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Interview Avellone, Ziets, Sawyer, Vincke and Kurvitz on the future of RPGs at Kotaku UK and PC Gamer

MRY

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I wrote poorly when I said "there's nothing like Gondor." Gondor in LOTR isn't just a fortified city -- it's an ancient city, whose antiquity and nobility is a central thematic element in the story. I guess maybe you could analogize the (unsuccessful) siege of Gondor to the (successful) siege of Asgard during Ragnarok, but, again, they feel very different to me. Gondor is like Byzantium, but it's not the image of Byzantium that we find in the sagas. There's no comparable weary, ever-dwindling ancient power that has stood against alien hordes for centuries in the sagas that I can think of. That's what I mean when I say Aesir in Asia -- there just isn't (to my recollection, which is often faulty) any sense of a lost, ancient homeland like that. While many saga heroes are exiled or go viking, home isn't some high civilization, it's just farms and wooden halls. When I say "fantasize about," I mean fantasize about as one's own lost greatness.

As for people claiming Tolkien "just ripped off the Volsung Saga," I would read this as a kind of truthful hyperbole (surprisingly useful phrase!) that means something more like, "Tolkien borrowed liberally from Norse sagas."
Eh, maybe I'm just prickly about it, but when I was a kid (as I wrote about in the recent FG update), "Tolkien copied Wagner" was a very deliberate pejorative not used to acknowledge Tolkien's genius resuscitation of largely lost lore, but instead to suggest that Tolkien:sagas :: Terry Brooks:LOTR. (Not that the critics would've known who Terry Brooks is.)
 

G Ziets

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Clearly I stand corrected on this point. As a kid in the 80s, I wasn’t familiar with the RPGs you cited above, JarlFrank … but I wish I had been because I probably would have loved them.

I remember many of the games listed by MRY (especially Starflight, Savage Empires, and Martian Dreams), though I always perceived them as outliers in contrast to Might and Magic, Ultima, Bard's Tale, the D&D Gold Box games, etc. that (at least in my experience) dominated that era. But I’m happy to concede the point.

That said, I do retain my overall optimism about the future of nontraditional RPGs. The relative success of recent, nontraditional indies (AoD, Shadowrun, Banner Saga, Sunless Sea, and so on) gives me more hope for the future of such games than I had a few years ago (or in the 80s / 90s). When large and mid-sized studios see nontraditional indies achieve some financial success and public interest, I think they’re more likely to venture into new territory… albeit slowly, cautiously, and with much trepidation.
 

Neanderthal

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Eh, maybe I'm just prickly about it, but when I was a kid (as I wrote about in the recent FG update), "Tolkien copied Wagner" was a very deliberate pejorative not used to acknowledge Tolkien's genius resuscitation of largely lost lore, but instead to suggest that Tolkien:sagas :: Terry Brooks:LOTR. (Not that the critics would've known who Terry Brooks is.)

Personally I don't think copying/being influenced by is particularly egregious as a creative technique, mankind builds on previous iterations of ideas and themes, and the creator adds his own contribution for the next generation to (ideally) add to and improve. Though i'd never say Tolkien copied Wagner, as Saxo Grammaticus absolutely butchered the Sigurdrsaga.

I've always created campaigns and settings from a confluence of two or more ideas that spawn a more or less unique offspring.

Tolkien was an Elf propagandist to a disgusting degree however.
 

CyberWhale

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That said, I do retain my overall optimism about the future of nontraditional RPGs. The relative success of recent, nontraditional indies (AoD, Shadowrun, Banner Saga, Sunless Sea, and so on) gives me more hope for the future of such games than I had a few years ago (or in the 80s / 90s). When large and mid-sized studios see nontraditional indies achieve some financial success and public interest, I think they’re more likely to venture into new territory… albeit slowly, cautiously, and with much trepidation.

IMO, whenever you guys are pitching these kinds of non-fantasy settings to your bosses or publishers, you should always point your finger to Ubisoft's success.
 

buffalo bill

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The relative success of recent, nontraditional indies (AoD, Shadowrun, Banner Saga, Sunless Sea, and so on) gives me more hope for the future of such games than I had a few years ago (or in the 80s / 90s).

