I
define grinding as “repetitious combat whose primary goal is to
increase various statistics about a character ”. It is most
commonly associated with RPGs; Players grinding for character levels,
items or currency is a natural part of these games. Here, I will
discuss some bad and good examples, with various other aspects of a
game related to grinding, like experience systems, side bosses,
combat systems and so on.
Spoilers
for Undertale, Persona 3/4, Trails, Withcher 3 ahead, only discussed
as minimally as possible.
Definition
Dragon Quest(1986)
has set the basic template for console RPGs. Games made of same cloth
are somewhat simplistic in terms of mechanics and presentation. The
main activity in those games is to get through various dungeons and
grind a lot to defeat the next set of enemies. The games not only
require grinding, but it is the bread and butter of these games. On
the discussion of games, “grinding” is sometimes used to refer
any amount of dungeon exploration, or exclusively in a derisive way.
In contrast, my definition of grinding is more useful, as when I say
a game “requires grinding” or “grindy”, it means the game
asks or heavily incentives the player to spend a non-trivial
amount of time to engage in repetitious encounters for a certain
reward, and for some games, this is part of the appeal.
Emphasizing the appeal of
grinding helps us to distinguish it from “padding”, where the
game slows down player’s progress arbitrarily. Certainly, badly
implemented grinding might feel like padding but the earnestness is
the key distinction: Grinding Magikarp or Abra in Pokémon
Red(1995) might be
rather monotonous, but it clearly is designed to foster a “training
hard to get strong” mentality. More cynical designs grind the game
to halt to compensate for lack of content, likely because of
troubled development. Or something far worse, strong
arm them into buying microtransactions.
I have nothing but contempt for this kind of design. Some say “Oh
it’s not a big deal. Actually it’s kind of nice to get some
experience boost”. No! The game is designed
to require the boost! It is
the worst gaming design trend alongside with making the players
gamble with real money. Ever. I will never entertain it as an
artistic decision. Stuff like this doesn’t require much discussion,
moving on...
Also, while grinding is no
doubt an important part of MMOs, everything here pertains to single
player only, because I don’t play multi-player RPGs. My brief
experience with them is not very good and many of them also guilty of
“skip grinding for money” nonsense, but they feel like a whole
separate realm on their own and deserve more than my limited
viewpoint.
Avoiding Grinding
As games became more
sophisticated, they began to reduce or outright minimize grinding,
instead moving towards rewarding player’s ingenuity or softening
the gameplay to put the rich story or presentation in the center
stage. Final Fantasy
7(1997) is an
example of both; there are lots of items, spells, special moves that
turns the game into a joke; but even without going all out to become
god-like powerful, the game is quite gentle, as it is very focused on
telling a grand cinematic story, filled with lots of set pieces
and mini game. (In other words, it is the prestige game of it’s
time) Some games tightly control how much player can progress. In a
character-oriented RPG like Fallout:
New Vegas(2008),
overwhelmingly large portion of experience points and valuable items
are gained from quests, combat exhausts non-trivial resources and the
player can make a character that can get out of situations without
(much) combat. Witcher
3: Wild Hunt(2015)
is constructed very similar sans having non-combat builds, but in
this case the approach fails and renders the game bereft of any sense
of progression. There is a skill tree, but it mostly offers minor
stat bonuses: Geralt(the player character) can make their force
shield slightly bigger and start to breathe fire at thirty hours in,
not exactly the most exciting thing
in a fantasy game. In
F:NV,
leveling up gives cool perks and gimmicks like: getting stronger with
radiation, being able to carry a lot, splattering enemies into guts
or unlocking gay energy. In contrast, Witcher
3 feels like it is
an RPG only to justify its huge open-world, Geralt starts an ace
monster hunter and remains an ace monster hunter; what do levels even
convey to the player?
Some games use
intuitive leveling systems to nudge the player away from
grinding too much. Trails/Kiseki
series are quite great at
this. The amount of experience earned in a battle is much higher if
the characters are at lower levels. Conversely, after passing a
certain threshold, fighting similar enemies will start to yield a
much lower amount of experience. This is quite easy to follow because
the experience gained may drop to half just after going up one level
for example. Players are spared from worrying about being under or
overleveled both.
Some games even
turn into a mini-game
of its own. It’s fairly common to have special enemies which are
tricky to find or defeat but will yield a lot of experience points if
done so. Dragon
Quest has the famed
“metal slime”, Trails
in the Sky: FC(2004)
has a creature named “pom”. A different and more energetic
approach can be found in Trails
of Cold Steel(2013).
