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Why aren't historical time periods used more as settings within RPGs

Lhynn

Arcane
Joined
Aug 28, 2013
Messages
9,826
we take only the pure grounded medieval setting of M&B, not its mechanics
This is sad. M&B mechanics are the most interesting thing about it.
 

Athelas

Arcane
Joined
Jun 24, 2013
Messages
4,502
Non-linear story lets you choose between being a villain or a savior.
This sounds like something the marketing team of a Bioware RPG would say.
 

Smejki

Larian Studios, ex-Warhorse
Developer
Joined
Oct 22, 2012
Messages
707
Location
Belgistan
Also more importantly.. will there be boobs?
Most importantly: Will there be manboobs? Don't ostracise!

The game is story driven? What does that mean?
The emphasis. It means that the story is preset (and to some extent non-linear) and is the most important part of the game motivation-wise.
The counterpart is a mechanical game. What you do creates the context or is more important than the context. These games are primarily fun to play.
Story driven games: Mafia, Witcher, Mass Effect, New Vegas, Baldur's Gate 2, Planescape Torment.
Mechanical games: DayZ, Crusader Kings 2, Heroes of MaM, Far Cry 3, AssCreed, Geometry Wars.
I hope I don't have to explain these two aspects are not mutually exclusive.

Will there be invisible walls that open up as I complete quests?
Skyrim-like. A bit at the very start but for most of the time not

Do I get a castle and army and I have to manage them?
That's MaB mechanical-wise. Already told you what's our relationship to MaB as an inspiration. Deduce the answer. Also read the whole description. That you do not have shit all over yourself doesn't mean you are a king. You're a smith.

Do I run around with a bard lute beating peasents?
If we implement lute. As a weapon. And peasants.

why is this game gonna be better then the schlock we see every year?
that's a question. If it is a schlock it at least will be a historical one. no big deal, i know. That's why we are trying do our own thing which we perceive different from a schlock. We might fail. That's life.
 
Last edited:

Smejki

Larian Studios, ex-Warhorse
Developer
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Messages
707
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Belgistan
Non-linear story lets you choose between being a villain or a savior.
This sounds like something the marketing team of a Bioware RPG would say.
Yeah that's a bit... simple... unnecessary... I don't know, I didn't write it. And I don't even want to know who did. There might be more oversimplistic statements which don't come across as well as they should.
 

Commissar Draco

Codexia Comrade Colonel Commissar
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Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Divinity: Original Sin 2
Another example of how moderntards fail to understand medieval society. For them, everything is about class, which fails to explain how somebody could be born a peasant and still become a renowned scholar and eventually even Pope:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Sylvester_II

Its cause church acted as adoptionist corporation fishing from talents in all societal stratas? And until Renaissance it was not uncommon to be knighted by King in Potatoland for war heroism or other valuable services for crown; funny cause L1berals keep telling us that Medieval ages kept commoners down.
 

Karellen

Arcane
Joined
Jan 3, 2012
Messages
327
I like how passionate Sawyer is about history, but he largely talks about games in general without really touching on the issues that RPGs in general have with historical settings, and there certainly are a few.

The fundamental problem, as far as I'm concerned, is that in terms of game design, RPGs essentially revolve around murderhoboism. Now, you can build a fantasy setting in a way that you can comfortably kill things and take their stuff, but in a historical setting that gets increasingly tricky and contrived. You could conceivably construct a conventional-ish RPG set in the Viking era or 17th century Caribbean, but even then you'd probably face verisimilitude issues. Ultimately, murderhoboism simply never was very common in the real world, and even when it did exist, it tended to be pretty complicated, restricted and not nearly as fun and profitable as it is in your typical RPG. Trying to do that sort of thing in a real-world setting will almost certainly feel a bit off.

It seems to me like Sawyer is saying that a historical setting naturally comes with great "fluff", but if the game itself is at odds with its fluff, there isn't all that much point in having it. Ultimately, if you want to do a good job with a historical era in a game, it's not enough to have it there as awkwardly fitting background while for all practical purposes you just go around killing things for no apparent reason - you have to tailor the gameplay, the game's goals, conflicts and dynamics to be appropriate for the setting. The King of Dragon Pass is so great because its Bronze Age feel goes beyond simple aesthetics - indeed, the entire game revolves around tribal politics, cattle theft and gaining power and prestige through cultic activity. For all its gloriously weird Gloranthan fantasy, the game saddles you with goals and concerns that are appropriate for a Bronze Age village, and this immerses you in the setting.

