Playing through Evil West, the PS2-DMC-style wild west vampire basher, I came across something that I’ve been seeing in more and more games lately: the ability to reset your character’s abilities and upgrades and start afresh (aka Respeccing). Borderlands has always been pretty generous with this stuff; Divinity: Original Sin 2 gives you a mirror to respec in to your heart’s content; even the tortuously difficult Elden Ring gives you plenty of opportunities to drain all the points from your character then slap them all back on in different places.
So the big question is: is this a good thing? Should games that involve leveling up and upgrade points and perky points and all the other kinds of points give us the freedom to respec, or should we live with and adapt to those big decisions we make? Or should it be somewhere in between: that we can respec our character, but we have to earn it first?
Here’s the thing: unless you’re one of those people who spends horse researching an optimal ‘build’ for a game then working their character towards that, many of us like to go into an RPG or other type of game blind. That means we can’t possibly anticipate whether, say, one upgrade path you like early on may get fully negated by another later in the game.
In Evil West, for instance, I invested quite a few points into upgrading the flamethrower, before new weapons came along, old ones got upgraded, rendering the flamethrower as nothing more than a lumpy old gas canister that I lugged throughout the game. Its plummet in my arsenal was swift and violent, leaving several hard-earned Perk points stagnating in obscurity. I already put in the work for those perk points by getting them in the first place, so should I not have the right to do with them as I please? Are we not all here to ultimately have fun, especially in a knowingly dumb-and-fun game where you’re a cowboy fighting vampires with an electrically charged gauntlet? Evil West certainly seems to think so…
Things change a bit when you enter RPG territory. I think there’s something to be said for adapting to your character’s strengths and weaknesses, and seeing where those take you. Games that are committed to that roleplaying immersion like Cyberpunk 2077, or Bethesda RPGs like Skyrim and Fallout 4, notably don’t let you respec (not until basically after you’ve beaten the game anyway), and I can see the logic there too.
With so many possibilities for approaching encounters in their vast simulated worlds, there’s something to be said for going with the flow, working with what you’ve got and integrating that into your experience. Not feeling like the Ladykiller perk is all that perky? No big deal, you’ll get another one soon enough. For me at least, it feels far more organic and immersive in these kind of games when I’m not obsessing over things like min-maxing, meta-builds, and all the other mathematical stuff that certain kinds of players sweat over. I want to make my own path through the game, and the design of Bethesda RPGs has always facilitated that, never punishing you for whatever kind of character you create and therefore not pressuring you into rethinking your virtual life decision.
In stark contrast, you’ll be hard pressed to create a good Elden Ring build if you’re not intimately familiar with From Software games and spend as much time researching stats, builds, and upgrades as you do actually playing the game (and yes, I’m being a little bit facetious). In most games this obscurity would be seen as a design flaw, but in FromSoft games it’s simply a longstanding part of the design.
There are bad builds and there are good builds in Elden Ring, and you can screw yourself over really quite badly. Towards the latter stages of the game, I was hit with the sudden realisation that my build combining Dexterity and Intelligence was a complete shitshow. Having envisioned myself as some kind of speedy dual-katana-wielding rogue with exceptional magical abilities, I ended up mediocre at both. Thank the Gods for Rennala and her respec tears, because otherwise I’d never have seen the end of the game. On the other hand, it felt like a bummer that the game that I had to fall back on a far more conventional build to see the end of the game.
FromSoft games have had respec options since the days of Dark Souls, and you almost feel like these options exist because the devs fully expect fledgling players to completely cock up their builds and make these games a nightmare for themselves (and they’d be right). I do respect the fact that, like so much in this series, you have to really work for these respecs, finding the rare requisite items out in the hostile world, where only a limited number of them exist. This feels a bit more elegant than the simple monetary approach in other games, like The Witcher 3, where 1000 Crowns will buy you one of the four Clearance Potions sold by merchants in the world.
All in all, there’s not really a particular reason why all games with a deep web of upgrades and abilities shouldn’t let people respec. Whether this should come at a cost really depends on the kind of game it is, but the greater the cost, the more it forces you to really think about your engagement with the game world, and isn’t that a big part of what RPGs are all about?
