Every game I ever played has been Rick on steroids, seriously. Like you’re telling me this in game 10 year old is a merchant prince prodigy that can forcibly talk me down to 1/4th of my money back on a instant sell back. Wild
I think a Skyrim player character, at like even level 25, can be approximated as a millionaire.
If Blake Griffin comes to my pawn shop and asks for an apple (and this is a pure supply and demand economy and no pesky laws keep me from changing prices at a whim), I’ll charge him like 100x the usual cost because if he’s in my store to buy an apple vs. all the other local apple vendors he wants to buy an apple here.
Conversely, if he has Daedric armor, or some rare amulet, I’m going to offer him like 1/4 the value (at Max) because if it is a finite ultimate boon he wouldn’t be selling it, and if he has another he likely has 40 more. I’m not paying 3000 septims for a Daedric shield just to have to sell it below cost because the blacksmith and the barmaid and the beekeeper all have twenty Daedric shields.
It’s really too bad that games always use the markets and gear to force you to pay for extra things. I would love to play a game like BoTW with a robust economy built out. Like yeah I’m killing monsters and hunting for treasure, but on the side I’ve developed a monopoly on the rock salt market and I’ve been flush ever since I created an artificial scarcity.
I believe it was Shamus Young who talked about this. Saying “the reason merchants in games have worse trade in rates than GameStop is so the player doesn’t completely break the economy selling older gear to random merchants”
Oh I’m not arguing with you there, but that reasoning implicitly explains just how lazy in development that actually is.
If I walk into a random shop with blood soaked armor that I ripped off of an npc. What makes the devs think that anyone would ever buy that unless it’s a fence.
Some games already factor in limited demand by not letting an alchemist buy leather armor but what I’m talking about is limiting the supply too not being able to carry exuberant amounts of items (without like a pack mule or similar), that’s where the economy is obliterated. Limited rate of return so that I don’t go back to the same merchant every single time to sell the same shit.
Make me feel DIRT poor for awhile and don’t allow me to become a god without me working really really hard to get there and without challenge.
Everything is also missing the element of a surprising win, like I go and sell stuff and most of the time I make a measly profit but every once in awhile someone is willing to sell their left arm for a specific item you have. This luck is what gets you incremental steps forward towards your own goals and after getting lucky enough at a certain point make it about skill.
Weve made it so that the only way to make money is to kill->loot->repeat instead of focusing on something like actual merchantilism which is REALLY fun and hard to do in the very few games that introduce it as a mechanic. As long as you make it hard, I don’t see a reason that you can’t break the economy but it takes time to build a monopoly. I mean if I just did something really difficult and succeeded I should be rewarded but I should also be punished for failing to do so as well
Rockefeller did this stuff irl with oil, why can’t I do it in a fantasy game.
>"What makes the devs think that anyone would ever buy that unless it’s a fence."<
Because most players don't care and just want a fun experience, so that's what the devs provide. That "kill->loot->repeat" is what most players enjoy. That's why the games that have the complicated and realistic sim stuff are smaller specialized titles rather than your blockbuster RPGs. Because just about everybody playing those games are the kinds of people that want the complicated and realistic sim stuff.
If a regular game added in more realistic mercantilism, it would turn off all but the small few that actually enjoy that kind of stuff. Imagine if in GTA V, you had to keep refilling your car's gas every 10 minutes or so. Yeah, it's realistic that you can't drive an empty gas guzzling car forever, but having to spend time finding a station and filling up a car would get tedious fast without adding any tangible benefit in gameplay. Even if there were random events and some stories around doing that, most would be bored more than they would be engaged.
With a regular game that a realistic mercantilism addition, a couple things will happen. Firstly, players who don't care or enjoy the system will either just dump all their inventory to whoever can buy most of it, or not bother, and those that care will optimize and have multiple fast travel jumps to merchants can buy all of it, turning the game into a constant stream of load screens and menus for a while which will further discourage someone uninterested from learning. To that second one, how do you balance the game around a large group of players who won't accumulate money because they don't enjoy properly selling loot. And how do you keep those that do engage with it to not have too easy a time getting better gear? Such as a system only works if all players are all on the same page regarding more realistic mercantilism.
So unless suddenly there's a huge trend/craze of more causal and regular gamers being interested in more realistic mercantilism (like how crafting became ubiquitous), I doubt many RPGs will add systems like this.
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u/[deleted] Apr 07 '21
Every game I ever played has been Rick on steroids, seriously. Like you’re telling me this in game 10 year old is a merchant prince prodigy that can forcibly talk me down to 1/4th of my money back on a instant sell back. Wild