Do (most) RPGs not cover enough time?

[rusty_shackleford]

If I remember correctly, the first Fallout has a hard 500 day limit(?) to complete, which was increased in a patch(??). Even 500 days is not really enough time to go from a novice in a handful of skills to a master doctor, scientists, marksman, etc., And Fallout is probably one of the more tame examples of character growth. But at least it gives an actual timeline.

Should RPGs cover longer periods of time? Can you list any that actually do?
Are you fine with such narrative-breaking character growth in such a short period of time for the sake of it being a game?

[Oyster Sauce]

I like games where the characters get older and grow beards

[Val the Moofia Boss]

It depends upon the game. It is usually not necessary or feasible to make everything consistent. Often times, a fantasy plot will be urgent and span a couple weeks, but you also want to provide your customer with the satisfaction of having grown more powerful, so it can be an acceptable dissonance that is overlooked.

Should RPGs cover longer periods of time? Can you list any that actually do?

Romancing Saga 2 has you play as a dynasty of emperors locked in a generational struggle with 7 demon lords. The first emperor (a preset character) dies, and then you play as his descendant (with his retainer families as party members). Each time you wipe or complete a major objective like conquering a territory or killing a demon lord, the game timeskips to the next emperor and his generation of retainers. So permadeath is backed into the narrative, with the skills/abilities you learn being passed down to future generations. This repeats until you have killed almost all of the demon lords, at which point you reach the final emperor's generation and if you wipe, you game over for real. Each time you switch to a new generation, decades or hundreds of years pass, and there is missable stuff like a region being wiped out by a volcanic eruption if you took too long to get there and do stuff.




The Atelier series has you play as a young girl (or young man) working as an alchemist, with a 3 year deadline to accomplish the main plot objective, be it trying to raise profits so that your alchemy shop does not get closed down, working as princess to hand over your country in a peaceful annexation by a republic, or working to save a town from a drought. Everything you do causes the game to advance by a day, be it hiking to the next node on the world map, picking flowers, or crafting an item. There are also timed events like monthly markets at a city with discounted prices and rare vendors showing up for only a few days. So you have to plan out and think about what you are doing and where you are going and when you will arrive at places.

Fire Emblem 4: Geneology of the Holy War famously has almost everybody get betrayed and massacred in the middle, and then you timeskip to their descendants leading a rebel army trying to reclaim their kingdom.

In Sakura Wars, Trails of Cold Steel 1 and 3, and Trails into Daybreak 1, each chapter takes place in a different month of the year. So by the end of the game the story will have spanned most of the year. Trails does the LotR thing of having calendar dates of when every part of the game takes place (ie August 2nd year 1204), which makes it very immersive. Some of other the Trails games happen over the course of a few days or a couple weeks (CS2, CS4, Reverie, Daybreak 2, Beyond the Horizon). Aselia the Spirit of Eternity Sword takes place over the course of 2 years and has dates for when everything takes place too.

[rusty_shackleford]

Romancing Saga 2 has you play as a dynasty of emperors locked in a generational struggle with 7 demon lords. The first emperor (a preset character) dies, and then you play as his descendant (with his retainer families as party members). Each time you wipe or complete a major objective like conquering a territory or killing a demon lord, the game timeskips to the next emperor and his generation of retainers. So permadeath is backed into the narrative, with the skills/abilities you learn being passed down to future generations. This repeats until you have killed almost all of the demon lords, at which point you reach the final emperor's generation and if you wipe, you game over for real. Each time you switch to a new generation, decades or hundreds of years pass, and there is missable stuff like a region being wiped out by a volcanic eruption if you took too long to get there and do stuff.

I played SaGa Frontier 2 which takes place over 100 years while characters age, born/die, etc., It was very good. Probably the best game I had for the PS1, or close to it.
(I assume they're somehow related)

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Romancing Saga 2 has you play as a dynasty of emperors locked in a generational struggle with 7 demon lords. The first emperor (a preset character) dies, and then you play as his descendant (with his retainer families as party members). Each time you wipe or complete a major objective like conquering a territory or killing a demon lord, the game timeskips to the next emperor and his generation of retainers. So permadeath is backed into the narrative, with the skills/abilities you learn being passed down to future generations. This repeats until you have killed almost all of the demon lords, at which point you reach the final emperor's generation and if you wipe, you game over for real. Each time you switch to a new generation, decades or hundreds of years pass, and there is missable stuff like a region being wiped out by a volcanic eruption if you took too long to get there and do stuff.

