I'll say most RTS games. As you progress and gain access to more units/building to play with, it's much more engaging than the early stages of pretty much any RTS, where they want you to "build 3 farms, build a barracks and train 5 basic soldiers...".

The problem with Kingmaker is that the game gets hard in ways that are unfair to the player. Specifically, it:
* Introduces an enemy type that you need to have made some specific build choices to handle
* Traps you in the final dungeon, so you can't go back and prepare, or choose to take multiple trips. (I've always hated it when games with progression systems do this sort of thing.)
* Takes away some of your party members, so that party build you've been using for the entire game is no longer available.

There's also the fact that Kingmaker is rest anywhere (or at least in hostile areas) if you have the supplies, which means the game can't claim to be high-attrition, and therefore the ideas I gave for high-attrition don't really work well here. A lot-attrition needs to have a different game design, and that generally precludes having long dungeon with tons of encounters to battle through. Rather, a low-attrition game needs fewer encounters, and each encounter has to be a challenge by itself (and not just a repeat of previous encounters), for it to work well. Basically, the game designer needs to treat every encounter like a boss fight, though perhaps easier and without the famfare that usually accompanies such things, for low-attrition to work.

(Worth noting that I'm not aware of any non-CRPG RPGs with a difficulty setting. Remember that, if a game is a computer (or console) game and is an RPG, it's a CRPG by definition.)

Elden Ring is not a CRPG unless you are being extremely pedantic and not dealing with real people who live in the year 2023. If you truly wanted to be that broad you would drop the "C" and just say RPG video game.

Except that I'd likely argue that Elden Ring fails to qualify as an RPG because of the way combat is resolved.

(I mainly see the term CRPG as being there for when you need to distinguish them from, say, TTRPGs. For example, I can say that CRPGs can have more complex math formulas than TTRPGs simply because the computer takes care of all that math for you._

Starcraft. The first Terran campaign is the least interesting, ie. the faction/race itself is not that interesting to play, and the story isn't quite as good even though it has its moments.

The later Zerg and Protoss campaigns are much more interesting both to play, and story-wise.

I seem to recall Diablo 2 became more interesting later on, but maybe it was simply as I got an interesting objective, finding all the magic jewels for the staff or something to get an uber-weapon, not sure (I could be partly be mixing it up with Nox, it had something similar, finding parts for a magical weapon which would not wear down like normal weapons).

My point is that it doesn't really matter what you or I think. If the video game industry at large calls Elden Ring an RPG and gives it RPG of the year awards etc then Elden Ring is an RPG. Maybe in 1970 it would have been classified differently but that's what RPG means today. I don't particularly think of Elden Ring and an RPG either. To me it's more action/adventure.

But I'm not going to try and make the world subscribe to my classification system, especially when conversing and wanting to be understood.

Some of the Dragon Quest games, and possibly some other JRPGs, have this thing where you start out with just one character who doesn't have any interesting abilities (the character might, for example, be a pure fighter in a game that doesn't have physical techniques), but then more characters join later.

In the Dragon Quest series, for example, 2 and 4 fit this pattern (for DQ4 I'm thinking Chapter 1 here), and 6 comes close (though you do at least get a healing spell at an early level). Then, the game gives you characters who can use magic (or, in DQ6's case, the first human party member who can, under player control, use a special ability that's not a spell), and the game becomes considerably more interesting.

Final Fantasy doesn't seem affected as much; the only FF games where this pattern might hold are 3. 4 (but at least Kain has Jump, and if you're not playing the English SNES release Cecil also has a dark wave attack) and 5 (but you do get a full party in the pre-job portion of the game). In all three of those games, this section is brief, and ends after the first boss. after which you either get access to jobs (FF3 and FF5), get a party member who can cast spells (FF4), or get spells that you can use even as freelancers (FF3 3D remake).

The Necroing of the Daikatana thread makes me realise that the game is an ideal candidate for this thread. The first episode is basically derivative shit. After that, it gets really quite good (especially if you patch the shocking companion AI up to scratch). It genuinely catches a lot of flak that it doesn't deserve.

Just thought of a different example, for those that love glitches, and that would be SaGa 2 (Final Fantasy Legend 2), specifically the original version (not the DS remake).

In a glitched playthrough of the game, you have to play through the first few worlds, including my least favorite part of the game, normally. (Well, it *is* possible to have a glitch character in your party, but that character starts with 0 in every stat and is otherwise treated as a human, so that doesn't have much practical use.) However, once you get past that, there's a glitch involving the trashcan that allows you to gain access to later worlds early, then you can get the ability to teleport, and then teleport while riding a dragon, and then the entire game opens up.

Tomb Raider II: the first level is ok but the whole Venice/Abandone Theater/Oil Rig section gets extremely tedious since is basically "urban/modern environments with too many humans". After those first 6 levels, you go over to the Maria Doria (the underwater shipwreck) which yes, it overstays it's welcome but is way better than anything prior in the game and finally you move on to Tibet which has probable one of the best levels in the series (The Barkhang Monastery) and the following levels are really good too. And by the end you have the Temple of Xian, the Floating Islands... the very last level sucks but everything starting on level 7 to 17 is really good).

Yeah, I'm not a fan of it but RPG just means "character progression" at this point.



I'm definitely one of those people who played the opening swamp level and got the first companion and then bailed. I need to try it again someday with the mods.

Ok, I'm late to the party, nonetheless I wanted to hop in and mention as examples of games which get better as the player explores them, titles like The Forgotten City, Outer Wilds, Her Story, Return of the Obra Dinn, and others, which seem to aim at having a rhizomatic or hypertextual and deductive approach to their narrative structure.

I don't know about you guys but by playing games like the aforementioned, I've found that weaving the narrative thread in my mind is more often than not, more rewarding than unraveling it in the more common linear form of storytelling I'm used to experience. That is, of course, if the paths leading to the (or a) conclusion is (or are) both feasible, fun, and stimulating, and also if the conclusion itself provides some sense or the possibility of a catharsis. Is it the same for any of you? Am I going insane? Btw, if both answers are a yes then that means you're losing it too!

That's why they are good examples of games which have a better second half :P

Just kidding. I'm on the same page as you on that matter. Those sort of games don't often get me hooked like others do, but as of late that's become for me more a virtue than a detrimental quality. Maybe it's just my weirdness but most of my favourite games have encouraged me to play that way, in short sessions and in a relaxed manner, not being constantly demanding. I'm probably very biased in that regard; nonetheless, I can attest that they do get better!

Not exactly halves, as the game is split into several parts, but the first one of Knights of the Old Republic II has prevented many players from a second playthrough. It might be said that a RPG might follow a sawmill graph in difficulty: increasing, then lowering the difficulty so as to allowing the player to feel empowered. For example, new strengths would allow to defeat enemies similar to those met in the past more easily.

For me it was a bit of the opposite! Remember Dune II, that established the formula for RTS? A game provides new toys to play with in each mission, and the player learns to get the most of them. From the humble trikes and quads to sonic cannons or rocket launchers. When there are no more new things to learn, the game mercifully ends soon after.