Not Accessibility, but Dumbing Down

[Daemongar]

No, he's right. Not everyone speaks the words of numbers, some people live in the world of images, patterns, and words, glorious words! Shut them out? Give them no room at the table? No wonder RPGs are dying. People making folks get an advanced degree in numerology just to get a seat at the RPG table. Begone!

Would you rather have ELF +1 Dex/-1 Con (and sit up all night trying to figure that out!) or have

Spoiler

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Sigourn]

To the last sentence, this sounds like projection.

It sounds like reality. The reason classic RPGs don't sell is because they aren't accessible. If you want your RPGs to be doomed, keep shunning newcomers. My way guarantees everyone will be happy and games will make money.

 

[Alkarl]

To the last sentence, this sounds like projection.

It sounds like reality. The reason classic RPGs don't sell is because they aren't accessible. If you want your RPGs to be doomed, keep shunning newcomers. My way guarantees everyone will be happy and games will make money.

Your "way"? I'm sorry, other than shit posting, what exactly does your "way" do? You realize that even most of the Codex top rpgs are made for somebody and not everybody, right? Cause when you start making games for everybody, you might as well make them for nobody.

As I said previously, I don't care if some COD tard can appreciate an actual rpg. Most COD tards are total dude bros who aren't interested in games as a medium or rpgs as a genre in the slightest. There is a huge rift between your average dude-bro and most of the individuals lurking on the Codex. A rift the size of the Bootes void.

Rpgs sell well enough. There are new ideas being tried every day by smaller, independent studios. It would be great to see these guys given a Biowarean or Bethesda-esque budget for development and see what they produce. However, the reality is that this is a niche market. Most of these individuals aren't making games for the love of cash, they're doing it because they love games. Some of them probably started where most of us are now, dissatisfied with current industry trends, they made games they wanted to play. That is the way forward for the genre, Sigourn . Not patiently awaiting the next bug ridden cranial extraction.

You don't need 100 million dollars to make an rpg, and you don't need to sell 20 million copies to be successful. You don't need state-of-the-art water textures or hair meshes. You don't need every writer in budget fantasy. You don't need every hack director in bollywood. You need real game designers and a half decent idea.

 

[Sigourn]

Your "way"? I'm sorry, other than shit posting, what exactly does your "way" do? You realize that even most of the Codex top rpgs are made for somebody and not everybody, right? Cause when you start making games for everybody, you might as well make them for nobody.

You can very much make a deep RPG that everyone can play as long as you take into account that not everyone has decades of cRPG experience. It's exactly as shoving increasingly bigger dildos up your ass. A game developer's task, in order to make quality RPGs that sell a lot, is to properly make his games so that the complexity increases as you play it. If you make it incredibly complex from the get go, the game simply won't sell because a lot of people won't even bother learning to play a game that may not even be fun.

 

[thesheeep]

f you make it incredibly complex from the get go, the game simply won't sell because a lot of people won't even bother learning to play a game that may not even be fun.

Yeah, but for the majority of players, having to decide on 5 stat scores plus selecting maybe a small number of skills on character creation is already more than they can handle.
Because they are fucking idiots and there just is no other way to put it. Sorry to break your hippie fantasies, but yes, people come with varying qualities of brainpower, and no, they should not all be treated equally.

Of course there are those who could handle it but simply don't want to. Either at the moment or generally. But why would you even care about them? There's no way they'll ever like a stat-heavy game, no matter how late you introduce that complexity. It is absurd.

I'm all for not overwhelming people with a ton of numbers from the very start, at least optionally. For example, Arcanum's initial character creation is the basic example of "too much input" at the start. Instead, it should be a basic choice of directions to start with (maybe just selecting attributes) and the first real full stat screen should be shown after a few level-ups.
But what someone perceives as "a ton of numbers" varies wildly.

Any product that tries to please everyone will end up pleasing nobody. Compromise truly is the death of creativity.
It is much better to have a simple game for casuals and a complex one for the hardcore crowd than trying to create one game that will draw both in (hint: such a game doesn't exist, never has, never will).

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Would you rather have ELF +1 Dex/-1 Con (and sit up all night trying to figure that out!) or have

Spoiler

Nice picture, but it won't be truly accessible to gamers unless you add geometric shapes.

 

[Luckmann]

[...] it's not the same to be 20 and have played RPGs all your life, than be 20 and have played nothing but Call of Duty or FIFA.

[...]

This is true. The latter will get you the chambers when the revolution is over, while the former will earn you a seat in parliament.

