Non-mondblutian RPGs

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Read a book.

Are there any visual novels with character creation? That might fit what you're looking for, they usually have "RPG elements".

Does not compute.

Not, but aspieration is.

How many professions are there? And how often do you do these takeovers as a guard or thief class? And how shitty is the interface and mechanics system for doing so? That's what you call an emphasis?
My bomb placing forays in pizza tycoon make it a heavy combat game too then and you know, not a pizza creation and restaurant management game with some sabotage on the side. That would be disingenuous.

If out of all the bloody things you can do in 1400 those two covert options that give you a text message outcome and a special building offensive ability is focusing the game on combat then age of empires is heavily based around diplomacy and trading since you can barter resources. And Dragon Age 2 is a game focused on roleplaying. And your post is focused on objectivity.

Emphasis. Do you know what it means?

Hey, this is a troll isn't it?

Doh.

Aspiration? My point is about the criteria they use to judge games.

I merely say, "No game has actually had the qualities you demand from it, so why are you using your fake, made-up, arbitrary criteria, instead of just looking at the features that RPGs actually have? Do you even like this genre?"

I am not prophesising. Do you know that those criteria are based on contradictory demands that negate themselves? They have made it logically impossible for their ideal game to exist. On grounds of "roleplaying", they may idealise one-character games, and on grounds of tactics they may idealise challenging turn-based combat, but then they want challenging turn-based combat with only one character?

Old Codex turned its preference in RPGs into a religious doctrine, not realizing that this has been a genre with broad room for anything ranging from Dungeon Master/Eye of the Beholder to Daggerfall/Ultima Underworld to Realms of Arkania/Darklands to Fallout/Arcanum to Gold Box to Ultima/Torment to MM/Wizardry. Yet, by the rigid criteria that some of them hold, they reject 95% of RPGs ever made.

The early codex was campaigning for a closer adherence to and surpassment of the acknowledgably limited facsimile of pnp rpg experience that were fallout and the various other nonlinear class crpgs since that was the most direct way of making a reactive game where you could play in the character style you want including speech focused ones.

This was a backlash to the heavily glamoroused direction that 'hardcore' rpgs were heading in via BG2 and Oblivion without so much as a nod to the design successes within Fallout or Planescape.

It's not that the old codex didn't want dungeon crawlers(and the ratio of codex fans who like JA2 is quite high indeed), but the definition of what constituted an ideal pc rpg translation was already being ascribed to the former set and that would not do.

Academagia.
Reccetear.
I didn't tried Winter voices.
Modded Arcanum with invisibility and teleportation from the start.

You actually have it right without knowing why.

Dark Underlord admits to never really playing RPG games before Fallout, or at least enjoying any. Taking him as an example, this is the tree from which he wanted further RPG's to grow. It isn't a bad wish really, in fact you could compare, in a small way, to oldschoolers wishing the genre had turned in a different direction to what it did.

I enjoyed games like Wasteland, the Goldbox series, the mid Ultima series, and so on. I didn't mind some of the other games at all ('Blob' style games, action RPG's, etc), but preferred, the 'top down, tactical/turn based combat' games. Fallout was merely an extension of Wasteland, with a huge amount of content cut and replaced by graphics and a more detailed conversation system, so I would not have lamented more games along the lines of Fallout. Where I and they disagree is what should have happened to make Fallout better; I say expand the combat system to a Jagged Alliance/Silent storm system; They want more talky with more options included.

As for the newbies, they have largely grown up on 'speed bump combat'. In the absence of a good combat system, they wish to breeze past it faster to get to the talky and cutscenes. Different generation, different aspirations.

As for the OP, I don't know why he just doesn't play Adventure games.

given how warmly received toee's combat system was I don't think there's any resistance to better combat in rpgs, why would there be? This isn't a dichotomous schism in approach so much as which side is being neglected more and needs attending to first, and I really don't think you want to be arguing that combat in rpgs is as much of an artifice with no-consequence choices and on-rail events like narratives are.

Really? How many RPG's have had decent combat engines in the past 10 years? 2001 to the present. TOEE, KotC...am I missing another?

As for the argument, it would address finite resources when creating an RPG. What would you rather have added on to Fallout?

a) A Jagged Alliance/Silent Storm combat system?

b) A use for outdoorsman, etc in a few conversations?

