If I may engage in some good old-fashioned country lawyerin’ for the Prince Of Lies, while I agree that features have been removed from RPGs over the years, have the games really gotten substantially dumber?
More combat-focused, certainly, but that’s closer in spirit to pre-90s RPGs like Wizardry and Bard’s Tale than most fans of those games would let on. They have narrowed their focus to a single protagonist in a lot of cases, but there are plenty of well-respected games throughout the history of the genre that did the same. There are fewer nuanced role-playing options, but it could be argued that the ones that are still there are more meaningful. And so on.
I dunno, maybe it’s just an instinctive reaction to the phrase “dumbing down” that I have, but it seems to me that doing things like making the interface more intuitive to people who hadn’t already played a lot of cRPGs were net positives for the genre. It could be argued that the games have gotten less intellectual, and there’s no arguing that they’ve gotten less tactically interesting in a whole bunch of ways, but I don’t know that the genre should have continued as it was before the EEE-VIL consoles got ahold of it.
There are three things to blame for the so-called “decline” of cRPGs (which is not a narrative I subscribe to), in my opinion, and only one of those is inarguably the fault of the console boxes:
1) Console memory limitations. PC-only RPGs have always been distinguished by their vast, nearly seamless landscapes, whereas I still vividly remember starting up KOTOR on my Xbox and expecting Baldur’s Gate through a Star Wars lens, and being horrified at how tiny so many of the environments were. I didn’t understand what the eff memory was; I just knew the whole game felt hideously small.
On the orher hand, not only did I love the game, but I completed it. i never managed to get very far in Baldur’s Gate, because the size and scope of the game intimidated me. It wouldn’t now, so much, but my point is that the memory limitation led to tighter, more focused level design on Bioware’s part, which ultimately made it easier on me and people like me, who had always admired the IE games for their depth, but been frightened to play them because of that depth. Which leads me to my point: console memory limitations made RPGs feel much smaller, yes, but they also forced developers like Obsidian to hone their level design skills and make it easier for players to move around, which I don’t think is a bad thing at all for Project Eternity or the rest of the Kickstalgia bunch.
2) A lot of people would say gamepads here, and certainly, what allegedly feels best on a gamepad was the motivating factor behind a lot of these changes, but the real problem was the disdain for and ultimate elimination of menu-based interaction with the world, which can be done perfectly well on a gamepad. A lot of console players grew up playing the PS1 Final Fantasies, and I don’t know a single one who says that the well-designed menus of those games feel worse than real-time combat. In point of fact, a lot of them still feel that it’s superior to banging away at some mook in a game like Skyrim, and think the moment when FF went wrong was its introduction of true real-time elements to the combat. So there’s absolutely a big contingent of console players who are willing to play a menu-based game if it’s presented well.
The upside of the elimination of menu-based interaction to the genre as a whole is twofold: it forced developers to sweep away a lot of the crusty old bullshit that nobody actually liked about the old cRPGs and focus on intuitive design, and it forced them to think about the power of quality combat animation and proper visual feedback for the player.
Let’s face it: cRPGs have a history of crap visual feedback. Originally the feedback was text-based, which mitigated the issue a whole hell of a lot, but once the games started cutting back on or entirely eliminating the classic “all of your stats, equipment, etc. are visible, and the actual game is being played in a teeny-tiny box in the middle of the screen” GUI and text readout to focus on more immersive design (which was itself a net positive, I think), the visuals just weren’t enough to deliver the needed feedback adequately. You can see this in games as recent as Morrowind, where the player could appear to stab a monster, but actually miss completely, with nary a “You Missed!” in sight to contextualize it as a dice-roll game.
The intuitive design thing is an obvious benefit. It’s been taken too far in many cases in order to make the game idiot-proof, but Western RPG interfaces were hideously shonky, ultra-intimidating things until very recently, and that created a barrier to entry that needed to be lowered. The awful stay-outta-my-treehouse mentality those interfaces encouraged is still an issue, of course, but at least the interfaces themselves aren’t absolute shit now.
Obsidian’s experience in dealing with both of these factors on consoles will help Project Eternity immeasurably from an accessibility standpoint, which is important whether or not you want it to be.
3) The rise of MMOs, and of WOW specifically. I’m not even knocking WOW, because it’s foolish to knock a successful thing for inspiring imitators. It is a spectacularly well-crafted game; that’s something even I can see, and I pretty much hate it. But what it did was create a mentality among developers and/or publishers and/or players (don’t wanna blame anyone unfairly here) that all RPGs were about loot. Some people like to blame Diablo or Diablo II for that, but that’s bullshit. While both games were undoubtedly magnets for loot fiends, and while both games were popular, it wasn’t until WOW achieved global domination that we started seeing every single-player RPG developer going, “The loot in our game is epic!” and “Our fans always complain because the party member who leaves had some awesome gear!” and blah-de-blah.
I don’t care about loot. If it’s really visually impressive or has a neat story behind it, I might look at it for a few seconds, but the only thing I actually care about is what it does for me.
i will say, however, that the popularization of different types of crafting systems was probably a good thing for the genre as a whole. Oblivion had as much to do with that as WOW, but WOW is primarily to blame/thank for it. I think crafting and enchanting are nifty, but more importantly, they open up alternate avenues of evolution for cRPGs and give the player a path of meaningful advancement that doesn’t involve killing things.
Of course, most games completely balls it up, but I still think the idea is a good one, and Project Eternity’s implementation of it sounds aces.
Also, WOW has grown the size of the audience for cRPGs a hundredfold, which is great for everybody.
Okay, let’s see here, what was my original point…?
Ah, yes! Basically, I’m saying that the alleged “dumbing down” of cRPGs has, at the end of the day, been extremely beneficial to the genre in a lot of ways, and will be helpful to the Kickstalgia games when they’re released. The games themselves may not have always been to our taste, but the experience gained from making those games will result in better neoclassical cRPGs, which is good for everybody.
of defense, more like.
