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[TroicaBlur]

Game development costs are astronomical compared to the 1980s. There are more games releasing now than ever before. 60$ games are competing against free-to-play games whether gamers,publishers like it or not. Games are released on more platforms than ever before. These are the main reasons why grinding, loot boxes exist. They are coping mechanisms for makers and publishers.

Not a single word about any of this in the article. This is why most game journalism is delusional. Irrelevant.

 

[Spaced Harrier]

First console jRPG in the U.S. - this is what grinding meant back then in '88.

I consistently like your posts


Grinding to me always reminds me of Phantasy Star IV I think that was the first real RPG I played.

A Japanese exchange student, Ken, in my brothers school brought over a copy of it.

(Wait that doesn't make sense... It wouldn't have workd wth a PAL mega drive.. he must have bought a PAL copy???)

 

[Raven117]

Grinding with the skinner box is terribly manipulative and disrespecting of player time.

A little grind IMO is good (for brute force issues), in that it can give the appearance of getting stronger, and conquering some big boss that much more effect.

In short, a little bit can give the game some gravity and some weight in beating its challenges...Done poorly, its a thinly veiled slot machine.

 

[AmyS]

I consistently like your posts


Grinding to me always reminds me of Phantasy Star IV I think that was the first real RPG I played.

A Japanese exchange student, Ken, in my brothers school brought over a copy of it.

(Wait that doesn't make sense... It wouldn't have workd wth a PAL mega drive.. he must have bought a PAL copy???)

Hehe, thanks!

I think I had the most fun with Phantasy Star I and II.

PS IV was great, but much too easy.

 

[Airola]

There is actual challenege in using less credits in arcade games. There is no challenege in figuring out the math for a jrpg fight once then mindlessley following the exact same steps over and over, hundreds of times. The fact that jrpgs can be turboed should make the distinction obvious. It's literally an admission by developers that the process isn't worth your time.

I didn't mention them because of challenge. I mentioned them because of fun.

For lives in arcade games challenge obviously was one reason they were fun. For grinding in RPGs it's not the challenge that makes it fun. It's the experience of leveling up with enough work to do. Surely challenge also plays part in that in a way because you can always try to beat a hard boss without grinding, but if you want to go easier with the boss you have to do the work. But it's not the main thing that makes grinding enjoyable.

The fact that jrpgs can be turboed means that the developers have caved in with the pressure of modern players wanting to make things easier and faster for them.

The developers also make stupid things like the possibility to rewind time in games (The Disney Afternoon Collection). That doesn't necessarily mean the developers feel old school challenge isn't worth people's time. It just means that they have to cater to people who demand stuff like that. And I think it's not a good thing at all.

 

[GodofWine]

Sometimes I will play a track in Trials a hundred times or more before I get it.

I'm curious if that fits into the realm of grind. It feels like it probably should, but at the same time not. I guess it would fall into the problematic grind if it made someone repeat the track after a success a number of times?

Thats a skill grind, I've done the same, but I'd say its different than the, Warframe (its free, so I give it a pass but its the first thing that popped in my head) where you have to rerun the same places and HOPE to get a material you need to make something to progress.

 

[Lumination]

The darkest gaming period for me was grinding in MapleStory like a decade+ ago. The most efficient grinding got you something like 3-5% of a level per hour. I totally see the appeal of that type of gameplay (there can be a sort of zen to it all) and I don't regret it, but since then I've been unable to handle grinding anymore.

This is why MMOs like GW1 enticed me more than WoW and Souls more than MonHun. I do agree that grinding is no longer implemented for technological shortcomings, but for budgetary reasons -- doubling the amount of bosses in a MonHun game is no small feat. But when you mix in microtransactions, I can't help but feel a slightly more nefarious goal here.

 

[Keinning]

No, I'm saying there are better tools in the developers' toolkit to keep players playing their game than making them repeat a repetitive task that provides little else than a quick rush when you do finally get that reward your brain has been expecting (level up, random loot drop etc).

Like...?
Just saying "add more new content in its place" is cute but not practical and reasonable to do at all.

I enjoy grinding and i believe it made possible several things that i enjoy about singleplayer RPGS (the sense of progression, getting stronger, overcoming challenges, the joy of being beaten to death in an area but then coming back a few levels higher and passing through it, etcetera). Wouldn't want to have it all removed and end up with a two hour game "100% new experiences". Her complaints about grinding in MMORPGS and other genres is a whole different beast and not conclusive enough to blame grinding as a whole

 

[shandy706]

I like a good grind once in a while.

