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Interview Fargo, Sawyer, McComb and others weigh in on the future of RPGs at Rock Paper Shotgun

hpstg

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BG 2 was the popamole RPG of its generation, and it was great.

Half of the gatekeeping hardcore retards in here, are here because of it, yet modern popamole attempts are the works of Satan

If anything, the problem is that nobody is attempting something new, and all the new stuff are usually combined with what would have been considered pure action games.

The only thing I really miss from modern gaming is something with the setting of JA2, for whenever I get bored of the Long War 2's setting.
 

FeelTheRads

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So the logic is that if one popamole was good then all popamole is good?

You also can't talk about "moderm popamole attempts". Everything is popamole. That's not attempting, that's business as usual.
 

hpstg

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My actual argument is that these days there are actual games out there for most niches, and that even the very large AAA games, have RPG elements in them that should make it easier for a lot of more casual players to approach something a bit more complicated. Even Assassin's Creed is basically an action RPG these days, that's only good for the niche games that a lot of people in here like, as it opens more potential market for them.
 

Lutte

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RPGs cost a lot of effort even without graphics. Writing a cohesive, interesting world and characters, a large amount of side content (because the audience of RPG pretty much makes it mandatory to have it and will bitch about any game being too short. It's already a miracle Fallout 1 could become the cult classic it is despite the lack of content, and loads of codexers in fact prefer Fallout 2 because it has "more content" despite much of it being garbage content like the hubologists), balancing systems which requires a decent amount of eating your own dog food or having other people play test..
I know the history of Fallout's development and the scrapping of GURPS, but truthfully, so what? It doesn't change the fact that most of the top 10 games have really bad gameplay and Fallout is one among them. I don't look at the why but the final result. RPG as a genre got a notoriety for clunk, jank and exploiting and it's really not for no reason.

No, nobody comes into game development looking into it as a get rich quick strategy but people still money to live. Most people can't just leave their day job so they rely on external funds, traditionally this was publisher funding devs so profitability of games always mattered and a niche nobody wants to deal with is not going to see much funding. Crowdfunding might help your vision of randos making their own games, but for now most of it is used to fund known crappy aimless veterans like Obsidian rather than people like Styg (in fact, Underrail wasn't crowdfunded and is one of those rare case of people putting their own blood and sweat and taking some financial risks of their own).

Anyone HERE could could make RPGs exactly the way they like in their spare time, if they didn't care about graphics. Caring about graphics is what stops everyone doing it and that is my point.

What stops people is talent, interest and financial security (the latter determines how likely someone is to just outright quit their day job and put blood into making something of their own if they were neither employed by a studio or funded by kickstarter).
Even if you could discard 1 and 3, interest still matters. "Make rpg the way they like" is a workable tagline for people who work as game devs but when you say anyone here you're losing it. Most people want to play games, not make them. The idea of putting the amount of effort you have to work into a RPG for a game that you wouldn't even be interested to play because you know it from the back of your hand as your creation is not exciting many.

And finally, the image of people like Jeff Vogel can only come to mind when you come up with the idea that anyone could make their dream RPGs provided they don't care about graphics. No, not anyone can. The talent/skill criterium comes up first.
Vogel's games are so average, in every way outside of C&C, it's hard to understand how he managed to keep reselling the same reskinned shit over the years. Writing is barely passable, there isn't much charm to the characters and the vocabulary is rather basic. Geneforge's setting is interesting but that's about it. Combat is neither horrible nor great, just working, albeit getting long in the tooth and repetitive after a while but so are most RPGs so I'll cut it some slack.

Ultimately seeing your dream rpgs being made on this very real planet earth is more akin to seeing the right alignment of the stars that happens once every millenias. There is just too many circumstances that must be gotten right before someone out there, with the right level of talent, skill and taste, gets the will to make something and succeeds.
And so far, much of crowdfunding got people to feed on nostalgia drivel that doesn't fully understand what made the classics great despite their many many flaws. Instead of pioneering the genre the way the originals did, to add onto the genre and not just remain stagnant, they just ape them in all the wrong ways.
When I look at the gameplay mechanics of something like Wasteland 2 I feel appalled. This is as deep as they think a game with so much combat needs to be? So fucking boring. Games like Fallout, Arcanum were great in spite of their mediocre, repetitive mechanics because they pioneered many things. They're among the first games with so much reactivity and freedom not just of exploration but action and branching within quests. They were cause of a lot of "you can actually do this in a game?" moments that can't be reproduced. It's like virginity, you don't get it back after experiencing sex.
The genre is stuck with many devs just trying hard to mimick a certain era of RPGs without understanding context or desire to push the genre forward.

