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Fate of the Middle Class RPG

mutonizer

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What is the fate of the middle class RPG on the Codex? Do we really want to play throwback RPGs forever? Is there a middle ground here perhaps, some way to bridge the gap between the middle class RPG and the "open world with good writing" AAA RPG?

Nothing to do with "throwback" or middle class, AAA or indie and whatnot for me. It's just that most cRPGs (and many other genre as well) these days treat the player like complete addicted retards who needs to be filled up with dopamine non fucking stop. Not sure if it's because of competition on the mobile market and their 10 minutes attention span, or console retardo fallout or something but that's what we have.

There are many cRPGs I don't personally like but I respect them at least. They have their own pacing integrity or something. However, games like Witcher 3, Skyrim (unmodded), D:OS, DA:Inquisition and really most out there are just utter shit, worst even. The very definition of decline for me. Designed to feed, almost scientifically, the worst things in some people. It's like these fuckers put crack in some candies and then everyone went "ohh, that works well, they sell shit!".

And that doesn't work on me (edit: well it works, but knowing about it I instantly back off) and therefore these games are just seen as their true selves: garbage.
 

caldera

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That's a pattern all over the industry. Terrible product pricing that is enforced by an even more unreasonable budget (or claiming that is the AAA price standard). They try to add some artificial value to their product. Ubisoft is an incredible example of this, fill the world with "interesting" , "exciting" content - sickening amount of collectibles, busy work, fetch quests etc.. Consequently they bump up the game clock with additional filler quests and you start to feel like you actually got your moneys worth. You wouldn't believe how often I hear the argument of - " I get X hours for X money, so worth." Some people don't even consider how they waste their own life on that generic shit.
Same could be applied to PoE and D:OS, I really wanted to like those games, but I simply got burned out on them at 30-40 hours, 2/3 of the game, and it was me simply trying to force out some value out of the money I spent. I feel like the pacing of these games is extremely poor, struggling to maintain its own quality and promise it shows at the start. I actually think a lot of it falls to Kickstarter campaigns, stretch goals and obligations to fill these games with everything possible.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that I feel like games are trying to justify their price and budget, instead of being simply good.
 
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zeitgeist

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They try to add some artificial value to their product. Ubisoft is an incredible example of this, fill the world with "interesting" , "exciting" content - sickening amount of collectibles, busy work, fetch quests etc..
This just reminded me of something, for example in Assassin's Creed 3 you have this crafting system where you have to manage caravans and trade for items to craft various weapons and equipment, and it's an incredibly tedious system that ultimately results in some slight upgrades that you don't really need at all since the game is already too easy without them. A similar crafting system exists in practically every modern FPS/TPS with "RPG elements", and in quite a few of these "middle class RPGs", it even found its way into roguelites and similar games (I recently found it in Sheltered).

Who likes this, and if a significant amount of players does genuinely like it, why does it always give such uninteresting and unimportant rewards?
 

AwesomeButton

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This just reminded me of something, for example in Assassin's Creed 3 you have this crafting system where you have to manage caravans and trade for items to craft various weapons and equipment, and it's an incredibly tedious system that ultimately results in some slight upgrades that you don't really need at all since the game is already too easy without them.
It seems you have not been subjected to the wonders of Pillars of Eternity's crafting system, because you just described that too. :lol:

The official explanation: "we wanted the game to be fun for everyone, even for players who chose not to engage in these systems".

The next level will be "we wanted the game to be fun for everyone, even for players who didn't want to play it at all"
 

Roguey

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Crafting should be fun for the people who want to enjoy it, but it shouldn't be mandatory for people who don't want to bother with it. So you get crafting that gives you marginal bonuses.

Underrail's an example where crafting is deliberately overpowered despite the complaints of those who say it makes it too easy and thus feel compelled to always put points into crafting skills. :M
 

AwesomeButton

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Underrail gets too easy if you use crafting, I can understand that. PoE is too easy without any crafting.
 

Telengard

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But what I'd like to add is that the success of Skyrim has had beneficial effects for non-hiking sims as well. If you can make a best-selling game where you plop the player in a huge open world and let him wander around and do as he pleases, pick up and manipulate anything in the environment, and build a character out of hundreds of perks, then you can also make a non-open world game (with tighter level design and a stronger narrative) that allows players to do those things. Skyrim is a dumbed down game, but its success still provides a pathway for even more dumbed down games like Mass Effect to become better, without necessarily becoming open world hiking sims themselves. (which doesn't mean that they will, of course)
The trick is, design is not a U-pick fruit lot, it is more of an avante-garde mural that must be crafted by a team, so certain patterns fit well together to make an interesting picture, others do not fit well at all.