 

[Iznaliu]

If you make it incredibly complex from the get go, the game simply won't sell because a lot of people won't even bother learning to play a game that may not even be fun.

This is half the problem with RPGs. The mechanics stay the same the whole game, so you learn what works and repeat it ad infinitum.

 

[Daemongar]

If you make it incredibly complex from the get go, the game simply won't sell because a lot of people won't even bother learning to play a game that may not even be fun.

Could you cite an RPG that suffered in sales for being too complex?

 

[Iznaliu]

Could you cite an RPG that suffered in sales for being too complex?

Pillars of Eternity sold 10 million copies, right?

 

[Daemongar]

Could you cite an RPG that suffered in sales for being too complex?

Pillars of Eternity sold 10 million copies, right?

Are you claiming PoE didn't sell a 10 million copies ... because it was too complex?

 

[Iznaliu]

Are you claiming PoE didn't sell a 10 million copies ... because it was too complex?

Yes.

 

[Sigourn]

Are you claiming PoE didn't sell a 10 million copies ... because it was too complex?

Yes. You faggot. It will be years before I bother to properly make a character because of its character creation.

 

[Iznaliu]

Yes. You faggot. It will be years before I bother to properly make a character because of its character creation.

It's not ULTRA-COMPLEX(TM), but it's too complicated for the general public, and that's what matters.

 

[Daemongar]

Are you claiming PoE didn't sell a 10 million copies ... because it was too complex?

Yes.

Any proof to back this up, or is this just a hypothesis of yours?

 

[Iznaliu]

Any proof to back this up, or is this just a hypothesis of yours?

Reading discussions about PoE on Reddit.

 

[Daemongar]

Any proof to back this up, or is this just a hypothesis of yours?

Reading discussions about PoE on Reddit.

Yeah, but that's a place for Retarded Peop... oh... sorry. Yeah. You are right. PoE hard! Make e-z 4 BIG sales! Hard? No sale! Me no want!

 

[KyivAfter12am]

Could you cite an RPG that suffered in sales for being too complex?

All of them? This is why RPGs sell worse than shooters.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Could you cite an RPG that suffered in sales for being too complex?

I'd argue that it in part affected Drakensang, and more importantly, its sequel, TRoT.

 

[Daemongar]

Could you cite an RPG that suffered in sales for being too complex?

All of them? This is why RPGs sell worse than shooters.

If RPGs were as simple as shooters, they would sell more?

 

[Luckmann]

Are you claiming PoE didn't sell a 10 million copies ... because it was too complex?

Yes.

Any proof to back this up, or is this just a hypothesis of yours?

It's hard to measure, but I have no difficulties believing it. There are tons of people that genuinely found Pillars of Eternity genuinely difficult, not just in terms of game difficulty, but also because of the rules. If you venture out of the Codex and to more mainstream venues such as the Steam and Reddit forums, it's full of people that seriously disliked Pillars of Eternity because it was seen as confusing.

I realize that this sounds patently absurd, but I've lost all faith in mankind. The average person is so average that they blend in, and when we interact with them, we assume that they're simpletons, but no, no, the average person is, as absurd as it sounds, below average. I've spent the last two years with full-grown adults with full-time jobs and families, and I swear that not a full half of them could read their native language fluently. Everyone one of you that have regular jobs with regular people, cherish it, because as long as they can stick to doing whatever the hell they're doing for a living, they can almost pass for something slightly above mammalian weeds.

Could you cite an RPG that suffered in sales for being too complex?

All of them? This is why RPGs sell worse than shooters.

If RPGs were as simple as shooters, they would sell more?

Objectively, yes. They wouldn't be RPG:s, of course, but they'd sell better, for sure. But they'd also be shit and have absolutely zero brand or customer loyalty. Rabid fans of things are usually niched, and represents a core of supporters.

Lose those and you're just another Activision or Blizzard, churning out the latest shit.

 

[Alkarl]

Any proof to back this up, or is this just a hypothesis of yours?

Reading discussions about PoE on Reddit.

I haven't seen the data myself, but I'll assume for arguments sake that you're right. PoE, unlike others you could have mentioned had a fairly decent marketing campaign, so that at least correlates with your assumption/conclusion.

The main problem with PoE, I would argue, is that it isn't necessarily complex, but needlessly obtuse. Especially during character creation, although it certainly doesn't end there. I'd personally like to dismiss PoE from the discussion as I didn't think it was very good. PoE had so much useless lore bloat and so many needless stats. It's easy to contrive that a game like PoE is complex when it heaps so much useless data at a player, but when you get down to it, its simpler than a lot of the games it was attempting to emulate, at least in gameplay.

