More "realistic" RPGs (also, party vs 'solo' RPGs)

[JarlFrank]

I think the problem with "realism" as a buzzword is that it's most of the time only applying to graphics. Realistic graphics! Realistic physics! Eye-candy!

While realistic physics could make for some *awesome* gameplay, most of the time they're just there to make dead bodies look good while they fall down. Meh.

 

[JarlFrank]

have you played portal, good sir?

I said, most of the time. If physics are implemented in a good way, it makes for an awesome game. Like Half-Life 2 or Portal. But sadly, most of the time physics are just in for eye-candy [remember how in Oblivion they hyped the physics and in the end they didn't play any gameplay-relevant role at all? meh]

 

[ghostdog]

I remember reading some documents and comments of Warren Spector about the development of Deus Ex. In the beginning he wanted to make a game based on the present time with completely realistic weapons/gadets/situations, but it just didn't work thus he went with futuristic, augmentation, mutants etc. Of course the game ended up being much more realistic than the vast majority of video games.

 

[racofer]

have you played portal, good sir?

I said, most of the time. If physics are implemented in a good way, it makes for an awesome game. Like Half-Life 2 or Portal. But sadly, most of the time physics are just in for eye-candy [remember how in Oblivion they hyped the physics and in the end they didn't play any gameplay-relevant role at all? meh]

Not to mention that Oblivion felt like walking on the moon surface.

 

[Elwro]

Is it worth skipping RR and playing Deus Ex Machina directly? It is supposed to have an improved interface.

I'm not sure it was in any way improved. Both games were goddamn hard and quite unintuitive iirc.

 

[dagorkan]

I'd like to see Realm of Arkania 1/2's realism/difficulty becoming the industry standard.

No, please, no.

Yes, offering challenge is a good thing. It's a wonderful thing. I have played RPGs like Betrayal At Krondor and Ultima Underworld and I love them for their uncompromising challenge.

But RoA - *falls to his knees and claps his hands together* - dear God, no.

No game hurts a man's ego or humiliates him as much as RoA. The entire game is a long sadistic excercise in kicking the player in the teeth and laughing at him. It feels like a long downhill track, where all you can do is struggle to survive.

Yeah, playing RoA only requires some perseverance, and is not that challenging once you put your mind to it, but what depresses me is having my party suffer all sorts of ailments, running short of food, losing mana, and having to be on guard against ambushes before they have started to get anything done already. Around the beginning of the RoA2, I was thinking: "Is all this worth a 1000 ducats?"

It is not the hardest game out there, but the thing about hard games is that difficulty causes you to get greater satisfaction when you find the powerful item with which you can finally start kicking ass on all those annoying enemies. The tradeoff is the positive rewards. RoA doesn't feel...rewarding. In this game, you are constantly stuck under a huge pile of shit, and your tradeoff is merely being able to stay on top of it.

Basically: in most games, if you do things right, you get rewarded. In RoA, you do things right, you don't get punished.

As for what this topic is about, yeah I agree with you.

Then we can make a special super easy mode just for you, same mechanics and design but with all penalties reduced by 90% so you can handle it. I just don't think RPGs should be scaled to that level as default.

Or you could follow through your original thought that this is a uniquely challenging game and that challenge is good, learn to enjoy it and stop whining.

 

[SuicideBunny]

Then we can make a special super easy mode just for you, same mechanics and design but with all penalties reduced by 90% so you can handle it. I just don't think RPGs should be scaled to that level as default.

this isn't about difficulty but fundamental design approach. the dsa games were so challenging not because of what you normally consider to be higher difficulty but because they were simulationist rpgs. obviously there are people who like those, and as companies shy away from them there is a mostly empty (unreal world) niche that could be easily filled by some more indie devs, but i'm one of the people who views the challenge in such games more like work that needs to be done in order to get to the good parts, and don't think something like that should be industry standard.

 

[Demnogonis Saastuttaja]

I'm perfectly fine with your character becoming the destroyer manifest or whatever, like in MoTB. But in MoTB, I didn't like at all that street vendors sell Death Stars and that some random thieves, barbarians, pirates and whatever are all generally on your level. But anyway, I like collecting loot and getting levels and more power.

I also would like to have a lot more games like Jagged Alliance 2, which for me is the most awesome game ever made. Also, games like Deus Ex where you have a difficulty setting in where you die to almost anything and so does everyone else. Everything dying fast often tends to make the game a quikload-fest, though, but since RPG's usually involve some luck it would be incredibly annoying to not have quikload.

A real Warhammer CRPG could be cool, one which faithfully recreated the PnP rules, so you would occasionally have to replace your limbs with peg-legs, hooks and such, would get diseases like Bloody Flux, mutations like that one which replaces your blood with anything from acid or electricity to excrement, and so on. Perhaps should be party-based, and replacing dead party members mid-game should be an option (maybe only if you're paid up with priests of Morr?). But meh, they made a MMORPG instead and I don't think there'll be anything but MMORPG 2 chat box edition instead of some real games.

And realism isn't what I'm missing in the current generation of RPG's all that much. I'd like them to have good sense of humour. Not that I hate all those goth-kid serious games about darkness and pain and whatever, but there's just no variety.

 

[Lemunde]

But in MoTB, I didn't like at all that street vendors sell Death Stars...

You've obviously never been to a Texas flee market.