With Skyrim's success, the suits will all think that they can take pieces of Skyrim and add them to other games and thus produce another mega-game of Skyrim's sales caliber. But that's not how it works. Break up the pieces of Skyrim and it breaks the combination of elements that made Skyrim so popular. Add too many of those broken-off elements to another game, and you typically also break what gave that other game what popularity it did have.

And that is because Skyrim is a giant dicking-around simulator. It is a giant consequence-free sandbox playpen, just like the kind you had at preschool. Nothing you do matters, everything and everyone tells you that you're someone special, and does so repeatedly. This makes it so people like Angry Joe can flip the game on (consoles, you know), not read anything as they activate quests, and just go and insert their dicks into whatever game crevices (in the case of loverslab, quite literally so) they feel like at the given moment, and the game won't care. There is no reactive consequence - you can go around killing innocents one day just cause you had a bad time at work, but then the next day go be a total paladin, and the thing is - the game won't react to either, beyond giving you reward-treats for both. And then people say, "Oh, the game is so reactive, it detects when I'm being a total asshole and gives me [insert reward messages, gear, and achievements here]". Because that's the sum extent of the reactivity the dicking-around crowd wants. It gives them treats for their dicking around in the sandbox (and not bothering mum for a while), and lets them be totally awesome (aren't you a good boy) no matter what they're doing.

Plus of course the game MUST scale, so you can keep sticking your dick wherever you want at any given moment, and yet still have the game play exactly the same way every day no matter where you decide to go stick your dick that day. Even the Learn By Doing skill system is meshed into constantly handing out positive yet meaningless rewards. And not just the point increases, but eventually having high skills become a part of the populace commenting about how awesome you are. Yet, at no point is raising those skills ever made necessary, so people don't actually have to interact with the numbers (you know, the actual skills) in any meaningful way, don't have to do anything they don't want to do, can just keep going dicking around wherever they want.

All of the above design elements and more all mesh together to form that giant dicking around and penis-stroking simulator. Breaking off pieces of that design and adding them to a different style of game doesn't lead to a better, more popular game. It just leads to a flacid version of the dicking simulator that nobody buys. Not only that, even if you slavishly copy all of Skyrim's dicking elements, why would most people pay to see your game's dicking crevices when they can just go buy Fallout 4 with its official branded crevices or examine Skyrim's crevices more thoroughly? Like all off-brand clones, you will forever be the poor-man's vag.
 
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vonAchdorf

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Crafting is a time and money sink for MMOs - I don't like it in RPGs most of the time - maybe with the exception of alchemy like in Darklands, where it's a proper part of the world.
 
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Tigranes

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I think all this sophistry can only be truly Codexian if there are consequences to our choices

Everyone who loses each debate should be permanently purged
 

mutonizer

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Last crafting I found somewhat interesting was from one of my favorite 90s games: Sapiens. Some kind of french free roam, open world do whatever prehistoric homo sapiens simulator (think skyrim in the 90s). There was some kind of rock crafting that involved "hitting" the raw rocks at the right angle and place to make your own tools, which, for the time was pretty cool.

Edit: found some kind of old footage: https://youtu.be/5RPPDsZly_U?t=4m25s
 

Infinitron

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FO:NV's crafting seems potentially interesting for certain character builds and playstyles. Avellone revealed his love of SYSTEMICS early on by continually trying to make it a focus of his DLCs. (I may make a thread about that someday.)
 

Lacrymas

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The NWN OC also had a blacksmith who made unique stuff for you with materials you brought him. I like that sort of thing because it's like another quest and it's not mind-numbing like 99% of crafting systems. DA:O had the dragonscale blacksmith and the one in the expansion. Seriously, who thought that crafting is fun? Does it come from Minecraft?
 

Mustawd

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There hasn't been a game yet where crafting didn't bore the ass out of me.

I loved it in UO, but that's it.

Nothing to do with "throwback" or middle class, AAA or indie and whatnot for me. It's just that most cRPGs (and many other genre as well) these days treat the player like complete addicted retards who needs to be filled up with dopamine non fucking stop. Not sure if it's because of competition on the mobile market and their 10 minutes attention span, or console retardo fallout or something but that's what we have.


There's actually a really good point in there. All these throwback games have been trying to appeal to the audiences that kickstarted them, while at the same time expanding to newer customers. And it's almost impossible to do that correctly.

Which is why we get all kinds of retarded and casual crap in these games. Yet, all the old IE games were made for one audience in mind, so it can just be what it is instead of worrying about hitting demographic A, B or C.
 
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I loved it in UO, but that's it.

UO's crafting is extremely repetitive and a terrible time waste. I can only understand non-ocd people liking it if they used EasyUO scripts to complete it.

Edit: I guess using runic kits to lotto items could be enjoyable in small doses, but that is after all the grinding or scripting.
 

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