During a battle the game rewards certain actions with experience
point multipliers: Doing combos, hitting multiple enemies at once,
being first one to hit, using weaknesses etc. This is a really great
way to making players seriously pay attention to regular battles
without making them excruciatingly difficult.
Some games employ a set of
measures to dissuade or outright prevent the player from grinding. In
Persona 3(2007),
players get through a singular, humongous dungeon. However, it is not
open to exploration in its entirety from the start, instead it is
gradually opened as the story progresses. Spending too much time in
the dungeon will literally make the characters tired and insisting to
continue on
will make them sick, making them unable to come to dungeons for a few
in-game days entirely. At times, they will refuse to come along for
personal reasons. Also, in-game days have limited time slots and
there are often other activities to do instead of going to dungeons.
Ideally, the player should go to dungeon only when it’s necessary.
This makes sense narratively too, as the dungeons are not exactly
pleasant to be in, conveyed both by it’s visual design and
characters talking of it’s oppressive, sickening atmosphere. To
ensure that players won’t feel pressured to grind too much, before
the day of mandatory story fights, the characters will not complain
about being tired; so that players have always a last-minute chance
of grinding as they want. Also, the mandatory fights will be always
easier than their counterparts in the dungeon. Therefore,
being able to reach the limit imposed by the story will ensure that
players
are more than capable for the story fights.
Level-scaling is a common
anti-grinding feature: Instead of enemies becoming stronger as the
game progresses, they become stronger as the player gain levels. In
theory, it allows a consistent level of challenge without players
being too strong or needing to grind. Unfortunately, this method is
often implemented in rather problematic ways:
A common issue is that
games do not tell that they have level-scaling. Players can often
divine it only when it becomes too late. Elder
Scrolls 4: Oblivion(2006)
is quite egregious because of this. The game has a overly
complicated (or insufficiently explained) class/skill system. It’s
quite possible to end up with a underpowered character because of
this. It doesn’t help that there are a lot of
at-best-situationally-useful non-combat skills, even basic
activities like running might cause the player to level-up depending
on the build. [1]
When the level-scaling
makes the game more difficult on higher levels, some players avoid
leveling. In Oblivion, there is a somewhat counter-intuitive[1] way
to make a low-level
build. In Final
Fantasy 8(1998),
mandatory fights do not yield experience points, so the method is to
avoid non-mandatory fights as much as possible. Doing this makes the
player unable to access certain content; in Oblivion
some quests and powerful
items are locked behind levels, in FF8,
the player will only have access to basic spells. Ironically,
level-scaling doesn’t even reduce grinding. In fact, it might even
cause more grinding in Oblivion.
[1] And in FF8,
the time spent in battles do not really decrease because the player
still needs to farm magic [2] from enemies, which is, quite frankly,
much more monotonous than simply defeating monsters in battle.
Fundamentally,
level-scaling dampens the sense of becoming powerful. Things like
turning a previously annoying adversary into a joke, seeing a
previous boss demoted to a regular enemy, realizing that I am able
to make just a little more damage are what makes RPGs so satisfying.
Level-scaling also makes the game world feel more artificial, as it
is quite obvious when random bandits start to wear golden armor just
to match up with the player.
Level-scaling can be
successful however. It works in Elder
Scrolls 5: Skyrim(2011)
quite nicely as it is subtle enough to be not noticed by many people,
I have learned its existence only after reading about it as well.
First, instead of continuously growing stronger, enemies and dungeons
have their own unique level ranges where the player can still be too
weak(bears) or strong(basic undead) for them. Second, there is some
degree
of randomness so that occasionally the player might get weaker or
stronger enemies. Third and perhaps most importantly, the game’s
skill system is intuitive and the game is forgiving enough that
players are unlikely to find themselves in a considerably
disadvantageousbuild. (It also helps that Skyrim
doesn’t really pretend that skills like “speech matters” at
all). This results in a
game truly beautiful in
it’s simplicity. It’s kind of wonderful to just walk around the
world without ever worrying about being prepared for a fight: If
something is big and scary-looking or throws lightning bolts, all
needs to be done is to go away and come back later. There are only a
few end-game bosses that warrant any kind of planning, everything
else just blends into one seamless adventure, it’s very likely that
when player arrives somewhere they will be already strong enough to
take whatever they encounter. The game can do this while also still
being able to make the player that they are actually getting more
powerful. This is a not a trivial achievement for such an open-ended
game.