For someone who's aware of the finite resource dilemma you seem to consider both options equally intensive. Don't stoop to rigging your choices if you're presenting possibilities and want to make it sound like you've considered both equally. Hahaha so what's being said here is that the idiot would like more outdoorsmen choices instead of Jagged Alliance Fallout edition, get a load of h-No.
This is what I'll look like if I was doing it your way:

What would you rather have added on to Fallout?

a) A use for all skills both in and out of combat, usage tallied, magnitude balanced and viability tracked across the breadth of the game so that no well played character build can be said to be suboptimal?

b) A few stance options and some more aiming levels?

how does the table look from this side eh

Jagged Alliance 2 was built around its combat system in mind

Perhaps one day we will get an rpg built around the character system it has in mind instead of whichever cinematic narrative the lead designer wants to throw at us and ingratiatingly wrought quests the fans feel sexually titillating, humorous or gives sufficient excuse for the artifacts they get at the end.

Go fight a medieval war.

A marriage of JA2 combat with Post-Apoc setting of Fallout writing would definitely shine, if only.

It's not that hard. JA2 is already open source, bolt on some more statistics, ditch special, add the quests, maps and dialog engine. Boom, JA2 fallout.

Problem is all talk, no guts (including me).

But yes, why not play an adventure game?

That whole talking the Master into killing himself thing in Fallout - it basically involved finding the right mixture of clues, having the right items at the right place, and making use of them to solve a puzzle.

In other words, it was basically adventure gaming material. In fact, this is Adventure Gaming 101, as far as I can see it, and it comes nowhere near the complexity of the harder clues/problem-solving in the average adventure game. Alone in the Dark has harder puzzles, from what little I have played of it.

You don't need RPGs for this. There are other genres that do it better.

So suggest some properly non-linear adventure games then (preferably with a player created PC)?

What would be the point?

If you want to solve non-combat problems that are actually challenging, they need to be puzzles designed for YOU to solve, not your character. If you only need a WIS > 10 to solve a given puzzle then that's not challenging... you're just playing a CYA book.

One of the reasons why the old Codex never got the game they wanted.

They want both a) use of stats, and b) challenging non-combat problems. The two are fundamentally different things.

Jeff Vogel often said that people on forums keep giving him some advice about how to make a roleplaying game, and he keeps disregarding them. Obviously, it is impossible to follow one suggestion without going against another; gamers have contradictory suggestions, as the above case shows. That's why he sticks to the fundamentals - getting more powerful and getting more equipment - and irrespective of what gamers keep claiming about how much importance they give to those features, their demonstrated preference (in terms of sales and post-release feedback) shows that this is exactly what they want.

Blade Runner, more C&C than any RPG I've ever seen.

Oh and just wait for AoD

This thread says what I've been thinking for years. I've never been able to articulate it so briefly, but yes, this is it. At risk of painting with too large a brush, the "old Codex" view was a belabored discussion of theoretical mechanics which are found in bits and pieces all over the RPG world, but not wholly in any of the games that make up the canon. And anyone suggesting otherwise was generally marginalized.

And the "new Codex", best as I can tell, does not have belabored discussions of theoretical mechanics, it just mocks every single aspect of any new release while playing the shit out of it. And anyone suggesting otherwise has generally stopped posting here.

Again, broad strokes.

Lord Chambers, here is an interesting result of the Old Codex's marginalisation of those who ever said otherwise.

Relatively new gamers who never played any RPG before 2002 got the idea that old games were full of the theoretical features that Old Codex idealized. Anyone who thought otherwise was obviously wrong, because he was ridiculed.

This led them to bashing even games they previously liked, while getting the idea that old games were different. The result? See this thread:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=31859

Can you believe the hypocrisy of *some* people on RPG Codex? Racofer, who was a KotOR fan before he came to RPG Codex during his AVault days, got the idea from the Saint Proverbius crowd that it was his fundamental duty to dislike KotOR. Why? Because it lacked features that never existed in old games. He had not even played Fallout, Torment,.etc at the time, but he believed the mythology related to them.

It's halfway new, halway old posters such as Dark Matter and Admiral Jimbob who have been the voice of sanity and reason here, while pre-2006 and post-2007 periods have been times of trendy hipsters.

This came to its most hilarious climax with Alpha Protocol. There's lots of things you could criticise that game, but it has C+C coming out the whazoo. Much much more than the 'choices' in Deus Ex, where at most you get a bonus throw-away line by a character, or (if you kill a character) a different NPC saying exactly the same thing as the old one would have if you hadn't killed him. In AP you get an insane degree of different allies, different bosses, different difficulty of enemies, sometimes you might get backup soldiers where otherwise you'd have none, and the different factions' soldiers would have radically different equipment and tactics - and it was all 'lol...red shirts v blue shirts'. Overlooking the fact that even if it was just red shirts v blue shirts (and it wasn't), that's still a MUCH bigger consequence than 95% of the choices in the lauded older games (which I also played and loved).