Al Fabet

[Elhazzared]

Is it. Let's look at it this way. You do a quest to gain absolutly nothing. I look to do a quest to gain something. This counting that you had already done it in the past at least once to see the outcome so simply seeing the outcome of a quest is no longer the issue here.

In my case I am doing it to gain something thus I've not wasted my time.

In your case you are doing because you can do it but there is no reward (we'll assume you throw the reward away and that this is not underrail but a game with a proper economy system) for doing so thus you've wasted your time.

Now, you may be one rare case that considers that doing something for nothing in a game it's no waste of time and if that's what gets you going then more power to you, but doing quests for no reward is for the majority of people a waste of time. So is exploring and getting no rewards.

[Fenix]

With that approach better play diabloids...

[Elhazzared]

No, you do things in the game to get better. Be it more money to buy more stuff, be it XP or any other kind of reward, anything that advances your character in some way or another.

To put into another terms, even if this doesn't exactly compares to PnP. You are not going to save a town from a bunch of trolls just to get a smile and a thanks. You better be getting paid for putting your life on a line.

This goes for any RPG, you do something in order to gain something it doesn't means that you won't do something just cause you can and felt like it of course. For example I always liked to exterminate the slavers in the den after I joined those anti-slaver group in the new california republic. But that is just a one thing I'd do because I could. I general I don't do anything if I don't get a reward. Even then wiping them out would yield me money in the form of loot and of course XP so it wasn't a total waste of time though the money for it is bad.

A player has to be rewarded for what he does or punished for what he does (it goes both ways of course since for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction). However a player's time should never be wasted.

[player1]

In do not see any instance in the game, when player is not rewarded for the quests, either with XP (quest completion or oddity) or money or loot (to sell or to keep). Same for exploration.

In fact, most important rewards are those that add to XP or give items or crafting materials you want to keep, and not those that give coins or sellable junk loot, since money is abundant.

[Elhazzared]

Since you can't take and sell all of the loot, your reward is denied. Sure, you could go in and do that quest, only to return and the merchants still not buy absolutly anything. Same thing with exploration. Sure you get the drops. But you don't get to make anything out of it.

[player1]

But who cares about sellable loot?

It's the loot that is worth keeping that is the real reward, as well as oddities to level up.

Due to abundance of money, sellable loot is not really worthy reward anyway, just something extra you can carry around, if you happen to have extra space in backpack, otherwise no big deal if left behind.

Really, you are way out of touch with this game. Too much theorycrafting and too little experience.

[Elhazzared]

I know that you can still make more than enough the money, that is not the point. the point is that it is a big chunk if not the only thing that there is of a reward which is just going into the trash bin.

To you it makes no difference if you have 20K charons or 200K, to me it makes all the difference. It doesn't matters if I can spend it or not. I fought for that loot, therefore I have the right to take and sell it. It is my reward, if I don't get my reward then it is a waste of time.

[player1]

Money is supposed to be the tool in the game, and not reward on its own.

If you can not spend it, is is useless, just a number in the inventory.

Item that you can use is worth zillion times more then inferior item whose only role is to give you money (if already full of money). Those are the rewards why exploring is done, not junk items.

[Jazhara7]

Elhazzared, dude, it seems you've been into this game for a time now. surely you understand there's more to it than collecting loot and selling it to merchants for shiny coins.

Perhaps to you this isn't an important part of the game and as I said rpeviously, this will just make players not want to go explore and do side quests. Basicly, they will ignore a large part of the game because what is the point? You can't sell it anyway!

I have no doubts some player are that obsessed with looting, but they aren't in the majority. But "the most important thing in an RPG"? Really? What about such things as lore, quest lines, character development, NPC interactions, puzzles, enemy encounters?

If I wanted to play a game with a heavy focus on buying & selling, I'd rather play Monopoly with friends.

Personally, I can say I am a pack rat too. Yes, I took every single item I could in the office of Sellus Gravius in Seyda Neen, Morrowind (I actually made a point of collecting entire armor sets and displaying them in mod houses. Also, complete sets of weapons in specific materials, and crockery). Yes, I robbed the people of Neverwinter blind. Those golden pantaloons in Baldur's Gate 1? I held onto them until Throne of Bhaal (expansion to BG2), despite not knowing what use they were to me (and oh my god, was it worth it in the end!). I am currently busy finding every single rag in the Hive in Sigil (PS:T). No piece of cheese, no wooden fork is safe from me in Skyrim. Arcanum was fun too, though I don't exactly remember how I handled the inventory in there.


But at the end of the day, I can live with leaving stuff behind when I realise "Meh, it's not really that important" - the plot is important, and at the end I am swimming in gold anyway, even in the Underrail. I still take everything with me, even if I have to go multiple times, and contrary to what some here say, I still explore - a lot. I am a completionist, and a hurdle to packratting is not going to stop me from finding everything in here (after playing Morrowind for 1 week, I knew more about the game, setting and community than the friend who had recommended it to me. And he had been playing it for 2 years.) It is fun in a way, and I get to memorise the paths way better by going along them several times.

 The only system that ever really annoyed me was the one in Neverwinter Nights, where you had a combination of weight (which was okay) and Tetris. You had different sized items, which had to fit into luggage tabs of a specific size. This could get annoying, as when you have lots of stuff, you might find a large sized item (3x2 squares), and while you have lots of space (20 squares), they could be scattered all across your inventory due to bad automatic Tetrissing (it filled the tabs from bottom left to top right, going horizontally) when picking up stuff. It was unnecessary, and weight alone would have been enough. Underrail is pretty chill compared to that. But I still continued and finished NWN, and am still a big fan of all those mods.

