Fate of the Middle Class RPG

[Zero Credibility]

My favorite crafting will always be BG2-style "pay someone else to combine unique items."

Completely agree. As limited as it was, BG2 crafting was interesting, with good lore description of components and items, it kept you looking for more, and gave powerful and rare items. None of that "collect 30 buffalo horns, 20 goblin spleens and 10 dragon dicks to create a generic enchanted sword" bullshit. I still can't believe how badly they missed this point in PoE.

 

[Mustawd]

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.

I enjoyed the multiplayer part of it. Not so much the crafting in and of itself. The weight limit to carry stuff was rage inducing to be honest.

But I liked going to the forge, seeing the same people smelting ore into ingots and forging weapons, etc. Then you'd go to the bank, and spam your ICQ channel with what you were selling and for what price. Then you'd get a few regular customers. It was a bunch of fun at the time. Like, crafting felt like an actual skill that was valued. Even if you weren't high level, people would still pay to buy ingots because they leveling up their blacksmithing skill. Which meant I mostly focused on increasing my mining skill and did blacksmithing when business was slow.

Again, it felt like an actual world where artisans had value in the community. Making it difficult meant only some people could stand the grind. Dunno, but MMOs nowadays feel like everyone is crafting because it's more streamlined. Might be wrong, but that's just the overall feeling I get.

 

[Roguey]

Completely agree. As limited as it was, BG2 crafting was interesting, with good lore description of components and items, it kept you looking for more, and gave powerful and rare items. None of that "collect 30 buffalo horns, 20 goblin spleens and 10 dragon dicks to create a generic enchanted sword" bullshit. I still can't believe how badly they missed this point in PoE.

Pre-release, Josh said they were going to have both kinds of crafting. Did they not?

 

[Zero Credibility]

Don't remember anything like that in the base game, but then I never finished it and I am trying to forget the disappointment of even playing it.

 

[Infinitron]

Completely agree. As limited as it was, BG2 crafting was interesting, with good lore description of components and items, it kept you looking for more, and gave powerful and rare items. None of that "collect 30 buffalo horns, 20 goblin spleens and 10 dragon dicks to create a generic enchanted sword" bullshit. I still can't believe how badly they missed this point in PoE.

Pre-release, Josh said they were going to have both kinds of crafting. Did they not?

There's the Blade of the Endless Paths. But BG2's thing isn't "crafting", it's just a form of quest.

Real (systemic) crafting is a way to add a little extra something to your character build, it's not a way of acquiring super-items. I suggested to Josh to add an explicit "crafting points" stat of some sort that characters gain on level up to emphasize this. Crafting as incremental character improvement, just like how you choose a talent on level up.

 

[Beastro]

They're all garbage. And retards, to boot. How hard is it making a polished game with limited C&C? Do we need bloated 50h shitware? Must they use horrendous 3d assets and Unity? Why not make a turn-based game set in a world with gothic architecture, with heroic visuals and aesthetics, Banner Saga graphics, an indepth combat and stat system that doesn't border on the autistic (thanks Josh!!), and a 15h campaign. How is it possible that literally dozens of designers keep failing over and over and over again. Is it stupidity? Ignorance? Avarice? Hubris?

Joined: Tuesday

 

[Infinitum]

The thing I never understood with PC crafting is that the player eventually becomes the worlds most skilled blacksmith/jeweler/tailor/cook, producing items matching the great artifacts of old or making the most fucktastic delicious food known to man or brewing the very, very best healing potions or whatever, yet still opts to make his or her living as a glorified pest control/errant boy.

 

[Immortal]

They're all garbage. And retards, to boot. How hard is it making a polished game with limited C&C? Do we need bloated 50h shitware? Must they use horrendous 3d assets and Unity? Why not make a turn-based game set in a world with gothic architecture, with heroic visuals and aesthetics, Banner Saga graphics, an indepth combat and stat system that doesn't border on the autistic (thanks Josh!!), and a 15h campaign. How is it possible that literally dozens of designers keep failing over and over and over again. Is it stupidity? Ignorance? Avarice? Hubris?

