Is the New Decline(tm) of cRPGs imminent?

[rado907]

Times have been good for RPGs recently. We had the Shadowrun games, the new Divine Divinity and its sequel, Fallout 4 (not great but decent), Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity (no Baldur's Gate but playable), The Witcher 3 plus expos, Banner Saga, Age of Decadence and Under-rail that people here like and perhaps some other titles I'm missing.

This is much better than a few years ago. And we have PoE2, Tyranny, the new Torment and other titles to look forward to.

What we really need is a new BGII, Fallout II, or Morrowind. That would do the job just fine.

 

[shihonage]

Fallout 4 (not great but decent)

 

[SniperHF]

To quote the avatar of that poster:
"The sanctity of this place has been fouled"

But then again there's that screenshot of everyone playing Fallout 4 on Steam so

 

[rado907]

We played that shit and enjoyed it for what it was worth.

When there is no whiskey you drink beer. Where there is no steak you eat hotdogs. And when there is no real Fallout you play Bethesda faux-Fallout Skyrim wannabe Fallout 4.

Not buying DLC's, though. Original was more than enough.

 

[shihonage]

We played that shit and enjoyed it for what it was worth.

When there is no whiskey you drink beer. Where there is no steak you eat hotdogs. And when there is no real Fallout you play Bethesda faux-Fallout Skyrim wannabe Fallout 4.

Why not palay Call of Duty Ghosts? Its abetter Fallout4 experiance Bettar shootings and storey and it has the dog to

 

[Black]

We

Who?

 

[Theldaran]

I just wanna point out that the Sega Genesis was an excellent classic console, much better fun than today's shit, and it had few RPGs (but some were really great at the time, like PSIV and Shining Force 2), but a great library.

In short, sometimes there come lean times for videogames as a whole and for RPGs, but the cycle ends up repeating (I hope) and if you don't get what you want you can still shift to, I dunno, FPS, strategy or something...

 

[anus_pounder]

It's not as if PoE, WL2, and D:OS were flawless additions to the genre.

You want flawless?

No, but I do want RPGs that have strong points without being overburdened by garbage. How many decades have people been developing RPGs now?

Instead here's what we got:

PoE -- Pretty art and graphics, otherwise it ranges from underwhelming to absolute shit. The encounter design is probably the low point, just hordes and hordes of trash mobs and copy-paste battles.
D:OS -- Fun combat (really fun), good music, makes you giggle here and there. But the story and writing are crap, world is boring, game is ugly, crafting and itemization are straight-out-of-an-MMO trash. And it falls flat after Act 1.
WL2 -- Cool setting and reactivity, otherwise I'm not sure since I got bored of it before too long.

Let me continue:
Planescape Torment: It hat good story and reactivity, it had shit combat and character system.
Baldur's Gate 2: it had good encounters and mediocre story.
Age of Decadence: it had good reactivity and combat, medicore art, underwhelming exploration and basic story.
Etc.

So let's not kid ourselves that there was a holy grail of games in the past which had no weak points.

As for your OP:

Romances are starting to creep in too.

No romances in PoE, PoE2 (probably), Tyranny, WL2, WL3, BT4, DOS, DOS2 (AFAIK). Where are those romances you are talking about?

I married my gender-bent self in the ending of D:OS, I'll have you know.

 

[adrix89]

Codex you are embarrassing me!
You are like a whinny child not even knowing the amount of success you had.
PoE and Shadowrun showed you can have beautiful 2D and Text with No Fucking Voiceacting and be a success this is HUGE this is game-changing.
It doesn't matter that PoE is a steaming pile of shit or that the combat is garbage. Combat in cRPGs was always garbage so it was expected for the first generations to be complete ass especially if they are brand new systems.
The only thing PoE needed was to be pretty and be successful. Which it did.
Why you ask? Because the problem has always been 3D and voiceacting, the problem has always been the budget. You cannot have anything truly ambitious without breaking from the shackles of 3D and voiceacting.
The gates have been open and we are now awaiting for the flood.
The nature of is by definition that things are getting better, that does not mean that things have to reach their peak immediately. There has been some success with the first generation and the second generation may be a flop but by the third generation things will improve.