Sorry, but this is a bad list. Age of Decadence is great, but the other games are mediocre to bad. Any list of good modern games should start with BOTH AoD AND Underrail—a truly great game made (mostly) by only one person. Underrail dammit! But also, Neo Scavenger, Serpent in the Staglands (this is more of a flawed gem, admittedly), Caves of Qud, and Infra Arcana: THESE (along with Underrail and AoD) are the best modern games (with interesting mechanics, good writing and unique settings), not the ones you list. And they are all made by one or two people.

I perhaps sense a bias of some sort, perhaps toward thinking only games made by mid-sized or large studios with decent budgets can be good. It turns out the opposite is (closer to) true.
 

JarlFrank

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Clearly I stand corrected on this point. As a kid in the 80s, I wasn’t familiar with the RPGs you cited above, JarlFrank … but I wish I had been because I probably would have loved them.

I remember many of the games listed by MRY (especially Starflight, Savage Empires, and Martian Dreams), though I always perceived them as outliers in contrast to Might and Magic, Ultima, Bard's Tale, the D&D Gold Box games, etc. that (at least in my experience) dominated that era. But I’m happy to concede the point.

That said, I do retain my overall optimism about the future of nontraditional RPGs. The relative success of recent, nontraditional indies (AoD, Shadowrun, Banner Saga, Sunless Sea, and so on) gives me more hope for the future of such games than I had a few years ago (or in the 80s / 90s). When large and mid-sized studios see nontraditional indies achieve some financial success and public interest, I think they’re more likely to venture into new territory… albeit slowly, cautiously, and with much trepidation.


Personally, I'd say the landscape hasn't really changed that much. The majority of RPGs is still set in relatively standard fantasy worlds. Back in the 80s, we had tons of D&D style Tolkienesque fantasy, but along with it we had games like the ones I mentioned above. In the early 90s, it was the same: we had games like Megatraveller, Planet's Edge, the Buck Rogers Gold Box games, Elvira, Worlds of Ultima: Martian Dreams, Spelljammer and others, and Dark Sun which is D&D but not the usual high fantasy setting. Along with that, we had plenty of more standard fantasy like the Ultima, Wizardry, and Might and Magic sequels, and plenty of others which would be too much to list. When we get to the late 90s and early 00s it's the same again: a few non-standard settings like Fallout, Planescape Torment, Morrowind, Deus Ex, VtM: Bloodlines, Knights of the Old Republic, but also plenty of more standard fantasy like the Diablos, Baldur's Gates, Divine Divinity, Neverwinter Nights, etc.

I don't think the ratio of standard high fantasy to different settings has changed much. As far as I can see, it has been relatively constant throughout the years, especially when we look at all the games that are released, not just the big well-known ones. Those I linked up there from the 80s weren't the most well-known ones of their era, and are definitely not well-known now. But there are just as many obscure RPGs that are merely simple clones of popular fantasy RPGs, so there's kind of a balance in the ratio of standard high fantasy to other stuff, both among the more well-known and among the lesser-known games.

Let's look at the modern age now: we got Torment: Tides of Numenera, the Shadowrun Returns series, Mass Effect, Wasteland 2, Bethesda's Fallouts, and plenty of others I'm probably forgetting right now, but we also have Pillars of Eternity, Black Geyser that just kickstarted, Jeff Vogel's new Kickstarter which is also for a high fantasy game, Bard's Tale 4, Divinity: Original Sin, Skyrim, Grimrock, and Realms Beyond (on which I myself am in the dev team :M ), and likely plenty of others I'm probably forgetting right now.

I'd say the balance of traditional fantasy vs. more unique settings is roughly the same as it has always been throughout the history of PC RPGs. They've always ventured into new territory, but traditional D&D style high fantasy has always been the majority, and this will likely stay the same in the future, too. I'd love to see some different settings be explored by RPGs in the future, sure, but there are some games I've been waiting for since the 90s but they weren't made yet, so I dunno. Especially in the realm of science fiction we're still seeing very few RPGs (and by scifi I mean stuff set in space; we've had Mass Effect, and Iron Tower is now working on a game set on a generation ship, but other than that? Not much).
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
IMO it's more than just looking at the ratio of "high fantasy to other". I think there's a difference in the way developers approach these concepts now. The older RPGs feel like they sort of unconsciously drew from a shallower but wider pool of geek culture. Today when somebody does something non-high fantasy it seems much more deliberate, and there are genres that are conspicuously absent (eg, other than Mass Effect nobody else can seem to get a decent space opera RPG off the ground).

