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Strategy games are better RPGs than RPGs

Mr Happy

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I mean, Jesus. Let us start from the hopelessly broad definition that RPGs are about defining a character or party, because this umbrellas both stats and character development as well as gameplay-oriented “choice and consequence.” Your standard strategy game or squad tactical game has got stats covered. You typically select some sort of state or team or whatever with particular characteristics or attributes compared to your other options. You generally develop certain characteristics of your nation (etc.) exclusive of others through research, training, recruitment, and in-game choices. Bam, character creation and development covered. Often with at least as many stats as your average RPG. Of course in some strategy games you can become (or even start as) as jack of all trades, but same with fucking Morrowind. Condense your nation into a character or party, throw some mediocrely written dialog on top of your diplomacy system and you have a solid CRPG.

But the gameworld of competing nations/factions (or even just two, you and the enemy) with various internal measures of health (wealth/economy, manpower, stability, size, etc) that strategy games typically present the player provides a far superior mechanism for the playing out of “choice and consequence” than is just about ever the case in an RPG. Strategy gameworlds allow for different approaches to victory (strategically, and some times with a choice between combat and other approaches), provide non linear narratives, react to your strategic and developmental choices, and in general provide a dynamic arena for gameplay. In an RPG, the only arena even approaching level of responsiveness to character traits is combat, which usually sucks anyway. Fallout’s variety in ending slides pales in comparison to the various possible states of the world even at the end of a Total War game. Consequences to choices are substantive in strategy games, not superficial, and can profoundly affect how the game plays out, instead of meriting a brief and inconsequential mention in dialog. Many strategy games provide a far better system for defining a character than RPGs, and that isn’t even their goal, they’re just attempting to provide some fun strategic gameplay. Strategies beat RPGs at their own game without even trying.

I don’t even know why we keep this site dedicated to RPGs anymore, we should switch to covering strategy games exclusively, because they align far better with what we claim to be our interests. Maybe rename the site something like “Tacticular Cancer,” as a nod to one of the more serious pathologies afflicting our age group.
 

RK47

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...because in Strategy games, you cannot be gay and have your dwarf cock up a hot male elven arse.
 

Crooked Bee

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That may be all technically true, but I still enjoy RPGs more than strategy games. In fact, I don't play strategy games at all these days. So screw you.
 

Mr Happy

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Well that is because you are a slave to simulated interpersonal interaction and cannot handle the abstract nature of a strategy map. But that shouldn't matter, if RPG developers, whose medium is at the level of human interaction, were smart and believed in their own shit, they would build their gameworlds up from a strategy game basis, where interacting entities have multiple measures of health and multiple means of dealing with each other, and standardized algorithms for doing so. Throw in an element of chance and you're set.
 

circ

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You're absolutely right OP.

Back in the day I loved to see my characters progress and gain new skills and stats and get more and more fancily named loot. Then there was interaction, which had its charm for story progression too.

Then it became all about that interaction.

If I want characters progressing and loot, fuck, I can fire up Dawn of War 2. I even get dialogue and oh wow, combat that actually brings partially to mind RPG's of old.

In your face RPG's.
 

Crooked Bee

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Mr Happy said:
that is because you are a slave to simulated interpersonal interaction and cannot handle the abstract nature of a strategy map

Youa rew rong, sorry. Dark Heart of Uukrul has no personal interaction and is no less abstract than a strategy game, and it's my favourite RPG. To me RPGs are all about monsters, puzzles, and crawling dungeons. Can strategy games provide all that? Nope, they can't. That's why I don't really care if their mechanics is infinitely better.

Which doesn't mean I don't endorse your appeal for more complexity in RPGs, I totally do.
 

RK47

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Hmm. King Arthur? The RP Wargame? Tried it yet? Who knows...army , rpg, stats, puzzles adventures..
 

Visbhume

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Mr Happy said:
Well that is because you are a slave to simulated interpersonal interaction and cannot handle the abstract nature of a strategy map. But that shouldn't matter, if RPG developers, whose medium is at the level of human interaction, were smart and believed in their own shit, they would build their gameworlds up from a strategy game basis, where interacting entities have multiple measures of health and multiple means of dealing with each other, and standardized algorithms for doing so. Throw in an element of chance and you're set.

I seem to remember an interview with Avellone, posted here recently, in which he said something close to that. Something like aiming for emergent gameplay by specifying multiple interacting mechanics instead of hand-crafting the narrative.

The question is: can you really have interesting "interpersonal interaction" without needing human-level AI, which isn't going to be available anytime soon? Maybe "interpersonal interaction" is a bit like Go, which is a bitch for computers to play well. Chris Crawford has spent decades pursuing the holy grail of interactive narrative and has not succeeded.