Harsher anti-grinding
measures can be effective if the fantasy of becoming stronger can be
achieved in other ways. Demon’s
Souls(2009) and its
sequels are among the few Action RPGs series where “action” and
“RPG” parts are both important. While grinding is a long process
with diminishing returns due to level-scaling, one way to beat any
kind of enemy is just responding to their attack patterns. So, the
game dilutes the more traditional, statistical progression of RPGs
and puts the player’s gradual mastery of combat in its place. The
game also features lots of different weapons and equipment, there are
a lot of hidden ways to get really powerful. It’s also possible to
summon NPCs or other players to help out with to deal with bosses.
The game never outright forbids grinding but takes great lengths to
make sure that the player adopts a mindset which rejects grinding and
accepts challenges head on. Which would be absolutely dreadful to
play personally, but it is quite interesting to watch how it affects
other players’ behavior nonetheless.
As I discussed in previous
posts, when a game has unconventional or counter-intuitive mechanisms
it’s very important to seed the correct mentality in the player.
Undertale(2015)
is famously very anti-grind
and this is woven into the very core
of the game. Amazingly this doesn’t actually trivialize the combat
in the game, player is merely guided against trying to gain
experience and can only get the happiest ending if they avoid gaining
experience entirely. If the player goes the opposite way however,
they will find the that that they have rendered the area they are in
completely devoid of life. If they choose to do this from very
beginning and continue on the path of sin, the game will enter to a
state of constant, dreary, bleak tone. Most encounters will be total
pushovers, expect for exactly two. The first one, while isn’t that
difficult, catches the players off-guard and more importantly makes
it clear that player brought this upon themselves. The second, more
famous,difficult
encounter takes this up to eleven. While reportedly not being
exceptionally tough for a regular of bullet hell games, it is still
not only quite difficult for anyone who isn’t accustomed to, it is
difficult in the most player-unfriendly ways. The game will begin the
fight in the middle of a conversation, feign mercy, mock the player
for dying and after a long fight abruptly stop to trick them into
quitting. Moreover, every hit only causes 1 damage but they also
drain all hit points until only 1 left, so health and armor is
useless. The enemy has only 1 hit point, but
they will evade all attacks until the very end, so attacks and
weapons are useless. In other words, all grinding is utterly
meaningless. And, if players persevere through this fight and reach
to end of the game, all they are rewarded with is a blank space to
stare into, have game crashing to desktop indefinitely or an offer to
start the game anew (which by one interpretation, will not even
cleanse the evil) The entire game is an elaborate joke on the very
concept of grinding. However, it’s important that the game does not
tut-tut the player for playing an undesired way but rather it
challenges them to question their motivations: Did they reach to the
end just because they could? Is that worth it? Perhaps grinding is
actually a waste of time sometimes, perhaps not every game needs to
be “completed”.
Side Content Grinding
Save for a niche section of
games, RPGs of the 2000s and 2010s tend to allow players to get
through the “main story” without too much hassle. They will
rather put more time-wasting things on the side, such as things to
collect; quests to finish, and of course, optional enemies to defeat.
“The legendary epic sword of coolness” isn’t for defeating the
final boss, that would be an overkill no, it is for the ultimate
secret boss. Unfortunately, despite how I can enjoy long RPGs and
grinding, Undertale is right about this kind of content: I am
often unable to muster enough motivation to care about these extra
bosses. They seem to only exist for the sake of completion with
hardly any larger context. What does defeating “Emerald Weapon”
mean in FF7, that problem fixes itself in the end anyway. Or
“Dark Valefor” in Final Fantasy 10(2000) for that matter,
it literally comes out of nowhere? Why bother with “Satan” in
LİSA: The Painful(2014), he is just some dude whom the
players will not even see unless they go out of their way to find
him? Such extra bosses often drop remarkable loot but why would
someone who already defeated the toughest enemy ever need that? They
further serve to highlight how much this kind of content only exist
to be bragged about; both for advertising “hours of extra content”
and to satiate the drive of completionism alike.
