On the subject of mainstream RPG design: Is it removing RPG elements for. . . something?
So I noticed that in recent RPG titles such as Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Dragon Age: Inquisition that there are a few trends that are becoming apparent such as a reduction of stats interacting with dialogue, simplification of spells and combat systems, and voice acting becoming a *must* for the primary protagonist as opposed to being an option in the tool kit.
I, as bias as I am, feel that game designers are turning away hardcore RPG fans in exchange for a wider audience but I don't quite understand that line of thinking.
I'm just frustrated with seeing greats like Bioware go from making fantastic games, to ok games, to "what the crap were you thinking selling me this garbage" games. As some will know I *despise* Dragon Age: Inquisition and view it as a blight that I sunk 80 hours into just so I could say I dislike the thing and feel justified about it. On PC with keyboard and mouse controls no less.
If you disagree and think RPGs are getting better explain why so that I might understand. The PC elitist in me wants to blame consoles but I don't think that is really the case.
Also, share what designs get on your nerves the most and what do you think is lost or gained from such decisions?
I, as bias as I am, feel that game designers are turning away hardcore RPG fans in exchange for a wider audience but I don't quite understand that line of thinking.
I'm just frustrated with seeing greats like Bioware go from making fantastic games, to ok games, to "what the crap were you thinking selling me this garbage" games. As some will know I *despise* Dragon Age: Inquisition and view it as a blight that I sunk 80 hours into just so I could say I dislike the thing and feel justified about it. On PC with keyboard and mouse controls no less.
If you disagree and think RPGs are getting better explain why so that I might understand. The PC elitist in me wants to blame consoles but I don't think that is really the case.
Also, share what designs get on your nerves the most and what do you think is lost or gained from such decisions?
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Comments
- Like you said, the console market. Gamepads can simply only go so far when it comes to input (though we may see more complex input systems in current gen, thanks to the WiiU, the Steam Controller and the PS4 controller, because of their touchpads.
- Easier accessebility. Say about BG and Co what you want, these games are not beginner friendly. The mechanics can be overwhelming and confusing.
- Broadening the market. Complicated games are a niche market. A lot of players don't want complicated mechanics in their games. Especially with the flood of games on the market, one might not want to have to memorize the different systems for every game.
- Some games just don't need complicated gameplay. Especially in the past days I have repeatedly heard the argument that for example PS:T would have been better off if it wasn't D&D but a point & click adventure instead.
- Making things more "cinematic". One way to deliver atmosphere and narrative in games, is to give them a cinematic feel throughout. And for that the gameplay simply has to be simplified.
But for as long as there is a demand, someone will keep making 90s style CRPGs.
Otherwise we wouldn't be here
Now, for my part, I think there's something to be said for streamlining things, but there's also something lost. I'm not sure modern RPGs have necessarily found the right places to streamline, where the gains outweigh the losses, but I don't mind them trying to find the right places.
Full voice, because people either don't want to read, or find reading from a television set more difficult than a computer screen. This however, limits choice, limiting gaming experience.
Companies are also attempting to give the players everything. When they do this (as they attempted in DA:I) they water down the experience of the game. They do this however because of "fan" feedback. "A game should have a crafting mechanic" "It should be open world" "I should be able to ignore the story and do my own thing" "Classes should be balanced" etc etc etc.
Telling a compelling story takes a back seat to fan demands. If you just focus on the main story with Inquisition, ignoring all the bells and whistles, it is actually a great game with an amazing story.
All the companions in one nice place so that you can run around and talk to them. Think mass effect 2 on this one. I love that game. I have played it and beat it countless times, however, after every mission I find myself running around the ship to talk to all my crew mates to get their morale up. I literally stop playing the game to do this. DA:I had it worse as the NPCs were spread over an entire map instead of a small ship. When this happens, the game becomes a chore and not an experience.
But they do this so that the player can mix and match their party in one play through instead of countless ones so they can experience everything in one go.
Do you see a pattern emerging?
They are only giving the consumers what they want allowing them to market the game more effectively. If it is a trend that you do not like, you need to start telling companies what type of game you want to buy. If enough people chime in, perhaps they may reverse the trend and start making games you will enjoy.