Still, at the very least, an expansion and generalization of some sort of faction mechanics wouldn't hurt.
 

sea

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I have to agree with the sentiment entirely, but I'd like to qualify it and mount what is maybe an unconventional defense for RPGs. Where strategy games tend to fall apart for me (especially real-time ones) is that you typically need to be thinking about everything all at once. This might be a bit whiny as far as "wah my game's too hard" goes, but I actually like how RPGs tend to have differing (not inconsistent) rules for different mechanics, and that I don't have to constantly think about each and every one. Playing a strategy game, for me, is a fine line between fun and a bit of a burden because of this.

As an example, I love Civlization, but I constantly have to force myself to think about, say, the diplomatic impact of act, or the long-term consequences on my empire's economy caused by founding a city in X spot, or the combat odds, etc. For the most part you're thinking about things, and other things related to those things, even in situations where those things aren't immediately relevant, because they could be relevant at any second. I deeply enjoy those game mechanics, but that doesn't mean I always want to pay attention to them each and every turn.

RPGs provide respite from the constant demand. Whereas many strategy games force you to focus at everything at once for risk of getting your clock cleaned due to an amateur mistake, RPGs instead are able to provide variety and varying levels of tension by only requiring certain mechanics to be present at certain, much more specific times. In RPG combat, I don't have to think about how much money I have and the long-term financial repercussions of each and every bullet I fire, I don't have to think about the diplomatic problems down the road (not until after combat's done, anyway), I can just fully invest myself in that moment, and because I don't have moments like that all the time while playing an RPG, it means I'm rarely bored of the same old thing, or overwhelmed by everything that's going on.

Meh, I don't know. Look at it as sort of a cop-out answer, but for me it's that variety and freedom from constant responsibility over a huge number of systems and rules that makes RPGs more fulfilling. When you look at strategy games objectively, yes, they are almost universally better designed, and they don't have to/can't use things like narrative as a crutch for bad/sloppy design, but objectivity doesn't really matter when it's my subjective frame of reference determining whether I enjoy a game or not.
 

PorkaMorka

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Strategy games and squad based tactics games aren't the same thing.


Strategy games are more ambitious than RPGs to be sure, but they're also arguably the most disappointing genre.They promise tons of choices and consequences, freedom to implement your own strategy and have the game world react, etc.

But due to the limits of computer AI, typically one or more of the following will apply;
- the game isn't sufficiently challenging for it to matter what your strategy was, at least not once you become decent at the game
- certain strategies break the game
- the AI cheats so much to keep the challenge level high that many strategies that seem sensible are worthless.

For example there is an ability to hurt the enemy's gold production. So your strategy is to attack their economy. Sounds good right? Oops, you're playing on hard where the enemy gets +300% gold, so this strategy won't be effective.

And once the challenge is gone, these games quickly turn into horribly tedious slogs, see the mop up of phase of any total war game (which can take hours)

Strategy is almost a failed genre because the AI just can't handle it, unless your freedom to create your own strategy is greatly limited. Computer games handle a series of predefined challenges better.

As for squad based tactics games... proper RPGs are just a variation on the squad based tactics genre with slightly different emphasis. JA2 illustrates this fact pretty well by being both one of the best RPGs and one of the best squad based tactics games.

Of course, there is no defending the kind of games they've been calling RPGs in the last few years.
 

ever

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PorkaMorka said:
For example there is an ability to hurt the enemy's gold production. So your strategy is to attack their economy. Sounds good right? Oops, you're playing on hard where the enemy gets +300% gold, so this strategy won't be effective.
Yes! Man do I hate this so so so much. Almost every game in the genre suffers from this problem, making normal difficulty the only thinking man's option.
 

Morkar Left

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RPGs are on a more personal level with a world where you interact in a smaller scope; pick up an item from the ground, not take a castle from the map. Sure there a squad-based tactical strategy games but they are usually missionbased. And I consider JA2 as a full fledged rpg. that it is very tactical too doesn't matter.

I can fully agree with that the world for a rpg should be self-consistent and "live" without playerinteraction. A good example for this is Space Rangers 2 or to a smaller degree M&B Warband. With such a "living" world without having the player the center of all interaction the game already provides enough entertaining gameplay without providing a single handcrafted quest. The interaction of the factions alone provide adventures for the player alone. I'm not saying there should be no hand-crafted narrative, quite the contrary. But I think it should be on top of the multiple interacting mechanics.

You can even create an interesting conversation with "encounters" by solely relying on good gameplay mechanics. Bring default dialog stances in like "friendly", "threaten", "bluff", "cowardly", "surrender", "pay tribute" which rely on the chars dialog skills and get modified by the type of encounter (faction, monster, humanlike, general success of a specific stance to a specific encounter type and solved quests, language skills, monster lore). And then add unique dialog to unique npcs with multiple choice dialog.

A good economy for the world is a must for me too. If you have to think about how you can earn money in the world (trade, buy and sell, questing, doing jobs with skills your chars have, spending money for training, horses, repairs, food and shelter) you create dynamics on its own for the player without a crafted narrative.

