Could BGEE be responsible for causing another renaissance in decent RPGs?
Samiel
Member Posts: 156
For those of you that remember the gaming climate when the original released, RPGs of its type were in a bit of a slump, and it's release rejuvenated the whole genre in many ways. The ramifications of which can still be felt to this day. Now whilst the rpg genre as a whole is very healthy nowadays I do remember feeling a little disappointed with Dragon Age when it released.
Whilst i did love Dragon Age I do feel it failed a bit in its stated role as being a true "spiritual successor" to the Baldur's Gate series. Fewer party members, bieng too easy, an inability to fully zoom out enough, reduced tactical and strategic options and what I felt were compromises made to make it viable on consoles (it was originally a PC exclusive). It left me still feeling hungry for that quintessential Baldur's Gate experience.
What occurs to me is that if this truly works across the tablet market, and becomes the runaway success it deserves to be. Might be we be standing on a threshold of a renaissance for this kind of game? It seems born to run in a tablet environment, and considering how huge the market is, we might not have to be blighted with compromises for the sake of consoles standing in the way for this rich style of rpg?
Whilst i did love Dragon Age I do feel it failed a bit in its stated role as being a true "spiritual successor" to the Baldur's Gate series. Fewer party members, bieng too easy, an inability to fully zoom out enough, reduced tactical and strategic options and what I felt were compromises made to make it viable on consoles (it was originally a PC exclusive). It left me still feeling hungry for that quintessential Baldur's Gate experience.
What occurs to me is that if this truly works across the tablet market, and becomes the runaway success it deserves to be. Might be we be standing on a threshold of a renaissance for this kind of game? It seems born to run in a tablet environment, and considering how huge the market is, we might not have to be blighted with compromises for the sake of consoles standing in the way for this rich style of rpg?
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Comments
Personally, I felt Dragon's Age didn't even come close to being a successor to Baldur's Gate.
Neverwinter Nights was closer to me, but only because of its incredible mod-ability, online play, and community.
tweet about it! like it on facebook. convince people to give it a try. (its only twenty dollars)
if we can prove to the gaming world, (to the big studios like EA) that classic rpgs are a viable source of income and return buisness for them, they will make more for us- all they want it money, they dont care what the game is, (this is ok, because the developers do care)
also, the game makers at the studios we love, these guys, bioware, obsidian, bethesda- i truly belive they want to make these games. Tim Howard, Trent Oster, Chirs Avellone, these guys grew up on D&D and started developing games when BG and Fallout (to a lesser extent) were the big things, like skyrim is now. it could be that way again!(tim cain kickstarted wasteland, check that out too)
Now, to conclude my semi-drunken tirade, we the rpg games, in order to get more awesome rpg goodness, have to make these small games work, not only because they will be awesome and great to play, nor because beamdog has put themselves out there to ressurect something that is not a HALO 7000, solely for the us the gamers, but because the future of these games depsends upon us proving we are a lucrative market. The success of BGEE is paramount to this.
otherwise, (as we have seen) we move from DAO to DAII to something resembling fable to finally shooter games called rpgs where you pick your face and what weapons you use.
fire and brimstone, people
I followed Dragon Age for that exact reason, it was marketed as the spiritual successor of Baldur's Gate. While I loved the game, NEVER even in my wildest nightmares would I call it spiritual successor, simply because it was made out of greed (feastday packs? REALLY?!?) I understand that the developers had good intention, but EA didn't.
Now I am following "indies", if you want to call them that way, simply because I feel like these developers can bring back the art that gaming once was. While I know that BGEE can't really be defined as an indie, I have faith in Overhaul, not only for this title, but also for the possible future : either a new IP or Baldur's Gate 3. Why? Because they care about us.
I too played Dragon Age Origins with fun, but only for a couple of hours. The fun part kinda quickly faded away and even though I had set away the money I did not buy the successor (and never looked back). The genre of RPG desperately needs games like this from developers like Overhaul: small studios devoted to do something very simple: "A good game."
The monetary side is important as well, but as we see here making "A good game." and not being greedy in the same time is almost bound to create a good revenue. Overhauling Baldur's Gate guarantees success because - let's be honest - most of us waited for something like this for years and years and pre-ordered the day the preorder went live.
Even the biggest studios nowadays started as a small bunch of dedicated, motivated, innovative people - now they are businesspeople. Time for the next generation! :-)
Thanks to kickstarter for some very cool games and the ones we might see in the future.
What will be a major barrier for anything good is the obnoxious amounts of kickstater projects being "set up" as if thats how a successful development studio could possibly work.
Also, I don't agree that rpg's are in a particualarly good place at the moment. I can't think of many game genres in a worse place. Possibly simulations.
What do you think about my Christian Bale impresison?
Bioware, Bethesda, and CDProjekt have pretty much taken over for the past decade.