Oh yes I remember the item limit for missions. I loved how in OpenXcom I could give each soldier in my 8-man team a rifle, an ammo clip, a proximity mine, smoke grenade and 1 or 2 grenades. And proximity sensors, medpacks for a few more. And then a whole bunch of extra rockets for the heavy weapons guy if I felt I didn't like a part of the landscape...

I think when it comes to mundane quests in RPGs the problem is that they often don't fit with the epic main plot. If you're a nobody and you're trying hard to scrape together some coins, they can make sense and feel rewarding to do, but why would a "chosen one" or someone dealing with urgent matters of life or death or even the potential end of the world take the time to water everybody's plants or something? That seems a bit out of touch, as if one part of the developer team doesn't communicate with the other, or as if those things are just in there as lazy filler material or because every other RPG does it the same way (regardless of whether it's bad design).

For a while there when I played a whole heck of a lot of Oblivion, I tried out various "realism" mods that added detailed eating and cooking and sleeping aspects. It strikes me like playing with dolls. Which a lot of people seem to like. But not me.

However, along the way I discovered several mods that I ended up liking a whole lot. Several used together added a need for rest. Basically, if you went too long without resting you would get some penalties that would grow slowly over time. And you would get some benefits from being rested. Same with food. Some penalties after a certain amount of time without food, and some benefits from being well fed. What made them fun was that food was automatically used up at regular intervals outside of combat or sleeping. And sleeping was now a resource management. Heading into a dungeon? Might want to rest up before you enter. One mod added a camping/sleep anywhere feature that was useful here. And no playing with dolls. The penalties/rewards were also well balanced. Big enough to make them worth considering. Not so big that you felt like you had to abandon a dungeon half way through to take a nap.

So, I don't like the micro-management of simple day-to-day stuff. But I do like resource management.

Things that really annoyed me were:

Inventory management in Mass Effect 1. That was one of the worst inventories ever...
Scanning planets in Mass Effect 2. Honestly, whoever thought this was fun to do more than once should never again design a game.

One thing I like although many people probably don't: travelling. In open world games I always exclusively use the "world" methods of fast travel - like Guild Teleport or ships in Morrowind. Everything else is done "manually" on foot or horseback or boat.
In Witcher 3, which has several areas, if for instance I want to travel from the Baron's keep to Skellige, I either ride to Novigrad and there to the harbour and travel from there, or I get a boat and sail to the "edge of the world" until the game asks me where I want to go.
One of my favourite Skyrim mods was Scenic Carts, where you actually travel by cart. Seems this was originally a planned feature, since the driver would occasionally remark on some landmarks you pass by. And if you want to skip the trip, you could say "I'll take a nap". Cool stuff.

Really enjoyed cooking in monster hunter :D

I enjoyed cooking bread and filling buckets with water and throwing it at people and animals in Ultima VII. True, they were not a requirement (I think). But I did hate going through 5 different keys to see if I could unlock a door. I think the same goes for Ultima Underworld.

There was some game where you have to keep an eye on body temperature and need do other similar things to keep alive. I think I saw it here at GOG.

I keep hearing to avoid that game like the plague which is odd because Origins has quickly become one of my favorite games of alll time.

Baldur's Gate II has you state: "I am no stranger to the mundane tasks."

Which involves: after heavy hints, buying a heavily discounted LVL9 "Freedom spell" in a dungeon that is story essential, and HARD, especially first time around.

You cast it, and free the "mundane task giver" from imprisonment, suffered from extra-planar looting ambition. Your task is to secure return of a spell-book,


You agree to the mundane task, and make your way to the innkeeper that appropriated that book.

You return to the mage that hops planes while the portal summons elementals, three times over.


Either you accept a poor reward from the mage, or you kill him for fab rewards, 26k XP, and fairly nice rewards.


This of course cannot have been the standard measure for "mundane tasks" because hardly any game has the absolute writing brilliance of Baldur's Gate.


But if you ask me to be frank that elfroot picking in Dragon Age Inquisition was pretty insufferable, I would have to say, yes. Would picking elfroots just really trounce Anomen, Vionia, Aerie? Healing all around, and all.

NO.

MMO grind does not add value to PC gaming. If only mundane tasks where the BG era!

See about my post referring to what "mundane task" is in the Underdark of BG2 - and I would suggest respect to what Black Isle / Bioware was, and pioneered for RPG story telling as a whole genre, an industry even.


Are you in your twenties to throw such shade, or is this the corporate environment of yours?


Dragon Age 2 is in my book at par with PlaneScape Torment, as a most bold gaming media narrative.

So, yes, elfroot hortonomy fixation sucks. I absolutely hated DA:I for the grind.



But compared to the Witcher, I shall have been able to love, love, love whatever BioWare developed as a woman gamer, until DA:I where the horrible MMO grind was universal.



As to The Witcher universe: you do know Yennefer was written as a heavy handed bitch, so that us Geralts of this world could cast ourselves as the nice guys? You do know that Geralt coyly turned away from the tortured
Valette titties while us gamers looked on, just to distance ourselves from sexualised torture that was meanwhile expressly written for us?



So yeah, @chandra - elfroot picking is boring. But do have a bit of awareness before you attack. BW is a legend.


And woman gamers will always be able to enjoy a BW title, elfroots and all. As well as homosexual and lesbian gamers. And in case of DA:I, the pansexual ones.



Do come back to me to tell that CD Project RED empowers you to be so negative of peers. I perso find it out of line.


Not least because being a BW fan will be an equal joy of frustration to all gamers. I do love CD Project project red, but as a woman gamer, I never have felt as with BW.

Do you really not mind how hard it is to like CD Project RED games, as a woman gamer?


I still find it hard to think you are, as CD Project Red "blue", highlighting when BioWare goes amiss.



I hated, also, perso, Inquisition, as MMO grind. But compared to CD Project RED, I have always been able to take the good, as well, as the bad, as a woman gamer. And as much so, I suspect a man, gay, lesbian, queer, any gamer.


I just really, really bothers me that a blue one from a game maker that is Geralt all around criticizes the worst title of a developer that has actually achieved a lot.


How so?

In Divine Divinity you have to wash dishes.

And don't get me started on The Escapists.

A lot of good points raised. As an adventure gamer I've found the "needless" back and fourth or backtracking to locations to get this item for that object. Just having played Monkey Island 2 SE, it was a grindfest having to travel the three islands to get items you needed to complete quests. The devs even commented it was their design to increase the game's length. I didn't mind it so much back in '91 but today, it was overkill.

Actually, this sort of thing is appropriate if the game is meant to focus on that. In particular, that's the main reason I occasionally like to replay Dragon Warrior 1 on the NES (not the remake, as that drastically increased XP and GP rewards).

It's only when content is gated behind such "grind" that it becomes a problem.

Keep in mind that games like Cookie Clicker (in which the whole point of the game is to increase a number to the point where you get less familiar number names like "octilion" (= 10^27)) exist and can be quite fun.

Would you rather have a game that would not let you backtrack at all, causing you to be permanently stuck if you miss that item? (Some games actually did this.)

Incidentally, this sort of mandatory backtracking can make speedrun routing more interesting, as your goal is then to find a route through the game that minimizes the amount of backtracking required.