Elder Scrolls Predict worst RPG of 2023

[somerandomdude]

Diablo 4

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

Both Starfield and Baldur's Gate 3 will be excellent. My money is on Obsidian or some other household classic rpg creator to fuck it up.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

one of two things will happen in 2023:
there will be more video games released from notable developers than any other year in recent memory
OR
nearly all the games supposed to release in 2023 will be delayed to 2024

guess which one it will be

 

[quaesta]

Bethesda at least makes nice worlds/environments, and that edge could carry me through Starfield. Even if it's a shit game, if I can see nice locales it would be enough to not be worse RPG of 2023 (Still won't buy it till it's as cheap as a sandwich)

 

[Nikanuur]

Mark my words, the worst will be Underrail 2, having scored 9/10 at IGN, 9/10 at RPG Codex, and 4,5/5 at GoG as: "best surprise out of nowhere" of the decade, almost reaching the Call of Saregnar (short by 0.3 points).
Read that again and happy Christmas to you lot.

 

[Humbaba]

Anything that isn't Owlcat's Rogue Trader

 

[Serus]

Mark my words, the worst will be Underrail 2, having scored 9/10 at IGN, 9/10 at RPG Codex, and 4,5/5 at GoG as: "best surprise out of nowhere" of the decade, almost reaching the Call of Saregnar (short by 0.3 points).
Read that again and happy Christmas to you lot.

Stop it! You are not called rusty. Shitting on Underrail (with any number) is his job not yours! Even if you are his alt.



Correct answer 1:
Ur mom.

Correct answer 2:
Some shitty indie that even Codex will miss. I won.

 

[luj1]

I don't know what will and what won't be released in 2023. My predictions for the incoming period are Rogue Trader as the worst CRPG and Urban Strife as the best.

Space Wreck as the second best and Starfield not an RPG at all.

 

[KainenMorden]

Even though Sven and co are clearly dumb as fuck, they are at least trying to capture part of the spirit of the earlier games. Sure it'll be done awfully, full of woke bollocks, and a waste of time, but I think we'll get enough residue of the originals to at least stop it being THE worst.

Controversial Opinion time. I know this is going to get me shit on by some of the more diehard members here, but they are wrong on this issue so I don't really care about their opinions.

Baldurs Gate and Planescape Torment are the two worst Infinity Engine games. BG was the popular one and since then every CRPG has followed the "Baldurs Gate style", which was always awful (one protagonist, small interconnected areas on an overworld map littered with lots of random unrelated side quests, filler locations between the real ones such as forests etc littered with arbitrarily placed and easy enemies, and a somewhat serious theme with comedic moments). Instead of focusing on dungeon crawling (which AD&D was literally built around and is the strength of it's design) they instead tried to shoehorn in a half-assed RPG using dialog choices and "good writing" (of which there is almost none in the original BG, every character is either totally virtuous and perfectly good or they are pure evil because....being evil is fun I guess??), and it leaves a hollow and unfulfilling experience where almost none of the mechanics really gel with what you're supposed to be doing. The storytelling will grind to a halt and suddenly hit you with "combat time" while you're wandering the wilderness because 3 random wolves attacked, but even the actual storytelling itself is also so completely devoid of mechanics and interaction (because AD&D has virtually no mechanics for handling conversations) and so everything becomes a largely meaningless dialogue tree where all the options boil down to "I will do your quest", "I will not do your quest", "I'm an asshole" and "tell me about the local area". Everything else is just worldbuilding. I would describe Baldur's Gate as smoke and mirrors, but that's being too harsh - smoke and mirrors implies deception, and I think they were trying to make the best game they could, they just chose the wrong framework and their work suffered horribly as a result.

The AD&D Model was just never a good fit for a game that's supposed to be story-driven or quest-driven. It's an excellent fit for an overarching dungeon-crawl type game since almost all of the progression is based on getting more powerful, rather than fulfilling story experiences. In fact, most RPGs suffer from this problem (it's not just endemic to BG). Most RPGs try to follow the D&D model to some extent (stats, abilities, etc) and in almost all cases create a complex character system that is almost completely irrelevant to the story or the actual experience of the writing, which is supposed to be the focus. When they do make it affect the writing, it usually ends up either being an RNG mess (Fallout 3 speech) or a completely overpowered mess (F:NV speech) because you can't realistically apply numbers-based mechanics (checks, etc) to narrative branches. It's like trying to "calculate" morality. The system doesn't work that way! I don't think it's anyone's fault that RPGs are designed like this. I think someone just decided one day that the D&D model was a good fit for a story-driven game and we all just went with it without thinking.