 

[Sigourn]

Any proof to back this up, or is this just a hypothesis of yours?

Reading discussions about PoE on Reddit.

I haven't seen the data myself, but I'll assume for arguments sake that you're right. PoE, unlike others you could have mentioned had a fairly decent marketing campaign, so that at least correlates with your assumption/conclusion.

The main problem with PoE, I would argue, is that it isn't necessarily complex, but needlessly obtuse. Especially during character creation, although it certainly doesn't end there. I'd personally like to dismiss PoE from the discussion as I didn't think it was very good. PoE had so much useless lore bloat and so many needless stats. It's easy to contrive that a game like PoE is complex when it heaps so much useless data at a player, but when you get down to it, its simpler than a lot of the games it was attempting to emulate, at least in gameplay.

This is really the huge problem with Pillars of Eternity. Thinking about the character creation, I wonder how much of it actually makes a meaningful difference in the game, if any, and how it could have been replaced for something much easier to understand without worrying about "maybe I'm making the wrong decision".

 

[Luckmann]

Any proof to back this up, or is this just a hypothesis of yours?

Reading discussions about PoE on Reddit.

I haven't seen the data myself, but I'll assume for arguments sake that you're right. PoE, unlike others you could have mentioned had a fairly decent marketing campaign, so that at least correlates with your assumption/conclusion.

The main problem with PoE, I would argue, is that it isn't necessarily complex, but needlessly obtuse. Especially during character creation, although it certainly doesn't end there. I'd personally like to dismiss PoE from the discussion as I didn't think it was very good. PoE had so much useless lore bloat and so many needless stats. It's easy to contrive that a game like PoE is complex when it heaps so much useless data at a player, but when you get down to it, its simpler than a lot of the games it was attempting to emulate, at least in gameplay.

I'm not sure what you're saying. PoE is obtuse precisely because it tried to hide many of the inner workings in plain sight, trying to please both those that don't want to bother with the stats and those that like to see all of it and examine it. The fact that you didn't need to keep track of anything and could practically sleep your way through the entire game was considered a great success by Sawyer.

PoE doesn't heap any useless data at the player whatsoever. You can just ignore 99% of everything and just sorta go with what works based on the descriptions. And most of PoE:s mechanics are extremely simple, and not complex at all. If anything, PoE seemed to be deathly afraid of adding any complicated mechanics whatsoever, and actively shied away from things like hard counters and advanced rock-paper-scissor mechanics. Look at an ARPG like for example Grim Dawn and we can start talking about obtuse mechanics and having to follow a flow-chart in order to work out what things convert and how they interact with weapon damage vs. spell damage. But it's not considered difficult by the average fuckwit because you just run around and beat on things until they die.

It is the very concept of what PoE is that made the average consumer hesitant and afraid. These types of games are "complex" by design, in that you actually have to consider what you're doing. No amount of dumbing-down, "accessibility" or "streamlining" will take that hurdle away until you actually make it into a shitty nu-ARPG or Ciinumattic CYOA game, at which point the whole idea is lost anyway.

Either you capitalize on the strengths of the genre and build to appeal to actual fans of the genre, or you make a game outside of the genre and fuck off. Those are really the only two options.

Any proof to back this up, or is this just a hypothesis of yours?

Reading discussions about PoE on Reddit.

I haven't seen the data myself, but I'll assume for arguments sake that you're right. PoE, unlike others you could have mentioned had a fairly decent marketing campaign, so that at least correlates with your assumption/conclusion.

The main problem with PoE, I would argue, is that it isn't necessarily complex, but needlessly obtuse. Especially during character creation, although it certainly doesn't end there. I'd personally like to dismiss PoE from the discussion as I didn't think it was very good. PoE had so much useless lore bloat and so many needless stats. It's easy to contrive that a game like PoE is complex when it heaps so much useless data at a player, but when you get down to it, its simpler than a lot of the games it was attempting to emulate, at least in gameplay.

This is really the huge problem with Pillars of Eternity. Thinking about the character creation, I wonder how much of it actually makes a meaningful difference in the game, if any, and how it could have been replaced for something much easier to understand without worrying about "maybe I'm making the wrong decision".

The mechanical effects of character creation in Pillars of Eternity are abysmal, and while the choices obviously matter a little and may nudge things in your favour based on your playstyle, it ultimately does mean jack shit.

You could completely ignore the modifiers and just choose based on the descriptions, and unless you're playing on Path of the Damned or something, it will not matter in any meaningful way. If you are shitty enough at the game that you'll bitch about it being too hard, it has nothing to do about the attributes you chose.