Graphics whoring really has nothing to do with the general stagnation that goes way past the world of AAA shit regurgitated by Bioware and Bethesda.
RPGs are difficult to make right, there's naturally loads less great amateur attempts than, say, platformers. Edmund McMillen is making a decent living out of games whose designs look ugly, low prod value and nasty on purpose. There's no reason why RPGs devs couldn't.
Your insistence on blaming graphics is just the blinders fans of the genre put on to avoid looking at the convoluted history of the genre (which includes the constant joke question "what is a rpg" that couldn't exist for other game genres because other genres never had any identity issues) and the fact that basically all the great games of their own top 10 are things they would themselves often describe as "flawed, unpolished gems" because reasonable people realize even those great games had some serious issues going that needed to be fixed. And the fix for PST wasn't to remove most combat entirely the way TTON did, lol, wtf. The biggest issue of the genre is that people who were responsible for its classics don't even understand what made their own games great to begin with, and what part needed to be fixed, and how. TTON didn't turn into garbage because they put too much budget into graphics. It was garbage because they didn't know what they were doing. Just the choice of setting (numenara) was already starting from the wrong foot. Numenara has no charm whatsoever.

@hpstg

When other games add what they call "rpg elements" it's usually to the detriment of the game itself and added as padding to make the game lengthier, which only contributes negatively to the general perception of the genre itself.
 
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hpstg

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Messages
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Playing the two examples I mentioned, it doesn't feel like padding at all. If anything, these systems are the actual game. The padding usually lies with the size requirements that most of these games have, as they compete in a specific space.

Even the worst popamole offenders have RPG elements in them these days, for me that's a good thing. If anything, companies who made different styles of games are slowly embracing RPG elements, and traditional AAA RPG developers like Bethesda and Bioware are making their games less and less RPGs over time.

Bioware's next game will have much less 'RPG' in it than AC:Origins has, and is obvious that Obsidian and InExile want to move to what their out of touch leadership considers the "big leagues", by abandoning their heritage, while the "big leagues" incorporate more and more of those systems as people tend to get bored fast if games are shallow.
 

Lutte

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Can't speak of AC personally as I don't care and never played games of that series past the first one, but when I see 'rpg elements' (like the concept of levelling) in the form of having to play countless hours of online multiplayer to unlock weapons in a first person shooter I want to punch a kitten.

I'm calling the whole thing padding because contrary to what you say it doesn't add depth it adds grind and grind is the worst concept to ever have come of the genre. It doesn't make the actual gameplay mechanics more complex it just gates your ability to use things until you've spent whatever amount of playtime the developer wanted you to.

I was curious about your point so I did some quick googling on the asscreed stuff and... lo and behold :
Assassin's Creed: Origins delivers early when I unleash an adrenaline attack on a hippo's face. In a storm of slashes I bring to bear the martial expertise of a master assassin to take down a swamp animal that, minutes earlier, had been quietly getting on with its day.

It is a high level hippo, though, so the barrage of blade strikes only removes a portion of its health bar and I'm forced to dodge around its teeth to lay into its blubbery flank. At this point a crocodile gets involved so I retreat to use my warrior's bow to blast the animals at range. It fires a spread of arrows like a shotgun. A flashing indicator on the hippo's health bar lets me know that head shots do extra damage.

Missions have level recommendations, and if you strive too far ahead of your level you will barely be able to damage basic enemies. To move between story missions you need to grind out side quests and kill wildlife to gain crafting components and upgrade your gear.

Color me surprised! RPG elements being once more just an excuse to artificially lengthen a game by gating content until you reach the required level in the sort of game that just doesn't need that sort of progression system.

Oh boy, I totally would want to "kill wildlife" to be able to do the most fun activity of video gaming, sitting behind crafting menus. Amazing quality gameplay right there. So much depth! games are elevated and become something more when instead of enjoying the action I have to spend hours killing the same thing over and over to get drops to get to the privilege of accessing The Menu and build my own weapon!

Some are happy when games that aren't RPGs gain garbage like that, me I'm happy when I hear Miyazaki say he got rid of most RPG characteristics in Sekiro.
 

hpstg

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If you reduce the number of repetitive steps that stem from the size requirements, what you get is an action RPG.

