10 Modern Video Game Tropes We're Totally Sick Of

9. "You Can Play However You Want!" (Artificial Customisation)

I adore God of War, but for as much as Sony and their Santa Monica team stated that you could "play your way" in regards to Kratos, my build of the character was 95% exactly the same as yours.

The difference? He could equip a few different percentage buffs and special attacks, but the vast majority of his abilities were identical.

You'll see this approach to marketing across the board though.

In an age where the "RPG" label increasingly means nothing other than "there are some numbers to make go up", it's resulted in what used to be that genre's big selling point - actual customisation of an avatar - being spread across every major release.

The issue is that on the other end of so much potential "customisation" is a character with animation sets, physics etc. that uniformly produce the same result.

Arbitrarily increasing damage or defence output while creating level paths and enemy types that don't change no matter what we do, isn't "playing our way".

Think about it: What even is an RPG in the current age?