While actual historical settings are nice and all, practically speaking, I'd settle for fantasy games with settings that take their cues from something other than medieval Europe. And really, like King of Dragon Pass, fantasy games can do a great job evoking the "spirit" of a historical period if they put their minds to it. Fantasy as they are, Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre are head and shoulders above just about any other game in how they present their late medieval settings, simply because the game casts you as the participant of a civil war instead of just drifting all over the place. That sort of thing makes a huge difference.
 

rogozhin

Cipher
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Dec 31, 2010
Messages
294
The chief problem with a historical setting is that player interactivity intrudes on historic outcomes. And disallowing the player from affecting major events is a major turnoff.

Well, so do strategy games. If you play the Germans in a WW2 strategy game and win, the war takes an ahistorical outcome. If you play as Venice in Europy Universalis and colonize the Americas, it is ahistorical. If you play a historical battle in a TW game and win as the historically losing side/lose as the historically winning side, the outcome is ahistorical.

In strategy games, everyone accepts that once the player is involved, the game will not end up as real history did, because the player might make different decisions to what historical leaders did. Why should that be a problem in RPGs? Let the player take sides and influence the outcome, maybe even just very slightly in some detils, or majorly if your story allows for it. Give Arcanum-style ending slides on what happened. When there's an ending slide saying "your involvement led to Napoleon winning against Russia" or "you helped the Emperor defend Constantinople and the Turks were beaten, the Empire continued to exist for another century", you know that this isn't how things really happened, but it's fucking awesome to know that your actions changed history to such an extent.
Apart from that I don't see what's wrong with confining the player to a minor role in the grand scheme of things. I'd love to play a JA2 / Expeditions: Conquistador style game in which you control a band of mercenaries simply out for personal fame and riches, working for multiple opposing factions, set during the Reconquista or Thirty Years' War.
 

SwiftCrack

Arcane
Joined
Oct 3, 2012
Messages
1,836
Secret of Evermore is the best SNES RPG and it is historical as shit.

Come at me :smug:.
 

Eirikur

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 25, 2014
Messages
1,126
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
This person apparently has never heard of Darklands. Unleash the dogs.

Call off your hounds, sir! Redemption in progress! It's never too late!

UBMjQCZ.jpg
 

Immortal

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In My Safe Space
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Safe Space - Don't Bulli
The chief problem with a historical setting is that player interactivity intrudes on historic outcomes. And disallowing the player from affecting major events is a major turnoff.

Well, so do strategy games. If you play the Germans in a WW2 strategy game and win, the war takes an ahistorical outcome. If you play as Venice in Europy Universalis and colonize the Americas, it is ahistorical. If you play a historical battle in a TW game and win as the historically losing side/lose as the historically winning side, the outcome is ahistorical.

In strategy games, everyone accepts that once the player is involved, the game will not end up as real history did, because the player might make different decisions to what historical leaders did. Why should that be a problem in RPGs? Let the player take sides and influence the outcome, maybe even just very slightly in some detils, or majorly if your story allows for it. Give Arcanum-style ending slides on what happened. When there's an ending slide saying "your involvement led to Napoleon winning against Russia" or "you helped the Emperor defend Constantinople and the Turks were beaten, the Empire continued to exist for another century", you know that this isn't how things really happened, but it's fucking awesome to know that your actions changed history to such an extent.
Apart from that I don't see what's wrong with confining the player to a minor role in the grand scheme of things. I'd love to play a JA2 / Expeditions: Conquistador style game in which you control a band of mercenaries simply out for personal fame and riches, working for multiple opposing factions, set during the Reconquista or Thirty Years' War.

Agreed.. I enjoy being a smaller part of a bigger puzzle.. I don't wanna be the king / chosen one / inquisitor / whatever trope bioware thinks of next.

I want to be a small fry with my own goals and power struggles over shadowed by larger forces at work or in conflict.

This is why I loved Final Fantasy Tactics.. It really embodies a plot with multiple angles and shades of grey. Everyone is out for something and backstabbing eachother under the umbrella of a larger war. It was the first and last time Square Enix actually gave a shit about a plot.

(They later Reconned half of FFT and made shitty spin off clones to cash in)
 
Joined
Aug 24, 2014
Messages
162
The chief problem with a historical setting is that player interactivity intrudes on historic outcomes. And disallowing the player from affecting major events is a major turnoff.

