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.
Actually, DAI is full of RPG elements. This game has controls that are hard to get used to, yes, but other than that this game is very rewarding as an RPG. Its companions are great, great, simply great. Its companion quests and dialogues are very well written. I remember how this game impressed me and I put many hours into it. It brought me the story of Varric and Hawke which I will never forget. It brought me the best romance I've seen in the form of Dorian.
Most of their quests amount to go to x location and pick up a book or slay a little mob of creatures. I understand what you're getting at, but the gameplay portion of those sidequests aren't that well designed IMO. Then there's the removal of attribute and any conversational feats, except some stuff you get through Influence.
I don't know.. It feels incredibly stripped down for me.
I am not so sure most people who play DnD CRPGs have a PnP background. Poll material?
I'm sure it's changed a lot. I would guess that prior to Baldur's Gate, the vast majority of people playing CRPGs had a PnP background. It was probably still around 50% for NWN. Now I guess that for DAI, it's less than 1%.
I'm trying to do my bit: I've got at least a couple of youngsters interested in PnP.
I am not so sure most people who play DnD CRPGs have a PnP background. Poll material?
I'm sure it's changed a lot. I would guess that prior to Baldur's Gate, the vast majority of people playing CRPGs had a PnP background. It was probably still around 50% for NWN. Now I guess that for DAI, it's less than 1%.
I'm trying to do my bit: I've got at least a couple of youngsters interested in PnP.
I haven't waded into pnp either, though NwN did introduce me to DnD style games back in the day. So I have great respect for the history of pnp.
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),
The word "gaming" existed in the 80s. As did the word "gamers" (although I know you didn't mention that). Gaming has a much longer history than what we've seen on computers.
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.
So for some context, Baldur's Gate was published in 1998. 1998 was four years after id Software distributed Doom shareware over the internet to considerable success (leading to a sequel very soon thereafter). 1998 wasn't almost before the internet - it was most assuredly during the internet, years after people started flocking to it. Gamers, like most geeks, were at the forefront of such things and you could find tabletop and video gamers online in the early 90s. The main change was the shift from most people accessing the internet from their university accounts (I had an account on a non-academic ISP in 1993, and it was around that time that AOL connected to the internet). Many publishers were establishing online presences in the mid-90s until the end of the decade.
The internet was a pretty big thing in 1998, and getting bigger all the time.
The easiest way to think of all of this is to say there are many sub-genres within the cRPG genre itself. Yeah you can say "I like rock music" and give a fairly general impression of the kind of music you could like, but whatever you mean when you say "rock" could be wildly different from what somebody else takes for the meaning of the word. Modern cRPGs fall into the same realm. When shooters were ascendant they ran into the same problem (doom-clone vs. arena shooters... now modern and tactical shooters, and arena shooters).
The Witcher games are sort of their own beast (although the first one is very obviously heavily inspired by the IE games).
Bethesda has a HUGE emphasis on visual story-telling, or at least it's something they do very well. Yeah, the actual story itself isn't anything to write home about, and many of the environments and characters are reused throughout, but if you decide to pop into a recent Bethesda game and give it 5-10 hours of your life you're SURE to come away with an image locked into your mind - that often has nothing whatsoever to do with a quest or storyline - it's just a memorable thing you saw.
Dragon Age is a series that's basically constantly experienced an identity crisis. The first game openly advertised itself as the successor to BG and the IE games, but the second game was more of a pure hack n' slash, and the third one was different again.
So, in short, when we talk about cRPGs it's best to talk about them as subgenres within the wider RPG genre. I don't hate Skyrim for its existing, it's just not my cup of tea. Since there have been several indy production houses get into the cRPG game you've seen a lot of even pre-IE influences Ultima, Bard's Tale, Darklands, etc coming back even the good ol' fashioned dungeon crawler has gotten some love with the Grimrock and new M&M game. There are also games which sell-out for tactical combat with a lesser emphasis on story - like Blackguards or Banner Saga which could still fall within the cRPG genre but don't really bear any resemblance to lots of other cRPGs.
Sure, if you're into IE style games, or more "classic" cRPGs like the Ultima, M&M, or Bard's Tale, there are games out there for you to try out which *do* feature rather a lot of complexity, but they just aren't AAA titles - which although I'd like for games like Underrail to get AAA funding. or see what PE could have been with AAA funding, I'm happy as it is - it just means you have to do some hunting around to find the new hotness in cRPGs if the recent AAA titles don't do it for you.
I've almost come to the sad acceptance that PC/Mac based RPGs are a niche product. But I await Tides of Numenara, though, before getting all pessimistic.
I tend to think that take away (the highly diluted) lore, Skyrim or Inquisition could have been made by the same shareholder-value maximising game developer!
The game world is vast and pretty and varied, but the questing is very formulaic, and the user interface for PC gamers just appalling. (Bethesda always had it pretty bad, so I am more forgiving there)
Whenever I must shuffle top menu by "esc" to access "journal" - as opposed to hot key "J" or "L" (for Log) - I read "game controller as design feature."