In theory, if something is
fun then it’s just fun but even modest embellishments can really
make things quite interesting. “Death” from Persona
3 is a fun extra
boss because of this: “Death” essentially serves to make sure
that people won’t linger on the same floor for too long. It is not
only visually striking with its imposing body and over-sized
revolvers, but hearing its approach with growlings and rattlings
of the chains on its body is appropriately eerie for a creature that
will crush the player party easily for a long, long time. Towards the
end of the game the player finally becomes barely strong enough to
turn the tables on it. Sure, defeating it won’t change anything
narratively but it is actually more thematic that way; after all
“Death” is a manifestation of the fear of mortality, obviously it
won’t go away completely. And, it just feels nice to get some
personal revenge and have an opportunity to realize how far I have
come. Facing death is what all characters do in P3,
so it puts a neat bow on that theme too. More importantly, defeating
it doesn’t require shouldering mountains, it only demands the
correct strategy and some luck. It is also an interesting inversion
of most extra bosses. Instead of being there to justify grinding, it
rewards the ability to grind more when defeated. It unlocks extra
floors of the dungeon. While it isn’t necessary for finishing the
game, it’s still quite neat: It gives the player something to do in
the last stretch[3] of the game, allows them to easily reach the
level cap(addressing a pet peeve of mine) and gives the
opportunity to access and use absurdly powerful end-game Personae[4].
This system both actively enables completionist players by rewarding
their efforts by making the game easier to complete and can guide the
usually-not-so-completionist- players(me) into completing the game
just by just having fun naturally. In contrast, in Persona
4(2008), Death is
just a hidden boss in the “new game plus”. It just exists, with
no relevance to anything else in the game. Players can get a strong
item by defeating it, I guess. Whatever. At least it makes a good
showcase for the
argument that,
difference between a great and an alright game indeed lies in the
details.
Another obstacle to create
meaningful motivation to grind is that games tend to have narratives
in conflict with the idea of grinding. Combat is often something that
just happens to the characters, no matter how many is slain by
character’s hands. Characters tend to be either against or
indifferent to combat; and if the game has a serious narrative
concerning loss of lives, explores non-violent solutions in its
role-play or has a degree of urgency in regards to “saving the
world”, it then feels quite dissonant to ask the player to take
time to gather a hundred monster toes for the perfect armor. This is
one reason why some RPGs feature eager, fledgling adventurers as
their protagonist. Fighting repeatedly makes a lot of sense when the
player’s party also enjoys doing them. In Trails
In The Sky,
fighting monsters is a part of main cast’s job and in Trails
of Cold Steel,
basic battles are an important piece in worldbuilding, showing that
the authorities are neglectful in their promises of defense. A lot of
characters in both series have a deep relationship with combat,
everything from the weapons they use, why they fight, their strengths
and weaknesses are all part of their character. When a character is
able to jump in the air and do a cool sword move, that’s just part
of the world. While it is obviously unrealistic, the series has
mostly consistent and subtle rules on whether a battle will be deadly
or not. Slaying gods is not uncommon in video games but they don’t
usually explore as to what it means that main character is able to
slay a god or single-handedly prevent an apocalypse. This actually
weakens the power fantasy somewhat. It makes just a little more
difficult to care about min-maxing stats, much less about actually
taking on some random overpowered boss. In contrast,feats of main
casts in Trails
games feels much more impressive precisely because it's made clear
that they are not even among the strongest warriors, they are just
bunch of brave young people.
Combat
While motivation to grind
is certainly important, it’s secondary to the quality of combat
itself. The combat should avoid banality and hair-splitting
difficulty both at the same time. Even a basic damage multiplier or
rock-paper-scissor weakness system goes a long way to stop battles
from being sleep-inducing. The stat gains by combat should be at a
reasonable pace. Increasing levels or advancement in skills trees
should give a palpable sense of improvement but also the overall time
spent in combat loops should not be too long. Navigation in menus,
the time it takes to execute commands (being able to automate them or
turning off animations), the rate where the player needs to re-stock
resources to continue grinding. Of course, as I discussed earlier,
allowing player to be smart at leveling up certainly helps even when
grinding is inevitable.