Until RPGs move away from the dungeon-crawling model set by D&D and foolishly adopted by Baldurs Gate, we will forever be stuck with simplistic, largely gameplay-unaffected dialog trees for quests, a handful of wonky "out of combat" stats that are either completely useless or so overpowered they are must-picks, and a strange disconnect between "gameplay mode" (the combat part of the game, stat rolls, spells, abilities etc) and "story mode" (the rest of the game, story branches, speech checks etc).

PS:T is even worse than Baldurs Gate in this regard. It has so little gameplay, and what it does have is so extremely underwhelming, that the game basically gets in the way of itself and most of the actual gameplay is much better skipped than actually played. You literally can't even die, the combat and stats systems literally only exist to give you something to do in the sparse and unimportant "combat" sections and are the exact opposite of what the game is about. The rest of the game doesn't add any new mechanics so it's just dialogue trees. What gameplay is there is bad, and the main focus - the writing - has almost no actual gameplay attached to it. It has the full AD&D stats system, and completely squanders it. PS:T would have been a far better game if they focused on their goal of writing an interesting character story and made it purely an interactive story-driven game with some actual mechanics around player choices and consequences for their decisions. Instead we get a very crappy D&D campaign with a pretty good novel attached to it. Personally I could never finish PS:T because as much as I enjoy the writing the gameplay is so horrendously bad it borders on unplayable.

Garbage in, garbage out. BG3 is going to be shit specifically because they are trying to "capture" the original, which was never that good to begin with. It doesn't matter that they are using D&D 5e rather than a weird mutant version of AD&D 2e. What matters is that they are trying to shoehorn combat-focused and adventuring mechanics onto a "story driven" role playing game. It sucked in the original and it's going to suck even more in the new version.

AD&D was not a good fit for Baldur's Gate, but it WAS a good fit for Icewind Dale, which is why IWD is the best Infinity Engine game by a significant margin. If you don't believe me, go play it through to the end with an open mind and you will see how much better the mechanics work because they are utilised in a quite good dungeon crawler rather than a somewhat-average RPG. People like to complain about "muh lack of story choices" but they have missed the point entirely. Icewind Dale is not a game about branching story choices (not to mention, BG has a severe lack of player agency when it comes to dialog choices as well). It's a combat-focused RPG with an emphasis on adventuring using the ruleset from AD&D, which works extremely well for that sort of thing because that's what it was designed for. It's also oozing with atmosphere and environmental storytelling, but because environmental storytelling isn't a dialog tree, most people discount it out of hand and consider the game "boring" because they aren't making largely meaningless choices in mostly-binary dialogue trees like the rest of the IE games. Play it, it's really good, trust me! IWD does have it's fair share of issues too - such as missing out on good items because of RNG item placements - but most of it's issues are technical in nature and a lot of them can be fixed by Tweaks Anthology (which also, coincidentally, fixes the exact issue I brought up). It's also a bit long for what it is and the gameplay tends to sag a bit in the middle (the Severed Hand location, specifically, really drags on and is terribly balanced for characters at that point in the game).

(In before people chirp in with "it's not about the gameplay, it's about the story!". No. That's an extremely badly-thought-out and very stupid thing to say. Gameplay is the cornerstone of games. It's a core part of game design. It's literally what separates them from the rest of media. If you need to justify awful gameplay by slapping a "but it has a good story" over the top of it, you're defending a book, not a game. The Fighting Fantasy novels did the interactive story thing FAR better and are a much better fit for the medium. Stop making the discussion around gaming worse with your awful and wrong opinions. If gameplay doesn't matter then we are no longer talking about games, we are talking about something else.)

I'm curious on your thoughts on integrating the game play/combat with the story in a more cohesive manner than we've seen up to this point?

