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Awesome Interview on CRPG's and their Future
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[Deleted User]
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Old school doesn't have to mean hard to work UIs, labyrinthian zones with zero navigational aids, and completely helpless clerics. It just needs to pursue the same old school philosophies in new school ways.
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As we have a paucity of AAA RPG games with AAA graphics I put up with CRPG, but I would prefer it was a thing of the past and we got the games we deserve. That said I really enjoy them, PoE was really great, I just wish we eventually get a PoE made with the production values of DA.
Tyranny is also a favourite, but I would not say it is a better or worse game than PoE, it rather stands alone as we get so few games like it.
The largest amount of time is spent trying to explore a way to continually open wallets, when CDPR, Larian, and Obsidian are still living proof you can open our wallets, quite happily so, by delivering quality games and DLCs that hold that same quality and add actual content instead of just for-purchase skins or gambling mechanisms. I hate to generalize, but it seems apt: lootboxes and skins are low-hanging fruit for devs, period. It's easy mode monetization.
The Nemesis system would work well not only in multiplayer party-based cRPG style games, but games like Destiny, because encounters can still be tailored to personal experiences. In fact, playing through some things individually would only mean that, when you and your buddies came together to party up, you'd have that much more branching mini-narratives that are personal to each individual that could be leveraged into party-based content. You and your buddies can then assist one another in furthering their own personal content through things such as a Nemesis system that altered encounters based on prior play performed separately. Alternatively, you can embark on a party content line that is consistent for all of the players involved, not unlike the Justice League or Avengers line of comics. The Nemesis system could even be used to populate the "Legion of Doom" you and your friends face together by mimicking the players' choice to work together.
There's a lot of possibilities there, and while writing actual specific narrative content for all the branches would prove highly difficult, I see no reason the individual pieces and actors in each narrative couldn't be used in innovative ways once you start teaming up.
I don't view games as a service. I think it's incredibly misguided. Yes, you can provide support services for your game, but games are a product. Not an ongoing action taken by the company but a thing the company creates, completes (hopefully, I guess I should say these days), and sells. The companies that push that evoke skepticism and caution from me.
I think so long as there are games that receive commercial and critical success ala Witcher franchise, D:OS, and PoE (Pillars), those types of products won't die out. We may have to accept that there won't be as many options, or that bells and whistles like graphics may take a backseat due to funding restraints, but my opinion has always been that I would rather have one or two quality games I can play regularly than juggling 5-6 games just because the dev keeps pushing new skin packs or grinding for extra lootboxes. In fairness, those things aren't mutually exclusive (take Blizzard's Overwatch, for example: maps and heroes are free and developed on a regular basis, but they still include lootboxes and skin packs to garner continued funds), but few and far between are the devs that seem to successfully balance the two styles of continuously delivering extra gameplay content and focusing on creating convenience items and shweet cosmetic items in lootboxes to entice microtransactions.
Genres have died or transformed, we could have lost AAA RPG's and got hardly anything in its place apart from action/adventure games. So I welcome CRPG (which to me is a type of isometric graphics as much as anything else, I realise that's a bit fuzzy).
I did not mention Planescape Tides of Numenera, not played it yet (in my to play list) but based on the Numenera RPG so already a fan. I am not sure we should forego "wordy" RPG's, is encouraging people to read so bad? If you go down this line you end up like GW2 with one sentence quests appearing on your screen as you wander into areas. That's not questing to me.
The great thing about RPGs is they have metric shit tons of content hours. Just dive into one, take your time to take it all in, because it's not like there's gonna 3 more released every quarter this year. I still have things I haven't tried in PoE, D:OS2 (waiting for the enhanced edition), and KCD. If you're looking for something online old school, Fallout Online Reloaded is probably what most of us wished FO76 was going to be.
EDIT- Also, This War of Mine is a truly unique experience, and has released DLC that adds children to the mix as well as a couple storyline based scenarios. It's the only game that I've ever actually panicked after being spotted sneaking around what I thought was an abandoned house, murdered a few people with a crowbar only to have the final person drop to their knees and start crying for their friends, making me pause to realize that the NPCs weren't merely evil bandit raiders, but were panicked civilians like myself trying to protect what little food they had, and I just became the Neegan of my own storyline, as badly as I wanted to avoid it. It's truly brutal and emotional.