Let’s analyze Pokemon
series from this viewpoint then. Motivation for grinding is implicit
in the series: Whether the player desiring to just having a full team
in the final story mon, training a late-found or new-born mons or
preparing for competitive battling, one thing to be sure is that
there is no convenient way
to level up fast, some games allow to battle with same trainers more
than once(which gives more experience than wild pokemon), there are
some items which helps, traded mons also get experience faster but…
overall, it’s quite slow. [5] It’s certain that if the player
wants battle-ready mons, they will have to spend quite amount of
time, defeating same mons over and over. The one alternative is to
leave it them to day care and let them level up automatically as the
player walks around the world but not only it’s quite limited and
slow, it requires constant checks if the player doesn’t want to
lose certain moves. [6] However, what makes grinding in Pokemon
so dreadful is that not only the battles are so mindless, they also
require frequent backtracking to recharge their moves. There isn’t
even an auto-battle system. And sure, player can just watch or play
something else when they are doing it but… why? Like I play Pokémon
because, I want to battle with
fun pocket monsters. Why I need to put hours and hours on this, why I
can’t just catch something and have it be active member of my team
without having nonsensical concerns? And people actually train mons
for competitive battles, lots of ones, without using some sort of
emulator turbo? This is probably my primary psychological block to
play a Pokemon
game. I just want to play with various different mons and have fun
for couple of hours, that’s often impossible to do without using
some kind of generator.[7]
Thankfully, newer
generations made some improvements on this issue. The most important
of them is that battles finally grant team-wide experience. Wow. On
the one hand, it still has grinding, especially one is serious about
competitive play. On the other hand, being able to grind six mons at
once is still massive and more importantly, the player is now wholly
free to experiment with different mons as they like.I am forever
baffled at the people who whine about this. Oh, it is too easy,
they say. Too easy. Tackling this aspect of the series is
outside of this post’s scope, but for now, if I may, allow me to
say this: I am still in utmost sadness and pain that Gayme Freak
dumbed down this hardcore series for the peasants but having to
level up a Beldum was never quite peak gameplay, so it’s not
all that bad, dear gamers.
Conclusion
We have examined different
approaches to tackle the question of grinding. Classic RPGs are very
openly grindy, but they are understandably primitive in their design
and this might make sheer monotonousness of such games rather hard to
swallow. As the depth of mechanical, textual and audio visual
elements have increased, games began to favor livelier and crunchier
designs over long-term, gradual satisfaction. Some games have
extensive side content, but they tend to be lacking in appeal. There
are games with excellent combat mechanics, addictive game-loops or a
narrative that strongly contextualizes gameplay but there really
doesn’t seem to be any game that tries to strike at the very heart
of grinding. There are repetitive games with astounding quality, but
never a game has been astounding because
of it’s repetition…
Well… no…
There is one….
[1] On character creation,
players picks certain skills as “major”, the other becoming
“minor”. Skills are developed by using them, growing enough
causes a level up and grants boots to the stats which are related to
the skill player has developed. To prevent leveling, it’s possible
to pick irrelevant skills as major, this way player can grind their
skills while also keeping enemies weaker and don’t have to deal
with keeping track of their skill growth. This might actually end up
increase grinding because players will miss the starting boost to
major skills, which can be rather problematic to magic-using
characters.
[2] In Final Fantasy 8,
the main method to obtain magic is to literally absorb them from
enemies using “draw” command. Having magic is also the main way
to boost the character stats, so having them maxed out is optimal for
every character. Only a small amount can be drawn at a time so this
process is quite long, especially if the player also uses the magic
for attacking and needs to re-fill every so often.
[3] In last month of
Persona 3,
the only grand story event left is to wait for the last
confrontation. The player is likely reach to end of the dungeon long
before the month ends and has already completed most of the other
side activities; often, only thing to do with free time is to skip to
the next day. Given the rather melancholic tone in the game, having
more dungeon to explore is a genuinely refreshing alternative.
[4] In the game, “persona”
refers to the physical manifestation of one’s emotions, in the form
of various mythological figures. Characters fight by summoning their
personae
[5] For a detailed look:
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Experience
[6] Mons learn new moves on
leveling up and can learn only four at a time. Normally, the game
asks you to whether swap the new move with an old one, however; in
day care, new moves are automatically sapped with older ones top to
bottom. Recovering forgotten moves is not trivial, actually
impossible in some cases, particularly in the older games.
[7] Aside from regular
cheating devices, there is software called Pokegen which can create
Pokémon, items and other stuff inside an existing save file. It’s
rather fun to use, and especially useful to facilitate unusual
playthroughs.
This article is written
thanks to my dearest Patrons and special thanks to: Acelin, Laura
Watson, MasterofCubes, Makkovar, Morgan, Otakundead , Sasha and
Spencer Gill.