Well, so do strategy games. If you play the Germans in a WW2 strategy game and win, the war takes an ahistorical outcome. If you play as Venice in Europy Universalis and colonize the Americas, it is ahistorical. If you play a historical battle in a TW game and win as the historically losing side/lose as the historically winning side, the outcome is ahistorical.

In strategy games, everyone accepts that once the player is involved, the game will not end up as real history did, because the player might make different decisions to what historical leaders did. Why should that be a problem in RPGs? Let the player take sides and influence the outcome, maybe even just very slightly in some detils, or majorly if your story allows for it. Give Arcanum-style ending slides on what happened. When there's an ending slide saying "your involvement led to Napoleon winning against Russia" or "you helped the Emperor defend Constantinople and the Turks were beaten, the Empire continued to exist for another century", you know that this isn't how things really happened, but it's fucking awesome to know that your actions changed history to such an extent.

Historic strategy games still need determism, there is nothing worse then playing through HoI and finding out the Germans pussed out in 39. While you can certainly leave the ending open to anything, it's the choices in between that can have a significant effect on future outcomes. If a PC convinces Napoleon not to invade Russia for example. This isn't much of a problem in strategy games as their mechanics allow for ahistorical events to be represented properly but it can either screw over other genres or force the developer to make significantly more content, and most fantasy RPGs already railroad player decisions to fit the narrative leaving choices to minor cosmetic differances.

But I'll admit that having very little global influence and merely being a minor player in the setting sounds great.
 

Telengard

Arcane
Joined
Nov 27, 2011
Messages
1,621
Location
The end of every place
Why aren't there more historical rpgs? I will quote for an answer.
History is boring.
What's the point, it's already happened so who cares?
People say history is boring, and that is true because people are boring.
But really, may as well ask why so many shooters are set during WWII rather than using bow and arrow. Big picture, History is more niche than Fantasy. RPGs are already a niche. So, a Historical RPG is a niche of a niche. If previous historical RPGs regularly pulled big sales numbers, like Fantasy RPGs regularly do, getting them funded wouldn't be an issue.

We could even rattle off a list of actual RPGs with at least a historical backdrop, and most people even on the Codex wouldn't have played them, and it would be drastically worse outside of the Codex, where most wouldn't even have heard of them. But everyone's played Dragon Age: Origins. And there you are. You can take DA:O to investors and say "We want to make a game like that, and this is what we expect to earn." Do that with, say, Gladius, and even though it's a psuedo-historical RPG designed for consoles, the investors'll say, "Fuck off."

Of course, if we rattled off that list of historical RPGs, most of them suck. So, there's that. But lots of Fantasy RPGs have sucked and still done well sales-wise. (Did I mention DA:O?)
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Another example of how moderntards fail to understand medieval society. For them, everything is about class, which fails to explain how somebody could be born a peasant and still become a renowned scholar and eventually even Pope:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Sylvester_II

Its cause church acted as adoptionist corporation fishing from talents in all societal stratas? And until Renaissance it was not uncommon to be knighted by King in Potatoland for war heroism or other valuable services for crown; funny cause L1berals keep telling us that Medieval ages kept commoners down.

That's because they are fed the bullshit marxist version of history which is utterly retarded and based on herp and derp. 100% of history is class struggle and the powerful keeping the poor down, and religion has always just been a way to blind people from the truth, be it the ancient cults with many gods or the medieval Christian and muslim churches. In Marxist world view there is no place for spirituality and idealism, it is all just about bullshit materialism and people never do anything for reasons higher than themselves.

A huge crock of absolutely retarded bullshit that doesn't apply to any historical period ever.
 

DaveO

Erudite
Joined
May 30, 2007
Messages
1,240
I don't know if this has already been said in the replies, but here is my take. Life expectancy was much lower before the 1900s. Disease was far more likely to kill you due to insufficient resources to combat it. Then you have wars, revolutions, and other events that any nation could be vulnerable to. Oh, and did I mention that combat was to-the-death quite often with no save-reload?
 

Johannes

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Nov 20, 2010
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casting coach
I don't know if this has already been said in the replies, but here is my take. Life expectancy was much lower before the 1900s. Disease was far more likely to kill you due to insufficient resources to combat it. Then you have wars, revolutions, and other events that any nation could be vulnerable to. Oh, and did I mention that combat was to-the-death quite often with no save-reload?
WTF does that have to do with RPGs?
 