I agree with everything else you mentioned, but the game play itself isn't that far away, and neither I belive it takes away my main point which was that major AAA developers use more and more systems that would have been considered even hardcore RPG stuff, while old developer studios in this space seem to back away from them slowly.
 
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Davaris

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RPGs cost a lot of effort even without graphics. Writing a cohesive, interesting world and characters, a large amount of side content (because the audience of RPG pretty much makes it mandatory to have it and will bitch about any game being too short. It's already a miracle Fallout 1 could become the cult classic it is despite the lack of content, and loads of codexers in fact prefer Fallout 2 because it has "more content" despite much of it being garbage content like the hubologists), balancing systems which requires a decent amount of eating your own dog food or having other people play test..

"Lack of content" is a silly comment. That's like saying the Mona Lisa is nice, but it needs more content. Give me a paint brush. lol

Fallout stuck around for just the right amount of time and left the player wanting more. If they had added moar to it, they would have spoiled it. There used to be a saying in the American entertainment industry which has been long forgotten:

"Always leave the audience wanting more."

Now the AAA Hollywoodians and game devs hang around like 3 day old dead fish, and bore people to death with their offerings. Is it the massive egos of the writers, or is it the marketing people needing a hook to sell it? Sure F2 was "50% more", but it wasn't "50% more tasty".

I know the history of Fallout's development and the scrapping of GURPS, but truthfully, so what? It doesn't change the fact that most of the top 10 games have really bad gameplay and Fallout is one among them.
I don't look at the why but the final result. RPG as a genre got a notoriety for clunk, jank and exploiting and it's really not for no reason.

It is in there because of a business decision, not artistic reasons. Criticizing it for that reason is just you being silly again. lol

No, nobody comes into game development looking into it as a get rich quick strategy but people still money to live. Most people can't just leave their day job so they rely on external funds, traditionally this was publisher funding devs so profitability of games always mattered and a niche nobody wants to deal with is not going to see much funding. Crowdfunding might help your vision of randos making their own games, but for now most of it is used to fund known crappy aimless veterans like Obsidian rather than people like Styg (in fact, Underrail wasn't crowdfunded and is one of those rare case of people putting their own blood and sweat and taking some financial risks of their own).

They don't have to leave their day job, if they don't get caught up in the "muh graphics" mass psychosis.

Plenty of authors didn't leave their day jobs. Without graphics problems student level programmers can do it,

What stops people is talent, interest and financial security (the latter determines how likely someone is to just outright quit their day job and put blood into making something of their own if they were neither employed by a studio or funded by kickstarter).

Incorrect. What stops them in games is graphics. That's all I see indies showing off in forums, be it 3D or 2D, They struggle with graphics and after some time banging their heads on the brick wall, they get discouraged and give up. If you don't practice a thing, you aren't ever going to get good at it and graphics isn't the game.

Plenty of well loved authors had day jobs. Some took many years to write books that are still loved today. No publisher in their right mind would support someone for that long, so the authors just got on with it.

Even if you could discard 1 and 3, interest still matters. "Make rpg the way they like" is a workable tagline for people who work as game devs but when you say anyone here you're losing it. Most people want to play games, not make them. The idea of putting the amount of effort you have to work into a RPG for a game that you wouldn't even be interested to play because you know it from the back of your hand as your creation is not exciting many.

And finally, the image of people like Jeff Vogel can only come to mind when you come up with the idea that anyone could make their dream RPGs provided they don't care about graphics. No, not anyone can. The talent/skill criterium comes up first.

To repeat: Anyone here could do the technical side, if they didn't bother with graphics. Sorry to burst your bubble, but without the graphics it is not rocket science. The graphics part is what everyone gets stuck on. They waste years on it and produce nothing.

Tons of people made their own campaigns when D&D was huge and had their friends over to play their games. So according to you they must have been having really bad times, because the DMs did not have the mystical talent that only people who work in AAA game dev houses seem to have.

Jeff Vogel made tons of games, but even he is too much graphics. I'm of the opinion that if you can't do something well, then you shouldn't do it at all. If his 2D graphics are an eye sore, then he should simplify. But who am I to give him advice on anything? He's survived the collapse of many big game companies. He has done what they can't even do. That advice would be for newies. Start out simple as possible so you can make lots of games so you can get better with practice.


Ultimately seeing your dream rpgs being made on this very real planet earth is more akin to seeing the right alignment of the stars that happens once every millenias. There is just too many circumstances that must be gotten right before someone out there, with the right level of talent, skill and taste, gets the will to make something and succeeds.

