Have the best CRPGs already been made?

[TemplarGR]

Of course not. Technology always improves and with better technology there are better possibilities for better designed CRPGs.

I am really surprised that so many people voted yes. They must be either too old and should find another hobby because they are clearly disillusioned with gaming, or too young and want to appear edgy.

It's ok folks. CRPGs will continue to be made. Remember that us old relics who lived the golden 80s and 90s used to think that way as well. Remember that back in the day edgelords used to bash BG1 and Fallout 1 as well... And now they are considered classics. Hell, people bashed hard NWN, FF8-10, IWD, Planescape Torment literally didn't sell, Arcanum didn't sell, Gothic 1 and 2 were obscure etc.

Good games keep getting made, but many old timers bash them because they really have outgrown this hobby and won't admit it. How else could someone explain the huge amount of edgelords who bash Witcher 3? Those people would kill for such a game to have been released 20 years ago, but they won't admit it. 20 years from now, Witcher 3 will be considered the pinnacle of RPGs and codexers will be claiming that Witcher 7 is popamole...

This is the circle of life.

 

[Bocha]

I voted NO because I have some hope for Deadfire, tim cain project, sawyer dream rpg, pathfinder and some of the indie projects.

 

[mfkndggrfll]

Lol @ technology improving RPGs... the genre has been dead for a while now.

 

[Shadenuat]

I think now that we know that old crew probably won't make good RPGs anymore, we realise that it's up to young inexperienced indie people to grab the torch and do what they can while making their own mistakes and keeping with their own vision. That's what fills me with hope.

 

[Lurker47]

Fuck no. There's so much C&C that could be in a game now compared to the ones made on a toaster. Could be.

 

[Daemongar]

Well, I'll say this. Fallout 1 and Diablo came out about the same time. If it wasn't for Fallout, I would have abandoned RPGs. That is, Diablo was the "next generation" of RPGs, and everyone was trying to emulate Diablo's success. In Diablo's shadow, Fallout 2 came out. The world was all going one way, but two of the greatest RPGs of all time came out. Fallout never got Diablo sales, but in spite of Diablo Fallout 2 came out and it's still revered.

What I'm trying to say is: there will *always* be good rpgs. They may not be AAA, they may not be praised by the gaming press, and they may be hard to find. But they will be there.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Is Codex losing its edge? There are no good rpgs

Yep. Which means there's infinite room for improvement.

 

[Tito Anic]

No. Styg, Iron Tower, Biskup, Vogel are still making games.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

It's sad that so many voted Yes. This genre (and video games in general) is in its infancy. There is so much more that can be done with the power of computers:

1. True sandbox procedural worlds with sophisticated NPC AI and emergent behavior.
2. Complex RPG systems, like the ones in say Realms of Arkania, but with actual interesting implementations (beyond just stat checks).
3. In-depth skill based systems such as dialogue, stealth, crafting, etc.
4. Actual well designed combat systems (whether real time or turn based).
5. Photorealistic graphics and realistic physics and animations.

And if it all fails, there is Dwarf Fortress: Adventurer Mode.

 

[Comrade Goby]

Cyberpunk 2077 isn't out yet

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

Well, to be honest my "Golden years" in gaming and crpg gaming were from 89 up to 2005 [low, mid, high, college - school years ] .
I think we still have and will see good games in the future, but my attitude changed with work , family, kids, adult life around etc. .
It's hard to spend much needed time to feel story and characters as you want, when You can sacrifice max up to 4-5 hours a week for pure gaming.
To better describe this i have around 20 -30 crpg titles to finish from last 4-5 years and im almost sure it will take nice part of my old age [ i mean after 60's ] to do that.
Why i wrote about this? Becouse you need time to enjoy crpgs and give them right score. Time is biggest problem, not their quality.

 

[Walden]

In about 20 years there will be no crpgs, retrogaming and crpgs pantheon will be populated by Skyrim, TW3, Anthem. Your sons will be playing the new kool Apple-VR moba and the Amazon AI in the living room, and you'll cry alone in the toilet, and your tears will dry the frame of a Fargo picture in your hand.
"I miss you so much..".

 

[Kruno]

Ahh Dragon Age 3, the best CRPG is existence with writing that rivals MCA's best work.

 

[Dorateen]

What the world needs right now is more Gold Box-style computer role-playing games.

 

[Alex]

Yes, they probably have been done.

Of course, you could make games better than the ones from decades ago, in theory. You could have a game like Fallout and make it significantly bigger. Add more use to different skills, refine the combat, etc. Arcanum has a lot of room for improvement, all the while giving a really good basis for an incredible game. You could take gold box games and add a whole lot of interesting aspects from pencil and paper games, use a really good adventure as the basis, and you could probably beat any of the Gold box games by their own parameters.

