Which RPG series has the best loot system?
deltago
Member Posts: 7,811
So I was having a conversation on loot and magical items in rpg series and how I felt it had deteriorated since the release of Baldur’s Gate 2, so I am going to ask the community here, which RPG series has the best loot system and explain your answer.
Loot should only be considered items that you can find/buy in the game and not other mechanics such as crafting.
For the options below, please consider all games in its series (Baldur’s Gate = bg1, BG2, sod & ToB for example.)
Loot should only be considered items that you can find/buy in the game and not other mechanics such as crafting.
For the options below, please consider all games in its series (Baldur’s Gate = bg1, BG2, sod & ToB for example.)
- Which RPG series has the best loot system?21 votes
- Baldur’s Gate42.86%
- Pillars of Eternity/Tyranny4.76%
- Diablo0.00%
- Dragon Age4.76%
- Neverwinter Nights4.76%
- Pathfinder:Kingmaker0.00%
- Elder Scrolls0.00%
- Divinity: Original Sin4.76%
- Dark Souls9.52%
- Other28.57%
3
Comments
Basically loot should be unique and rare if powerful. BG 1 and BG 2 are great, ToB and SoD suffer from loot inflation.
But if we're talking about a "whole" RPG series... then nope. Later games of TES with their random loot system are an abomination of the gaming industry. It just makes exploring so utterly pointless and unrewarding. Even the daedric artifacts are mostly leveled to your character level... honestly, that's just plain bad design in both fluff and crunch appartments.
The fan made Arktwend/Nehrim/Enderal RPG series would probably come closer to my ideal loot system. But even SureAI's total convertion games are not perfect in that regard.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker's abyssmal in puncto loot. While it does reward players to actively explore the world (with a very high Perception stat, I might add), it's still not enough to evenly present its vast majority of weapon types. This even goes to the rather limited amount what you can buy from merchants. Not counting royal artisans here of course, because they're crafting related.
If there is a stand out game in the series feel free to highlight it but mention why the other games don’t live up to the other game in the series, especially if the other games are newer. What changed that made them worse?
I'm going to go with Dragon Age, seeing as custom gear is out of the equation. Always felt I had options and things I liked, without it becoming too much.
- Predetermined drops(like BG)
- Random predetermined drops(like IWD)
- Full random drops(Diablo)
Level scaling is its own thing that can be applied to any of these, really.
Newer games like Neverwinter Nights (2 in particular) or Pillars of Eternity still gives you good pre-determined gear while also having enough diversity with vendors and random loot.
As much as I love RPGs from the '90s, I can't say I miss there being "best loot" or "only option" when it comes to building my characters and party. Random loot, crafting and modification are good things in my book. More options is better. That said I don't think everything should be scaled or that unique, powerful loot shouldn't be a thing.
My vote goes to Titan Quest. Using the utility "TQ Vault" I spent years of my gaming time curating my collection of every rare, unique, legendary, and set piece I could get my hands on. It also has difficult to construct artifacts you can build. It's very satisfying to build one, because of all the drops that have to happen before you can - a formula, three relics that only drop in pieces (you need five of the same piece to drop before you can complete a single relic), and a whole lot of gold. Sometimes you have to decide to sacrifice one of the lesser artifacts in your collection to build a greater artifact.
All the good items have sockets, and you can spend hours just figuring out the perfect way to socket them.
Very close runner up for me: Sacred 2
If you come across a chest in a loot-oriented game, your brain releases dopamine because opening a chest in the past has resulted in coveted loot. Making things more complicated, unexpected meaningful loot results in a bigger dopamine hit, which keeps players coming back for more in the hope that above-average rewards might again ensue.
The trick, though, is that the sporadic nature of loot means our brain is constantly trying to figure out how to get that dopamine hit, despite the other, logical parts of our mind knowing there’s no way to actually control the unsystematic environment.
According to Jamie Madigan, a Ph.D. psychologist who runs the website Psychology of Games:
"Humans are very susceptible. They can be influenced by rewards. You see some sort of stimulus in the environment and you perform an action based on that stimulus, and then you get a reward. And because you got a reward, you are then on the lookout for that stimulus in the future. That's basic psychology 101 classical conditioning where you increase behaviours by rewarding them and decrease them by punishing them."
This means that an in-game cue becomes associated with the potential of reward, which is why players tirelessly pursue items such as chests, caves, missions and specific enemy types. This classical conditioning process is made even more effective by adding a dash of randomness on top.
"The random element to these types of reward systems makes them that much more engaging because sometimes you get something and sometimes you get nothing, and sometimes you get something that is spectacularly awesome," says Madigan.
"That randomness leverages part of the way our brains are put together... we're really sensitive to patterns and deviations from what we predict or what we expect to happen.
"We open a treasure chest once and we get something that is far and away better than the 10 other times we've opened a similar treasure chest. When unexpected pleasures like that happen, we pay more attention and we devote more time and mental energy to figuring out why it happened so that we can get it to happen again in the future."
Source: https://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2015/10/23/the-science-behind-why-we-love-loot.aspx
I can confirm it works exactly like that with me (especially the part in Italic). This is why I find the loot system in DOS II "the best": there you have Diablo-esque random loot, but controllable by the Lucky Charm civil ability (players can put points into it to improve chances for better loot and its higher "grade").
On a side note, once I learned about this, I immediately got why rolling for stats in BG/IWD games, or, for example, catching Pokemon, can be so engaging.
Games are very much tied into our hunter-gatherer instincts, and that's not always a good thing. Some behaviors, like gambling and inventory management, are addictive without actually being fun.
And the worst thing about this? Some people gladly pay for that! Urgh...
Normal video games are very cheap in terms of how long you can play them without getting bored. A game can last 10 times as long as a novel (which itself is one of the cheapest forms of entertainment) while costing the same amount. But pay-to-play games are very, very different.
But selling numbered tries for rolling the dice isn't even that. What they do isn't selling ingame items, but (almost impossible) chances of getting them through paid random drops from
addictsgamers that basically burn their money like tinder on this abonimation. That's one thing which I do feel is nothing but obnoxious.