Levelling up and spontaneously learning new abilities usually do not make sense in the story. Your character suddenly knows how to perform some elaborate technique or magic spell that he couldn't a second ago. Class quests where a character reaches a high enough level and then goes to an NPC and gets taught how to perform a technique are pretty immersive. Sadly these don't seem to be in vogue anymore.
The orbment system in Trails is pretty appropriate. Every playable character has acquired an easily affordable or a NGO distributed magitek device called an Orbment that can cast spells, with different refined crystals called quartz being swapped in and out of the orbment to cast different spells. So learning new arts is tied to quartz acquisition. There is also a section in the second Sky game where the villains activate a huge region wide phenomena called the Orbal shutdown, which disables most orbments, including preventing the player characters from spellcasting unless they have an accessory equipped that protects their orbment from the jamming. Things get weird when Falcom copypasted the system for a one off action game called Tokyo Xanadu, but in that game there is no real explanation for the orbment-esque system there.
In Final Fantasy XIV, your character equips a job crystal, which contains the memories and techniques of its previous owners. So as you "level up" the job, your time spent having worn the crystal is allowing you to access more and more of the memories of the prior bearers and draw upon their techniques.
I feel that levelling is often not tuned correctly. Most game plots take place over a few weeks. It is preposterous for a character to go from a level 1 "I swing my sword clumsily because I have never been trained to swing a sword before" to a level 90 character, as if he is equivalent to this other level 90 character who is a middle aged master swordsman who has 30+ years of experience. By the end of a plot spanning a few weeks, the novice character should be level 20 at best. It seems like game designers are unimaginative and can't figure out how to design campaigns or missions where a level 20 character is still useful when a level 90 present, so everyone gets flattened into being the same average level range when the characters in the story are most certainly not.
MrTwinkls wrote: ↑
September 8th, 2025, 23:33
******* poorly implemented stealth mechanics in every **** game doesn't make sense to me. The only two games I played where stealth was satisfying were not RPGs. First one is the old online FPS shooter NEOTOKYO (you could use optic camo to fool other players but they too had different interesting ways to counter it) and the second one is TF2 (Spy).
I am reminded of a story someone told me, about how a computer technician at a school lost his keys and then went around the classrooms trying to stealthily search for his keys on the floor, crouching and looking suspicious. He got fired. KCD was on the right track with a "conspicuousness" stat that accounted for guards catching a guy dressed all in black, but IIRC it didn't account for people crouching as if they are trying not to be seen. That should get you confronted immediately. But if you go further down this rabbit hole of realism, you're gonna wind up at the player getting kicked out for entering random people's houses, and then have to ask why even model the inside of most people's houses, etc.