The thing here this is subjective to opinion, believe it or not there are people who have played some of bioware more "great" games and didn't see them as "great" No comment, after dragon age 2, I swore never to touch the series again! I don't think they are getting better, but I also don't think they are getting any worse. It easy to look back on past era's and see all these great and even amazing games, then compare them to today and believe gaming in the past was better. It wasn't, just like how we had garbage games today, in the 90s, before bg was considered a classic and was coming out, it was surrounded by garbage games as well. Those game faded into obscurity living only the games that sparked our imaginations in that era in our mind, but moving closer too the current topic.
If you want to blame anything, blame time, things change this is doubly true for the entertainment industry no matter the field. Anime...I use to love it but now a days I'm annoyed to see it every -beep- where! Even anime can be done nice from time to time, but its so saturated with crap that its basically modern day Art Nouveau.
There is something more I want to say to the fourth quote but I just can't manifest it all right now.
Edit
So basically @deltago said what I was trying o say just more efficiently... don't judge me it 2:20 in the freaking morning!
It's the same with movies. Expensive movies have to be big on explosions and as unsophisticated as possible. More sophisticated fare will inevitably attract a smaller audience, so it has to be made on a low budget.
I don't think that all RPG games are going that way. Certainly we are seeing it in Fallout and Elder Scrolls (both Bethesda and so maybe that's a reason in itself). And absolutely Dragon Age, although I would have hoped that they learned their lesson after DA2??
However, there's Dragonspear and POE and DOS and the like. They are becoming even more niche (who knew that could be possible), but they aren't necessarily going away. I think that (hope that) gamers like us will still represent a need. And that some members of our community will create games to meet that need as we are still seeing. Or we will just replay the old games add-infinitum as we do today.
The real "culprits" here are Bioware and Bethesda, clearly. It's entirely true that they aren't very deep. They sacrifice massive build variety for obscene amounts of content (in Bethesda's case) and a cinematic, movie-type experience (in Bioware's). There is room for everything. As for stats affecting dialogue options, it's rarely been done well outside of Planescape and the first two Fallout games. In fact, to go beyond the basics that have been generally static for decades at this point would just turn things into a conversation simulator, at the expense of what MOST people play RPGs for, which is combat, leveling, and gear acquisition.
I am a HUGE fan of the Dark Souls games and while they are RPG games of a sort, they really aren't "In the style of Baldur's gate" RPG games. There is little to no actual conversation or "Playing the role" other than Statting up and 'Building' your character. There's TONS of lore and quests and all sorts of stuff like that, but as hard core an RPG gamer as I am, it doesn't scratch the same itch as BG. And quite frankly, it stands alone (if you include Demon Souls and Bloodbourne). The only close relative is Lords of the fallen and if you ever played that you would see it is no comparison.
The Witcher series is another thing again. I tried playing the first and actually have the third 'To be played'. Although it has story and branching conversation and character building options, you can't really play "Your Character" because you have to play Geralt (or however you spell it). True, in BG you are shoehorned into Charname's legacy and background to a degree, you are still basically your own character.
To say that the real culprits are Bioware and Bethesda, you just named two of THE Biggest names in RPG game building today. I don't have the numbers handy but I would bet that they significantly outstrpped sales for a game like Divinity or Pillars. And if you were to ask the average gamer on the street to name an RPG game, they would say Fallout or Skyrim long before they named any other titles.
And there it breaks down. Playing Fallout 3 even over Fallout 4, you can see that 4 significantly narrowed your conversation choices and "Streamlined" your character choices. Dragon Age 3 did likewise, revealing a pattern of sorts. I bet money that the next iterations of these franchises will fall into similar lines.
Sure we have games like Pillars and Divinity and Wasteland. Hopefully we will have more in the future, but it does appear that there are more and more popular games with titles like Fallout and Dragon Age.
First, we have casual gamers, who want simpler, streamlined gameplay. Is it because they don't appreciate more complex games? Is it because they represent the lowest common denominator? No, it's because they have 40 other RPGs on Steam, waiting to be played. They experience a small amount of content from a wide variety of games. They go through the main quests, linger a while, and then vamoose.