 

[SkeleTony]

That is what separated the first RPGs from their ancestor "War games".

weird. i always thought what separated them was that players controlled individual units rather than armies and most importantly that units had statistics that could be improved and carried over between games.

You are partly agreeing with me here(and partly assuming I don't agree with you I think).

What IS an "individual character"? Such is a unit made up of quantified attributes. Usually in RPGs these characters gather into parties of 4-8(a "squad" in wargame terms. Each character is defined by 4-14 primary attributes, 2-20-something secondary attributes and various skills, powers, talents etc.

Now what is an "army" in a war game? It is a 'unit' made of of many other 'units'(analogous to character attributes in a RPG in a sense). Many "squads" make up a 'division', a few 'divisions' in a battalion(or whatever) etc.

Again, squad based tactical games are an off-shoot/sub-genre of war games. RPGs are to squad based tactical games what squad based tactical games are to war games. The evolution is from macro scale "Armies" to "Squads" to "Characters" in terms of where the games concentrate their focus.

 

[SkeleTony]

That is what separated the first RPGs from their ancestor "War games".

weird. i always thought what separated them was that players controlled individual units rather than armies and most importantly that units had statistics that could be improved and carried over between games.

Yeah, last I checked, it was the fact that you play a single character that separated D&D from Chainmail.

Relevance...?

 

[SkeleTony]

Why do I start a thread on RPGs and all you guys can talk about is squad based combat games?

Jagged Alliance 2 IS a RPG. RPGs by definition ARE squad level tactical games(not necessarily "combat" but you can see why this is usually the case). That is what separated the first RPGs from their ancestor "War games".

squad based combat games can be RPGs, but they don't need to.

Agreed 100%! The converse however...not so much. RPGs must be squad-based tactical games in order to be RPGs. Whether your "squad" is a single character or a party of eight.

I understand people arguing "i can't rolepay 12 characters" and they're right. At the same time, squad interaction may yield more character development than your pale, generic "little-boy-grows-hero-saves-world" storyline ever can.

Agreed. I have never understood the "I can't roleplay 12 characters" contention when applied to COMPUTER RPGs though. I mean really...are they LARPing from behind their monitors?!

(as a sidenote, latest ja2 1.13 development allows to create up to 8 or 10 or whatever party members according to your taste, not pre-selected. The normal maximum is 6, but you can use more slots to generate larger parties. So Icewind dale style party generation is also possible in ja2, depends on your taste and use of new features.

I know. I tend to regularly SVN my JA2 1.13 stuff. I personally do not like to create multiple IMPs for JA2 because it is cheating(unless you jack up the price in teh options.ini file which I am not sure if you can even do?) and you miss out on all that glorious dialog/personality and such.

It is even fairly easy to put in custom voice and faces, i'll tell you what, there's no character that gets you more involved in the game than one talking with your own voice.

Yeah, I never can bring myself to put that much work into customizing a game. I have tried modding before and always get derailed by real life or lose interest. I do custom graphics for RPGs that employ the old 2D tiled graphics with very limited or NO animation(Natuk, Helherron etc.) but beyond that...nothing Would be kind of cool to plug in my mic and record some voice dialog for JA2 though. I have a decent voice, diction and can deliver lines better than a lot of people. But I am not a writer and am afraid I might end up voicing more than a few "She is evil. A Driven bitch." type lines or some crap.
Would be fun/funny for just me and my friends though.

IMHO, realism has become an awful "Unwort" in metagaming lately. It's used as pretext for all kinds of retarded perversions, so i'd say it's easier to argue about a game's inherent logic or consistency or whatever. But realism is overloaded and overused as a metagamin term

Agreed.

 

[dagorkan]

Agreed 100%! The converse however...not so much. RPGs must be squad-based tactical games in order to be RPGs. Whether your "squad" is a single character or a party of eight.

Lolz, I don't think so. There's such a thing as pushing an analogy too far...

 

[Ebonsword]

I think the problem with "realism" as a buzzword is that it's most of the time only applying to graphics. Realistic graphics! Realistic physics! Eye-candy!

While realistic physics could make for some *awesome* gameplay, most of the time they're just there to make dead bodies look good while they fall down. Meh.

I agree. What especially ticks me off is when you have a game set on spaceships and space stations yet it has not one single moment of weightlessness (yes, I'm looking at you Mass Effect).

One of the big problems with a lot of sci-fi movies is that it's too difficult to deal with weightlessness so they just handwave it away with "always on" artificial gravity. A videogame with a realistic representation of weightlessness could offer something totally unique and I really don't know why it hasn't been done yet (or maybe it has and I'm just not aware of it).

 

[inwoker]

dead space has a lot low-gravity based locations but that's no arpeegee

 

[SkeleTony]

Agreed 100%! The converse however...not so much. RPGs must be squad-based tactical games in order to be RPGs. Whether your "squad" is a single character or a party of eight.

Lolz, I don't think so. There's such a thing as pushing an analogy too far...

Only if you are one of those guys who try to ambiguously define "Role-Playing Game" so broadly that DOOM becomes an RPG because "Youa re playing a ROLE!". If, like me you employ a useful definition that enables us to distinguiosh RPGs from other genres then my above is completely true.

Name ONE RPG that is not a squad-based tactical game.

 

[JarlFrank]

Name ONE RPG that is not a squad-based tactical game.

Ultima Underworld?

 

[ghostdog]

Let's make this another "Definition of RPG" thread !