The future of RPGs

[Purkake]

The year is almost over and I find myself pondering over the future of rpgs, the western kind to be specific. There have been quite a few rpgs this year NWN2: Storm of Zehir, Mass Effect (PC), Fable 2 and Fallout 3. While most of them were ok, I still find myself going back to Baldur's Gate 2, Planescape: Torment and the Fallouts. Those games are almost 10 years old, but I find replaying them to be more entertaining than playing through most of today's rpgs once. Baldur's Gate still has an active fanbase and modding community after 10 years. How many other single player games have that? There have been a few really good rpgs since then (Mask of the Betrayer, Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines), but there seem to be fewer and fewer with each coming year.

 

The future doesn't look too bright either. I look forward to Alpha Protocol, the Alien RPG and Dragon Age, but (western) rpgs seem to be few and far between. So I ask you, is it even viable to make a rpg like Baldur's Gate 2 in today's market with increasing production values and risks? Will the future of rpgs be first person action rpgs with some arbitrary stats tacked on?

Edited December 26, 2008 by Purkake

[Slowtrain]

I still find myself going back to XCOM and Master of Orion, but eh nobody cares anymore. It makes me totally confused since they were such great games, but there isn't much I can do about it.

 

I still do hold a slight hope that a larger market for niche games may develop, alllowing for a wider variety of game types to be developed.

 

Its funny. I was never really a huge fan of PS:T and BG1 and 2. I bought them when they were released and played them all several times. AT the time I thought they were solid games, but not anything that I would ever really consider great.

 

Now I look back on them and think that by todays standards they WERE all pretty deep and awesome games that offered gameplay on a scope that I don't really see today.

 

I used to troll PS:T fanboys all the time, btu I quit that a while ago when I realized that it would in fact be pretty great to get another crpg similar to Torment.

 

Otoh, while crpgs have pretty much flatlined, shooters are better than they've ever been, so there is still some positive stuff about the current state of gaming.

[Purkake]

Yeah, I like to play some Jagged Alliance 2 every now and then(especially with the mods), X-COM wasn't bad either. The difference here seems to be that people still keep making rpgs, but the mechanics get simpler and more repetitive while the story loses it's importance and the focus shifts on action. Strategy games have pretty much lost all progression, there are no new(good) tactical squad-based games(Silent Storm was the last one) and big scale strategy games are either horribly simplified (C&C3) or just remakes of the old games (Starcraft 2). The last good one was Company of Heroes and I abandoned that after they let the machine guns damage tanks in Opposing Fronts.

Edited December 26, 2008 by Purkake

[Slowtrain]

The difference here seems to be that people still keep making rpgs, but the mechanics get simpler and more repetitive while the story loses it's importance and the focus shifts on action.

 

 

I agree. I think part of it is simply that shooters have lifted a lot of elements from crpgs and people can now find some things in shooters that used to only be in crpgs. Shooters have come a long long way from Wolfenstein and Doom.

 

This blending of genres has had the positive effect of giving shooters a bit more depth, but it has also sort of killed off the true crpg. I think most of todays crpgs are really shooters wearing some of crpgs old clothing.

 

Even the Witcher, which I consider one of the most crpg-y of recent games, still feels more shootery to me than it does crpg-y.

 

And STALKER:SOC, even though it is a shooter, feels a whole hack of a lot like a crpg.

 

So really, I think the crpg has sort of been assimiliated into the shooter.

 

I blame Deus Ex.

[Pop]

I love threads like these. It's like walking into a Flat Earth convention.

[Slowtrain]

I love threads like these. It's like walking into a Flat Earth convention.

 

 

How so?

 

If anyting it seems to me just the opposite. I don't really see anything in here that is trying to maintain an antiquated world view in the face of change. Rather I see a discussion centering around how the crpg has changed and how gameplay elements have crossed genre lines resulting in new types of games.

 

Its not roclet science but if one is interested in games and has been playing them for a while, it is as valid a conversation point for a genernal gaiming forum as anything else.

[Hurlshort]

Actually the last two years have really revived my interest in RPG's. Fallout 3, Mass Effect, The Witcher, and Mask of the Betrayer have all been high caliber games that sparked my interest. Fallout 3 is also one I can see myself going back to over the years, and that's rare.

