felt a little overpowered. Had I jumped straight into the game and tried to wing it, I would most likely have struggled at certain points and ended the game with a mish-mash of stats and abilities, some of which I'd wasted precious experience points on.

Judging by how easy KotOR was with a bit of planning, it's safe to say that it doesn't require the player to go through such a process if they want to complete the game. So what happens when such precise character building and knowledge of the ins and outs of the game feel more mandatory? I've recently been playing Demon's Souls, the notoriously difficult RPG that includes many options for character stats, abilities and gear, and quite a lot of choice in how to progress through the game itself. Before starting the game, I had a friend give me advice and spent some time reading the unofficial wiki that he recommended. Now that I'm some way into the game, I can't imagine how I would have managed without this pre-gameplay planning. I'm confident that I'm building my character to a 'good spec' and completing the levels in an order that is advantageous to my character in terms of armour and weapon loot. Even as prepared as I am, it's still far from a walk in the park. Without the knowledge I've picked up from my research, I might have given up in frustration by now.

One of the major warnings I received about Demon's Souls was the different ways in which you can entirely ruin your game. With the auto-save feature making it impossible to go back on yourself and correct anything, it's possible to make one simple mistake and lose access to certain items or even cut off access to the services of certain NPCs for the rest of the game. This is a case where a lack of prior knowledge could have ruined the entire experience for me. Similarly, but not quite as harsh, in KotOR there's a certain part of the game in which you make a transition as far as character class goes. To take advantage of the more powerful class you become, a good tactic is to hold off on leveling up until you reach that part of the game. Not knowing that could easily result in a character that has a bunch of obsolete early class abilities and less of the superior advanced class abilities of the mid to late game.

A typical Bioware character creation screen (Dragon Age: Origins). Do you go with your gut instinct and just pile on the strength, or have you already done your homework and have a more specific build in mind?

It's times like these where I'm thankful for the internet. Back in the day, your main sources of gaming information were magazines, word of mouth and TV shows involving Sir Patrick Moore's head. All the information I need about any game is readily available and easy to find. One can wonder, then, if developers working on games like Demon's Souls take into account the information that'll be available to players shortly after the game's release. It's safe to say that the majority of gamers have access to the internet somehow, especially considering the focus on online integration by this generation's consoles. I mean, if you're reading this right now, you have access to the internet in at least one way. Can developers assume this, and create more complex or difficult games as a result?

Such a decision could actually enhance a game with RPG style character development and side-quests. It's in the nature of RPGs that a character will only be as good as the player makes it. Players who have spent some time getting to know a game's system and planned out their character accordingly will naturally end up with something significantly more powerful than a player that just winged it. Ultimately, the game will be a lot more satisfying if there's a reason to have such a perfectly defined character. Many RPGs reward such work with optional bosses that only the prepared have a chance of beating, while your run of the mill 'jack of all trades, master of none' character won't last two seconds against them.

It was rather brave of Demon's Souls to extend this to the whole game. The unprepared will struggle significantly more than those who have done their homework. The game received favourable reviews for its difficulty, suggesting that gamers may indeed be accepting of the necessity to carry out some extra legwork. This is already happening in certain online games, World of Warcraft being one that immediately comes to mind. It's common practice for those raiding to extensively research and plan their character's builds and gear sets, as well as reading up on and watching videos on boss tactics, all before the first attempt at actually fighting bosses. Research is all part of the raiding experience.

World of Warcraft now deters newer players from making a 'jack of all trades' by locking them into a specific talent tree while leveling. This at least teaches the player to specialise before they reach the end-game.

So how could developers help out the player in a world where extra study of online material can put them at a huge advantage? The special edition of Demon's Souls was released with a strategy guide. While that's a great way of getting information to a player without even pushing them online, it's still a little too much to pack into a regular edition of a game and is best left to collector's editions, which the more enthusiastic gamers are going to buy into. Since the internet is always going to be the most rich and easily accessible source of information, it could be a good idea to provide a link to the game's official forums in the manual, or even somewhere on the title screen. Once you've found your way to official forums, you tend to find a sticky listing fan sites or an unofficial wiki that can provide you with further information and guides.

Of course, it all comes down to the target audience of each individual game. While some of us may enjoy spending hours looking at character stats, drawing up leveling plans and reading about advanced tactics, many gamers just want to stick to the game. For some, it needs to be enough that they can just glance at the controls or run through a tutorial and be capable of finishing the game just by playing it. Demon's Souls was an exception in that it was clearly catered for the more hardcore RPG fans and gamers who miss the harsh difficulty of older games. The developers, From Software, could assume that you'd do at least some research because they knew what type of gamer you were.

Companies like Bioware and Square-Enix are trying to cater to a larger spectrum of gamers and will generally allow their games to be beatable regardless of how deep the player goes. They stick to the inclusion of higher difficulty levels or optional bosses (respectively) to keep the more knowledgeable players of the game interested, and this a trend that will most likely continue. One has to hope, though, that developers are aware of how powerful a tool the internet is when it comes to mastering a game, and take it into account when designing these optional, high difficulty scenarios. Those perfectly calculated stats have to mean something.