Heh....uh...me too.

 

[Jeronimo Jones]

I'm not a fan of grinding overall because of the time sink but using it as a tactic to trick players into spending more money is pretty nasty.

It can be hard to define the area between acceptable and exploitation, so I avoid spending for boosts/currency in paid games as a general rule.

 

[commish]

No, I'm saying there are better tools in the developers' toolkit to keep players playing their game than making them repeat a repetitive task that provides little else than a quick rush when you do finally get that reward your brain has been expecting.

See also: achievement systems. Trophies are rarely ever good, but you can't deny that their systems are lazy ways to long extend the lifespan of games and keep eyes glued to screens.
Indeed.

"Better" to you, perhaps. Giving me 100 different things to do over a play time of 30 hours isn't necessarily going to bring me, personally, more enjoyment than doing 10 different things to do over a play time of 30 hours.

Of course, I was the guy who really enjoyed grinding out levels for hours, fighting the same enemies over and over, 10 feet outside a town in RPGs in the late 80s (looking at you, Phantasy Star).

Can it be done better? Perhaps. I believe everything can be improved. But I don't necessarily think a game is bad because it has grinding. In fact, I recently switched away from Destiny 2 and started Warframe simply because Warframe had things for me to grind towards while Destiny just handed me everything.

 

[Bitch Pudding]

What's US Gamers' GTS review score? Because PD did exactly what they asked for.

 

[Kinyou]

Didn't fans just recently ask for an endless version of Shadow of Wars endgame? Someone's grind might be someone else's fun.

 

[Toadthemushroom]

Like...?
Just saying "add more new content in its place" is cute but not practical and reasonable to do at all.

I enjoy grinding and i believe it made possible several things that i enjoy about singleplayer RPGS (the sense of progression, getting stronger, overcoming challenges, the joy of being beaten to death in an area but then coming back a few levels higher and passing through it, etcetera). Wouldn't want to have it all removed and end up with a two hour game "100% new experiences". Her complaints about grinding in MMORPGS and other genres is a whole different beast and not conclusive enough to blame grinding as a whole

No one is asking for this. And I have played plenty of compelling games that haven't asked me to repeat previously-completed tasks or content that are far longer than 2 hours. Obviously we're referring to the worst of grinding - where the player is literally repeating an action they've done before in a previous level or environment for a rare loot drop or a level up.

I wouldn't want to transcribe that Extra Credits episode I linked earlier, but it's all in there. They also produced an episode that's all about games that do progression right, rather than using Skinner Box grinding as a crutch for making players repeat dull actions over and over:

Progression Systems - How Good Games Avoid Skinner Boxes - Extra Credits

 

[Sorcerer]

First console jRPG in the U.S. - this is what grinding meant back then in '88.

The first Phantasy Star is often cited as a grindfest, but lol you can only reach level 20 and it can actually be accomplished in a few hours if you put your mind to it.

 

[Keinning]

I wouldn't want to transcribe that Extra Credits episode I linked earlier, but it's all in there. They also produced an episode that's all about games that do progression right, rather than using Skinner Box grinding as a crutch for making players repeat dull actions over and over:

Progression Systems - How Good Games Avoid Skinner Boxes - Extra Credits

I'm not in a place where i can watch videos right now, could you tell which games they mentioned as "good examples" so if i have played them i can think about arguing back or agreeing? Thanks in advance

 

[thumb]

If you say you enjoy "grinding" then you are not actually talking about grinding. Grinding is, by definition, a task that feels both repetitive and monotonous. If it feels fun to you, for any reason, you are no longer grinding.

A better way to put this is that games have padding, and padding can take the form of repetitive tasks that most players will find monotonous. These players are experiencing grinding.

 

[emag]

Some people like grinding/farming just as some like loot boxes. They'll justify the mechanic using tortured reasoning (life isn't fair, you need to "work" for your reward, etc.).

As long as I can play good games without grinding/farming/loot boxes, I'm fine. Let others enjoy their terrible mechanics.

 

[Afrocious]

I agree with the writer's stance with grinding, and I also felt the same way about Persona 5's Mementos which did a good job at giving me a clear objective to work toward as I climbed through it.

I think grinding is fine if the goals are tangible and the effort toward it is rational. In MMOs I've played, I've had to do certain raids once a week for a couple of weeks on top of doing dailies in order to get tokens that I could use to purchase gear that would make the raids easier. There was a weekly cap on tokens, and there was a limited amount of quests that gave tokens in one day. The raids themselves had weekly lockouts.