He could start to buy a trade good in one town to sell it with profit in another to have enough money for his next training session or are magical item. Because the weather is bad and roads are easier to travel on he decides to take the main route. On the way to his destination a wandering band of monsters could lay an ambush to the party (not enough wilderness lore) and try to rob them and demands gold/goods from them. The monsters sympathize with the evil foozle and makes talking not easy. But one of the party members has specific monster lore and a high speech skill and can convince them to let them travel further for a small amount of gold or they could decide to fight (outnumbered and in disadvantage because of the ambush)... There's already a narrative going on without a single scripted event...

The world automatically creates interesting content on its own and makes the playing experience unique. And I think that are exactly the dynamics strategy games create and makes them interesting and something a rpg should copy from strategy games. There were already good signs of it but with recent game-development it is completely abandoned.
 
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Crooked Bee said:
Mr Happy said:
that is because you are a slave to simulated interpersonal interaction and cannot handle the abstract nature of a strategy map

Youa rew rong, sorry. Dark Heart of Uukrul has no personal interaction and is no less abstract than a strategy game, and it's my favourite RPG. To me RPGs are all about monsters, puzzles, and crawling dungeons. Can strategy games provide all that? Nope, they can't. That's why I don't really care if their mechanics is infinitely better.

Which doesn't mean I don't endorse your appeal for more complexity in RPGs, I totally do.

Sounds like a strategy game to me :smug:

Borders between the two genres are heavily blurred.
 

ever

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Dark heart of Uukrul is as computer role playing as it gets. It borders between a rogue-like and a 1990s dungeon crawler.

If the Uukrul game is strategy, then there is no difference between any role playing game and strategy game.
 

MetalCraze

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People seem to forget what RPG is on the Codex today

81a3723213ee.jpg
 

Crooked Bee

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ever said:
Dark heart of Uukrul is as computer role playing as it gets. It borders between a rogue-like and a 1990s dungeon crawler.

A rogue-like!? Why? There is no randomization in Uukrul, the dungeons are static. And it's party-based, not single-character like most roguelikes. Oh, and it's not from 1990s. :smug:

But yeah, if you call Uukrul a strategy game, then all proper RPGs are strategy.
 

Mr Happy

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PorkaMorka said:
Strategy is almost a failed genre because the AI just can't handle it, unless your freedom to create your own strategy is greatly limited. Computer games handle a series of predefined challenges better.

No doubt a more structured narrative has its merits for an rpg. And one of them is definitely the ability to have extensive hand crafted dialog. Another is a certain expected quality of encounters (say combat in a dungeon) that cannot be guaranteed if not handcrafted to a certain extent. There is certainly room for more than one approach to allowing a player to define a character. But RPG developers, armchair or otherwise, tend to talk a lot about how the holy grail of the genre is a game with a non linear storyline, a reactive and dynamic world that goes on with or without you, and responds reasonably to your choices and stats with short term and long term consequences. “Emergent gameplay” or whatever. They also talk about how this is way too much work, technology is not at this level, etc. But the best of the strategy genre has been doing it for years.

Actually, I have been quite impressed by the Magna Mundi mod for Europa Universalis 3, in terms of the AI being able to handle freedom. I have brought empires to bankruptcy, harassed some bitches with spies, and have competed to become a trading superpower, and yet, the “tipping point”, where everything becomes a cake walk, comes late, if at all.

I’m not advocating that we turn every RPG into a Europa Universalis game, but I don’t think it would be too difficult or fruitless to have these sorts of systems running in the background of a Fallout-style game. There definitely can be an intermediate between a full open world freeform “mess” and a static tree of predefined paths, and I think the key is making the faction system central, not peripheral to the game world. Morrowind actually did this sort of well, though didn’t utilize it too much: most entities including the Sixth house were factions with set characteristics and relations between each other. The work comes when you trying to layer a partially constructed plot over oh shit the Supermutants just conquered the Hub, but I think this could be achieved by putting certain limitations on the strategy-esque faction system. There is an intermediate to be found, and you don’t need super-advanced AI to achieve it. You just need a system keeping track of the right stuff.
 

Commissar Draco

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You forgot Total war there you have all RPG needs: stats, inventory artifacts, compagnions and perks gained throu gaming, nation wide C&C, tactical combat, turns and 2D portraits. My campaign as Aurelius Ambrosianus is more hardcore role playing than Witcher, FNW, and ME although I realy like those cinematic ARPGs.

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Soon with anihilation of Saxons the KWA will be purged from this timeline. :smug:
 

Radisshu

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Yes, because strategy games have so much depth when it comes to character building.
 

Mr Happy

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Yes, I'd say many are at least comparable to your average RPG especially these days, see my first paragraph.

Comissar: what mod is that?
 

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