RPG on Locodigital

The grind: farming XP without knowing what for

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:00:00 -0300

It was three in the morning. I was in the same dungeon, killing the same lesser dragon, collecting the same scale that dropped once every ten attempts. I needed forty. I was on the ninth. And the worst part: I knew exactly what I was doing, knew it was tedious, and went back in anyway.

That's the grind. And if you stop and think for two minutes, you'll realize you do it outside the game too.

Dragon Quest at 40: the RPG that stopped Japan

Sat, 23 May 2026 10:00:00 -0300

The Japanese government went so far as to ask that future releases in the series happen only at weekends. Not because the content was inappropriate — but because children were skipping school and adults were walking out of work to buy the cartridge on launch day. If you need a metric for a video game's cultural impact, that one is hard to beat.

On 27 May 1986, Enix released Dragon Quest for the Japanese Famicom. Forty years on — exactly four days from this Saturday — the franchise has racked up more than 97 million units sold, 11 mainline titles, and has just entered the World Video Game Hall of Fame. But what made this modest 1986 RPG shape an entire genre?

Side quest: the detours are worth more than the main mission

Fri, 22 May 2026 10:00:00 -0300

I've done this more than once: I open The Witcher 3 with the clear intention of pushing the main story forward, and three hours later I'm in the middle of a side quest involving a drunk ghost in a village that doesn't even appear on the main map. By the time I notice, it's midnight. I don't regret a second of it.

The logic of the detour

In an RPG, the main quest is what the game wants you to do. It's the marked path, the fixed destination, the "official" narrative. Side quests are everything that falls outside it — smaller missions, parallel stories, characters the game could have ignored and put in anyway.

Protagonist or NPC: do you drive your life or just exist in it?

Sat, 09 May 2026 14:00:00 -0300

Have you ever stopped in front of an NPC in an RPG and stared at them for a bit too long? One of those background characters who are always in the same spot, with the same line of dialogue as always, waiting for the protagonist to walk past. The town might have been destroyed, the villain might have come back from the dead, the world might be on fire — and there they are, perfectly serene: "Good morning, traveller. Careful on the roads out there." The other day I found myself wondering whether I'm that NPC in some story that isn't mine.

Unveil Baldur's Gate 3: An Epic Journey Through the World of RPGs

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 14:00:54 -0300

A parasite implanted behind your eye. A moral choice in the first few minutes that can define the rest of your campaign. A nautiloid mind flayer ship crashing in flames over the Sword Coast. That's how Baldur's Gate 3 welcomes you in — and it's only the beginning of a game that swept the 2023 Game of the Year awards.

The Return of a Dormant Legend

Larian Studios resurrected a franchise that had been dormant for more than twenty years. Early Access began in October 2020, and the full release didn't arrive until 3 August 2023, after more than six years in development. The result: over 174 motion-capture actors and a script running past 2 million words — longer than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.