Second, we have the tinkerers, the folks who delve deep into the same games and explore every tiny detail about them. I'm one of them. Runnerguy2489 is another; I've been watching him play Ocarina of Time blindfolded on Youtube. We live for complexity and detail, and try absurd challenges no reasonable person would enjoy, because it makes an old game new.
The thing is, the first group is far more numerous--and they are therefore the most important group. We are merely the most vocal group.
Complexity is only good for a very narrow demographic. Game devs serve their customers best by catering to casual gamers, not the tinkerers. The trend towards streamlined and simplified gameplay is a good thing.
Don't you worry, though.
I will acquire all of those companies within the next century or two.
@semiticgod - I think it is both simpler and more complex than that. The really hard core gamers love games with loads and loads of rules and customization so that they can learn them and play around with them and get lost in them. It's almost a mini-game unto itself to understand the nuances of the various rules such that you can immerse yourself in them.
More casual gamers want a game that they can play and put down, moving on to another or maybe just going and doing something else without having to get deep into the rules. Give them fewer choices so that they can get through the content and not have to worry about "do I go with the less damage, but quicker weapon or the big damage but SLOW weapon" kinds of questions. Instead of ten dialogue choices, give them three and make it all come out the same regardless of what you choose and they are happy.
To talk about Baldur's Gate as a trend-setter in its time we must get in the time machine. We have to remember that this game was hailed and anticipated in the press not as a new word in gaming (the word "gaming" didn't even exist then), but as a *transfer* of the Dungeons&Dragons game to a new medium. Back in the late 1990s, when the game came out and when I became interested in role-playing, pen-and-paper AD&D was very much alive. There were numerous circles, groups and people eager and able to come together on a Friday or a Sunday, sit around the table and kick some orcs. Supplement books continued to come out, and fans delighted in writing netbooks with new spells and classes. The game was owned by TSR, not yet the moguls at Wizards of the Coast.
Remember, that was almost before the Internet, before cell phones and your boss thinking it normal to call you on weekends. So role-playing was unrushed around the pizza box, except maybe that "Who Let the Dogs Out" barked. Live play gave Dungeon Masters the opportunity to draw up adventures to their hearts' delight - with special mechanics, backgrounds and one-time surprises. One of the highest pleasures I know is letting imagination swell to create worlds, creatures and situations... But computers had already made their presence felt. Enter Baldur's Gate - an honest, straightforward attempt from a small company with a large publisher (TSR) to carry the pen-and-paper experience to a fairly new, curious medium. And they did it. Let me underscore this: what makes the *first*, and only the first, Infinity Engine game so special and wonderful to this day is that it is basically a typical early-level AD&D adventure lifted from paper and plastered on the screen.
This is why when I play Baldur's Gate, I rejoice, a little sadly, in what I could mistake for a genius simplicity. In this game everything is in broad strokes - characters like Xzar or Minsc, the clear good vs. evil theme, exploration in a green, rustic countryside, the search for interesting items and exciting fights, hidden temples and lairs, the most archetypical of all classes: the wizard, the warrior, the thief, the cleric. But this simplicity, which also left space for a lot of detail and complexity - from THAC0 to interesting, long spell names like Aganazzar's Scorcher to the nine alignments - this simplicity and complexity were not Bioware's invention. Bioware only very brilliantly and confidently imported them from the pen-and-paper game.
So what I think you are experiencing here, Vallmyr, is not nostalgia for old-time computer games, but for real, that is, LIVE role-playing and genuine human imagination and teamwork without any kind of machine to run monsters and tell you what to do on a click. Playing face-to-face was the best thing then and it is the best thing now, except now most people are so overworked and overstressed, so hypnotized by consumption, so flooded by media nonsense and so inured to accepting sub-par products and ideas that they simply have no energy, no time and no courage to say "no" to this trend. The computer game industry has really done a number on us all over these last 20 years - it has lowered our expectations so much, young people have no idea what they missed in the 1990s. And maybe it's best that way, because if they knew, if they ever got their hands on a time machine and saw what the last few decades have denied them - not just in role-playing, in everything - they would die. Of heartache. I really think that they would sink on the ground and not want to get up, if they knew.
