Slow Beginning
The weakest part of many role-playing games is the first hour or so. Why? Because they take so damn long to get started. Developers decide they have to ease the players into the game so they begin the game at the main character#DY#s military academy or peaceful rustic hometown. The latter is the worse of the two, by far. An RPG that begins in a small country village always starts something like this: "Hello child, can you fetch me some apples? Don#DY#t forget the festival is in town today! Your rambunctious friend said he#DY#d meet you there! OH MY GOD MASKED MARAUDERS ARE BURNING THE VILLAGE, SAVE YOURSELF!!!" Examples that come to mind are Fable and Neverwinter Nights 2.
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Errand quests
No, I don#DY#t want to deliver your fucking letter to Lady Rottencrotch. If you want to give some fresh bread to Griswold the burly innkeeper, go do it yourself or find a courier who isn#DY#t wearing platemail and carrying a flaming sword. The original Baldur#DY#s Gate did a lot of this but so did many, many other games. A quest that consists of walking up to one person, receiving an item, then walking up to another person and handing them that item isn#DY#t challenging or entertaining the player - it#DY#s testing them for a learning disability.
The only good thing about the genre being riddled with these stupid quests is that it sets players up for a surprise. For example, there#DY#s a quest in Knights of the Old Republic where you#DY#re asked to deliver a box to a crime lord. Sounds like a basic courier quest until you try to open the box and you#DY#re promptly sucked into it. Also, I don#DY#t mind these quests if they#DY#re driving the plot in some way rather than being filler. The steampunk RPG Arcanum begins with a zeppelin crash. A severely wounded gnome crawls from the wreckage and hands a ring to the only other survivor, the player. He then tells the player to give it to "the boy" before dying. This sort of thing is the exception rather than the rule when it comes to errands, though.
Repetitive combat
Combat for a role-playing game can come in many forms it should adhere to one principle: the player character(s) should gain abilities as the game progresses and so should the enemies. That seems simple enough but apparently not. This has gotten worse with the advent of "action RPG#DY#s" and the transition from turn-based to real-time combat. Combat in these new games feels like a brawler or a FPS except with less buttons and the enemies just blindly run toward you.
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