Besides the post-2000s movement towards DEEP LORE which we've spoken about before, I think another factor here is the great success of SSI's D&D-licensed games in the late 1980s, which seems to have pushed developers towards more self-consciously straight-laced fantasy adaptations (especially among non-blobbers - Might & Magic and Wizardry got to keep on being weird). A guy from G Ziets' generation might have that particular gestalt in mind when he describes old RPGs as "Tolkienesque" monster-slaying games.
 

Fred

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Why Kotaku tho, it's like releasing a car and going to talk about it on the Vegan Pedestrian Magazine.
 

buffalo bill

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Infinitron why the fabulously optimistic rating? Have you played Caves of Qud or Infra Arcana? The first is certainly one of the best and most ambitious games I've ever played—better than Underrail, and approaching the greatness of my favorite 80s and 90s games—and has a nearly perfect steam score, with many ratings for a game with traditional roguelike mechanics and visuals.
 
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Grab the Codex by the pussy
Infinitron why the fabulously optimistic rating? Have you played Caves of Qud or Infra Arcana? The first is certainly one of the best and most ambitious games I've ever played—better than Underrail, and approaching the greatness of my favorite 80s and 90s games—and has a nearly perfect steam score, with many ratings for a game with traditional roguelike mechanics and visuals.
What you need to understand is that the taste of most cRPG players is a natural expression of their superficial personalities. They judge games based on looks (graphics), pedigree (status) and what is the next big thing (group thinking). If you think that you can brush aside this lack of individuality and autonomy even for a moment, you are deluded. You can’t dismiss the core of their personality with arguments, because that’s a way of looking at the world.
 

ScrotumBroth

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In
IMO it's more than just looking at the ratio of "high fantasy to other". I think there's a difference in the way developers approach these concepts now. The older RPGs feel like they sort of unconsciously drew from a shallower but wider pool of geek culture. Today when somebody does something non-high fantasy it seems much more deliberate, and there are genres that are conspicuously absent (eg, other than Mass Effect nobody else can seem to get a decent space opera RPG off the ground).
Space operas are continuously covered by a variety of strategy and sim genre, I would think it would take a truly original vision to make something stand out.

Besides the post-2000s movement towards DEEP LORE which we've spoken about before
Could you be as kind to link this please?
 

Trashos

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I haven't played Underail much (my eyes couldn't take it last time I tried, unfortunately), but I can see its Oddities system being the answer to the "killing everyone is always the optimal solution" problem. So it's possibly serious innovation, if it catches on.
You should try again. It is worth it. The problem with this system is at time passes youl receive more and more oddities you don't need for killing certain types of enemy, including enemies you are forced to fight over and over again because they respawn on the map.

You know what, I just did. Cheers.
 

l3loodAngel

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Never heard about any of these people. Here in Obsidian we're more interested it hiring talent from the extended Urhuhart family.
Judging by your performance you get your talent from discount isle for broken or otherwise damaged employees. And then they are microed by coon and/or others. Hence this is nor a joke, nor it’s funny.
 

DeepOcean

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All this talk of "tolkienistic fantasy" here and there, ignores the reason why most people like fantasy, the romantic individualism. You can easily make a "realistic" fantasy game without romantic individualism and it will bomb hard, no, most people don't give a single fuck to lore and how well historically accurate it is put together and "realistic sounding" it is, if the setting lacks this romantic individualistic idea that is the true selling power. People tend to say people don't like lower magic settings but this isn't true, the question isn't high, low or medieval fantasy but how it is done.

By romantic individualism, I mean the notion that an individual has value and can change things based on will power and strength alone, we are mostly city dwellers nowdays and we feel like ants on a anthill but nature didn't make us to live like ants but to live like hunt gatherers. The life of a hunt gatherer is a life of constant life and death struggle with nature, of changing between the dangerous chaos of nature and the comforting safety of social order where everyone on the tribe knew each other by name and could remember each other individual accomplishments of those that are alive and those that died. The individual is a hero that fights chaos, overcome it and is praised by the community because his power made it stronger.

