Fate of the Middle Class RPG

[Doktor Best]

You also may not forget that AAA Rpgs in the recent past had the hardware limitations of the former console generation. Developers were mostly forced into small corridor levels no matter if they wanted them or not.

Now they are off the leash, they have the possibilities to create vast level structures. They only have to learn how to use that ressource, how to fill those big levels properly and maybe out of the seas of aaa productions we will get some other pearls like Witcher 3 or Fallout NV.

As far as your question goes, i dont prefer AAA Rpgs over middleclass rpgs or vice verca. I like variety in my gaming and when i want action and decent cinematics with good VA i am glad i can grab a game like Witcher 3 and have fun with it.

The majority of good rpgs that come out nowadays are still "oldschool" though. And i cant say that any of the big kickstarter rpgs failed me miserably. They definitely have a future in my book.

 

[Longshanks]

I've not not found any improvement in AAA RPGs, maybe I need to play NV and TW3? Tried the former but I just can't get into these large open world games, so the shift to those is doing nothing for me. I can play GTA but find any similar sized open world RPG far too tedious, it needs to be really good to overcome that. The mid-sized RPGs are still far better than the AAAs to my taste, though I've spent more time this year on indies (to be honest it's mostly AOD). I see character based reactivity as far and away the most important RPG element and most games simply don't deliver, AOD does.

I don't think it's impossible for AAA developers to make an RPG I'd play, they do it in other genres, but it needs to be a more focused game not depthless, watered down crap with size of map being its greatest feature.

 

[Gregz]

Wasteland 2 D-cut, D:OS, Underrail, Age of Decadence, the Shadowruns...

All of these were great after a certain patch threshold, they made money, and the people who made them are making more of the same types of games.

While we're not returning to 12 such games a year, things are better than they were in the mid-to-late 2000s.

 

[Excidium II]

great

Man some words are used p. liberally on these boards.

 

[duanth123]

great

Man some words are used p. liberally on these boards.

Isn't it great?






In fact, it's downright fucking

Spoiler

majestic

 

[Blackstaff]

I disliked Fallout : New Vegas, so I guess I won't hop on your hype train. It's not only the inanities of the gamebryo engine (who the fuck had the brilliant idea to put compagnions in a game that just can't support them aside from being dead dogs ?), it's mainly for me the poverty of pew pew or slashy slashy gameplay. It's just terribly boring. If there is a heavy level of atmosphere and dialogue likie Vtmb, it's tolerable, but it's just not gonna replace good tactical gameplay.

Those gameplay are just so far apart that I just can't see how you can compare or oppose them.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Man some words are used p. liberally on these boards.

Rich comment from someone routinely calling Sawyer a second coming of Hitler.

 

[Excidium II]

Point to one quote.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

No thanks, drive-by made up quotes are more fun.

 

[Mustawd]

Point to one quote.

Sawyer is p. much the second coming of Hitler.

 

[Excidium II]

Slander is basically rape fyi. I will report you two to our female admin.

 

[Mustawd]

Slander is basically rape fyi.

Yes, but it is tasteful. You of all people should understand this.

 

[Trashos]

The middle-class is just confused by their insecurity about their financial... oh, we are talking about RPGs.

Very good OP, Infinitron.

While I like FNV and I 'd like to get more games like that, first-person games lack in tactical gameplay, and open world games lack in strategic gameplay. I don't see that changing. Such games can still be immersive and interesting story-wise, but they won't replace games that can satisfy both my storyfaggotry and combatfaggotry.

I need to see TToN, D:OS2, and PoE2 before I know what I can expect form the middle-class. I understand that these companies feel insecure about their financial future, so their decisions will be based on that. What I want to see however, so that I don't pronounce them dead, is a willingness to make games that they themselves want to play. I am afraid they may have no space for such luxuries, but we 'll see.

It is usually obvious when creative people make products to appeal to an assumed audience instead of themselves. The end product painfully lacks the fire that we see in the best games. So you know what, I say let them build something they are enthusiastic about and take it from there. They want to build to open worlds and shit? I 'll give it a chance. They want to build isometric? I 'll take that too. But please, let me see that fire -it is contagious.

 

[taxalot]

I am not really sure where OP wants to go.