For me, personally, crpgs should be dungeon crawl/combat simulators with interesting build opportunities, first and foremost. That's what I enjoy but I also think this style of game fits the medium of a video game much better in general.

From what I know of TTRPGs, its just very hard to simulate all the interactions, exploration, story arcs, choices, etc in vidya.

 

[Fargus]

Voted for Starfield number 3. Out of all Starfields it looks like the most banal shit boring popamole garbage Starfield.

 

[Nikanuur]

Mark my words, the worst will be Underrail 2, having scored 9/10 at IGN, 9/10 at RPG Codex, and 4,5/5 at GoG as: "best surprise out of nowhere" of the decade, almost reaching the Call of Saregnar (short by 0.3 points).
Read that again and happy Christmas to you lot.

Stop it! You are not called rusty. Shitting on Underrail (with any number) is his job not yours! Even if you are his alt.



Correct answer 1:
Ur mom.

Correct answer 2:
Some shitty indie that even Codex will miss. I won.

But I have nothing against Underrail, and I told you to read it again. Ok, maybe three times now.

 

[Late Bloomer]

BG3. Every bit of news / media that comes out only makes it look worse.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

I'm curious on your thoughts on integrating the game play/combat with the story in a more cohesive manner than we've seen up to this point?

For me, personally, crpgs should be dungeon crawl/combat simulators with interesting build opportunities, first and foremost. That's what I enjoy but I also think this style of game fits the medium of a video game much better in general.

From what I know of TTRPGs, its just very hard to simulate all the interactions, exploration, story arcs, choices, etc in vidya.

Giving gameplay to story events is inherently hard because they can't often be described as a series of interacting systems.

However, some games have tried, and have done a reasonable job at it.

New Vegas comes to mind. It does a decent job of adding consequences to questing with the faction system - do a job for one faction, and others will hate you, and vice versa.

I also much prefer speech systems where the player is tasked with finding the correct responses and actually thinking logically about how to approach convincing someone else of an outcome, rather than mindlessly clicking the option with the highest speech stat value. The first major speech encounter in Deus Ex Human Revolution (hostage encounter) is a good example of this, even if the game overall is pretty mediocre.

To be honest, gameplay around conversations is an area in gaming that often doesn't get much thought because people like to (very stupidly) separate gameplay and story. That's a huge mistake.

I also tend to agree that CRPGs work much better when they are trying to be tactical build simulators, and focus on combat. Again, it's why I recommend people play IWD because it's excellent.

 

[Trojan_generic]

Mass Effect Forever.

 

[Robotigan]

From what I know of TTRPGs, its just very hard to simulate all the interactions, exploration, story arcs, choices, etc in vidya.

You have to figure out how to gamify them. TTRPGs can just sidestep the whole ordeal because the DM can improvise whatever to keep things varied and engaging, but a video game needs a hard coded rules framework. Story/dialogue lovers are resistant to this because you get robotic conversations like Oblivion's NPCs.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

From what I know of TTRPGs, its just very hard to simulate all the interactions, exploration, story arcs, choices, etc in vidya.

You have to figure out how to gamify them. TTRPGs can just sidestep the whole ordeal because the DM can improvise whatever to keep things varied and engaging, but a video game needs a hard coded rules framework. Story/dialogue lovers are resistant to this because you get robotic conversations like Oblivion's NPCs.

Gamedevs are usually lazy and just implement the D&D (or whatever other tabletop) ruleset exactly, with no consideration for changes needed for transforming to a video game, and we end up with horribly clunky systems with no depth or interesting elements because it's like playing a campaign being run by a rules lawyer DM who isn't willing to do anything fun or interesting.

It doesn't help that tabletop rulesets are generally based around tactical combat and are absolutely terrible fits for most RPGs, which I explained in a long wall of text a few posts up.