This doesn't stop with the 1990s, either. I do not want to present that decade as anything's heyday just because I myself started playing pen-and-paper at that time (and all too briefly). You complain that things are too simple now; well, back *then* there were already older players who thought AD&D itself too simple and too stringent for imagination. There were already people in their 40s who had played the original D&D from the late 1970s - early 1980s and seen its mad brilliance, the same brilliance Gary Gygax later thought too unbalanced, unpredictable and chaotic, so he replaced it with AD&D. So this is the progress of time for you: from natural, easy-going interaction with few rules but lots of ideas through a multiplication of rules for order's stake and ideas not fewer, but paler of complexion, and finally the conveyor belt and a complete descent into banality. And the more you learn about what happened, about particular events, articles, shifts of opinion along the way, mergers and acquisitions, the more grief and dismay you are likely to feel, as if it is a history of doom unrolling...
That is what I feel, at any rate, and the decision for me has been not to look back on those good, still smart, in many cases very exciting computer games from the Golden Age of late 1980s to early 2000s. I refuse to play even my beloved "Morrowind" or "Planescape: Torment." If I can be said to go anywhere, I go to the source. And you too should turn to the font of imagination role-playing came from. Of course, begin live group play if you can, with nuanced rules if you can, try to get people to appreciate the feeling of warm bodies next to them and a slower pace, unravel the addiction to instant rewards, teach them to enjoy the ringing of words the human voice leaves suspended in hushed silence - if you can. But at any rate go back to the books, to the wonderful stories - Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Conan the Barbarian, Elric of Melnibone, to Jack Vance, Tolkien, Eddings, Sprague de Camp, Simak, Le Guin, Zelazny, and to movies - "Willow," and *both* "Conans," and "Neverending Story" and "Flight of Dragons" and "The Last Unicorn" and the *good* "Hobbit" from 1977, and to that little jewel no one has seen, "Dragonslayer." Beyond mass culture and fantasy, go to real writers and filmmakers from before the flood gates of garbage opened. Some are still around, just a little pickled... Find RPG manuals from those days, and other great RPGs too, not just D&D. Read up on White Wolf's games, on Shadowrunner, on GURPS.
And for early D&D in particular you should look into the archives of the Dragon Magazine. I have put up a link to someone's full collection of issues in another post called "Merlane." Search for that, follow the link, browse there and the history of the game, really of America's popular culture will unroll before you from the late 1970s to the Wizards of the Coast era. The magazine accepted advertisements for all the latest games, movies, accessories; it is a monument. Read forward, read back, return to the beginning, and then you'll know: tempus fugit.
However, I agree that the first Baldur's Gate does have the exact charm of those early level adventures. When a single wolf can easily take out your character and Imoen. The characters you meet have just enough personality to read into them what you will. This does go away with Baldur's Gate 2, where everyone has their own quests, romances, and you are fighting vampires and trolls within the first 10 hours, and of course, but Throne of Bhaal, your characters have become demi-gods. But again, Baldur's Gate implemented it in a more immersive way than the Gold Box games because the world wasn't squares on a grid, but something you could tangibly see and control with precision.
*gets sued for harassment*
I would not generalize that new games are removing RPG elements.
Some people think Witcher games are not RPGs but I think there're enough RP choices in quests and dialogues in those games.
Some people think Skyrim is too "hipster" if compared to Morrowind and Oblivion. But there're many skills in that game, there're many different areas with completely different style in that game. It's not Morrowind but it's a game of its own.
The developers of Fallout 4 not long ago admitted that full voice-over was a mistake.
But in the same time, these games are not old-school like BG, IWD, PST, NWN.
If we look at BG, this game is based on the D&D rules, DAI, Skyrim and Fallout are not based on rules which were created as a result of long thoughts and tryings. This factor is the main reason for differencies, I think.
Pillars of Eternity was made to have an " old-school feel" but because it was not based on the D&D rules, people felt some kind of artificiality about it.
To me, modern RPGs have RPG elements and there're very good games among them. But among modern RPGs we're missing a game that were based on the D&D rules, that were transferring the feeling you were playing a tabletop D&D.
*scriver twitches*