The nature of the revolution is not to get more of the same, nostalgia faggots who always look at the past cannot be the future. Your old faggot studios and celebrities will not save you. Some old lessons are slowly relearned with the help of pretentious YouTubers but that's it(shame on you for leaving it to those pricks).
There are a couple of forces that will change the nature of cRPGs forever:

Roguelikes are hugely popular. Even old hardcore roguelikes like UnrealWorld and ADOM has some success as well as a new generation like NEO Scavenger or Dungeonmans. Dwarf Fortress have inspired many and more are coming like Ultima Ratio Regum or Cogmind.
They have good combat, good encounter design, good resource management, tension and pacing. All the aspects missing from cRPGs since time immemorial.

More japanese rpgs and srpgs are being translated and ported. While it does not have the cRPG customization and character development they do have some of the most brilliant and innovative turn based combat systems and have pretty good stories,characters and world. If you want blobbers you will get them from here.
The Indie Market has shown it can handle challenging gameplay. The is continuously attracted to pretentious non-games walking simulators like a honey trap while leaving the rest of the market to pursue more challenging games. Consoles are also on the way out and the shitcontrolers with them. VR have perfect controls for turn based tactical combat and have a big vomit inducing problem with movement which is perfect in our case.

And there are a couple of game changing ideas on the horizon that can make a world with truly infinite choice and consequence not by some scripts but by logical cause and effect on the world.

Things will evolve even if your old faggot studios flop. They have already done what they needed to do.

 

[Grauken]

We played that shit and enjoyed it for what it was worth.

When there is no whiskey you drink beer. Where there is no steak you eat hotdogs. And when there is no real Fallout you play Bethesda faux-Fallout Skyrim wannabe Fallout 4.

Not buying DLC's, though. Original was more than enough.

piss off, beer is better than whiskey

and when there's no real Fallout, you either replay it or something else great, you don't go wading into shit and play with poo

 

[Hobo Elf]

Times have been good for RPGs recently. We had the Shadowrun games, the new Divine Divinity and its sequel, Fallout 4 (not great but decent), Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity (no Baldur's Gate but playable), The Witcher 3 plus expos, Banner Saga, Age of Decadence and Under-rail that people here like and perhaps some other titles I'm missing.

This is much better than a few years ago. And we have PoE2, Tyranny, the new Torment and other titles to look forward to.

All shit.

 

[Grape_You_In_the_Mouth]

No.

• cRPGs sell less than other categories, but our markets have changed to allow low-cost developers to serve niche markets.

• And Witcher 3 sold millions of copies, and Bethesda will sell millions of each game for at least the next 5 years. "Bethesda-tards" will trickle into maturity for desiring cRPGs. CDPR will keep the story aspect of RPGs famously awesome as well.

• If the market gates for developers don't change, then the niche gamers who want good cRPGs will be served.

Eventually, technology will advance to create much easier platforms for people to make RPGs. RPGs will be like the Neverwinter Nights module days, but permanently---like books, where everyone makes one and there's way too many terrible ones.

 

[J_C]

Codex you are embarrassing me!
You are like a whinny child not even knowing the amount of success you had.
PoE and Shadowrun showed you can have beautiful 2D and Text with No Fucking Voiceacting and be a success this is HUGE this is game-changing.
It doesn't matter that PoE is a steaming pile of shit or that the combat is garbage. Combat in cRPGs was always garbage so it was expected for the first generations to be complete ass especially if they are brand new systems.
The only thing PoE needed was to be pretty and be successful. Which it did.
Why you ask? Because the problem has always been 3D and voiceacting, the problem has always been the budget. You cannot have anything truly ambitious without breaking from the shackles of 3D and voiceacting.
The gates have been open and we are now awaiting for the flood.
The nature of is by definition that things are getting better, that does not mean that things have to reach their peak immediately. There has been some success with the first generation and the second generation may be a flop but by the third generation things will improve.

The nature of the revolution is not to get more of the same, nostalgia faggots who always look at the past cannot be the future. Your old faggot studios and celebrities will not save you. Some old lessons are slowly relearned with the help of pretentious YouTubers but that's it(shame on you for leaving it to those pricks).
There are a couple of forces that will change the nature of cRPGs forever:

Roguelikes are hugely popular. Even old hardcore roguelikes like UnrealWorld and ADOM has some success as well as a new generation like NEO Scavenger or Dungeonmans. Dwarf Fortress have inspired many and more are coming like Ultima Ratio Regum or Cogmind.
They have good combat, good encounter design, good resource management, tension and pacing. All the aspects missing from cRPGs since time immemorial.