Fallout was made the way it was because it was hidden inside a very big company. The business/career climbers in the company thought it was B-grade garbage and so they left it alone. Fallout 2 is the result of these people finding out that Fallout was actually good and moving in to work their "midas touch" on it. lol

If the only way the stars can align is if a game falls between the cracks in some mega game corp, then the games industry is a complete failure and will always be so, because something like that isn't going to happen ever again in anyone's lifetime.

Graphics whoring really has nothing to do with the general stagnation that goes way past the world of AAA shit regurgitated by Bioware and Bethesda.

Yes it does, because that is where the vast majority of the mental effort and money goes, and it is done all the way from AAA down to indie level.

RPGs are difficult to make right, there's naturally loads less great amateur attempts than, say, platformers. Edmund McMillen is making a decent living out of games whose designs look ugly, low prod value and nasty on purpose. There's no reason why RPGs devs couldn't.
Your insistence on blaming graphics is just the blinders fans of the genre put on to avoid looking at the convoluted history of the genre (which includes the constant joke question "what is a rpg" that couldn't exist for other game genres because other genres never had any identity issues) and the fact that basically all the great games of their own top 10 are things they would themselves often describe as "flawed, unpolished gems" because reasonable people realize even those great games had some serious issues going that needed to be fixed. And the fix for PST wasn't to remove most combat entirely the way TTON did, lol, wtf. The biggest issue of the genre is that people who were responsible for its classics don't even understand what made their own games great to begin with, and what part needed to be fixed, and how. TTON didn't turn into garbage because they put too much budget into graphics. It was garbage because they didn't know what they were doing. Just the choice of setting (numenara) was already starting from the wrong foot. Numenara has no charm whatsoever.

@hpstg

When other games add what they call "rpg elements" it's usually to the detriment of the game itself and added as padding to make the game lengthier, which only contributes negatively to the general perception of the genre itself.


[/QUOTE]

Everyone agrees that AAA games look awesome. Where the contention always comes in, is if they are any good. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out.

Edit:

Innovation 1997:
Designer: Lets make a game that is as close to the pen and paper experience as possible! RPG players will love it.

Innovashun 1997++:
Sales guy: There's this big cashed up demographic that doesn't like RPG games, but if we put these innovashions in, they might like our games. It will upset the base, so put the community manager on it. AAA graphics don't pay for themselves bros!
 
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Lutte

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"Lack of content" is a silly comment.

I am merely quoting the argument, not making it. I much prefer FO1 over FO2 and find it fine as it is. But whenever you see someone talk about how much they prefer FO2 it usually devolves into "there is more things to do" as the main motive. You are a dexer, if you've read any of the dumb |fo vs fo2| threads you should know the general mood about this. Even on the codex there's a decent proportion of people who look into quantity just as much as quality and shudder when something is "too short". When even in the places that are the least declined you find stuff like this how do you think devs would feel about player expectations?

It is in there because of a business decision, not artistic reasons. Criticizing it for that reason is just you being silly again. lol

The why of development doesn't have any influence over how people perceive a genre based on what is being actually released to them.

Tons of people made their own campaigns when D&D was huge and had their friends over to play their games. So according to you they must have been having really bad times, because the DMs did not have the mystical talent that only people who work in AAA game dev houses seem to have.

Pen and paper has more of a social component to its attraction than to the actual quality or lack thereof of the various corny stories and garbage characters most people just make up on the spot. The average D&D session is not something I'd be interested in playing solo at home, that's for sure. What makes you think the average person is qualified to write dialogue, settings, characters that are actually interesting and standing on their own, worth making it to a solitary hobby (cRPGs)?

If the only way the stars can align is if a game falls between the cracks in some mega game corp, then the games industry is a complete failure and will always be so, because something like that isn't going to happen ever again in anyone's lifetime.

Well, that exploratory era of gaming where loads of people didn't just feel content aping but wanted to pioneer stuff certainly doesn't seem to be coming back.

Innovashun 1997++:
Sales guy: There's this big cashed up demographic that doesn't like RPG games, but if we put these innovashions in, they might like our games. It will upset the base, so put the community manager on it. AAA graphics don't pay for themselves bros!

