DPS and the Decline of Complexity in RPGs

Our own Eric Schwarz has chosen to write another Gamasutra editorial blog on an issue that’s personally annoying him with modern RPG design: the rise of DPS as a balancing tool, and the alleged decline in complexity it causes.

I’m honestly not sure if I actually notice this rise to prominence of DPS and I’m fairly neutral on the issue, but still, whether you agree or not, it’s an interesting read nonetheless:

The first major issue I have with DPS is the most fundamental: standardizing damage types. While some games using DPS do tend to also maintain multiple damage types, the majority do not, instead treating DPS as a be-all, end-all number. Even those games that do have those different damage types tend to have only cosmetic effects. By contrast, the Infinity Engine games made famous by Black Isle were built around the Dungeons & Dragons rules, and as such multiple damage types were in play in any given battle. For example, instead of “physical” damage, there was slashing damage, crushing damage and piercing damage, all which affected different types of armor and different creatures differently (i.e. quipping staves or maces was critical when fighting skeletons, as slashing and piercing damage were significantly less effective), which promoted diversity in the party and made min-maxing less effective, and meant that even a “simple” fighter had wide utility value and some tactics to consider.

This leads into the second major problem, which is almost a direct consequence of the first: standardizing character classes. In games which feature DPS, that DPS tends to completely remove any uniqueness in gameplay from different types of characters. It doesn’t matter whatever permutations of a class you are playing – in virtually every game of this sort I have found that almost all of the differences between characters were not in gameplay, but in aesthetics. The fantasy of playing as a barbarian wielding a two-handed sword, versus the one of a svelte assassin backstabbing foes, is definitely a compelling one, but ultimately the only real difference in gameplay tends to come down to ranged vs. melee, and tank vs. damager – distinctions which already existed in other systems and, by virtue of the inclusion of DPS, have less depth to them than they would otherwise. For all their “diverse” character classes, most MMOs I’ve played have all classes feel pretty much identical, with the only major exception being Diablo III, which still pales next to earlier games in the series.

The end result of this are games that feel significantly less replayable and also tend to be far more boring, both in single-player and multiplayer contexts. When I’m playing a single-player game and the only difference between my character is what the loot I use looks like, that is not conducive to a varied gameplay experience – it means that if I ever go back to playing the game a second time, I’m not going to play it significantly differently, and even during the course of a single play-through, if DPS is all that matters, chances are I’m also going to get very bored very quickly. In an MMO, DPS has the effect of making distinctions between different character classes contingent largely on support abilities, i.e. aggro management vs. healing vs. buffing, and this tends to make different characters interchangeable with one another – one fighter is the same as any other, one cleric is the same as any other, and so on. This becomes overly formulaic and reduces the uniqueness of your given character significantly, even though creating a unique character and growing him/her in power according to your wishes is supposed to be one of the biggest draws of an RPG.