More japanese rpgs and srpgs are being translated and ported. While it does not have the cRPG customization and character development they do have some of the most brilliant and innovative turn based combat systems and have pretty good stories,characters and world. If you want blobbers you will get them from here.
The Indie Market has shown it can handle challenging gameplay. The is continuously attracted to pretentious non-games walking simulators like a honey trap while leaving the rest of the market to pursue more challenging games. Consoles are also on the way out and the shitcontrolers with them. VR have perfect controls for turn based tactical combat and have a big vomit inducing problem with movement which is perfect in our case.

And there are a couple of game changing ideas on the horizon that can make a world with truly infinite choice and consequence not by some scripts but by logical cause and effect on the world.

Things will evolve even if your old faggot studios flop. They have already done what they needed to do.

 

[Roqua]

No.

• cRPGs sell less than other categories, but our markets have changed to allow low-cost developers to serve niche markets.

• And Witcher 3 sold millions of copies, and Bethesda will sell millions of each game for at least the next 5 years. "Bethesda-tards" will trickle into maturity for desiring cRPGs. CDPR will keep the story aspect of RPGs famously awesome as well.

• If the market gates for developers don't change, then the niche gamers who want good cRPGs will be served.

Eventually, technology will advance to create much easier platforms for people to make RPGs. RPGs will be like the Neverwinter Nights module days, but permanently---like books, where everyone makes one and there's way too many terrible ones.

I don't know anyone who has written a book. Maybe this is a Texas thing?

 

[Roqua]

Codex you are embarrassing me!
You are like a whinny child not even knowing the amount of success you had.
PoE and Shadowrun showed you can have beautiful 2D and Text with No Fucking Voiceacting and be a success this is HUGE this is game-changing.
It doesn't matter that PoE is a steaming pile of shit or that the combat is garbage. Combat in cRPGs was always garbage so it was expected for the first generations to be complete ass especially if they are brand new systems.
The only thing PoE needed was to be pretty and be successful. Which it did.
Why you ask? Because the problem has always been 3D and voiceacting, the problem has always been the budget. You cannot have anything truly ambitious without breaking from the shackles of 3D and voiceacting.
The gates have been open and we are now awaiting for the flood.
The nature of is by definition that things are getting better, that does not mean that things have to reach their peak immediately. There has been some success with the first generation and the second generation may be a flop but by the third generation things will improve.

The nature of the revolution is not to get more of the same, nostalgia faggots who always look at the past cannot be the future. Your old faggot studios and celebrities will not save you. Some old lessons are slowly relearned with the help of pretentious YouTubers but that's it(shame on you for leaving it to those pricks).
There are a couple of forces that will change the nature of cRPGs forever:

Roguelikes are hugely popular. Even old hardcore roguelikes like UnrealWorld and ADOM has some success as well as a new generation like NEO Scavenger or Dungeonmans. Dwarf Fortress have inspired many and more are coming like Ultima Ratio Regum or Cogmind.
They have good combat, good encounter design, good resource management, tension and pacing. All the aspects missing from cRPGs since time immemorial.

More japanese rpgs and srpgs are being translated and ported. While it does not have the cRPG customization and character development they do have some of the most brilliant and innovative turn based combat systems and have pretty good stories,characters and world. If you want blobbers you will get them from here.
The Indie Market has shown it can handle challenging gameplay. The is continuously attracted to pretentious non-games walking simulators like a honey trap while leaving the rest of the market to pursue more challenging games. Consoles are also on the way out and the shitcontrolers with them. VR have perfect controls for turn based tactical combat and have a big vomit inducing problem with movement which is perfect in our case.

And there are a couple of game changing ideas on the horizon that can make a world with truly infinite choice and consequence not by some scripts but by logical cause and effect on the world.

Things will evolve even if your old faggot studios flop. They have already done what they needed to do.

PoE had a ton of voice acting.

 

[Xathrodox86]

I don't play enough cRPG's to care, but from what I'm seeing on the internet, yeah - the decline is real.