Meh.
RPG is the genre most dramatically affected by decline and if it was because of graphics trends alone it wouldn't stand out so much like a sore thumb.
Some game genres were even improved in the past decades. I really love the new type of platformers that became popular with Super Meat Boy. And they ain't big budget production stuff. And games like Hollow Knight really helped turned Metroidvania into an actual genre with various types of games and not just the umbrella for metroid and modern castlevania.

You largely underestimate the amount of work and talent making a great, not just decent, RPG represents. Combined with the size of the audience (tiny) it also means there's less devs interested in the genre, not just because of financial (sales numbers) reasons but also because it's not like there's a higher proportion of software devs among the RPG fanbase versus other game types. Whether you like it or not, the conditions for making the sort of RPG you desire most really is akin to getting the stars to align right. The right people wanting to make something with the right mindset and having the means, time and motivation at whatever point in life they're at. Even then, it doesn't necessarily result in a pure smash hit among us, some people here may love Age of Decadence for example but the extremely constrictive gameplay design didn't really result in a future classic. And this is a game whose development was led by a codex legend.

RPGs is also the genre of niche-within-niche. The tiny niche audience is also split into various subniches. Classic labyrinthine dungeon crawlers are pretty dead outside of whatever Japan pushes out for example. Literally no game genre is deader than this in the west. People still keep making traditional ASCII roguelikes but dungeon crawlers ala Wiz are out of the question.

You keep refusing to accept the idea that there's more than graphics hurting the genre because the alternative is more ghastly to think of, that the likelihood of getting something to suit your desires is actually genuinely tiny on its own. Graphics whoring contribute to making the phenomenon worse, but it's certainly not the only cause of decline.

Heck, to a certain extent I don't think pen and paper is as popular among younger nerds as it was for nerds of our generation. That doesn't help. In fact, among cRPG devs, where's the new blood?
 
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attackfighter

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Messages
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And if CRPGs of the future have fewer words, developers will want “more incisive, entertaining, and direct writing”, with fewer “winding monologues. In at least the immediate future, prose-heavy games are going to [be] much more niche,” he says.

One of the reasons that Tides of Numenera didn’t sell as well as expected was because it was too text-heavy, says Brian Fargo, head of developer inXile Entertainment. Wasteland 2, which came out before Torment, hit a better balance between story and action, and Wasteland 3 will focus on the “strategic aspect of combat in an XCOM kind of way”, he says.

Fargo is particularly keen to introduce “emergent gameplay” of the type that Divinity: Original Sin 2 used so effectively. Players could mess around with different elements to create fun interactions, like killing an enemy and electrifying their pooling blood so that it zaps anyone stood close, or throwing a poison flask at an undead ally to heal them while damaging any nearby enemies.

We’ll see more of that in CRPGs from now on, Fargo predicts, both because it makes for better games and because it’s inherently more attractive for streamers, who are gaining more and more influence over what the public play. “It’s more viral in nature, you’re more likely to get a friend to play,” he says.

This seems like poor thinking. Once a game comes out that has those features, the market [for games that have those features] becomes mostly saturated. Then, if every developer, like a herd of lemmings, rushes to make a ton more of those games, the market becomes even more saturated. The law of diminishing returns is applied.

Rather than have the mentality of lemmings [who don't understand their own business but speaks authoritatively and sententiously about it] these developers should
  1. Be more logical.
  2. View market outcomes in their creative domain as complex phenomena that can't be captured by simplistic doctrines.
  3. Keep an open mind.
Making crappy knockoffs of games whose markets have already been oversaturated is not a good business plan. Instead, a good business plan is to anticipate future developments in gaming so that one can profit from them while the market is still untapped. Sadly, these lemming-developers do not have the honesty to cater to niche markets, nor the ingenuity to succeed in the general market, nor even the brand names and institutional weight to compete with Todd Howard, so they are relegated to the development of mediocre, crappy games that will never make any money and which will accrue no longterm fans.
 

Bigg Boss

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Can't speak of AC personally as I don't care and never played games of that series past the first one, but when I see 'rpg elements' (like the concept of levelling) in the form of having to play countless hours of online multiplayer to unlock weapons in a first person shooter I want to punch a kitten.

I'm calling the whole thing padding because contrary to what you say it doesn't add depth it adds grind and grind
is the worst concept to ever have come of the genre. It doesn't make the actual gameplay mechanics more complex it just gates your ability to use things until you've spent whatever amount of playtime the developer wanted you to.
.

That depends on how satisfying the gameplay loop is. Look at Dark Souls. Am I old Infinitron or is that sentiment old? Alternatively both is a good answer I guess.
 
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