Joined: Tuesday

Dunno if that's pathetic.. or impressive.

 

[Ninjerk]

They're all garbage. And retards, to boot. How hard is it making a polished game with limited C&C? Do we need bloated 50h shitware? Must they use horrendous 3d assets and Unity? Why not make a turn-based game set in a world with gothic architecture, with heroic visuals and aesthetics, Banner Saga graphics, an indepth combat and stat system that doesn't border on the autistic (thanks Josh!!), and a 15h campaign. How is it possible that literally dozens of designers keep failing over and over and over again. Is it stupidity? Ignorance? Avarice? Hubris?

Joined: Tuesday

Dunno if that's pathetic.. or impressive.

He managed to unite Obsiditards and Sawyer haters.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Why RPGs need to have the open-world structure when most designers fail even with level-based/corridor-like worlds?
Why bother making a single playthrough take 40+ hours when most games outstay their welcome after 12-15 hours or so?
Why C&C is always limited to convos when there are other ways to make the players think about their actions?

 

[Mozg]

I've had zero enthusiasm for most of the upper middle class "BBB" crowdfunded RPGs. I like HBS but they're a level or two smaller scale.

Ideally I'd want the middle class dev to be committed to our niche (to the extent that we have one), yet not slavishly reproduce rote, conservative designs. Like, an exciting new set of mechanics, settings, themes, or whatever designed for people that liked D&D crpgs or Fallout yet not "I can't believe it's not 1991/1997/1999" attempts at cargo culty retro-designs. It's probably not possible.

 

[Trashos]

Arcanum's crafting is the best one I have seen. Its design complexity and the satisfaction I get out of it are awesome.

PoE's crafting is not that bad, it is very strategic and CnC like. You get to decide what to upgrade on a weapon when you have enough money -up to the weapon's upgrade capacity. So you have a nice sword and can choose to specialize it in kicking Ogre butts by upgrading the Corrosive damage and the damage against Wilders. But then the sword won't be as good against, say, spirits. I kind of liked this system.

 

[Beastro]

There's the Blade of the Endless Paths. But BG2's thing isn't "crafting", it's just a form of quest.

That reminds me, who the hell made that item and name when it's a fucking estoc, a bladeless sword???

Arcanum's crafting is the best one I have seen. Its design complexity and the satisfaction I get out of it are awesome.

PoE's crafting is not that bad, it is very strategic and CnC like. You get to decide what to upgrade on a weapon when you have enough money -up to the weapon's upgrade capacity. So you have a nice sword and can choose to specialize it in kicking Ogre butts by upgrading the Corrosive damage and the damage against Wilders. But then the sword won't be as good against, say, spirits. I kind of liked this system.

Too bad it had no damn impact on the combat.

If a game's going to add little things like that, they better stand out and be something you'd even carry around as a utility long after it's outclasses for those special encounters instead of making the difference be between "killing shit fast" and "killing shit slightly faster".

Like that one underpowered sword with more damage to wisps and ghosts you get first visiting the stronghold that's vendor trash because the situational bonus just doesn't compensate for drop in damage to be worth carrying around for those kinds of fights.

 

[Roguey]

That reminds me, who the hell made that item and name when it's a fucking estoc, a bladeless sword???

Characterized as having a cruciform hilt with a grip for two handed use and a straight, edgeless but sharply pointed blade of around 0.91 metres (36 in) to 1.32 metres (52 in) in length.

 

[Trashos]

Too bad it had no damn impact on the combat.

If a game's going to add little things like that, they better stand out and be something you'd even carry around as a utility long after it's outclasses for those special encounters instead of making the difference be between "killing shit fast" and "killing shit slightly faster".