I played SaGa Frontier 2 which takes place over 100 years while characters age, born/die, etc., It was very good. Probably the best game I had for the PS1, or close to it.
(I assume they're somehow related)

Same team of designers, going back to Akitoshi Kawazau designing Final Fantasy 2 which had the WRPG-esque system where you level up skills. Sakaguuchi didn't want to do that anymore for FF3 so Kawazu got to pick his people and go off and make his own games called the SaGa series. One of his team members, Hiroshi Takai, went on to direct The Last Remnant which is a high production value SaGa game in all but name. And then he joined Yoshida in assistant directing FF14 before going off to make FF16, though unfortunately that didn't play anything like TLR or SaGa or JRPGs in general and was just an action game.

[methoxetamine]

Can you list any that actually do?

Dragon Quest V

[Valter]

Should RPGs cover longer periods of time? Can you list any that actually do?
Are you fine with such narrative-breaking character growth in such a short period of time for the sake of it being a game?

Dragon Age 2 spanned 9 years and I like that a lot more, as it goes with what you said of keeping the character growth more narratively plausible, as opposed to the norm is in most RPGs.

[methoxetamine]

Also it's not exactly an RPG series even if it has a couple JRPG's included in it, but seeing the passage of time in Yakuza is pretty cool. Y0 starts in 1988, Y1 in 2005, all the way to Pirate Yakuza in 2024 with every other game in between accordingly. Seeing how Kamurocho and Sotenbori change from the 80s to modern day is neat

Though they refuse to age the characters so 60 year old Pirate Majima looks exactly like he did in 1988..

[WhiteShark]

Though they refuse to age the characters so 60 year old Pirate Majima looks exactly like he did in 1988..

That's just normal for the Japanese.

[wndrbr]

Though they refuse to age the characters so 60 year old Pirate Majima looks exactly like he did in 1988..

That's just normal for the Japanese.

[J1M]

It would be better for RPGs to have more time skips in them. For many obvious reasons, but also so you could revisit the same areas in winter.

[Norfleet]

Should RPGs cover longer periods of time? Can you list any that actually do?

Do we only count RPGs that even HAVE time in them? Most RPGs do not actually have any real sense of time, with the setting effectively frozen in stasis, at best having day/night cycles. If so, does Crusader Kings count as an RPG? Otherwise, I can only think of RPG-7, which covers several story arcs from the Cold War all the way up to the latest Ukraine War expansion.

[stormvermin]

The TES games have their own calendar and you can always open up the menu to see, the day, month, year, and just how much time has passed since beginning the game. It's all set dressing though as the passage of time means nothing and affects nothing. Sadly, even seasons aren't reflected in game which has always bothered me.
Something I do like in the older TES titles at least is that it's possible for the player to come out of character creation reasonably trained in at least one skill. One can potentially exit the Seyda Neen customs house with a skill in the 40s. If a part of the issue with portraying the passage of time is the player skilling up too quickly (in games where skill is assumed to be the product of hard work and training rather than the supernatural infusion of flesh and spirit a la Souls), then allowing them to start with certain skills far and above the baseline can alleviate at least some of that.

[Norfleet]

The TES games have their own calendar and you can always open up the menu to see, the day, month, year, and just how much time has passed since beginning the game. It's all set dressing though as the passage of time means nothing and affects nothing. Sadly, even seasons aren't reflected in game which has always bothered me.

This is what I mean by "no real sense of time", yes. They put a calendar and clock in there, but it has no meaning because the world is frozen in stasis. A clock moves, but there is no great significance to the passage of time.

Of course, time in a game frequently comes down to one of several flavors, sometimes multiple at once:

1. The player is put on a deadline. You MUST perform this action by a specific time or the game otherwise goes to ****, or you miss out. The Fallout 1 deadline was greeted with some level of dissatisfaction by many. While we can't deny it's thematic and appropriate, it's also not something that is clearly universally liked. Some sandbox games with story threads in them run with or without the player's involvement. Elite 3, for instance, had a story arc that will proceed whether or not the player gets involved with any portion of it.

