The RPG Element

Despite the name, which implies that the key feature of an role-playing game is the ability to embody a fictional character, in practice, the most distinctive legacy of this genre is the notion that a character will grow more powerful the more one plays.

As a game mechanic, character progression is an extremely attractive thing. It ties directly into the cultural mythos of the hero's journey. We begin with hardly any skill, and must learn to fight by confronting relatively weak adversaries while we flee more powerful ones, just as, say, Luke Skywalker has to run from Stormtroopers on Tatooine when we know that in the future, he'd be able to mow those guys down with ease.

So, the idea of RPG-style character progression, where the player character grows more powerful as the game goes on, is a very attractive thing to aid in the immersion of the story.

In terms of gameplay, it has two huge benefits. One is fairly simple: by playing, we have our expectation of improvement paid off by actual improvement. Rather than the question of "how many times do I have to swing at a baseball before I get good enough to hit the thing?" which, of course, has no exact answer, with an RPG you can say: "I only need to slaughter twenty more trolls and I'll hit level 12!" We like getting predictable rewards, as they serve both to motivate us and satisfy us after the fact.

It also makes it a whole lot easier for designers to tune the difficulty curve.

Fun story: apparently, during the making of Space Invaders, Tomohiro Nishikado's game had trouble displaying all 55 invaders, thus slowing down the speed of the game due to lag. Yet, as each alien was blasted away, the game had fewer things to process, and thus it was able to speed up. Nishikado noticed this and encoded the increasing speed into the game, thus creating a difficulty curve - the farther along one got, the more difficult the game got. The idea was that the more aliens you had managed to shoot, the better you ought to be to shoot more.

Not every game is set up in such a way that you can simply speed things up as time goes on. For one thing, the days-long epics we tend to expect for our 60 bucks are usually too complex to rely on such a simple tuning knob that worked for a game that lasted only a minute or two (and then repeated, of course.)

RPG player progression puts a numerical value on player power, and thus, creating a smooth curve is not terribly difficult. It actually allows  you to let players fine-tune the difficulty - how many times have you been confronted with a boss in Final Fantasy that is just wiping the floor with you, so you wander around for a bit, kill a few non-boss enemies and gain a couple levels before you try again?

There is an argument that could be made about the RPG character progression, which is that it takes a lot of the challenge out of a game. By allowing people to grind levels to clear hurdles, every encounter is something that can be effectively cheated out of.

It's not really something that I agree with, but I can understand where those who say so are coming from.

There's an other interesting issue that I think bears examination, which is the place of RPG elements in a linear game. Let's take Mass Effect, for example. Mass Effect is more of an RPG than most games with "RPG elements," in that I would argue the central gameplay mechanic is the crafting of your character and story through decisions made in conversations. The shooting segments are a lot like the action sequences in a good sci-fi film: they're fun and exciting, but they're not the focus.

However, it is that fact that makes the leveling system in that game somewhat puzzling. From start to finish, I did not feel particularly more powerful in combat. In Mass Effect 3, in fact, I felt somewhat less powerful, as I found myself put up against very powerful opponents like Banshees (I can't tell you how many times I died in that one section in London where  you get like three Banshees and Harbinger is constantly shooting you.)

Oddly, the one place in Mass Effect where the sense of real character progression feels significant is in the conversations where one has a "Charm/Intimidate" option. If you've been a good little Shepherd and done all your side missions and made your opinions known, you'd be able to do such amazing things as talking Saren (or the Illusive Man... um, spoilers, I guess) into killing himself, rather than fighting you.

The thing is, the inflation of player power in a numerical way only really feels significant if you can go back and smack things that used to be a real threat - to feel that growth of power, and see adversaries that were once brutal challenges fall in scores to your awesome might. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion made a weird misstep when they made the entire world scale up to your level. Because none of the low-level enemies stuck around, you'd actually feel weaker, because everything else was leveling up more efficiently. Yet I can understand their motivations, even if the implementation was flawed. They wanted an open world for you to explore in any order, which meant they could not simply make one area low level and another high level. They managed to fix this for the most part in Skyrim by still populating the world with low-level adversaries, so even if you had to struggle to take down that Hagraven, the raving Forsaken guarding her would get vaporized by your Lightning Storm before they could get a word in edgewise.

In the case of World of Warcraft, or other MMOs (I assume,) leveling actually serves as a way to keep the playing field even, rather than really make you insanely powerful. Each iteration of the game that has existed has had a higher level cap than the last. First it was 60, then 70, then 80, then 85 and is currently 90. Yet in WoW, hitting the level cap is not a grand accomplishment that's going to get people lining up to pat you on the back. Hitting the level cap is almost considered the "first step." There's an adage among players that "the game begins at..." and then the current level cap. Players who hit the level cap will then run dungeons or fight other players, earning them more and more powerful gear - armor and weapons - that will increase their power.

Yet as soon as the next expansion comes out, and the players climb to the new level cap, even the very most powerful pieces from the previous expansion will be insufficient. This serves to level the playing field, allowing the new players to catch up with the veterans.

This is even reflected story-wise. After a certain point (level 60, pretty much,) it's an accepted fact that your player is a stone-cold badass. You're an explorer and an adventurer, so you'll come across many people who do not yet know just how awesome you are, but short of some future expansion where you become a god or something, the levels are just to hit the reset button on everyone's gear and to give you a reason to quest through the new zones with their new story.

So it is quite interesting to see how this RPG element is working its way into other genres, to the point where it seems harder to find a game that does not involve this increased player power. It's not as if we've forgotten how to do it. Nintendo's Mario games, whether they are 3D or the "New Super Mario Bros." sidescrolling throwbacks (which, incidentally, I love, because just because we can do 3D games doesn't mean we shouldn't keep making side-scrollers) are really all about player skill. Sure, you can get access to new power-ups, but these items are not exactly long-term upgrades to your power. You're still going to have to land on Bowser nine (or whatever) times to beat him, and chances are, by the time you do, you'll have lost any of those power-ups.

As I've said, the RPG element is an incredibly compelling gameplay mechanic. It's true that generally, people consider video games nowadays to be easier than they were in the past. While I'm not convinced that's such a terrible thing, I do think we can look to this trend as part of the reason.