Like that one underpowered sword with more damage to wisps and ghosts you get first visiting the stronghold that's vendor trash because the situational bonus just doesn't compensate for drop in damage to be worth carrying around for those kinds of fights.

You have got a point that combat in PoE is usually too easy anyway, but that's not the crafting system's fault. PoE's crafting is OK as a system.

Btw, the Whispers of Yenwood sword is not vendor fodder at all. For several reasons:
- It is the only unique sword you are going to get for a very long time in the base game.
- You add Burn damage to it, and then it is always relevant against Spirits.
- Even when you get a sword that is more to your liking, WoY is still a good alternative weapon for Durance.
- Its curse is not that bad (Will -3), and its other unique properties (Con +2, Reliable) are pretty good.

 

[Tigranes]

Whispers of Yenwood is a blessing in many a solo run. Not because it has some special benefit when solo, but that's when you can really see how small number differences can translate into qualitatively huge gains in POE system. Yenwood can be the difference between a character in Act 1 who has to rely on luck to get past spirits, and one who now is able to construct a set of strategies against them. You may dump it once you arrive in Defiance Bay, depending on your party's needs, but that's not really a big problem. You have other weapons, like pre-1.5 Hold Wall, Oidreacht, Gaun's Flail, that continue to be tempting choices for many types of characters throughout the entire base game.

 

[animlboogy]

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".

Sure it's good for Codexers, but not just for Codexers.

I don't consider any of those three games to be awful in the larger scheme of things. I believe that Skyrim was a net positive for the RPG genre, and am happy that it buried the Mass Effect 2-style cinematic RPG, which was a blight threatening to turn the genre into Call of Duty.

Huh. I hadn't thought of that angle on Skyrim's popularity. At the very least, it proved that a more systems-driven approach was capable of drawing in a much larger audience than the borderline Square-Enix style Bioware went with.

But then Bioware's response was Inquisition, which was like some kind of cargo cult attempt at a systems-driven RPG. That thing plays like no games exist besides Skyrim and Dragon Age 2.

I guess if we get another open world game that leans more towards Gothic or something, maybe I'll agree that Skyrim had any kind of positive effect on the AAA RPG audience. Right now, we just have Inquisition being the overstuffed bag of shit that it is, and a Fallout 4 that somehow managed to be even bigger and even dumber than Fallout 3 (by most accounts; I didn't bother to buy the thing).

 

[Lilura]

BG2 crafting was interesting

 

[animlboogy]

Can you imagine people 15 years from now - "Man, games today suck, why can't we have an amazing game like Skyrim?". Uuugghh, just thinking about it makes me want to puke.

it is already happening. I saw a lot of fans of oblivion hate skyrim. fans of mass effect 1 hate ME 2/3.
even fans of gta 4 now are calling fans of gta 5 casuals

There are fans of Oblivion? I thought there were just people who fondly remembered the game because they only played it for 10 hours and didn't realize how literally broken the core of that game was.

The game is objectively bad past a certain point. It is no longer even attempts to be a game concept meant to produce fun if you do even a fraction of the non-critical content and train your character a hair too much.

People like that will never be worth listening to, or even discussing.

 

[Metal Hurlant]

Completely agree. As limited as it was, BG2 crafting was interesting, with good lore description of components and items, it kept you looking for more, and gave powerful and rare items. None of that "collect 30 buffalo horns, 20 goblin spleens and 10 dragon dicks to create a generic enchanted sword" bullshit. I still can't believe how badly they missed this point in PoE.

Pre-release, Josh said they were going to have both kinds of crafting. Did they not?

Even the backers who pledged for items in PoE weren't allowed to do a BG2 and break up items for them to be crafted.

