The problem is that today a major developer is a company that makes few AAA games, while in the 80s & most of the 90s they were just companies that made a lot of "normal" games. And since they were cheaper, they could take risks.
It can be an interesting choice if you tie the game world to the predefined character, but it also constraint your choices. In AoD you have four or five predefined backgrounds that allow you to see the gameworld from multiple perspectives, thus opening and closing new paths, etc.
You can produce something original that has value either by combining previous ideas, or by going against the conventional wisdom, or both. Disco Elysium is innovative in his take on stats and skills, but it is really traditional in others (it involves character creation, dialogue trees, etc.).
He should be more famous though. Because his game is good. It's balanced (currently), has its unique style, and some innovative mechanics. I'd crowd-fund him any time. Even if the game will be actually played by my kids' generation.
Absolutely haram!
That’s because there are a lot of misconceptions about the nature of creativity and innovation. If your personal touch to a traditional genre has value, you are being creative. But you can’t have a quality traditional game without a personal touch, that something extra that makes the game stand out instead of being just another carbon copy. In other words, you can’t have “just quality” without creativity.
That was just a gimmick. IMO, the main innovations of Underrail is improving Fallout’s combat to a new level of sophistication, doing stealth gameplay right (not a minor feat) and the excellent crafting.
Did you even read the stuff I posted before about creativity? Do you want a few references on the subject? Of course not. You are too lazy for that. You prefer to post like a superficial retarded because you don't like to think.
By innovative you mean shit right?
No, not really. They live and die on how great the gameplay is and how well it is integrated into the storytelling, C&C gaming narrative and quests design and vice-versa.
Something is creative or innovative when it is original and has value. Let's concede that oddity system is original and focus on its value. The system was designed to avoid encouraging players to grind. Now ask yourself. Does it really do what it was intended to do? It doesn’t, because players will grind all the same, now looking for oddities instead of exp. That’s not just a matter of arbitrary taste. You can debate its intrinsic merits even if you disagree with the design motivations.
If anything is a gimmick, it's this, and it works only the first time. It's still appreciated though.
One thing I noticed is that the genre attracts artistic minded people that share prejudiced notions about creativity, the genre and its players. They don’t care about the specificities of gameplay of the genre that require numbers, THC formulas, stats, etc. They want to tell interactive stories. I want C&C in my cRPGs too, even when it is mostly constrained to dialogue boxes in a more passive fashion because they don’t have the resources to make all quests open. But that doesn’t prevent me from also wanting character building to matter in the gameplay (both in combat and dialogue), and I have an impression that these developers are all too eager to throw these important elements in the trashcan as another relic of traditionalist grognards, because they don’t have the STEM inclination that is required to do these things. You can say that doing combat system right requires a form of scientific creativity that most developers lack. The industry needs more designers with a scientific mindset.
Yeah, that’s like trying to understand the lessons classic music should learn from pop music. It’s a silly comparison.
I don’t buy that. Strategy games are more demanding than cRPG’s in the combat aspect and they always sell more. If anything, the focus on the narrative is hurting the sales. Besides, even if that was true, it doesn’t matter because they have a moral imperative to do their job right instead of destroying their own genre with an unsustainable business model, streamlined design and myths about the genre. When Tim Cain is saying that Fallout is too complicated because he is motivated to sell more units he is literally trying to kill the genre and destroying his own legacy in the process. It’s imoral and corrupt. They should feel bad about themselves.
It is. I like creative people trying new things to improve the genre. It is refreshing. I always use oddity system by the way. The oddities have those little stories in them. I always read the new ones. What it boggles the mind is how people tend to ignore how many things Styg improved in Underrail. The stealh gameplay is amazing. When did we have something like this in a proper cRPG?
Was that the only design goal? I don't know, but I do know it manages to achieve something else, intended or not. With a regular xp system, the level up experience becomes predictable and linear. "Oh, I've gotten 50% experience in the last two hours. Two more and I get a new level!". The oddity system completely did away with that. You could get a full level in a minute, or it could take hours. But it was certainly much more interesting and unpredictable. I tried playing through the game with the regular xp system once, and the enjoyability of the experience decreased quite a lot.