While collecting tokens, I was able to get lucky and get stronger gear from drops in the raids, which reduced the amount of things I needed to buy. On top of that, I could also learn how to craft gear I bought with my tokens over time.

To me, that grind felt respectable.

Another respectable grind is what I encounter in older Harvest Moon games and Stardew Valley. These are games where you're literally farming for income. The more income you get, the more money you can invest to increase your income. You go from having less than a thousand gold and only being able to purchase a few bags of seeds to being able to have a ton of avenues to get more money concurrently.

A game that does grinding wrong is Destiny 2, where you grind for purely RNG distributed loot with no way to alter said RNG over time, such as by raiding with the same people repeatedly and over time everyone gets a piece of loot by having a raid leader distribute it. No. Instead, you get random loot and tokens that most of the time will give you loot weaker than your current power level.

It also doesn't help there's no feeling of getting more powerful in Destiny 2, which makes the grind pointless - a grind for the sake of grinding.

 

[A Serious Man]

It depends. It never bothered me in WoW because it's a social activity, you're grinding with friends and constantly progressing and tracking their progression. The downside of grinding is softened by it being a shared experience, I actually have a lot of great memories from slogging through dungeons repeatedly or camping a certain spot with friends waiting for a world drop. Grinding in single-player games entirely depends on how fun I find the core gameplay loop.

 

[ThatStupidLion]

at what point are games no longer going to be considered games?

 

[Wowfunhappy]

It's weird that you mention P5 as, like SMT, level does not matter as much as what attacks you have. The difficulty of SMT-type games boils down to "what attacks is this boss weak against and what am I weak against?".

This is why you can defeat enemies 30+ levels above you in SMTIV for example (barring bad RNG). Your level is mostly just padding that makes some situations easier, as it should be.

In the best designed RPGs, your level is not as important as your equipment or other external factors that can't just be grinded out. In my best experiences, grinding does not make a boss fight just "press A".

It's not as big a problem in Persona as much as some games, which is a big part of the reason Persona 4 and 5 are the only turn based RPGs I've ever completed.

Still, your xp and level makes a big difference in battles. Bosses are never "Press A to win," but depending on your level, a fight can either feel unfair, overly safe, or that juuuuust right in between space where you're constantly in danger but always able to push through. I really, really like fights that fall in that middle ground, but in order to get there, you have to make sure your level is neither too high or too low.

It's also possible that some of this is my imagination and the game just has a really odd difficulty curve. I don't think that's it though. XP controls how much damage you can sustain, whether your attacks deal light, medium, or heavy damage to enemies, etc.

 

[autoduelist]

The problem here is that the core concept - do something to make your characters better - it generally involved, interesting, and provides a great amount of the 'fun' of a game. This becomes a problem, however, when too much distance is put between progress markers, and you find yourself doing something awful to just 'get to the next level'.

For example - running back and forth on a small plot of land in order to spark a random encounter through which you just need to hit x to win.

The other problem is when the 'goal' isn't fulfilling - ie, instead of trying to get to level 15 to unlock a new awesome skill, the game just wants you to do a fetch quest. Oh - you need 30 fire pelts for this quest! But fire pelts only drop from one monster, which only spawns during 5% of random encounters in this one tiny area! Oh! And the reward for this is only 100 gold, but you don't need 100 gold because you just earned 20k grinding the damn pelts.

Microtransactions have brought this to a new level with 'grind gates'. Oh, you want to get to chapter 3? Good luck, because the boss for chapter 2 is so intentional OP that you either need to grind for 15 hours in chapter 2, or pay $5 for a leveling stone.

It's not grinding that's the problem - combat for progression is fun. It's the pacing.

 

[Toadthemushroom]

"Better" to you, perhaps. Giving me 100 different things to do over a play time of 30 hours isn't necessarily going to bring me, personally, more enjoyment than doing 10 different things to do over a play time of 30 hours.

Of course, I was the guy who really enjoyed grinding out levels for hours, fighting the same enemies over and over, 10 feet outside a town in RPGs in the late 80s (looking at you, Phantasy Star).

Can it be done better? Perhaps. I believe everything can be improved. But I don't necessarily think a game is bad because it has grinding. In fact, I recently switched away from Destiny 2 and started Warframe simply because Warframe had things for me to grind towards while Destiny just handed me everything.