I just wished that people that claimed to like crpgs didn't just stick to the major releases that teeter between what crpgs used to be and what they became after they push for bigger markets and consolization of the rpg genre. Try some of the lesser known titles. If you like the real Fall Outs, try Underrail, which is one of the greatest crpgs ever made. Really try out the actual genre and stop being a tourist around the periphery.
If you are playing just the releases from Obsidian, inXile, and Larian its like saying you are into French films and only watched Leon The Professional and Le Femme Nakita.
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My exact point was specifically about liking both higher and lower budget indie crpg titles. I don't know what a hipster point of view is, but trying the lower budget crpgs, and not only paying attention to three specific studios, is conjecture how? I don't think you know what conjecture means. I also think you have real, sincere problems in the comprehension department. Please actually read what I wrote and reply in a sensible way that makes sense.
If you were smarter you would have read the article, read the whole thread above, looked up the definition of conjecture, actually read what I wrote and tried to comprehend it, and not posted a nonsensical response.
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That's why turtle asked what you were going on about. No one here is ignoring indie titles of any size; I even included This War of Mine by 11bit in an edit in my post because of how awesome it is, which is by no means a large indie studio. So I'm not sure where you're getting that I (or anyone in this thread) was specifically excluding small indie studios that develop cRPGs. The conversation had evolved well beyond just discussing cRPGs specifically. Scot even mentioned Monkey Island.
The article itself is using those bigger names because, quite frankly, if they had quoted Dejan Radisic, most folks would've had to go look him up to see what title he had created. They're just trying to be relatable to the widest audience possible, because that's good business for writers.
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Also, I am not a huge fan of Spidwerweb's games, but for almost a decade it was the only developer making crpgs, other than the occasional release like Devil Whisky, Eschalon, etc. Iron Tower deserves a mention, since they were the first high profile indie, community funded crpg without them you wouldn't have had Dead State and some others jump on ship. Fargo seems to get all credit for starting the crpg "resurgence" from all these kinds of articles. And again, WL2 is solidly in my top 10 games list, with TToN near the top 10, so I have nothing against Fargo. I do have an issue with all these articles presenting in inaccurate and incorrect, lazy narrative and always ignoring everyone but these three developers. Maybe its because all three of these devs also release their games on consoles too? I don't know.
My point is specifically about this articles, articles like this, and all the talk being about three specific studios. I wasn't not responding to what you stated. What people didn't state was part of my statement.
I have no idea who Dejan Radisic is. I really don't see what people are getting so upset about from what I said. If people liked PoEs and DOSs and WL2 and TToN, and they have a computer, there are tons more games they can try in the same genre. What is so bad, "hipster", or controversial about that.
As I stated before, I don't know anything about French movies. But I know that a lot of people love them and there are more than two. If there were tons of articles about French movies, and they only mentioned Leon The Professional and Le Femme Nakita, two films that also were remade into US versions, and the discussion on the articles transformed to talk about Run Lola Run, and Pan's Labyrinth - would it be crazy for a someone to mention, "Hey, there are tons of French films besides those two mentioned in this article about French films, the same two that are always mentioned pretty much exclusively. If you like those two, you should check out other, lesser known French films that don't always get the spotlight."
I honestly am having a hard time figuring out where people are coming from on this, or what specifically I got wrong or incorrect.
If my tone came off wrong to people I can accept that, but the content was spot on and valid, and my analogy was fantastic. I don't think it warranted me being attacked by people that failed to actually read what I wrote or comprehend what I was actually saying.
I'm very happy to see how some of the bigger titles have broken through into the gaming mainstream in the past few years. This is a great development that should spur on more development and more innovation not just from the ones who managed to break on through but also from other less known developers who may bring even more fresh ideas into the genre.
I do have one reservation although it's just my own personal preference. Once upon a time I couldn't get enough complexity and detail in the games I liked whether in RPGs or the strategy 4X games I've also played for a long time. These days though I've sort of reached a point where too much complexity and too many options can be a turn off.
Take D:OS 2 for example. As much as I love the game overall, I found myself enjoying the early game much more than the mid or end-game and I realized the reason I was having more fun in the early game was precisely because my party's ability toolkit was somewhat limited to the extent that I found it easily manageable. Later on as more and more options, abilities and synergies open up, managing that started to feel more like a chore than fun.