 

[Atomboy]

Even if there is a decline, (which I don't think there is, seeing how generally middle-of-the-road-okay games like POE or Shadowrun come out fairly regularly), you won't feel it if you have where to hide from it. Upon learning there won't be any Tides of Numenera this year, and that Grimoire is slightly slow-ish with it's release, I got The Dark Heart of Uukrul. Also, Pool of Radiance is a great game, if you print out the manual. And I bet some of you never played Wizardry 6! It's an amazing game - the combat, the nudity, the most bizarre flavor text I have ever read - it's all there! And with an automapping tool found online, it's basically a brand new game! And speaking of David W. Bradley, have you heard of Wizards and Warriors? It's an awesome game for like Windows ME or smth, and although it's almost impossible to run, you get to have elephant men in your party. Just wait out the supposed drought of RPGs with some good old games!

 

[Hobo Elf]

Even if there is a decline, (which I don't think there is, seeing how generally middle-of-the-road-okay games like POE or Shadowrun come out fairly regularly), you won't feel it if you have where to hide from it. Upon learning there won't be any Tides of Numenera this year, and that Grimoire is slightly slow-ish with it's release, I got The Dark Heart of Uukrul. Also, Pool of Radiance is a great game, if you print out the manual. And I bet some of you never played Wizardry 6! It's an amazing game - the combat, the nudity, the most bizarre flavor text I have ever read - it's all there! And with an automapping tool found online, it's basically a brand new game! And speaking of David W. Bradley, have you heard of Wizards and Warriors? It's an awesome game for like Windows ME or smth, and although it's almost impossible to run, you get to have elephant men in your party. Just wait out the supposed drought of RPGs with some good old games!

Wizards and Warriors is supposed to work on Win10.

 

[Saxon1974]

We are getting lots of games, but not really any great games. At least not yet although I liked Wasteland 2, divinity OS, pillar and legends of eisenwald; none were great though.

 

[pippin]

No.

• cRPGs sell less than other categories, but our markets have changed to allow low-cost developers to serve niche markets.

• And Witcher 3 sold millions of copies, and Bethesda will sell millions of each game for at least the next 5 years. "Bethesda-tards" will trickle into maturity for desiring cRPGs. CDPR will keep the story aspect of RPGs famously awesome as well.

• If the market gates for developers don't change, then the niche gamers who want good cRPGs will be served.

Eventually, technology will advance to create much easier platforms for people to make RPGs. RPGs will be like the Neverwinter Nights module days, but permanently---like books, where everyone makes one and there's way too many terrible ones.

It's the late 90s all over again then?

 

[deama]

I wonder how long it'll take for peter to make me a "black and white" CRPG. I always wanted one, I was hopping the BG series would end up being it, but nope; still gotta wait...

 

[Azrael the cat]

The one positive lasting take that I think we can see right now isn't crpg per se, but that games like Dishonoured and nu-Deus Ex are showing what I've been saying for years - that those games, not Thief or DX1 quality, but in style, and with sufficient commercial success that you'd get a steady stream of gems, should never have left the AAA scene. If you can play FO3, you can play DE1. If you can play ME (any of them) you can play DE1. Mechanics-wise, you can definitely play thief.

They don't seem massively more tech-intensive or writing-intensive than the games that have dominated the past 10 yrs. Certainly not mechanically more complex. Oddly enough, it's harder to believe something like Witcher 3 exists - that a studio could devote that much time to handplacing content in an open world game.

I think the success of Dishonoured, and to a lesser degree the nu-DEx games, has brought that home. Unlike the other positive developments, those have AAA success, and should have taught the industry that there's a mainstream big-dollar game-style that they've simply overlooked for nigh-on a decade.

Otherwise, I loved WL2, and that's replicatable - no need for the kind of once-off brilliance that marks games like Torment (you can't plan for that quality of writing) or the willingness to throw investors and commercialism aside and just hope you get enough for your next game like AoD, or experimental styles that didn't really work but were doing something radically different like Dead State. There's absolutely no reason why more games like WL2 can't be made, and be profitable, if the will is there. I've got more trust in Fargo than most - you don't have to look far to see that having a management guy that can get the money in, and get the game roughly on time and on budget is an underrated asset in indie-land (Doublefine, cough cough). There's no question the guy will make whatever shovelware he has to, and sell out his own grandmother if he thinks it's necessary to keep the company afloat - but there also seemed to be some genuinely glee at having survived through shitty port contracts, shovelware, taking anything he could to keep afloat, and coming out the other end where Interplay's style of game had a publishing stream again. The name of company hardly seems accidental either - it seems like something you'd come up with if you saw a sea of shit in all directions, and decided that you were going to just be one with the bullshit, so that you'd still be around if one day things changed and you could come back home.