2. It's a resource to optimize the usage of: Something happens, produces, recharges, or spawns on this timer and the player must optimize their usage of it. The time-management genre is big on this one, where you have to raise your levels/stats/resources through a limited set of time intervals to achieve some ending or objective. Can be combined with #1 in various "President" or "Trainer" games, or just open-ended like a Sims game, or combined with #3 below in something like Factorio, where you want to produce things-per-minute while enemies gradually grow nastier.

3. Time functions as a scaling factor, where the game gets harder as time goes on, even in the absence of specific deadlines or use as a limiting resource. Pirates, for instance, does this: Your character gets old and the game thus gets harder as time passes. While no hard deadline exists, time is increasing the difficulty of the game. Tower/wave defense games also behave this way.

There's relatively few games where time just IS, and things are just continuously happening without a defined trajectory of good/bad/missing out, and pretty much all of these are some version of sandbox. Crusader Kings stands out here (although the game DOES have an end date, and many people feel initial pressure from it to thus choose the earliest start date, in practicality, it's not actually relevant), where time exists and is clearly relevant, but you're not trying to optimize its usage for a deadline, there are not story beats you miss out on if you are a slowpoke, and the game isn't making life worse for you as time passes.

[maidenhaver]

They really don't. Didn't the quest to find Gollum which Aragorn and Gandalf went about span over ten years? I would like more rpgs, especially space ones, to span generations.

[TKVNC]

The TES games have their own calendar and you can always open up the menu to see, the day, month, year, and just how much time has passed since beginning the game. It's all set dressing though as the passage of time means nothing and affects nothing. Sadly, even seasons aren't reflected in game which has always bothered me.

This is what I mean by "no real sense of time", yes. They put a calendar and clock in there, but it has no meaning because the world is frozen in stasis. A clock moves, but there is no great significance to the passage of time.

Of course, time in a game frequently comes down to one of several flavors, sometimes multiple at once:

1. The player is put on a deadline. You MUST perform this action by a specific time or the game otherwise goes to ****, or you miss out. The Fallout 1 deadline was greeted with some level of dissatisfaction by many. While we can't deny it's thematic and appropriate, it's also not something that is clearly universally liked. Some sandbox games with story threads in them run with or without the player's involvement. Elite 3, for instance, had a story arc that will proceed whether or not the player gets involved with any portion of it.

2. It's a resource to optimize the usage of: Something happens, produces, recharges, or spawns on this timer and the player must optimize their usage of it. The time-management genre is big on this one, where you have to raise your levels/stats/resources through a limited set of time intervals to achieve some ending or objective. Can be combined with #1 in various "President" or "Trainer" games, or just open-ended like a Sims game, or combined with #3 below in something like Factorio, where you want to produce things-per-minute while enemies gradually grow nastier.

3. Time functions as a scaling factor, where the game gets harder as time goes on, even in the absence of specific deadlines or use as a limiting resource. Pirates, for instance, does this: Your character gets old and the game thus gets harder as time passes. While no hard deadline exists, time is increasing the difficulty of the game. Tower/wave defense games also behave this way.

There's relatively few games where time just IS, and things are just continuously happening without a defined trajectory of good/bad/missing out, and pretty much all of these are some version of sandbox. Crusader Kings stands out here (although the game DOES have an end date, and many people feel initial pressure from it to thus choose the earliest start date, in practicality, it's not actually relevant), where time exists and is clearly relevant, but you're not trying to optimize its usage for a deadline, there are not story beats you miss out on if you are a slowpoke, and the game isn't making life worse for you as time passes.

M&B Warband

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The TES games have their own calendar and you can always open up the menu to see, the day, month, year, and just how much time has passed since beginning the game. It's all set dressing though as the passage of time means nothing and affects nothing. Sadly, even seasons aren't reflected in game which has always bothered me.

This is what I mean by "no real sense of time", yes. They put a calendar and clock in there, but it has no meaning because the world is frozen in stasis. A clock moves, but there is no great significance to the passage of time.