It's probably just me but I want a happy medium balance between simplicity and complexity. Extreme complexity just isn't as much fun for me as it once was.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
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Now, if you look at the core of the games, or when the acronyms where used more to define genre/type of expected gameplay rather than medium or geographic place a game was made, you can see some commonalities. This is general, since there are many exceptions. But, after the early Dragon Quests and Final Fantasies jrpgs tended to have the following - no character creation, predefined cast of characters as your party members, and a 100% set narrative you have no influence on.
Obviously some early rpgs, like Ultima 5 - 7, had set characters for party members, and a generally set-in-stone narrative. Lands of Lore also, etc. But generally, if you went to Radio Shack or EB whatever rpg you picked up for your computer in the 80s and 90s you were going to make your own party. You could say the goldbox games had just as fixed narrative, as did most crpgs.
The difference being how the fixed narrative was presented. In p&p games the whole thing was about creating a character, banding together, and creating a story. Western rpg devs wanted the illusion you were creating a story. Jrpg devs didn't hide it or try to make illusions or ask you not to look behind the curtain. This game wasn't about you - it was about the characters they created. You advanced the story of those characters, not your story or your character's story. A movie sliced up with a game in between those slices.
In the early 90s is when I think the different genres started forming for real, but it didn't become apparent until after you had failure after failure of crpgs like POR, Arcanum, and MM9 (though Arcanum may have been due to it being pirated heavily six months before it was released). Western rpgs devs started making rpgs for the console and mixed the two schools. That is when the term crpg sort of became fixed, and was used by us who liked how things were a short while ago, versus what the new normal turned out to be at the time with streamlining and simple systems, very simple and easy combat, lite to almost no chargen/dev, and horrible console UIs.
But that doesn't mean there is not tons of diversity within crpgs or crpg games. One specific example that really bothers me since I seem to be the only one to see a difference is in dungeon crawlers. People group games like Legends of Grimrock and Grimoire together. To me, if a game doesn't have npcs, quests, shops, towns, or any dialogue how can it be grouped with games like Grimoire or MMX? It doesn't make sense to me. But, on the other hand, games like Realms of Arkania trilogy are grouped along with games like Tyranny and I agree with both falling under the "crpg" umbrella.
Crpgs are turned based or RTwP because they wouldn't be crpgs if they had action, or twitch combat. No one considered Al-Qadim: The Genie's Curse an rpg when it came out. Ultima Underworld, Legends of Valour, and Daggerfall were considered first-person action rpgs.
This is another generality I have noticed. People that like more narrative-heavy games, usually dislike creating a party and want recruitable party members and RTwP combat. People that want more open gameplay, a story that isn't on rails, and a lot of choice and consequence usually want either single character or full party creation and TB combat. In crpgs and generally, not specifically. But there is no doubt that the more popular brand of crpg is the RTwP with recruitable party members such as Ultima 7, BG2, PST, NWN2:MoTB, etc.
Speaking of RTwP - have any of you guys played Serpents in the Stagland? Or looked into the new game from the same people - Copper Dreams?
What the fuck are you going on about? Seriously? Are you saying that no one should ever mention anything, because even though it hadn't been mentioned you should assume everyone knows about it?
What exactly about what I said bothers you so much and hurts your butt so much? You keep saying I blindly did this or assumed that, while ignoring what I actually wrote. I made a beautiful analogy for you that explains it perfectly and you ignore it and tell me what I think. Instead of telling me what I think, try thinking and read what I actually fucking said.
Who do you think didn't buy these lesser titles that sold a lot, lot worse than PoE or D:OS? People that like crpgs but don't fucking know about games like Underrail, or even games like the two Drakensangs that would be right up their alley. Who do you think are the best people to mention this to that may actually check these games out?
If you are not willing to answer questions, and continue to just spout off about what I think, while ignoring what I said, or engage in adult dialogue, please just leave me the fuck alone.
RPG's is used mostly for Single player games, the Dragon Age games a good example, although Balders Gate/Icewind Dale are good examples, if not iconic ones of the early turn based RPG's based on, i think, 3rd edition AD&D. CRPG's took RPG's one step further and allowed multiple players to interact in the same game, Icewind Dale also had this aspect, although at the time it was a tad unreliable, but it was GW1 that really did CRPG's well to me, providing a central hub where players could form groups with strangers rather than relying on a limited pool of friends who had PC's and an internet connection.