Will this happen, though? I very much doubt it. Bigger companies would reel from taking such a risk. In fact, I expect they would be, financially speaking, correct in doing so. RPGs aren't a popular genre, they require a certain level of investment to be really appreciated, and bigger companies, with their heavy expenditures in salaries, marketing and what not can't really approve something that won't pay for itself.

Then you have indie game makers. One problem with indie studios is that they don't really have the manpower for making a great RPG. I don't mean that they can't make good games; but the scope of what they can accomplish is limited by their situation. Take Geneforge, for instance. It is a pretty good game, it has an interesting setting, an interesting game world, several different items, an interesting system, etc. However, if I were to compare it to the great RPGs of the past, it feels... cheap. Yeah, the items have interesting descriptions and a nice story behind them, but they certainly don't make me feel like I am inside that world the way Ultima 7's interactivity made me. The setting is interesting and exotic, but it never feels as developed or interesting as PS:T. The system behind creating life is nice, but it really could use some customisation...

Indie games are also more likely to end up too experimental. Of course, experimenting with new ideas can be good, but it is hard to make the best of anything while experimenting. Especially when a lot of ideas that are being experimented actually drive away the resulting game from the classics of the genre. Age of Decadence, for instance, experimented with the idea of making its "text adventures" more central to the game. I don't find these parts bad in themselves, but they do show how the player doesn't have much agency at all.

So, I think the best is not yet to come, as far as CRPGs go. I could, of course, be wrong. My thoughts are based on how the industry looks right now, but that may change a lot in 10 or 20 years. You also never know when a madman will decide to spend 20 years in the same game in order to make a masterpiece. Last year surprised me with Hollow Knight the first game I've played that does Super Metroid better than Super Metroid. I am not jaded to the point where I think it is impossible for a new game to match Fallout, or Ultima, or Arcanum, or any other of the greats. I just don't see it happening.

 

[mfkndggrfll]

It's sad that so many voted Yes. This genre (and video games in general) is in its infancy. There is so much more that can be done with the power of computers:

1. True sandbox procedural worlds with sophisticated NPC AI and emergent behavior.
2. Complex RPG systems, like the ones in say Realms of Arkania, but with actual interesting implementations (beyond just stat checks).
3. In-depth skill based systems such as dialogue, stealth, crafting, etc.
4. Actual well designed combat systems (whether real time or turn based).
5. Photorealistic graphics and realistic physics and animations.

And if it all fails, there is Dwarf Fortress: Adventurer Mode.

I dont know if this was sarcastic or not but the power of computers is being used to create profitable games, not good ones. RPGs can only become worse with the years.

 

[mondblut]

Yes, and it's been that way for a quarter of a century.

 

[Egosphere]

Yes, I think so.

Technology won't solve anything. Technology does nothing other than promote fancy graphics and faster rendering ( whilst, ironically, making games more and more expensive to make ). Sure, there'll probably be a new fad of npcs being trained by machine learning algos and becoming 'smart', and we'll have a decade of the public fawning over every tiny incremental advance in that area. But that's not what gaming should be about, imo.

To me, games were always about the mechanics, the writing and the art direction/world building. Mechanics and writing cannot be improved upon through technology. You can hew a chessboard out of the finest wood and write Byron on fine parchment with a callgraphy brush, but that won't change the innate quality of chess or poetry. As for world building, well, you could get fabulous worlds out onto the screen over a decade ago. If you think 8k, 350 fps etc. is what makes good art direction then I pity you.

You can think of game industry as hollywood lite. They have the power of cgi, computerized touch-up etc. but did that help them churn out movies as good as Alien, The Shining, Apocalypse Now, 2001 Space Odyssey? The answer is a resounding no. Most millennial movies are forgotten after a year.

 

[Karellen]

We will never again experience the wonderment of youth, so I voted yes.

I think that this statement has a great deal of truth in it. It is my opinion that the CRPG is, fundamentally, an imperfect genre, particularly once you've moved on from early dungeon crawlers to games like Fallout and Baldur's Gate and so on. For all they do, CRPGs are simply inadequate to fulfil what is ostensibly their primary function, which is to provide the experience of playing a PnP RPG. So novelty has a great deal to do with the way people appreciate an RPG - RPGs are content-heavy games that, when approached from a naive standpoint, have a lot of new and exciting things to offer. But once you've played a few RPGs, you've seen most of the bells and whistles, at which point the basic structural faults of the genre start to become increasingly obvious.

The thing is, it's not obvious to me what developers can do about this. There's a reason, as far as I can see, why it seems like indie developers manage to genuinely improve on established genres like Metroidvanias, whereas RPGs seem to have only regressed; the reason being that the basic idea of a Metroidvania is in itself perfectly sound, with a lot hanging on implementation, so the games can be made better simply with polish and iterative refinement. With RPGs this sort of improvement is much harder to accomplish. Having said that, I don't want to be too pessimistic - what will happen (and has already happened to a degree) is that indie developers will increasingly improve their work on subgenres like tactical RPGs, dungeon crawlers or even jRPGs, which are much more constrained and have more cohesive and better understood basic gameplay. So there'll definitely be more games like FTL which are extremely good games, but not quite like classic CRPGs. In that sense, it's possible that there won't be a game like "Fallout 1, only better" - because by far the best way to improve on Fallout is to make a game that's substantially different from Fallout.