 

[Azrael the cat]

There are few reasons that the age of incline belongs to days long gone and is just a mirage:

1) Groundbreaking games already happened. Fallout 1/2, Baldurs Gate, Arcanum, Torment, [insert other codex classic here] were released when cRPGs were still a niche market, as the entire gaming market TBH. It was targeted at nerds and nerds were more or less who used computers for gaming then. Nowadays gaming became mainstream and is considered perfectly normal human behaviour, not restricted to alleged basement dwelers who spent all days at deciphering criptic hints from game manuals. Since it became mainstream, business welfare and market research tear out the heart and passions from game developers and their designs. It is the law of nature that everything that becomes mainstream goes downhill by catering to the common crowd.

2) Our beloved "Citizen Kanes" of gaming never really sold really well, if I remember correctly. Not sure about Fallouts and BG, but I'm pretty sure that Arcanum and Torment bombed pretty hard.

3) Nostalgia works in mysterious ways. Childhood memories of climbing a tree may seem like reaching the top of Mount Everest after years. Some of us constantly reminisce those thrills and memories that belong to past from the jaded perspecitve of a consicious adult being that "knows it better now".
"All is shit" and such. Most of those games are like first sex, might not be the best in your life but still you will remember it and compare all next to it.

Apart from that I'm still mad that some developers constantly fuck up at delivering what their core fanbase wants most. Obsidian and Piranha excel at it.

Drunk posting out...

All of Troika's games made a profit, and Arcanum was the biggest. Torment made a profit too. Trouble in both cases were that they didn't follow the industry model where total profits can be predicted from 1st 2 weeks - crpgs of that style have much longer tails than the models account for.

Again, all of Troika's games made a profit. They went under because they were operating in an era where survival didn't depend on your profitability, but on your ability to secure a publisher (and hence funding) for your next project. They couldn't get a publisher contract for their next project, so that was it - profitability didn't come into it.

 

[J_C]

The one positive lasting take that I think we can see right now isn't crpg per se, but that games like Dishonoured and nu-Deus Ex are showing what I've been saying for years - that those games, not Thief or DX1 quality, but in style, and with sufficient commercial success that you'd get a steady stream of gems, should never have left the AAA scene. If you can play FO3, you can play DE1. If you can play ME (any of them) you can play DE1. Mechanics-wise, you can definitely play thief.

They don't seem massively more tech-intensive or writing-intensive than the games that have dominated the past 10 yrs. Certainly not mechanically more complex. Oddly enough, it's harder to believe something like Witcher 3 exists - that a studio could devote that much time to handplacing content in an open world game.

I think the success of Dishonoured, and to a lesser degree the nu-DEx games, has brought that home. Unlike the other positive developments, those have AAA success, and should have taught the industry that there's a mainstream big-dollar game-style that they've simply overlooked for nigh-on a decade.

Otherwise, I loved WL2, and that's replicatable - no need for the kind of once-off brilliance that marks games like Torment (you can't plan for that quality of writing) or the willingness to throw investors and commercialism aside and just hope you get enough for your next game like AoD, or experimental styles that didn't really work but were doing something radically different like Dead State. There's absolutely no reason why more games like WL2 can't be made, and be profitable, if the will is there. I've got more trust in Fargo than most - you don't have to look far to see that having a management guy that can get the money in, and get the game roughly on time and on budget is an underrated asset in indie-land (Doublefine, cough cough). There's no question the guy will make whatever shovelware he has to, and sell out his own grandmother if he thinks it's necessary to keep the company afloat - but there also seemed to be some genuinely glee at having survived through shitty port contracts, shovelware, taking anything he could to keep afloat, and coming out the other end where Interplay's style of game had a publishing stream again. The name of company hardly seems accidental either - it seems like something you'd come up with if you saw a sea of shit in all directions, and decided that you were going to just be one with the bullshit, so that you'd still be around if one day things changed and you could come back home.

 

[Kev Inkline]

PoE is not great but decent

In general, I think you all should work more and play less. That's how there will be always something to enjoy as your freetime will be nearly non-existent.