Nowdays, the social order feels like alienation where people live on huge cities where they are just numbers for demographic studies and binding universally accepted institutions that made communities possible are weak and dissolving. People will laugh on your face or think you are naive if you show even a little of romantic ideals of individual power, this is specially true now where people exaggerate immensely the forces of "oppression" so they are free of individual responsibility. If you assume responsibility on the modern world, you won't be well compensated and people will try to take advantage of you, trying to offload their responsibility into you.

We like to feel powerful as individuals with the world around us recognizing that power as something good. The overwhelming nihilism of the big cities make people wish to escape to fantasy but fantasy don't need to be like Tolkien to be successful.

Developers misunderstand this as turning the player on some kind of demigod chosen one on a Tolkien copy setting, this is the lazy obvious choice. It is a choice that works but people that defend this is the only way to do it are lying and just want to hide their laziness and lack of creativity.

You can do your setting the way you want, you just need to be creative about it. You can make your story be on a dark fantasy world where life means nothing and you are an genetic engineered monster hunter or that you are a barbarian warlord that by pure steel willpower became a king or that you are a space commander that don't take orders and do what is right when the authorities are evidently wrong and only you can see the threat, you can be a vault dweller that needs to save his vault alone and by his actions can stop a mutant invasion where everybody else is oblivious.

You just need to preserve that core of romantic individualism and personal power for change, for the love of God, no, lore dumps won't save your ass, most players will just skip it mercilessly, no, don' t try to overly diminish the player and treat him like a schump to show how "edgy" your setting is, don't go over philosophizing over the nature of reality when the basic heroic romp you didn't even figured out well, don't even go to historical realism if you didn't even figure out how to make the player work as a force of change and individual power within the context of your story.

The great power of the chosen one story is that it is quick to setup, you can pretty much say to the player he is the chosen one on the first 10 mins, and even on this case, Morrowind writers took a very clever route on this tired trope, it is a pity that Bethesda just said fuck it and gone with generic garbage since then. You need to market the romantic individualism and how the player will be a hero within the rules of your setting, just take the key points of fantasy and make it as explicit as you can, you are a hero, bad shit is happening, chaos is everywhere and by some reason, superior genes, the authorities are dumb or any other excuse, you alone can save the day and people will love you for it.

If you fail to do this and create an atmosphere where the average player feels this empowerment, no amount of codex approved combat or choice and consequence will save your game. You need to market you game with the basic heroic romp as clear as water and as obvious as a brick wall on the way of the player on the first 10 mins of the game, after that is set, you can run your imagination wild. It needs to be something as obvious as "you are the chosen world that will save the world from some deep scary shit." but not this lame and cliche. You must make the position you are offering the player being an attractive one and no, saying the player is a Watcher when he probably don't fucking know what is a watcher and what a watcher does and why he is special is a dumb move that will lead most players not finishing act one and not buying the sequel.
 

Beastro

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To Ziets, this slow expansion beyond the realm of twenty-sided dice and Vancian magic reflects the advance of video games as a medium, in the same way as early television programs like The Twilight Zone resembled theatrical productions more than the elaborate multi-camera setups of later decades. “As the art form evolved, and creators discovered techniques that were unique to television, that gradually moved further and further away from the techniques of theatre,” says Ziet. “TV got better and came into its own because creators learned what worked best for their medium, but in the early days, they had to start with what they knew. I see RPGs in much the same way.”

And TV was better then as I've found out in the last few years watching old shows from the 50s and early 60s 75% of the time now.

It seems silly at first, but then you realize that the story and the themes and ideas each episode dealt with came first. Same reason why you had almost no continuity with guest actors playing different roles even a few episodes apart - why stick to a rule that someone's been seen once already in a show when an awesome character actor was perfect for both episodes roles and made each one all the better (Good example being DeForest Kelly who played a damn nasty bad guy and a decent good guy despite his acting all being variations of the Bones McCoy we know him for).

What he calls evolution was just new rules that wound up straight jacketing TV more and more into style over substance as they became cemented.

“I’ve noticed that Fallout has removed some elements and added others depending on the game,” says Avellone. “I suspect that’s done to make progression easier — easier for a more casual user to understand... Players expect quest-markers, an auto-map, easy equipment comparisons.