Of course, time in a game frequently comes down to one of several flavors, sometimes multiple at once:

1. The player is put on a deadline. You MUST perform this action by a specific time or the game otherwise goes to ****, or you miss out. The Fallout 1 deadline was greeted with some level of dissatisfaction by many. While we can't deny it's thematic and appropriate, it's also not something that is clearly universally liked. Some sandbox games with story threads in them run with or without the player's involvement. Elite 3, for instance, had a story arc that will proceed whether or not the player gets involved with any portion of it.

2. It's a resource to optimize the usage of: Something happens, produces, recharges, or spawns on this timer and the player must optimize their usage of it. The time-management genre is big on this one, where you have to raise your levels/stats/resources through a limited set of time intervals to achieve some ending or objective. Can be combined with #1 in various "President" or "Trainer" games, or just open-ended like a Sims game, or combined with #3 below in something like Factorio, where you want to produce things-per-minute while enemies gradually grow nastier.

3. Time functions as a scaling factor, where the game gets harder as time goes on, even in the absence of specific deadlines or use as a limiting resource. Pirates, for instance, does this: Your character gets old and the game thus gets harder as time passes. While no hard deadline exists, time is increasing the difficulty of the game. Tower/wave defense games also behave this way.

There's relatively few games where time just IS, and things are just continuously happening without a defined trajectory of good/bad/missing out, and pretty much all of these are some version of sandbox. Crusader Kings stands out here (although the game DOES have an end date, and many people feel initial pressure from it to thus choose the earliest start date, in practicality, it's not actually relevant), where time exists and is clearly relevant, but you're not trying to optimize its usage for a deadline, there are not story beats you miss out on if you are a slowpoke, and the game isn't making life worse for you as time passes.

M&B Warband

The time in M&B doesn't really matter outside of the early game and some overhauls. In the earlygame, you may need to do some time sensitive quests like find the village chief's kidnapped daughter, or to split from the kingdom's army and go herd some cattle to them, but those are quests you'll only do a few times. By default, the kingdoms will never defeat each other on their own without player interference, so you can just timelapse the game and aside from some border cities changing hands back and forth, there won't be any substantial changes. With mods like Persino, you get soft deadlines like a huge foreign invasion of elites at the 500 day mark and so on.

[Tangerine]

Don't characters die of old age in M&B?

[Norfleet]

M&B Warband

The time in M&B doesn't really matter outside of the early game and some overhauls. In the earlygame, you may need to do some time sensitive quests like find the village chief's kidnapped daughter, or to split from the kingdom's army and go herd some cattle to them, but those are quests you'll only do a few times. By default, the kingdoms will never defeat each other on their own without player interference, so you can just timelapse the game and aside from some border cities changing hands back and forth, there won't be any substantial changes. With mods like Persino, you get soft deadlines like a huge foreign invasion of elites at the 500 day mark and so on.

We see here that an ATTEMPT was made to have a world happening in the background, but the equilibrium is a bit too strong, and thus a sense of timelessness results. And, of course, if one side COULD win, the game probably doesn't have any mechanisms to cover what happens.

Although on that note, I'm reminded of another game where time does something: The Space Rangers games, where the war can be lost, or pushed to pretty much conclusion (the final ending will not occur without your action, but the enemy can essentially be wiped off the map), just by the passage of time, if you don't get involved in some way.

I think it's safe to say that time is never going to be anything other than what I said above in a narratively-driven game. For time to otherwise matter, there has to be an underlying simulation that is occurring. If nothing is being simulated and the world is just a facade, time has no meaning beyond what the developers forcibly assign to it by fiat.

[TKVNC]

This is what I mean by "no real sense of time", yes. They put a calendar and clock in there, but it has no meaning because the world is frozen in stasis. A clock moves, but there is no great significance to the passage of time.

Of course, time in a game frequently comes down to one of several flavors, sometimes multiple at once:

1. The player is put on a deadline. You MUST perform this action by a specific time or the game otherwise goes to ****, or you miss out. The Fallout 1 deadline was greeted with some level of dissatisfaction by many. While we can't deny it's thematic and appropriate, it's also not something that is clearly universally liked. Some sandbox games with story threads in them run with or without the player's involvement. Elite 3, for instance, had a story arc that will proceed whether or not the player gets involved with any portion of it.

