Jiro comments on Power and difficulty - Less Wrong

21 Post author: undermind 22 October 2014 05:22AM

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Comment author: Jiro 23 October 2014 08:54:39PM *  2 points [-]

Video games and roleplaying games give people the impression that all options have pros and cons, and are roughly pretty equal:

You obviously play a different type of video games than I do.

This is particularly acute in the case of RPGs, because

  1. They have so many statistics and abilities that it's almost impossible for the writer to balance everything, or in some cases to even try. (It is certainly not true that all Pokemon are equally good.)
  2. Boss battles and even some other battles are often set up as puzzles, where you have to use the right abilities on the right characters to win.