 

These games also seem to be commercial successes, which in many ways is the bigger deal than just being a solid RPG. That means we will see more of them being developed, and a few more risks taken in the genre, which can lead to new and inventive game design.

 

 

But honestly, it's human nature to hold certain periods in your life up on a pedestal. We got some great titles out of the Black Isle days, but the gaming world has moved on. A lot has changed since then, and we aren't going back. What is it you miss exactly from those older games? Is it the story? The writing? The characters?

[Tigranes]

Kinda of in-between Hurlshot. I agree with you that we're seeing some good games come out these days and we could well be looking at another great period of CRPGs. But I hardly think it's fair to say that it's simple nostalgia that sets the BIS days as 'golden'. They were really golden, in that we were seeing 2D at its peak and lots of beautiful hand-drawn environments; it also provided another dimension to the kind of games Ultima and Wizardry were; and they did have great story, great delivery, great presentation, great quality/quantity balance of content and great memorable moments.

 

MOTB, and to a lesser extent NWN2 vanilla, are the big hits that made me really excited about new RPG releases again. Say what you like about the orc caves, the current public acrimony against NWN2 OC is a massive ret-con IMO, and it was a solid, if flawed, campaign packed full of the good stuff. If anything, it showed that we didn't have to continue down the track of Cinematic RPG-Lites that characterised the KOTOR/JE franchises.

[Morgoth]

I don't know about you guys, but I'd say the future of RPGs looks pretty bright. Dragon Age, Alpha Protocol, Aliens RPG and (possibly) ME2 alone in 2009 looks pretty tight. And besides, it's quality, not quantity that should count. As long as there's Bioware and Obsidian around, I'm not worried about the future of RPGs at all.

[mkreku]

I think it looks fantastic (the future of RPG's that is)! No more guiding your little dress-up dolls around as some unseen god from above. Instead even the RPG makers of today has realized that removing abstraction layers between the player and the character is a great way of making games more interesting, instead of artificially adding them because of some outdated and obsolete table top rules.

 

I love the direction the new games are taking (Fallout 3, hopefully Risen, hopefully Alpha Protocol etc). I don't miss a thing from the past. The future looks very bright to me.

[SteveThaiBinh]

I'm very optimistic, too. It seems lots of people and developers have different ideas for how to take the RPG forward, so we should see a lot of experimentation and variety.

 

I'm even feeling good about the future of adventure games. Maybe it's something in the water?

[Hell Kitty]

The days of needing a supply of provisions to fend off death, graph paper to map, and a book of paragraphs which told the story, those were the days of the true height of RPG glory. Baldurs Gate is dumbed down junk for ADHD kiddies.

[Morgoth]

The days of needing a supply of provisions to fend off death, graph paper to map, and a book of paragraphs which told the story, those were the days of the true height of RPG glory.

God thanks I wasn't even born during those ages.

[Nightshape]

The days of needing a supply of provisions to fend off death, graph paper to map, and a book of paragraphs which told the story, those were the days of the true height of RPG glory. Baldurs Gate is dumbed down junk for ADHD kiddies.

 

Ahhh many hours spent drawing maps on graph paper and hastily hunting dungeons for food, with the book at my side... Oh hail be the days of RPG glory LMFAO.

[Pidesco]

I actually feel the genre really hasn't been going forward all that much in the past 8 or 9 years. MotB and The Witcher had great things, but other than that I feel that RPGs really haven't been evolving all that much. Bioware and Bethesda in particular(although I haven't played Fallout 3) seem to be the main "stagnators " of the genre.

 

Bioware has been releasing the same game over and over again with slight changes to the combat systems. As far as narrative, quest structure and dialogue are concerned, Bioware still has done thing to improve over BG2, which was in no way perfect to begin with. And, seeing as their games always get hailed as a new paradigm on release, I don't see this changing any time soon.

