Iniquity and Vindication

Grinding. For the sake of this article, I'm using the term to mean "repetition for the sake of some reward", not "stuff you don't like to do."

You could easily call this kind of repetition the definition of an RPG, as the most basic forms of rewards - experience points, money, and random drops - are the heart of the genre. You could easily say that if you remove the ability to accumulate strength via repetition from an RPG, it's not an RPG any more; it's just an adventure game with menu-based combat.

And you can say that if you want. I don't care what terminology you use. The fact remains that the primary feature I enjoy about RPGs (and what I consider the defining feature of the genre) is tactical, menu-based combat that forces me to think about my actions and gives me time to do so. And the primary feature I despise about RPGs is repetition.

There are two reasons I am on a crusade against repetition in Iniquity and Vindication. The first one is that it's simply not challenging, and thus not satisfying, and thus not fun. When you've already proven to the game that you can overcome a specific challenge, it should not force you to overcome the exact same challenge again. What's the point? You literally have a 0% chance of losing. You can, and almost always should, do exactly the same thing as you did last time. It's not just a matter of being too easy - there's literally no challenge to overcome at all. This type of repetition barely even qualifies as gameplay.

Granted, if the player has limited resources, then a few identical battles are more justifiable. In such a case, each individual battle is not the challenge - the challenge is being able to conserve your resources to last through the string of battles. I don't mind this type of challenge and will most likely include a few of them in Iniquity and Vindication. But I don't think it should make up 95% of a game. And many RPGs don't really have limited resources anyway - you can freely head back to town and restock, and save points probably heal you to full HP/MP. So the repeated battles are utterly pointless.

The second reason I dislike repetition is the reward scheme for it. Being extremely bored for several hours and then essentially skipping the next several challenges should not be presented as an acceptable alternative to playing the game the way it's meant to be played. Who ever decided that this was good game design? What's the point of including challenges, and then giving the player all sorts of encouragement and incentive to not tackle them? Shouldn't you be encouraging the player to have more fun, not less? Are you working on the assumption that your challenges aren't fun? If so, why are you making games?

You would think the only reason anyone would willingly grind up their power would be if they can't overcome your challenge, but that's not the case - many people (called completionists) simply like to experience everything a game has to offer. Other people are drawn in to the grind by story-driven side-quests, or by game mechanics like synthesis shops and monster hunts. And in the process of simply trying to play the game that's presented to them, they actually become so strong that they are prevented from being able to experience the game's challenges. They can still experience the battles, sure. But the challenges are taken away from them. You can tell me, "Oh, you can just not equip that new armor; you can just not use the new skill you learned; then it's the same challenge as before." But the human brain doesn't work like that. The game is less satisfying. You're not beating the game, you're beating your own game you made up because the real game isn't fun enough.

Grinding has its uses, for sure; it's not without benefits. It gives people goals to strive for, it makes every victory feel valuable. I can't argue with anyone who feels like these benefits outweigh the problems. But I want to see a game without grinding; with no repetition, but with RPG style battles. And so that's the game I'm making. Vindication had a somewhat unusual approach to preventing grinding, at least on hard mode, which was that it was impossible to obtain gold from random battles, and there were no sources of unlimited free healing. This made it feel almost like a kind of survival horror game at times. (On normal difficulty, obtaining gold was still difficult, but not impossible.) But I want to take it a step further this time. I'm not removing normal battles from Iniquity and Vindication, but each one will be different - at least diferent enough that you have to think a little bit about what to change in your strategy. None of them will be repeatable. And every third or fourth battle will be a boss. If you're like me, which hopefully some of you are, this will keep every single battle in the game interesting.