 

[SharkClub]

Starfield will probably be meh at worst. It's not like they can commit further lore rape on TES or Fallout with a brand new IP. It's also unlikely to be as bad gameplay wise as Fallout 3, as much as people don't want to admit it, Bethesda has improved a bit since those dark days, and the failure of Fallout 76 (and the delay of Starfield probably demanded by Microsoft) is likely to be a bit of a kick in the ass to get things right (or at least closer to it) for release. All I'm saying is that there is a lot of room for something worse than Starfield to come out in 2023.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

Starfield will probably be meh at worst. It's not like they can commit further lore rape on TES or Fallout with a brand new IP. It's also unlikely to be as bad gameplay wise as Fallout 3, as much as people don't want to admit it, Bethesda has improved a bit since those dark days, and the failure of Fallout 76 (and the delay of Starfield probably demanded by Microsoft) is likely to be a bit of a kick in the ass to get things right (or at least closer to it) for release. All I'm saying is that there is a lot of room for something worse than Starfield to come out in 2023.

How exactly has Bethesda been getting better?

Fallout 4 is tangibly worse than Fallout 3 to the point where a significant number of diehard Fallout 3 fans consider Fallout 4 to be too dumbed down to be enjoyable.

Skyrim suffers the same problem. Every RPG element that remained in Oblivion (already cut down from Morrowind) was gutted entirely, and the entire RPG system was replaced with a simplified perk system, which also made it into Fallout 4.

Sure, a lot of normies love Skyrim and Fallout 4 because they are much smoother games to play than Oblivion and Fallout 3. Bethesda has absolutely improved in terms of their technical ability and their ability to make a game feel nice to play, but when it comes to actual gameplay they are at the lowest point they have been at any point in their history. Fallout 76 made a small number of gameplay improvements over Fallout 4, so there is some hope that at least someone on the design team actually knows what they are doing, but that hope is instantly dashed when you consider that they also made a significant number of gameplay decisions which were significantly worse than those in Fallout 4, and overall Fallout 76 plays significantly worse than Fallout 4 does, even when you discount the bugs entirely and analyze it purely based on gameplay.

 

[Deadyawn]

Dragon age of course. Bioware has released nothing but pure shit for about 15 years now and I'm convinced the worst is yet to come.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

Dragon age of course. Bioware has released nothing but pure shit for about 15 years now and I'm convinced the worst is yet to come.

Bioware has not released a single worthwhile game ever. Change my mind.

 

[SharkClub]

Starfield will probably be meh at worst. It's not like they can commit further lore rape on TES or Fallout with a brand new IP. It's also unlikely to be as bad gameplay wise as Fallout 3, as much as people don't want to admit it, Bethesda has improved a bit since those dark days, and the failure of Fallout 76 (and the delay of Starfield probably demanded by Microsoft) is likely to be a bit of a kick in the ass to get things right (or at least closer to it) for release. All I'm saying is that there is a lot of room for something worse than Starfield to come out in 2023.

How exactly has Bethesda been getting better?

Fallout 4 is tangibly worse than Fallout 3 to the point where a significant number of diehard Fallout 3 fans consider Fallout 4 to be too dumbed down to be enjoyable.

Didn't read the rest of your post. Fallout 3 is a shit RPG with a shit story and it does everything worse than its predecessors, if you want to play a good deep RPG then Fallout 3 should be avoided at all costs. Fallout 4 on the other hand has open world survival craft qualities that can make the game fun for reasons other than its lack of RPG mechanics or lack of a good story. Same goes for Oblivion and Skyrim. That's all there is to it.

If you want a fun dumb shallow loot n shoot survival craft basebuilding game with coomer mod compatibility you play Fallout 4.

If you want a good RPG with (relatively) complex mechanics, choices and consequences and a decent story you play a classic Fallout game.

If for some reason you don't mind skimping on the idea of having fun gameplay but you want to enjoy a good story in a Fallout game you can play New Vegas.

There will never be any real reason for someone to play Fallout 3 outside of Xbox kids having nostalgia for it. It is a mediocre game with shallow mechanics and a bad story that thinks it's deep and smart (the worst kind of bad story). The game is cringe and Fallout 3 babies need to come to terms with the fact that anything Fallout 3 actually does well has been outdone by Fallout 4 ten times over.

Fallout 3 should not even be in the running for when you want to play a good RPG, and for that reason alone it doesn't fucking matter if it has slightly better RPG elements than 4 does, when everything else it does is worse than every other game in its own franchise.