It is bit like the current head designer for Chanel, the brand-mark, really!
Chanel was a ground-breaking original whom had a vision, and wanted to liberate women. Now we have a most skilful corporate-brand milker Lagerfeld - whom coincidentally thinks women should not be too free - they should be thin primarily. Which is an insult to what Chanel was about.
This said, I am sort of fearful of what Bethesda and BioWare will publish next.
I have such a deep love of BioWare and Bethesda, as an absolute fancier of Morrowind and Baldur's Gate unto DA2. The very idea of not maybe being able to remain a PC gaming fan of those developers saddens me enormously. But being a fan, I must bite that bullet if it comes to that.
People beat on Bethesda properties because they're popular, but frankly I doubt a lot of them have played (or especially, modded) much of their recent offerings to a significant degree. Skyrim and especially Fallout 4 have retreated from a lot of the statistical nuance of the old style of RPGs but have pursued depth in different directions. Fallout 4 especially does this with the addition of the settlement dynamic. What's more, the design of these games and the CK allow for mods which add this kind of depth to be made and added - the Requiem mod for Skyrim (which used the Baldur's Gate logo as its own for a while) is one such example. Fallout 4 adds the ability to make your own actor values (i.e., character stats) so a mod which loads skills back into the game is a real possibility.
As for Bioware, I remain disappointed that people continue to get their games at all. They are the studio which made Baldur's Gate only in the legal sense; any sense of soul or identity they had from those days is long, long fled, and all that remains is a machine that pumps money into EA.
Comments
I don't know.. It feels incredibly stripped down for me.
I'm trying to do my bit: I've got at least a couple of youngsters interested in PnP.
PS: Bleep Bloop
I fixed it tho.
The internet was a pretty big thing in 1998, and getting bigger all the time.
The Witcher games are sort of their own beast (although the first one is very obviously heavily inspired by the IE games).
Bethesda has a HUGE emphasis on visual story-telling, or at least it's something they do very well. Yeah, the actual story itself isn't anything to write home about, and many of the environments and characters are reused throughout, but if you decide to pop into a recent Bethesda game and give it 5-10 hours of your life you're SURE to come away with an image locked into your mind - that often has nothing whatsoever to do with a quest or storyline - it's just a memorable thing you saw.
Dragon Age is a series that's basically constantly experienced an identity crisis. The first game openly advertised itself as the successor to BG and the IE games, but the second game was more of a pure hack n' slash, and the third one was different again.
So, in short, when we talk about cRPGs it's best to talk about them as subgenres within the wider RPG genre. I don't hate Skyrim for its existing, it's just not my cup of tea. Since there have been several indy production houses get into the cRPG game you've seen a lot of even pre-IE influences Ultima, Bard's Tale, Darklands, etc coming back even the good ol' fashioned dungeon crawler has gotten some love with the Grimrock and new M&M game. There are also games which sell-out for tactical combat with a lesser emphasis on story - like Blackguards or Banner Saga which could still fall within the cRPG genre but don't really bear any resemblance to lots of other cRPGs.
Sure, if you're into IE style games, or more "classic" cRPGs like the Ultima, M&M, or Bard's Tale, there are games out there for you to try out which *do* feature rather a lot of complexity, but they just aren't AAA titles - which although I'd like for games like Underrail to get AAA funding. or see what PE could have been with AAA funding, I'm happy as it is - it just means you have to do some hunting around to find the new hotness in cRPGs if the recent AAA titles don't do it for you.
I tend to think that take away (the highly diluted) lore, Skyrim or Inquisition could have been made by the same shareholder-value maximising game developer!
The game world is vast and pretty and varied, but the questing is very formulaic, and the user interface for PC gamers just appalling. (Bethesda always had it pretty bad, so I am more forgiving there)
Whenever I must shuffle top menu by "esc" to access "journal" - as opposed to hot key "J" or "L" (for Log) - I read "game controller as design feature."
It is bit like the current head designer for Chanel, the brand-mark, really!
Chanel was a ground-breaking original whom had a vision, and wanted to liberate women. Now we have a most skilful corporate-brand milker Lagerfeld - whom coincidentally thinks women should not be too free - they should be thin primarily. Which is an insult to what Chanel was about.
This said, I am sort of fearful of what Bethesda and BioWare will publish next.
I have such a deep love of BioWare and Bethesda, as an absolute fancier of Morrowind and Baldur's Gate unto DA2. The very idea of not maybe being able to remain a PC gaming fan of those developers saddens me enormously. But being a fan, I must bite that bullet if it comes to that.
As for Bioware, I remain disappointed that people continue to get their games at all. They are the studio which made Baldur's Gate only in the legal sense; any sense of soul or identity they had from those days is long, long fled, and all that remains is a machine that pumps money into EA.