 

Bethesda, on the other hand, are much worse in this regard. Morrowind was Daggerfall with new clothes, with no improvement apart from interface and graphics. Daggerfall's great character creation system was toned down into oblivion, and the quests and dungeons, despite being hand crafted this time around were still as empty and lifeless as in Daggerfall. Oblivion had, at times, some improvement in writing, and the combat is marginally better than in Morrowind, but the world was still as dead as in Morrowind. Really for a game developer that touts itself as the creator of worlds to explore they've really been failing every step of the way. Maybe Fallout 3 changes this, but I have yet to find out. Again, like with Bioware, Bethesda's games always get hailed as masterpieces on release so I don't see Bethesda putting any effort into creating a living world filled with options and richness. Finally, I find it grimly humorous that Morrowind was hailed as brilliant by everyone, when it sported the exact same flaws that got Daggerfall lambasted at the time of release, but that's marketing hype for you.

[Slowtrain]

The days of needing a supply of provisions to fend off death, graph paper to map, and a book of paragraphs which told the story, those were the days of the true height of RPG glory. Baldurs Gate is dumbed down junk for ADHD kiddies.

 

 

Actually I enjoyed those days. I still have some of my graph paper maps floating around somewhere. The thoroughness and exacting detail of early CRPG gameworlds was pretty amazing. Granted much, if not all, of that detail mostly came through in text, but it was still beautiful stuff.

 

I don't spend my days pining for any of the above features, but at the same time I don't feel they were "bad" and todays games without them are "better". They were just part of what made the genre fascinating at the time.

 

I think a lot of text detail has been able to be replaced by better graphics, but I do think some of it has simply been lost. And each successive generation of crpgs seems to lose a bit more.

 

 

I Finally, I find it grimly humorous that Morrowind was hailed as brilliant by everyone, when it sported the exact same flaws that got Daggerfall lambasted at the time of release, but that's marketing hype for you.

 

 

It was a lot prettier though. ANd less buggy. Of course, it was less buggy because it was a lot smaller and less comlpex. ANd it was prettier because a lot more time was spent on pretty-ing up the gameworld rather than making the gameworld interesting.

Edited December 26, 2008 by CrashGirl

[Purkake]

But honestly, it's human nature to hold certain periods in your life up on a pedestal. We got some great titles out of the Black Isle days, but the gaming world has moved on. A lot has changed since then, and we aren't going back. What is it you miss exactly from those older games? Is it the story? The writing? The characters?

 

It might be nostalgia, but there are other people who see the writing in Planescape: Torment as the best there has been in a video game and things going downhill from there. The other thing was combat, the very best was in Baldur's Gate 2 and while I believe that stories can achieve PST goodness again, I don't believe that anyone has the guts to make a combat system like the one in BG2 with all the hundreds of spells, magic items and options. Dragon Age might try and succeed, but we will see.

 

The days of needing a supply of provisions to fend off death, graph paper to map, and a book of paragraphs which told the story, those were the days of the true height of RPG glory. Baldurs Gate is dumbed down junk for ADHD kiddies.

 

Sadly(or luckily) I wasn't playing games back then. If you still want to do some good old-fashioned dungeon crawling, look up Etrian Odyssey on the DS, it's pretty good.(also it has the map drawing that all you old-timers seem to miss)

Edited December 26, 2008 by Purkake

[Hell Kitty]

Actually I enjoyed those days.

 

So did I. I don't particularly want to relive them though, but that doesn't actually say anything about the quality of past, present or future games.

 

I still have some of my graph paper maps floating around somewhere.

 

So you're a hoarder? Ya know, if you got rid of some of that junk you'd have room for a whole bunch of sexy consoles.

 

I don't feel they were "bad" and todays games without them are "better".

 

I feel the same, although I also don't feel that todays games are "bad" while older ones are "better", which seems the basis this whole thread was started on. It's just a matter of confusing good and bad with what I like or don't like. Which is what the internet is powered by.

 

I think a lot of text detail has been able to be replaced by better graphics, but I do think some of it has simply been lost.

 

A well written bit of text is probably going to create a greater image in my mind than normal mapped polygons.

 

Of course I also don't care for the Monkey Island games after 2 because the character voices don't match at all what I imagined they would reading the text in the original games. In fact I don't much care for modern adventure games. I guess we all our "things were better in the past" hangups.

 

Oh, and in what bizarro world was Morrowind hailed as brilliant by everyone? Or by "everyone" does Pidesco actually mean "those pesky mainstream journos who give everything 10/10"?

[Slowtrain]

It might be nostalgia, but there are other people who see the writing in Planescape: Torment as the best there has been in a video game and things going downhill from there.

