[Great RPGs you played and enjoyed]

Some of my favorites in no particular order, and why:

 

* Final Fantasy IV - Had the most expansive storytelling in its day; paved the way for modern RPGs

* Chrono Trigger - Time travel was a novel game mechanic that gave a whole new twist on the game

* Terranigma - Very unusual plot, setting, and some great plot twists

* Arcanum - Pretty much the only steampunk RPG ever, and a great game which subverts fantasy tropes hard

* Mass Effect series - Good setting and characters

* Live-A-Live - Game told over seven unique settings from caveman era to far future, and the 'evil' ending is one of the best game concepts ever

* Planescape:Torment - Great game, great setting, great characters

[The Standard Fantasy Setting: what new things can be done with it?]

If you think that for setting to be interesting you must include surreal otherworldy terrain and never before seen races, you are direly wrong. See JRPGs and asian MMOs, which work starting to style and forget about substance. Planescape is't good because it has bat**** insane stuff in it, it's good because it has a lot of substance. It's possible to make a setting which has only humans as playable race and big-bads as everyone else, and still work out (Diablo).

 

I am a firm believer that every great game needs to have a 'hill to stand on' - something that separates them from the vast sea of other games. Novel settings aren't the only possible hill to stand on, but they are *a* hill to stand on. Western medieval fantasy RPGs make up 95% of the genre, so a setting change makes an easy hill to stand on.

 

I don't have any particular preference between bizarre settings like Planescape or Dark Sun and more traditional fantasy settings like Forgotten Realms. I think you can tell interesting and engaging stories in either kind of setting.

 

An interesting and engaging story isn't usually enough for a great RPG. Since story is at the heart of the RPG, an interesting and engaging story is necessary for a great game, but it's rarely sufficient. Story is a difficult hill to stand on, because there are already so many good stories told in RPGs. Few indeed are the RPGs that set themselves apart purely by story. Most of the great games with great stories also set themselves apart by unique and memorable settings, etc.

[Melissa Disney]

Gilbert Gottfried is the only voice actor you need.

[The LBGT "agenda"]

Really? Obsidian? Hmmmm ... well I guess they did have two homosexual characters in New Vegas, but they hardly beat you about the head with it.

 

If the existence of homosexuals is evidence of an LGBT agenda, then reality must be one hell of a strong supporter of the LGBT cause.

["Single-player gaming is our focus."]

 

I do agree that there's another underserved niche, but that niche ('awesome MP with substantial content') isn't one that can overlap with 'awesome SP', to which you agree in your last paragraph: Given Null's post and the admission that tacked-on is a bad MP experience, then the choices are--

 

(1) Great MP built from the ground up with required lossy SP

(2) Bad MP built on top of great SP

(3) Great SP with no MP

 

#3 lacks the extra debugging/etc. complication Tim Cain talks about. The caveat is Null's implication that great MP+SP is possible only at a very high cost, something I'm not convinced KS can provide--but the entire point is rather moot in the case of PE: From the very beginning, Obsidian has reiterated that PE intends to be a great SP experience. Since PE is designed to be solidly single-player, there is no good ROI argument to try to build MP alongside it.

 

So in practical terms, one's best bet in finding a good co-op game is to aim for games not designed to be single-player.

 

I would disagree with #1 - I think it's easier to take a game made for MP and make it work well SP than to take a game made for SP and make it work well MP. (As long as you aren't talking about MMOs, most of which have fundamentally poor gameplay that would make a transition to SP impossible). If the core gameplay is fun, the social aspect would be icing on the cake, not the only reason to play.

 

And yes, I know it's going to be a single player game. My comment was more of a lament on the fact that nobody makes good co-op RPGs.

 

If I wanted to play with other people, I'd play tabletop games.

 

I do - I generally have two or three games going at any one time. Sadly, a number of the people I'd really like to play with are hundreds or thousands of miles away - so they simply can't participate.

["Single-player gaming is our focus."]

 

Talent is only a fraction of what makes a marketable game, as it were. If the release date was, say, 2016 with target funding of over $10m, maybe? Only the devs could have any ballpark idea about that. But it's far, far more practical to design to current and expected funding based on the initial targets (at $1.1m and intended content). That "awesome MP" is the road less (or not) traveled has to do with a lot of factors, not just talent: market research, ROI, time to develop, number of dev teams to employ, and of course funding.

 

I am not sure if it really is that much different in terms of effort - if the game was designed around the idea of multiplayer from the get-go. Too many games build a solid single-player game and then tack on some awkward multiplayer afterwards (e.g. Mass Effect 3). In these cases, sure, it adds time because it's something else appended on to an already complete game. A true cooperative campaign, though, designed from the ground up, probably doesn't add that much, assuming the engine already has multiplayer support and can take care of the networking/syching aspects for you.

 

And while there is certainly risk, I think there's also a reward as well, at least depending on what kind of reward one looks for. For a purely ROI point of view of most companies, it's probably not worth it. Most of the people who would want a great multi-player game would also buy a great single-player game, so from a financial point of view, it's not really necessary because you don't really attract more customers.

 

On the other hand, starting from the goal of creating a revolutionary or memorable game, it's more attractive to focus on the underserved niche; your game can shine all the brighter if it shines alone, and being a trailblazer makes one more memorable than the games that follow. That's one of the reasons I would hope Kickstarter could do something like this - there's more freedom for originality and trailblazing when you don't need to answer to corporate bean-counters who probably don't even like video games.

 

All those things really have to come together well for that to happen, and maybe that will be some other Kickstarter venture down the road by some other talent.

 

I hope so; I think crowdsourced funding is one of the only hopes for that style of game. Much of the reason I don't play many RPG video games anymore is the lack of co-op.