Never said that would be the case. We're both generalising. Number of tasks isn't what this is about - it's how a game asks players to progress.

 

[Afrocious]

I like how grinding in Monster Hunter, over time, makes you able to kill certain monsters in your sleep since you've killed them over and over.

 

[Nev]

I would also argue that the endless walking, repetitive tasks, and bland so called "quests" in open world titles are grinding. They're just time wasters.

Yep absolute garbage all of them. Not wasting my time with any of that.

 

[Toadthemushroom]

I'm not in a place where i can watch videos right now, could you tell which games they mentioned as "good examples" so if i have played them i can think about arguing back or agreeing? Thanks in advance

Haven't watched it in a while but it mostly focuses on game design rather than looking at examining individual cases in games. I remember it namedropping World of Warcraft a few times as a good example.

The video from the previous page doesn't namedrop games at all, from what I remember.

 

[Tobor]

I love grinding. Sometimes you just want to pass the time and not think too much about what your playing.

I love coming home from work and grinding a few levels in whatever I’m playing. It’s relaxing and satisfying.

 

[commish]

Never said that would be the case. We're both generalising. Number of tasks isn't what this is about - it's how a game asks players to progress.

I was just trying to indicate variety of tasks, but you right, that does't really get to the heart of your concern, or mine.

 

[Afrocious]

I love grinding. Sometimes you just want to pass the time and not think too much about what your playing.

I love coming home from work and grinding a few levels in whatever I’m playing. It’s relaxing and satisfying.

If you haven't, give Stardew Valley a chance .

 

[Glass Shark]

.

 

[CookTrain]

Thats a skill grind, I've done the same, but I'd say its different than the, Warframe (its free, so I give it a pass but its the first thing that popped in my head) where you have to rerun the same places and HOPE to get a material you need to make something to progress.

Yeah, I guess that's about right. You succeed because you get better, not because a number goes up.

 

[Toadthemushroom]

Yep absolute garbage all of them. Not wasting my time with any of that.

Yup, absolutely. This sort of droll box-checking is grinding. It's the gamification of a video game - the latest RPGs from Gust (the new Atelier for example) are particularly bad offenders for this, as are the Neptunia games.

This was always good:

Creed III relentlessly foists busywork on you. Practically every action you can take in the world is recast, within seconds, as the first step in some demeaning meta-quest. If you kill an animal, a text prompt appears with a challenge: ”KILL 5 DIFFERENT KINDS OF ANIMAL." Take a ”leap of faith" from a tall tree, and you get ”PERFORM 10 LEAPS OF FAITH." Your reward for completing these scutwork challenges is more of them; once in a while you might get a brief mission.

It's a reductio ad absurdum of a worrisome attitude in modern game design: the belief that a task becomes entertaining simply by virtue of making it a goal. You see this attitude playing out in the corporate sphere with the execrable ”gamification" movement, which attempts to increase productivity among rank-and-file employees by applying game mechanics to their jobs—like, say, giving Joe Punchclock 100 points for filling out his TPS reports on time. Instead of making work rewarding, gamification strives only to make work seem rewarding. In Creed III we come full circle: the gamification of a game.

 

[Ploid 3.0]

If the game is good, I don't mind it.

Yeah, same here.

I played a ton of games, MMORPG, RPG, ARPG (diablo hack and slash style), and so on. If I really like the gameplay, I welcome grinding, especially if the reward is great. For example, I loved going to Ifrit's Cauldron to farm dragon blood off of Nightmare Bats. It was risky with Volcanic Bombs breathing down my neck, but made a ton of money for me. It was a type of relaxing thing to do for me. Listen to podcasts, bunker down, and chill out.

Currently I'm back to Warframe and I'm loving it. POWA!

 

[Baron von Loathsome]

This is why stuff like Shadow of War's lootbox system is so insidious. It's not just that you can pay to get the true ending, but also if you don't you have to waste a ton of time. And as players get older, they have less and less time to devote to games, so games like these are not respecting the player's time.

 

[Soltype]

I'm not an advocate for bad grinding, especially with microtransactions , but what do people want at this point?Games shifted from a more skill based investment to one more skewed to just time and now that's a problem.What do most people really want from games today?

 

[Leafhopper]

Grinding in RPGs for me has always been fine. Thing is the moment it leaves that kind of game I usually don't dig it.

 

[Gai Murakumo]

If grinding is tedious and necessary to be able to continue story content I say they should reduce that. But if it is grinding for post-game/super bosses I am fine with that.