What is a middle class RPG ? I'm having a lot of trouble defining that. It's clearly not the AAA Witcher 3, which was, in my humble opinion a very beautiful game in terms of writing, storytelling, and graphics but mediocre in gameplay, and clearly not other AAAs like Fallout 4 which hardly count as RPGs. What's the low tier ? The RPGmaker shit invading Steam over the last few years ? Yeah, that's pretty low tier. I'm also willing to include stuff made by Spiderweb not because it's shit, but because it's rather cheap.

So Middle Class would be everything in between ? I refuse to believe AoD to be low-tier, because what it lacked in development budget it compensated in years spent. Same goes for Underrail. Shadowrun, Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2, Torment and that kind are clearly in the middle ground between AAAs and that low tier, and they have been the most succesful of late RPGs. They had extensive coverage and great rankings even on mainstream websites. Anyone who has a mild interesting in gaming beyond Call of Duty and Farm Heroes Saga knows about these games and knows of their great reputation. The sales have been, as far as I know, very satisfying and they are less risky than AAAs. So it actually looks like those RPGs are actually the leading force these days, or if not leading the rising ones.

We might in the gap between two waves, granted. There was the kickstarter indie euphoria of two or three years ago, and those games have come out, so the future might seem empty. It's clearly not, the success of these last games have proven there is a demand. More will come.

 

[Llama-Yak Hybrid]

AAA games are terrible and get worse with time, I don't know where are you getting the impression that people are getting the impression that they get better.

Middle-budget RPG's are probably the thing "core" codex audience will care the most, obviously the toxic retards smearing shit overy my codex will rather want Fallout4 2: Electric Boogaloo: Vampire Edition but who cares about shiteaters.

The "loss of confidence" in them is caused by devs being retarded. Nostalgiabaiting doesn't work that well. Well it works if you want to sell few hundreds-thousands units ONCE. If you want to do better though, you have to innovate. It's not a coincidence that the best selling and one of most loved "middle class" kickstarter RPG is Divinity - the game is fresh from ground up. Wasteland 2, Might and Magic X, Pillars or Shadowrun feel stale in comparison. Even more - the new "middle class" RPG's, outside of Pillars and Divinity feel really clunky, you can see which games were made by competent people with some experience in industry and which were done by badly paid codemonkeys and interns(hey hello, our favourite used car salesman!).

However, it seems that they've learned something. TRANNY looks like Obsidian is trying to experiment, probably just in "muh stoooreyh" way, but it's still better than nothing(for them). While I have no hope for Torment, BT4 might be interesting because Fargo has to sell turn-based blobber to people, they'll have to actually try. Absolute retards quit RPG's.

The low-end RPG devs have it hard and it's not getting any better. I wish them luck, because some of those games, if underrated(Telepath Tactics, Legends of Eisenwald, Antharion etc.) are at least decent.
That's just the reality of indie games development though, can't help it.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Do we really want to play throwback RPGs forever?

I don't believe in this whole dichotomy. The opposition between AAA/middle-class exists only in the minds of grognards here and in similar places. It's not the budget or the isometric perspective vs. first person perspective that matter, it's the execution of the ideas and mechanics. I'm just as happy to play Witcher 3 (an interactive movie, wrongly accused of being an RPG), New Vegas and Age of Decadence.

I don't mind playing throwback RPGs as long as they get better and better at those things that made me like such RPGs before they were "throwback". As I said elsewhere - I don't mind playing D&D adventures converted to computer RPG games using the same technology - as long as they become better and better at translating the feeling of playing a D&D adventure, they will have value for me and I'll keep buying them. Why not? If they are improving at being this kind of a game, they are just running in their own corridor.

They did sell a lot of copies though, because we didn't have any other choice

"A lot" of copies, compared to what?

I think the first wave of KS RPGs was a success because
1. The big names (of developers) attracted backers, and after release, the games got good reviews and good user reviews (word of mouth included in this term).
2. They simply put out good RPGs for the audience that played them - D:OS was good, and got better with the EE which was given for free to people who owned D:OS at the time it was released. I think PoE was a turd at release, but I guess most of the audience didn't notice that, over the magic effects and pretty backgrounds. Eventually it will assume a presentable state with enough patching, and the quality of its expansions has improved a lot, relative to the base game. I haven't played or followed W2, but I guess it's a similar story with its Director's Cut edition. I'm pretty optimistic from what I see of TToN.