 

I think that reducing a love of old games to a result of nostalgia is way to simple an explanation. A lot of us still play these games RIGHT NOW. Today. If we are playing an old game like BG and PS:T or Jagged Alliance 2 right now and we still think it is better than any other new game, then that is NOT nostalgia. We are playing it right now and comparing it directly in present time to current games.

 

Nostalgia only works as a possible explanation on games you once played a long time ago and haven't played for years and years.

[Hell Kitty]

We are playing it right now and comparing it directly in present time to current games.

 

Of course if we compare those old games to even older games as well as current games, we'll see that they are anomalies, rather than typical of older games. It's not like old games all had writing of the same quality as PST. The genre never had that level of quality, and thinking it did is pure nostalgia.

[Slowtrain]

I feel the same, although I also don't feel that todays games are "bad" while older ones are "better", which seems the basis this whole thread was started on. It's just a matter of confusing good and bad with what I like or don't like. Which is what the internet is powered by.

 

 

I would only disagree in that I think that thread is more about how crpgs have changed. For some of us those changes wil be positive; for others not so much.

 

As I said earlier, for me personally, I do think crpgs have become less interesting, but shooters have become much more interesting, mostly becuase some of the ganmeplay features that I loved in crpgs have begun to move over into shooters.

 

I think we both would agree that genre classifications are a convenioent shorthand for describing some basic aspects of the core gameplay and not really that important as to whether a game is going to be fun or not.

[Slowtrain]

We are playing it right now and comparing it directly in present time to current games.

 

Of course if we compare those old games to even older games as well as current games, we'll see that they are anomalies, rather than typical of older games.

 

I would say that the fact that they got made at all is pretty incredible and shows what a different world gaming used to be. XCOM, Jagged Alliance 2, PS:T could never even be made in today gaming enviornment.

 

 

It's not like old games all had writing of the same quality as PST. The genre never had that level of quality, and thinking it did is pure nostalgia.

 

I think that's a good point and I do somewhat agree, but as I said above, just the fact these games got made at all says something.

[Purkake]

I feel the same, although I also don't feel that todays games are "bad" while older ones are "better", which seems the basis this whole thread was started on. It's just a matter of confusing good and bad with what I like or don't like. Which is what the internet is powered by.

 

Today's games aren't "bad", I just find that certain aspects were, on average, much better than they are now. Yes, rpgs are now much more streamlined and easier to play, the graphics have also improved by leaps and bounds, but the story, writing and characters have actually gotten worse over time. Those are the things I value most in rpgs and it is sad to see them become secondary to combat and visuals. I put up with the bad combat in PST, because the story was so good and I wanted to have a lengthy dialog about philosophy with the next random NPC. I am much more unwilling to put up with a bad story just to get to kill the next boring mob of default monsters.

 

Of course I also like Diablo 2, but for completely different reasons. I don't see it as a classical rpg, it is an action rpg. With action rpgs I don't care if the dialog or the story sucks, I play them for the fun I have in killing monsters and getting awesome loot.

 

EDIT: I agree that there were a lot of games with awful writing back then as well, but I expect things to get better over time, now worse. It's like they aren't even trying these days.(with a few exeptions)

Edited December 26, 2008 by Purkake

[Hell Kitty]

I would only disagree in that I think that thread is more about how crpgs have changed..

 

This is from the first post: There have been a few really good rpgs since then, but there seem to be fewer and fewer with each coming year.

 

It's like if less people are growing apples, and more are growing pears, and you eat those pears but insist they are bad apples.

Edited December 26, 2008 by Hell Kitty

[Purkake]

I blame Deus Ex.

 

But Deus Ex was good, really good. If they still made games that were as good as Deus Ex, I would not be complaining. But look at what happened to Deus Ex 2!

 

I would only disagree in that I think that thread is more about how crpgs have changed..

 

This is from the first post: There have been a few really good rpgs since then, but there seem to be fewer and fewer with each coming year.

 

It's like if less people are growing apples, and more are growing pears, and you eat those pears but insist they are bad apples.

 

Actually the question was whether it was even viable to make rpgs like PST in today's market. I think that we can all agree that the rpgs today are not like PST.

 

So following your analogy I would like more apples, I eat the pears because there aren't any apples left to eat.

Edited December 26, 2008 by Purkake