They did? I don't remember any of that in Fallout 2 or Tactics~ :M

ofc his works was not so symbolic as his closest friend C.S. Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia" (Aslan was a fucking Jesus Christ reference=)

The first has him allude to the kids that they know him in their world by another name.
 
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MRY

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DeepOcean I agree with this assessment, and I would add that this kind of romanticism is not only good business, it's the decent way to treat other human beings (in this case your players). Trying to persuade people that they are powerless is the ultimate kind of alienation -- you are not merely depriving them of the tangible fruits of their labor, you are trying to persuade them that there are no fruits of their labor, tangible or otherwise, everything is fruitless and everyone is powerless. Even if this were true (and I don't think it is), it is a miserable truth that can be overcome only if we disbelieve. Games are all educational, and one of the best lessons they can teach is confidence and commitment to improvement.
 

Beastro

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Trying to persuade people that they are powerless is the ultimate kind of alienation

What's interesting is what people do when put in such a position - they rebel.

Take the cut scenes in Half Life 2 or a modern TES game and what they're famous for - people dicking around doing silly things during them "breaking immersion". The designer and the player are at odds with one another with the former not giving the later anything to do but sit around listening to dialogue, but enough freedom to avoid doing that, and so they destroy whatever verisimilitude the game has built out of a desire to gain freedom and power, even if it's only to spite the spirit of the game whether they know it or not.

To analogize Saruman to Loki would be a considerable stretch; he may be a defector from the wizard-gods and he has a trickster's tongue, but his motivations are entirely different and his whole technological angle is different.

This doesn't even touch on the whole aspect of Sauron remaining a servant of Melkor even after de facto inheriting his position and authority. When he raised cultic worship of Melkor in places like Numenor, it wasn't as a cynical motive of a modern atheistic power player only out for himself, but as the leading member of his congregation that fully believed in him and his ambitions even if his master was cast into the Void.

Obviously, "fan fiction on bible" is even more absurd, but I don't like when people try to trivialize Tolkien's own genius not just in researching and hybridizing, but also in outright creation.

It's all the more annoying given that he hated allegory precisely because he felt it's spirit was pure unoriginality, that you simply took someone else's ideas and stories, switched the names around and few other thing to make them more symbolic, and acted as if it were your own.

Tolkien was highly aware of the fact that all new ideas draw on old ones and have one foot in each realm, and he always worked to make something new from what inspired him, which is why we can point at his work, or something like Star Wars and note what may seem unoriginal, but that misses what was more than just a new spin on old ideas that went into both that made them stand on their own (at least the latter did until recently).

People forget that that's the sweet spot where someone brings something new, but it isn't so new that it comes off comepltely alien to the audience, often too heavily front loaded to understand.
 
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Mr. Hiver

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The Hero with a Thousand Faces is certainly an important, even fundamental feature players expect to experience in games.
It is one of the fundamental archetypal expressions of meaningful existence - evolutionary and biologically strongly imprinted into males of the species, although its not limited only to males. There is nothing "romantic" about it.

As every Bucko should know these days.

But its possible to introduce such feature badly, superficially and lousily, as we can witness in a lot of games. That causes rejection, not exactly against the core idea although it may look like that expressed by less inteligent, but against it being done badly, superficially and lousily.

Not in the least because cRPG games are creations in which all the important parts depend on and are influenced by other critically important parts.
So getting one feature right isnt enough. The novelty is extremely important feature in human psychology in general. We all get fed up with repetition of anything and emotionally positively react to any kind of novelty.
This is also a biological and evolutionary feature physically chiseled into us.
But because cRPG games are complex creations with several critically important and interconnecting features - the novelty of settings and stories cannot be the whole answer.
Especially if that novelty works against the fundamental idea of archetypal human meaningful behavior and tries to undermine it or make it irrelevant. And especially if the novelty is lacking in improvements of quality.
Novelty without quality is a vacuous superficial thing that only serves to trick people in short term.

Compare how you would feel and what you would prefer if you would chose between something that has superficial novelty, and something that is a novelty but also contains quality and various improvements.
Whatever that thing was.