 

[Lagi]

...
Technology won't solve anything. Technology does nothing other than promote fancy graphics and faster rendering...

I put some trust in Copper Dreams. I hope they deliver more complex graphical representation of game mechanics.

 

[BreadGrill]

It's impossible to make the best anything because everything is infinite. Enjoy infinite shit though because you live on this gay ass earth.

 

[J1M]

In the distant future the RPG market could be 10x bigger based on population growth alone. Costs may also decline given advances in AI. At some point, RPGs will be profitable to make again.

 

[Alex]

In the distant future the RPG market could be 10x bigger based on population growth alone.

Well, then the costs of marketing would also rise by a factor of 10, wouldn't they? Not to mention that other games would be probably more lucrative still...

Costs may also decline given advances in AI. At some point, RPGs will be profitable to make again.

I don't really think AIs will ever amount to anything, as far as producing game content goes (they certainly could help with enemy AI, though). I suspect that anything we do with AIs in the future will be inferior to what roguelikes have already done. Now, maybe AIs and other programming techniques could reduce the effort needed to produce a good game by a sizable chunk, that I could see happening. Whether that will happen or not, I do not know.

 

[J1M]

In the distant future the RPG market could be 10x bigger based on population growth alone.

Well, then the costs of marketing would also rise by a factor of 10, wouldn't they? Not to mention that other games would be probably more lucrative still...

Costs may also decline given advances in AI. At some point, RPGs will be profitable to make again.

I don't really think AIs will ever amount to anything, as far as producing game content goes (they certainly could help with enemy AI, though). I suspect that anything we do with AIs in the future will be inferior to what roguelikes have already done. Now, maybe AIs and other programming techniques could reduce the effort needed to produce a good game by a sizable chunk, that I could see happening. Whether that will happen or not, I do not know.

At some point AI will be able to replace outsourced artists. Eventually, you will be able to tell a computer to make you a thing in an art style at a certain polygon count. That may not work for alien worlds, but it will reduce costs. Speedtree is an example of a first step.

The marketing thing is harder to predict, but social media has made that cheaper. Who knows what the platform owners will do. I agree the cost of a superbowl commercial will continue to rise, but that is an avenue for Halo, not RPGs.

 

[ilitarist]

I'm confused why there aren't more Skyrim clones. EA claimed that was their goal with Kingdoms of Amalur and Dragon Age Inquisition but both are pretty flawed, failed to grab the title, and don't seem to be influential. Mass Effect Andromeda was also supposed to be open-world but we all know how that turned out.

Maybe if CD Projekt made a Witcher game without Geralt. Something more sandbox-ish where you played a player-created Witcher, perhaps rebuilding the Witcher schools. One can hope.

I'm confused we aren't getting new Skyrim DLCs/standalone expansions to this day.

When Fallout New Vegas got 4 big story DLCs I was sure Bethesda and the industry as a whole are going this way. Fallout 3 too had something like 5 big expansions plus FNV was basically expandalone. It seemed like a waste to just drop those monster of games without reusing the engine and content.

But then Skyrim came out and it was a huge success and it got... 2 story expansions?.. Only one of them is a big new land. Plus The Sims DLC for building a home and creating a family. I can't understand why they didn't make 5 more expansions. I can't understand why they didn't force Obsidian or whoever else to make Non Canon Scrolls: Hammerfall or something.

BioWare tried to copy elements of Skyrim but they did their own thing after all. They mostly used the open world similarly to Mass Effect 1: it's mostly there to give you a feeling of scale and allow you to grind by completing obviously marked boring grinding quest. More of a worldbuilding tool, you're never supposed to play it the way you play Bethesda game. The most important part of Fallout 3/4/Skyrim is alternative quest structure: it doesn't use traditional quest hub system but rather turns the whole world into a web of quests and missions so you can go wherever and get an emergent adventure. DAI and ME and Witcher 3 and even FNV are much more traditional, partly because those games do not have as much story content and they're afraid you can miss it. Bethesda games are perfectly content with the idea that you can miss something and this adds charm, the only other RPG like that were probably Planescape and Baldur's Gate 1/2. That's the most important aspect of those games, I think, and it adds a feeling of a separate self-sufficient world.

And we don't get those for obvious reasons - you want players to see everything in the game. Paradoxically some JRPGs still have this feeling. Dark Souls and Final Fantasy XV really don't seem to care if you miss half of the game on your way to the victory, in Dark Souls it's even hard to find some DLC areas you payed money for.