On what's going to happen (is happening) with the AAA segment, I point you again, after I did it last year, I think, to this George Lucas/Stieven Spielberg panel report, titled "Studios Will Implode; VOD Is the Future". It's from 2013.
http://variety.com/2013/digital/news/lucas-spielberg-on-future-of-entertainment-1200496241/

Video:
http://deadline.com/2013/06/steven-...-predict-film-industry-meltdown-video-520423/

That's what, I believe, is the true analogue of the AAA games segment.

 

[Longshanks]

A AAA open world RPG that I would probably play is one where the world was a single massive city that actually feels like one. It's one reason why the GTA games work, the other being that travelling is not a chore: no interfering trash mobs, very little walking. In comparison the RPGs have huge, boring wilderness areas and dungeons, tiny cities, enemies at every step and paper thin content otherwise.

 

[taxalot]

A AAA open world RPG that I would probably play is one where the world was a single massive city that actually feels like one. It's one reason why the GTA games work, the other being that travelling is not a chore: no interfering trash mobs, very little walking. In comparison the RPGs have huge, boring wilderness areas and dungeons, tiny cities, enemies at every step and paper thin content otherwise.

Here's hoping that Cyberpunk from the polos does what you are looking for.

 

[Lacrymas]

"A lot" of copies, compared to what?

Compared to expectations I suppose? PoE sold like 500k copies, D:OS sold a million. I'm happy that the better game sold more though :p What I'm not happy about is that AoD, UR and SitS didn't sell that much and they deserve it far more.

1. The big names (of developers) attracted backers, and after release, the games got good reviews and good user reviews (word of mouth included in this term).

This is the crux of the matter - why exactly did they get good reviews and user reviews? Is it because they got media coverage and people found out about them, played them and saw that they are somewhat different than CoD clone number 854859345934594395? Is it just low standards? These offerings pale in comparison to even the Infinity Engine era games (especially PS:T), so I see no other alternative. I have this extremely unreasonable notion that this is just a ruse on Obsidian's part, making a shit game to appeal to a wide audience and then surprising us with a masterpiece in PoE2 and Tranny. I am so far up my own bubble that I think that, funny.

Media coverage is also a thing that should be explored more, PoE and D:OS got extremely good coverage even on mainstream sites, so that inevitably helped their popularity. AoD, UnderRail (that even we still don't have a review for) and SitS don't and I'm interested whether they will sell better if they do. I'm also interested what the reviews for them would be in the minds of a larger audience.

 

[Infinitron]

I am so far up my own bubble

Yeah. Don't make the mistake of thinking that the buyers of Kickstarter RPGs are all part of some "we" of hardcore Codex grognards. These are the top ten games also owned by Pillars of Eternity owners, along with the percentage that own them:

The median owner of a Kickstarter RPG is the "midcore" single player PC gamer who plays games like Skyrim, Civilization, and XCOM.

 

[Trashos]

Civ is an awesome franchise, and a bad example for your argument.

 

[Infinitron]

Civ is an awesome franchise, and a bad example for your argument.

You're probably misunderstanding my argument. Of course, those three games are so popular that they're even at the top of the Age of Decadence chart, but look what comes after that:

There's the Codex audience.

 

[Lacrymas]

That's gross.

 

[Trashos]

You're probably misunderstanding my argument.

Your data are interesting, and I *believe* I understand your argument.

I consider Civ (mainly IV though, not so sure about V) to be perfect for a Codexer, and that's why I thought it was inappropriate to use it in the sentence "The median owner of a Kickstarter RPG is the "midcore" single player PC gamer who plays games like Skyrim, Civilization, and XCOM".

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Obsidian understood perfectly what their audience was. It's the nostalgia driven people who played IE games way back in the day, but don't have as much time for gaming as they used to in the 90s. So they did what the audience wanted and trimmed a lot of archaic bullshit busywork that plagued the old games, and the game was a massive commercial success for the genre it represents, because the original IE audience, who are now in their mid 30s married with two kids, could enjoy that style of gameplay without all the timewasting bollocks this type of game would offer in the past.

What's baffling is that the monocles deluded themselves into the idea that PoE is going to be some ultra-hardcore sausage fest. The plan from the start was to streamline the gameplay. Not for new audience, as much as people would prefer to believe otherwise, but for old audience, which in overwhelming majority wouldn't stand for all the D&D tabletop feature creep that has no place in a video game.