So, Ehazzared while I can understand you on one hand, I at the same time have to pity you a bit, as you seem too focussed on this mechanic and making money. But to each their own.

By the way, I think using stashes (something that was not always an option in those older games I mentioned) is a good way of making me reconsider what I really need - that way I also know what I can safely sell off, and specialise my character (something I am notoriously bad at, sometimes. I always play a rogue, for example, because I have to open those doooooors!) concerning their fighting style.

When I saw Al Fabet? I laughed, because I recognised my habits in him too.

[Elhazzared]

Sadly there is no way around this. If I cannot loot everything and sell everything the game ceases to be fun for me and there is no point in playing a game that just isn't fun.

Out of those games you mentioned I played only arcanum, never got to finish it actually but I remember my favorite build was a 20 str, 20 dex fighter with full arcane stuff (just passing days and checking the witch XD) with a little bit of temporal magic for either doubling my movement or just stasis the strong enemies... As for my looting habits nothing was left behind, not even at the point that I had more money than I could count. That's what your party were good for, mules, I specificly told them not to fight.

I remember farming the portal near the starting area, my thrower builds actually managed to kill everything the portal spawned even early on when it was worth a load of XP. Other builds have to kill some and then close the gate before I died.

All in all it was a good game but if I had to put faults to it were the tecnology path was aweful cause it required more inventment than your level cap allowed and you hit level cap way too fast. I could get to max shortly after the isle of despair (or whatever that place where the dwarves were thrown it was was called).

But anyway, yes, it was fun and I could quite literally swipe everything... some of the bugs were extremely annoying though.

[chimaera]

Is it. Let's look at it this way. You do a quest to gain absolutly nothing. I look to do a quest to gain something. This counting that you had already done it in the past at least once to see the outcome so simply seeing the outcome of a quest is no longer the issue here.

In my case I am doing it to gain something thus I've not wasted my time.

In your case you are doing because you can do it but there is no reward (we'll assume you throw the reward away and that this is not underrail but a game with a proper economy system) for doing so thus you've wasted your time.

Now, you may be one rare case that considers that doing something for nothing in a game it's no waste of time and if that's what gets you going then more power to you, but doing quests for no reward is for the majority of people a waste of time. So is exploring and getting no rewards.

The reason I consider obsessing about loot (like you are doing) a waste of time is very simple: I play games to be entertained. If I play Monopoly with friends, the reason I enjoy is not because I can win fake paper money. Similarly, if I enjoy a cRPG it is not because my character can accumulate virtual loot. It's the quality time spend I can spend with friends, or the fun things I can do with a character in a cRPG that matter to me.

Btw, I have played Arcanum too. You spent your time "farming" all that loot and XP in a game that doesn't even have challenging combat. At the same time if you never finished it, you missed out on some of the best features, like the conversation with K., or the various endings where you can see how your character influenced the world.

Playing Arcanum like Diablo, now that's what I'd call a waste of time. 

[Fenix]

...

iknowthatfeelbro.jpg  only with years that have passed this urge has become weaker, and never was an actual problem that prevented me from gain pleasure from any rpg.

[Elhazzared]

Well if you are entertained by doing something completly pointless then more power to you. To me the RPG part pretty much screams. If I'm not getting paid, I'm not risking my skin. If you even want to go there.

Exploring, yeah everyone will explore once, they'll see everything there is to see and after that expect them to not explore the whole map ever again. Same with quests. Maybe they'll do this or that one cause of one particularity or another, the majority of the side quests however will be ignored as there is no point in doing them...  You talk about yourself but the truth of the matter is that the majority of gamers won't do something that won't benefict them. In fact the majority of gamers won't care about the RP that much, they will do good and bad things depending on what yields the highest reward. Taht's their concept of morality in a game.

As for the Arcanum example, what stopped me from finishing it was actually bugs, bugs that at a certain point wouldn't let me progress. As for the time I spent farming. Was it wasted? I kill things, loot the bodies and containers and move on. It was pretty simple and quick, I never even have to move between location cause between me and the party there is more than enough carry weight. As for the game not having any challenge, no game has challenge once you learn it's ins and outs. I've certainly died several times in it but once I've learned it I never died. Same thing with underrail when it was in a playable state to me. I died a lot the first fw times, once I lerned it's ins and outs I never died anymore.

[chimaera]

But that's the thing: for me, spending time fighting re-spawning critters in a game that has easy (and to be honest, a bit boring) combat is the very definition of a pointless action.

Btw, Arcanum isn't Diablo, where indeed you get the "explore once, see everything" experience. My evil wizard took a different path from my goody two-shoes scientist, and as a result, the outcomes of their choices were very different.
edit: have you tried playing with the Unofficial Arcanum Patch? I used it in my games and had no problems finishing.

[dirtman]

Since you can't take and sell all of the loot, your reward is denied. Sure, you could go in and do that quest, only to return and the merchants still not buy absolutely anything. Same thing with exploration. Sure you get the drops. But you don't get to make anything out of it.

leave some loot for others, surely there are lower level scavengers and adventurers in south underrail who would appreciate you killing enemies and leaving inferior stuff around. don't be so greedy.

But that's the thing: for me, spending time fighting re-spawning critters in a game that has easy (and to be honest, a bit boring) combat is the very definition of a pointless action.

Btw, Arcanum isn't Diablo, where indeed you get the "explore once, see everything" experience. My evil wizard took a different path from my goody two-shoes scientist, and as a result, the outcomes of their choices were very different.

don't even try, his approach to this is so different that he can't understand you any more than you can him. to each his own, he wants unlimited loot and unlimited respawns. there are games that have those.