 

Per your comment about reading not being a team sport... Honestly, I think your experience is special and not indicative of more common MP play experience. That seems more akin to reading a story book between parent and child. Getting five other adults together in a MP party across a network with a text-heavy game, though? Everyone reads at different rates. Then in traditional group live storytelling, it's done orally--oral and reading are vastly different in social interaction. Narrative/dialogue sharing among a game group would thus make more sense if all the content was voiced, forcing parallel intake. That of course will never happen in PE either, and by virtue of having VA, the price shoots up and narrative/interactive content plummets. Seems kind of like a Catch 22 to me.

 

I think while certain aspects, like dialog, might suffer a bit from reading speed issues, having a group of real people presents new opportunities as well as new challenges. There are entire dimensions to gameplay that would be possible that just can't exist with scripted AI companions.

 

I am also a very fast reader and played what few multiplayer RPGs there are with a friend who is a slow reader. That does slow how fast I would go through dialogs, but it's never been a real problem; if anything the main problem the games we've tried suffer from is trying to shoehorn co-op into a game that was designed to be single-player.

["Single-player gaming is our focus."]

So besides Bobby Null's post in this thread about the content limitations, there's also this RPGamer interview with Tim Cain, this week (I think it's supposed to be dated 26SEP2012, but there's no actual date on the article itself, which is lame):

 

MAC: Obsidian has been hit hard in the past by having games released before they seemed as polished as they needed to be technically. How does having crowd-funding over publisher-funding change the way you'll plan to tackle QA down the line?

 

TC: The biggest change is that we will decide on each and every feature in the game, and we can avoid the ones that add little to the game's content but a lot to its complexity. For example, we are not supporting consoles or multiplayer, both of which make the game far more complex and hard to debug. Instead, we are focusing on making the best single-player PC RPG we can make, and that focus is simplifying a lot of our choices.

 

/thread

 

Yeah, I know it won't happen. Really, it comes down to the devs' vision, not anything else - I do like that they have a clear focus and a clear vision and won't sway from that, because projects without that level of vision are simply doomed.

 

I just find it disappointing, because I think this group has the talent to make a great multiplayer RPG if that was their goal. There are just so many great single-player RPGs and so few (if any) great multi-player RPGs that it's a bit disappointing when time after time the great teams of the industry won't take the road less traveled.

[What do you wish not to see in PE]

Can you, uh, send your party over to my town for a bit? On another note, I'd love to complete a quest in a game, solving, or appearing to solve, the immediate problem via choice, only to have unintended consequences creating an even larger problem. Intentions do not always need to equal the results.

 

I don't know if you've ever read the Thomas Covenant novels, but it's pretty common that each consecutive series reveals that his decisions in the previous series, while preventing the immediate problem, served in the long term to enable an even worse problem than the one he was trying to prevent the last time.

[What do you wish not to see in PE]

Things that annoy me about RPGs:

• Lots of loot, limited inventory. I want to play a roleplaying game, not an inventory management game.
  
• Terrible companion AI. Yes, I know they will never be human-like in intellect, but c'mon, a brain damaged chimpanzee won't run straight into a gigantic rain of fire pummeling the baddies. My party members shouldn't, either.
  
• "The one" syndrome - where every bit of prophecy, lore, or other flavor text that exists anywhere in the game universe all directly applies to you and only you. The entire world exists just for the benefit of this one moment.
  
• Related to the last one, games that just play every RPG trope straight (ESPECIALLY the 'prophecied one' or 'amnesiac' tropes). I love Arcanum for many reasons, not the least of which is that it subverts the hell out of tropes.
  
• Too much linearity / not enough choices
  
• Choices and character development that is either forced or encouraged by game mechanics towards solidly black or white morally. I'd like a choice somewhere between "saint" and "genocidal madman", please.
  
• Every single problem in the universe is solvable, and conveniently my character is able to solve every one. Poverty, war, racism, hunger, deceit, treachery, and country music were easily eliminated by one party within a few years in the game world. Guess everybody else who has every tried to make a positive difference in all the world's history just needed to be as cool as I am.
  
• The 'token' party - we look like a walking diversity special because we have exactly one of every race.
  
• The 'two dimensional' party - every member of that diversity special of races will act out every stereotype of that race or (rarely) act out the exact opposite of their race's stereotypes.
  

[Have you played an Infinity Engine game before?]

Played them, enjoyed them, reverse engineered their file formats and helped mod them

["Single-player gaming is our focus."]

When it comes to storytelling and relationships with companions, multiplayer is rarely able to provide the depth

that a singleplayer game is.

 

While that's true, I don't think it's because it can't be done, only because it hasn't been done. Part of that, I think, is that it's simply too easy to fall into conventional molds, and the genre of video game RPGs fully matured before widespread internet access was the norm. Newer titles are inspired by what have gone before, and few even attempt to try the road less traveled. Those that do often tack multiplayer on as an afterthought to a game that was not really designed for it, and thus do it poorly.

 

It's a pity, because the original genre that inspired video game RPGs, tabletop RPGs, derives so much of its enjoyment (and, to be fair, drama) from the interaction of the gamers in the party. And unfortunately, we're not going to see a golden age of multiplayer RPGs until someone blazes a trail and proves excellence is possible. Right now, designers are mainly staying at the edges of the spectrum - either single-player or massively-multiplayer - and ignore the middle ground where tabletop gaming has thrived for so many years, the small group.

 

I also strongly disagree about reading not being a team sport - it's just another form of storytelling, which is possibly the oldest form of social recreation. I've had many, many great hours of playing solo RPGs 'co-op' with my brothers when we were growing up - passing the controller back and forth while we were all engrossed in the story being told.