Thats why its critically important to innovate (but innovate with the aim of improvements of quality) in all of these features, especially the gameplay mechanics.
The games i consider such innovators and examples of proper evolution of the genre were Fallouts, Planescape Torment and MotB.
Because in those cases the gameplay mechanics affected the story and the narrative (quests and their C&C) that the player creates by playing, while the choices in the story and the quests narrative affected the gameplay mechanics. Thus the full integration of of these critical features were achieved - in ways that were innovative and improvements in general.
None of those games did it perfectly, but they did it good enough to clearly point out thats the correct path to take and improve on.

In more recent times only games like AoD and DoS provided some kind of true innovation, (I haven't played Underrail or few others that could be noted here) although in case of DoS it was limited to mechanics - which caused a lot of criticism for its story, setting and the playing narrative, which were of the superficial and lousily implemented "heroic" variety. DoS2 then went the opposite way, trying to improve the story and narrative but devolved the mechanics, or kept them the same in some cases.
AoD went down the path of reducing the "Hero" archetype in its story, setting and the lore - but not in the gameplay itself, because me or my character are still the protagonist and effective instigator of changes in the world.
And, wouldn't you know it, it got a lot of criticisms because of sense of reduced agency of the player. Conflated and probably enhanced by pushing hard skill checks too far.

I believe the right path to take is the one between these two extremes of presenting the hero archetype lousily and superficially (including any superficial "irony" or sarcasm) and trying to exterminate it.
I know how to do it too, but im gonna keep that for myself. I don't think my way would be the only way either.

Even in action RPGs which lower limits of character abilities in favor of player skills the best ones are those where the player cannot directly override the character he is playing with.
Which is why Witcher 3 is considered a good game. The player cannot override Geralt character and just go Axi raping around. While Geralt presents a quality type of archetypal hero - by not being a superficial lousy kind.
You can go killing every NPC in the world, but thats an irrelevant, nonsensical and superficial gamey option which immediately destroys the whole story and the entire game.
Keeping the character strongly defined, but not distorted into superficial nonsensical and one dimensional hero, is what also allows the morality themes to be complex rather then liquefied into meaningless ambiguity.
In turn, such approach to morality issues and themes allows the character to remain strongly defined. The Wild Hunt excels at providing several narrative opportunities where you can experience exactly what a Witcher is supposed to be and how one as Geralt is supposed to behave. It doesn't keep that level of quality across all quests and sub quests, of course, but there are several high points one can point at and say: this, this is the spice.


Developers misunderstand this as turning the player on some kind of demigod chosen one on a Tolkien copy setting,
Superficial, lousy and distorted copy.


To conclude, - the fundamental feature of cRPG games are the limits on the gameplay options imposed through various character abilities that the player must shape and evolve to succeed, but cannot directly override.
This fundamental core feature enables emergence of all other features of cRPGs - including the story, the narratives, and C&C. This creates the specific RPG type of gameplay where the player controls the strategic and meta options - while he cannot directly override limits imposed through character abilities on the immediate in-game options.
If the best stories told are character based, and they are - so they must be in cRPGs because that transcends the change of medium from solid linear story imprinted on the paper to a virtual, changeable and interactive medium of video games. The difference is that in cRPGs the character is defined and constructed through various abilities he has, attributes, skills, traits, perks and so on - but the basic concept of constructing an experience based on a specific character remains the same.
 

Neanderthal

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To me it's always been about believable strengths and weaknesses, Geralt for instance has a specialised field of expertise but outside of that flounders. Obviously if we think about it logically all of his supermutant skills are bullocks, but you just need a little internal consistency and set up to justify even the most outrageous abilities. Reinforce these with game play advantages and disadvantages and you're golden in my book. A bad example would be any Bioware protagonist, excels because the story demands it and is lauded and turned to even when unworthy.

A big part of this is facing fitting antagonists, clever, able and to be feared rather than doomed to fail because the hero is so awesome. Letho was Fucking quality in this respect, except for his "victory" in the Elven baths which is as forced, clumsy and unexplained as the usual bad protagonists victories.
 
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1) I think these people are generally all over the place and feel like they have to say sweeping things about change and progress and blah and blah and generally just assume progress and change is good for its own sake.

2) Many of the things they say are just wrong. Rpg's don't try to put you in the skin of one person (some do, some don't), and Rpg's are not better in my estimation when they try to tell big stories, often they are much worse.

3) I am not sure they really know why their games sell, or in some cases don't sell, or why one game is poplar and another is not. They may think they do, and they have a lot of guesses, but I am not certain they they actually know. I think they are often wrong and attempt and hope what is true is that some particular fetish they really like or hope emerges is the TRUE direction RPG's are moving in the future.