 

[Afrocious]

Grinding has to be enjoyable and have a point.

Destiny 2's grinding is enjoyable (via the shooting), but there is no point.

Diablo's grinding is enjoyable and there is a point.

 

[Keinning]

This is why stuff like Shadow of War's lootbox system is so insidious. It's not just that you can pay to get the true ending, but also if you don't you have to waste a ton of time. And as players get older, they have less and less time to devote to games, so games like these are not respecting the player's time.

"respect for the player's time" is a lazy argument. you have little time to game, should every game start you with the entire game unlocked, maximum skills and equipment, a clear path to the final boss? is this enough of a trend that the sense of progression in games needs to be a thing of the past and games longer than 10 hour shouldn't exist? should this option overwrite every other option avaliable for other people who do have the time, or do not mind spending a little more effort in their games, no matter how limited their gaming time might be?

It's perplexing to me how some people find "playing the game" wasting time now. What else are you expecting, then?

 

[Raw64life]

Traditional JRPG grinding is the only kind of grinding I've ever enjoyed. In the JRPGs I've been playing throughout my life, you usually don't have to spend a lot of time doing it, nothing is locked if I don't it, the rewards are tangible, and no one is taunting me with an option to skip it by paying real money.

 

[FallingEdge]

 

[Ploid 3.0]

Outside of RPGs, I don't know if I ever liked grinding. It just felt like it got in the way. There was no gear to try for, no drops to sift through, nothing to sell to a npc for currency.

For example, I only played Overwatch for event skins whenever it happened, playing that game for loot crates was so boring to me. After the xmas event I just ditched playing that game to try to collect event skins in hope those skins would be used later when they make a PVE rpg like dungeon crawler with all that lootbox cash people pump into the game.

 

[davepoobond]

I think it's worth it sometimes because it gives you a lot more time to really mess around with the Rpg mechanics etc. otherwise always progressing you never really have "time" to experiment

 

[Alter_Fridge]

Down with grinding or down, with grinding?

 

[sotojuan]

"respect for the player's time" is a lazy argument. you have little time to game, should every game start you with the entire game unlocked, maximum skills and equipment, a clear path to the final boss? is this enough of a trend that the sense of progression in games needs to be a thing of the past and games longer than 10 hour shouldn't exist? should this option overwrite every other option avaliable for other people who do have the time, or do not mind spending a little more effort in their games, no matter how limited their gaming time might be?

It's perplexing to me how some people find "playing the game" wasting time now. What else are you expecting, then?

What we are seeing is people growing up and realizing that they can't beat 40+ hour RPGs in two weeks any more and instead of just not playing them or playing them over a month or two, they are asking for them to be shorter or easier.

 

[Baron von Loathsome]

"respect for the player's time" is a lazy argument. you have little time to game, should every game start you with the entire game unlocked, maximum skills and equipment, a clear path to the final boss? is this enough of a trend that the sense of progression in games needs to be a thing of the past and games longer than 10 hour shouldn't exist? should this option overwrite every other option avaliable for other people who do have the time, or do not mind spending a little more effort in their games, no matter how limited their gaming time might be?

It's perplexing to me how some people find "playing the game" wasting time now. What else are you expecting, then?

There's a difference between seeing more of what the game has to offer and spending time doing repetitive tasks in order to see what the game has arbitrarily put behind busywork. You know, locking the fun stuff behind a boring grind.

What we are seeing is people growing up and realizing that they can't beat 40+ hour RPGs in two weeks any more and instead of just not playing them or playing them over a month or two, they are asking for them to be shorter or easier.

Indeed. Players are growing up, but major game releases aren't adjusting to the growing age and changing circumstances of their audience.

 

[firehawk12]

On the flip side, a lot of RPGs let you play on an easier mode now, and I value my time enough that I have no qualms about playing an easy mode that I can just walk through.

 

[sotojuan]

There's a difference between seeing more of what the game has to offer and spending time doing repetitive tasks in order to see what the game has arbitrarily put behind busywork. You know, locking the fun stuff behind a boring grind.

The latter should be optional, then. Nothing wrong with putting it behind a long grind. I can beat FFX without grinding but if I want to see how OP the celestial weapons are, I don't mind a grind. In FFVI, I can spend hours in the Veldt getting Gau some Rages that break the game, but I don't have to. It's only a problem when it's required. I don't think it's arbitrary at all to put great rewards under grinds, at least in JP games.

 

[Vital Tundra]

Some games wouldn't be the same without it.