2. It's a resource to optimize the usage of: Something happens, produces, recharges, or spawns on this timer and the player must optimize their usage of it. The time-management genre is big on this one, where you have to raise your levels/stats/resources through a limited set of time intervals to achieve some ending or objective. Can be combined with #1 in various "President" or "Trainer" games, or just open-ended like a Sims game, or combined with #3 below in something like Factorio, where you want to produce things-per-minute while enemies gradually grow nastier.

3. Time functions as a scaling factor, where the game gets harder as time goes on, even in the absence of specific deadlines or use as a limiting resource. Pirates, for instance, does this: Your character gets old and the game thus gets harder as time passes. While no hard deadline exists, time is increasing the difficulty of the game. Tower/wave defense games also behave this way.

There's relatively few games where time just IS, and things are just continuously happening without a defined trajectory of good/bad/missing out, and pretty much all of these are some version of sandbox. Crusader Kings stands out here (although the game DOES have an end date, and many people feel initial pressure from it to thus choose the earliest start date, in practicality, it's not actually relevant), where time exists and is clearly relevant, but you're not trying to optimize its usage for a deadline, there are not story beats you miss out on if you are a slowpoke, and the game isn't making life worse for you as time passes.

M&B Warband

The time in M&B doesn't really matter outside of the early game and some overhauls. In the earlygame, you may need to do some time sensitive quests like find the village chief's kidnapped daughter, or to split from the kingdom's army and go herd some cattle to them, but those are quests you'll only do a few times. By default, the kingdoms will never defeat each other on their own without player interference, so you can just timelapse the game and aside from some border cities changing hands back and forth, there won't be any substantial changes. With mods like Persino, you get soft deadlines like a huge foreign invasion of elites at the 500 day mark and so on.

Maybe the unmodded native, but practically anything else has Kingdoms destroying one-another

[Norfleet]

Maybe the unmodded native, but practically anything else has Kingdoms destroying one-another

Mods don't really count, though. How does the game even normally react to kingdoms destroying each other? Is it basically a battle royale survivorship where eventually only one remains and the game becomes degenerate? Or is it more like Crusader Kings, where a giant empire ball CAN form, but it can also break up into giant civil wars and independence movements?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Maybe the unmodded native, but practically anything else has Kingdoms destroying one-another

Mods don't really count, though. How does the game even normally react to kingdoms destroying each other? Is it basically a battle royale survivorship where eventually only one remains and the game becomes degenerate? Or is it more like Crusader Kings, where a giant empire ball CAN form, but it can also break up into giant civil wars and independence movements?

In M&B, Lord NPCs want a minimum amount of land (usually at least one castle and one village), and the lords have different assigned personalities that cause them to dislike each other or try to frame each other, which leads to the king having to settle disputes. As the simulation goes on, eventually some lords will either leave their kingdom due to dissatisfaction, be framed for betrayal and flee, or get banished by the king. They then have a chance to go join another kingdom, or a chance to just permanently leave the realm (the game world) altogether. In any game that runs long enough, the game will become heavily depopulated of lords. I think about half will have left by the second or third year.

When a lord's castle is captured by an opposing faction, the lord will go hang out at another lord's castle. When you are wiping out a faction, eventually all of that faction's lords will congregate at their last castle. You want to be taking lords prisoner and jailing them in your castles so that they don't flee to the enemy faction's last castle and inflate its garrison with hundreds of troops. A defeated lord who escapes a battle or captivity can just amass hundreds of troops out of nowhere, which is a pain. Mods address this by making lords have to slowly go around fiefs recruiting and training peasants back up, just like you.

[TKVNC]

Maybe the unmodded native, but practically anything else has Kingdoms destroying one-another

Mods don't really count, though. How does the game even normally react to kingdoms destroying each other? Is it basically a battle royale survivorship where eventually only one remains and the game becomes degenerate? Or is it more like Crusader Kings, where a giant empire ball CAN form, but it can also break up into giant civil wars and independence movements?

Well, the base game is quite simplistic. So, not really. Lords will randomly defect, and take their castles with them, from time-to-time.

[asf]

m&b strategic layer is atrocious

[TKVNC]

m&b strategic layer is atrocious

Sad, but quite true.