4) Honestly some of the best RPG's I have played have had almost no story, or terrible story and involved many characters or whatever...I don't think people necessarily want movie simulators. They may think they do, and say they do, but I am not convinced.
 
Joined
Jul 8, 2006
Messages
2,930
It's really hard to know how successful games were back then -- sales data is hard to come by. Starflight apparently sold over a million copies. Starflight, Wasteland, QFG 2, Buck Rogers, The Savage Empire all pulled sequels. All of those games are pretty memorable.

The other thing is that "all fantasy to some degree" is quite a fudge from "Tolkienesque, monster-slaying fantasies." The M&M games don't feel "Tolkinesque" at all -- they are much more Piers Anthony. Ultima has some Tolkienesque qualities, to be sure (the ~Ring Wraiths), but it's pretty reductive to call Ultima IV onward "monster-slaying fantasies." The settings really aren't particularly Tolkienian, either.

If you consider it an RPG, Pirates! was quite successful. Same deal with Elite.

But I guess more importantly than all this, you're totally changing George's point which was not that non-"Tolkienesque, monster-slaying fantasy" RPGs were unsuccessful early on, but that they simply didn't exist because developers had P&P tunnel vision and couldn't imagine such radical notions, and that it took decades of distance from P&P and of artistic evolution for these new settings to be explored. But that's hogwash. Early RPG developers were wildly creative with settings and rules; it may be that over time market forces narrowed things down toward fantasy and monster-slaying, but that would prove the opposite of George's point -- that evolution was reducing, rather than increasing, the eccentricity of RPG developers' visions. Put otherwise, mainstream RPGs today aren't in the era of Hitchcock and Welles breaking free of the shackles of stage plays -- they're in the era of Disney-Marvel market-based formulas.

[EDIT: This all sounds more annoyed than I really am. It's not a big deal, I just think that it's a kind of a "medieval people thought the world was flat" bad myth to think that early cRPG developers couldn't imagine deviating from P&P norms.]

exactly. I was going to say the same thing about the marvel super hero thing. Pretty soon the only movies to be released will be super hero movies it appears (exaggeration but, still...). I think 20 are slated to be released next year or something?
 
Joined
Jan 18, 2018
Messages
1,301
Grab the Codex by the pussy
We like to feel powerful as individuals with the world around us recognizing that power as something good. The overwhelming nihilism of the big cities make people wish to escape to fantasy but fantasy don't need to be like Tolkien to be successful.

Developers misunderstand this as turning the player on some kind of demigod chosen one on a Tolkien copy setting, this is the lazy obvious choice. It is a choice that works but people that defend this is the only way to do it are lying and just want to hide their laziness and lack of creativity.

You can do your setting the way you want, you just need to be creative about it. You can make your story be on a dark fantasy world where life means nothing and you are an genetic engineered monster hunter or that you are a barbarian warlord that by pure steel willpower became a king or that you are a space commander that don't take orders and do what is right when the authorities are evidently wrong and only you can see the threat, you can be a vault dweller that needs to save his vault alone and by his actions can stop a mutant invasion where everybody else is oblivious.
You are ignoring how much players’ expectations are influenced by their previous experiences in gaming and other cultural influences. The very fact that developers are always massaging their egos is enough to justify this is a core feature of good design. It won’t be long before romances becomes a mandatory mechanics alongside base building and crafting. People are dumb. If developers treat them as intelligent, they will get burned in the process.

The other aspect that is missing in your picture is that a more realism directly affects (restrict?) the options of the player with the game world. The notion that it is just a story thing in the background is misguided. The moment to moment gameplay will reflect this mindset.
 

Fred

Learned
Joined
Apr 23, 2018
Messages
128
Why Kotaku tho, it's like releasing a car and going to talk about it on the Vegan Pedestrian Magazine.


Looks like it yeah. If you like supporting a magazine that hates you, it's your right. Or perhaps you're a pansexual demiqueer dragonkin multiclassed marxist gamer so you see nothing wrong with their editorial line. I don't like reading a magazine that tells me I'm a nazi bigot for not hating certain games. There are enough corrupt game sites to not choose this one.
 

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