Dayyālu

Arcane
Joined
Jul 1, 2012
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4,466
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Shaper Crypt
Historical settings are hard to do. Difficult to evoke well, and they require effort compared to any two cents fantasy setting. And can we stop using the term "Tolkien-fantasy" as a comparison? Tolkien fantasy properly done would be awesome.

TB strategy games are far easier, relying more on descriptions and general atmosphere, while in a RPG you need to get people to talk and to represent something different. In AoD, for example, despite it being quite an adequate game, I've always found the writing completely off-putting. Literally, you could take them out of their setting and it would have made little difference: their world has no influence on the characters. My opinion, though.

As usual, it's a matter of how many people would enjoy the game for the resources devoted to it. Two options: big studios are not interested because it is not profitable, small indies often lack the weird blend of technical and historical knowledge.

Expedition: Conquistador was a nice attempt, that could be easily followed. But we should worry about who could be the market for such a game. Gary Grigsby's War in the West has a 60 euro pricetag for a reason: it's niche. Everything we can discuss is niche: and it would require too much effort for the results.

Drat.

That's because they are fed the bullshit marxist version of history which is utterly retarded and based on herp and derp. 100% of history is class struggle and the powerful keeping the poor down, and religion has always just been a way to blind people from the truth, be it the ancient cults with many gods or the medieval Christian and muslim churches. In Marxist world view there is no place for spirituality and idealism, it is all just about bullshit materialism and people never do anything for reasons higher than themselves.

It should be incredibly easy to destroy in a discussion German Marxists Historians if they agree to such a , bluntly put, idiotic view of history. If only "my" marxists were such uninformed and naive weaklings...
 

Athelas

Arcane
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Jun 24, 2013
Messages
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In case you haven't noticed, Ass Creed isn't really about historical events in any way, unless you think the time-transcendening conflict between Templars and Assassins is real.
 

Dayyālu

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Question: if historical setting would be so unpopular, why is Ass Creed so popular?


Accessible generic third person action title with good marketing. 'nuff said.The setting there is simply a decoration to be employed at the leisure of the story writers. Plus they are the standard stock Hollywood historical settings : THE Crusades, THE "Renaissance", THE American Revolution etc.etc...

But I'll admit, I have never played one of them. Lack of a console helps.


But we are talking about the possibility of a good historical RPG. I would threw my money at people doing such things (and I've done so in the past). But regarding RPGs.... well, we had Darklands, Teudogar, Nethergate, Expedition: Conquistador, M&B with his myriads of mods... little else. Maybe my idea that such a product would be quite niche is wrong, but I don't see a good amount of them nor in the past, neither in the future. Maybe Kingdom Come will change that, who knows.
 

eremita

Savant
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Sep 1, 2013
Messages
797
Also more importantly.. will there be boobs?
Most importantly: Will there be manboobs? Don't ostracise!

The game is story driven? What does that mean?
The emphasis. It means that the story is preset (and to some extent non-linear) and is the most important part of the game motivation-wise.
The counterpart is a mechanical game. What you do creates the context or is more important than the context. These games are primarily fun to play.
Story driven games: Mafia, Witcher, Mass Effect, New Vegas, Baldur's Gate 2, Planescape Torment.
Mechanical games: DayZ, Crusader Kings 2, Heroes of MaM, Far Cry 3, AssCreed, Geometry Wars.
I hope I don't have to explain these two aspects are not mutually exclusive.

BG2 is both. That's just confirming your point that those indeed are not mutually exclusive though.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Well, what I wanted to say was: if Ass Creed is that popular, even though the setting is horribly inaccurate in its historicity, it still means you can get people interested in historical games, as long as they're fun. Nobody really cares about Ass Creeds story, but everyone loves the parkour through historic cities aspect of it. Retarded 9gaggers even claim "IT IS GAEM THAT TEACHES U HISTORY SO IT IS GUD EDUCASHUNAL". As long as you make a game with gameplay people like, the historic setting won't put people off, it will make people like the historic setting instead.

If you make history look "cool" in a game or movie, the public will love it. The main reason it's so underused as a setting in games is because marketing research faggots say all the popular games are fantasy; but hey, when someone makes a popular post apoc game, suddenly post apoc becomes the new fad everyone tries to copy! If Kingdom Come becomes a hit, it's likely we'll see a lot of copycats around (that will mostly suck, but eh).
 

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