 

[hpstg]

The way I see it, the main problem of PoE and WL2 was that the actual expectations of people for them were similar to "first class" games because of the Kickstarter hype. The actual games had small budgets and were made by teams that HAD to play it safe because if they didn't, they could forget funding anything else through KS. It might sound weird, but my definition of a "middle class" RPG was Dragon Age 2. It wasn't as big a release as Origins, it was made by a more or less experienced team that had done previous very successful AAA titles, it tried a few new things but without the resources to see them implemented properly, and it ended up in the shit can.
The whole "middle of the road" RPG implies that it was something we expected more off, so no rational conversation about them can happen. We (correctly) forgive everything to Underail/AoD, but if e.g. Bioware or I don't know who else of the big guys, ever attempt something a bit different with a smaller budget, then the shit hose opens and it never closes until the lead designer commits seppuku and we piss on his grave. Apart from pure internet hate, the problem is exactly that. The games don't have good enough production values to be AAA, and not bad enough production values to be considered indies that we forgive everything because they will attempt to jerk off our favorite fetish. So they float onto the pile of shit and nothing new is ever tried in a middle scale.

Before anyone gets me on D:OS being the example of a "middle rpg", Larian still counts psychologically as a small studio doing a release with much better production values than we expected (hence the torrents of love). If D:OS was a Bethesda game, the reactions would be different (and I am a great fan of the game).

EDIT: I've never rolled before and I pressed it by mistake, so fuck it.

 

[animlboogy]

The way I see it, the main problem of PoE and WL2 was that the actual expectations of people for them were similar to "first class" games because of the Kickstarter hype. The actual games had small budgets and were made by teams that HAD to play it safe because if they didn't, they could forget funding anything else through KS. It might sound weird, but my definition of a "middle class" RPG was Dragon Age 2. It wasn't as big a release as Origins, it was made by a more or less experienced team that had done previous very successful AAA titles, it tried a few new things but without the resources to see them implemented properly, and it ended up in the shit can.
The whole "middle of the road" RPG implies that it was something we expected more off, so no rational conversation about them can happen. We (correctly) forgive everything to Underail/AoD, but if e.g. Bioware or I don't know who else of the big guys, ever attempt something a bit different with a smaller budget, then the shit hose opens and it never closes until the lead designer commits seppuku and we piss on his grave. Apart from pure internet hate, the problem is exactly that. The games don't have good enough production values to be AAA, and not bad enough production values to be considered indies that we forgive everything because they will attempt to jerk off our favorite fetish. So they float onto the pile of shit and nothing new is ever tried in a middle scale.

Before anyone gets me on D:OS being the example of a "middle rpg", Larian still counts psychologically as a small studio doing a release with much better production values than we expected (hence the torrents of love). If D:OS was a Bethesda game, the reactions would be different (and I am a great fan of the game).

EDIT: I've never rolled before and I pressed it by mistake, so fuck it.

If D:OS was a Bethesda game, it would be seen as the mid-budget side-project to their AAA work. They'd probably get praised for it, just like Ubisoft garnered some praise for bothering with Might and Magic X, even though that game has quite a few flaws as well.

Piranha Bytes is another studio that exemplifies what the middle tier RPG looks like. Too bad their games have been terrible for years... but anyway, that's what I believe Infinitron was getting at here. Not Dragon Age 2 type games, which still had proper AAA budgets and just happened to be a little more awful than usual. By Bioware's own admission that game was an attempt to bring what the Mass Effect 2 team accomplished in streamlining their sequel, over to the Dragon Age project. They were aiming to sell even more than Origins; that it ended up as it did had nothing to do with it being some handicapped budget situation.

 

[Mustawd]

Everyone has forgotten Hairbrained Studios or whatever they are called. Shadowrun games were pretty fun. Except for first one. That was a bit meh.

 

[Zeriel]

We just need someone to make an actual seven digit Fallout successor and/or a seven digit RPG with fantastic writing. It'll happen given time.

We had that. It's called Divinity: Original Sin.

 

[Prime Junta]

Everyone has forgotten Hairbrained Studios or whatever they are called. Shadowrun games were pretty fun. Except for first one. That was a bit meh.

They were fun but relatively forgettable. Not much to say about them really.