Has C&C become the cancer of RPGs?

[Gangrelrumbler]

A well-written story is not the same as an interactive story. An interactive story can be lacking in sophistication, that is not a problem because the appeal of it is the agency and freedom it gives to the player. Indeed, the control that a dev/DM has to exert over the narrative in order to craft something that can be memorable (to those who did not participate in the session) is more or less incompatible with letting the imagination of the players run wild. All that PnP requires on this front is a good setting, and there are many in the medium.

It's not a problem. It's something that video games can do infinitely better than standard PnP RPG's which is their strength, and which is why that approach keeps getting used. Sure, you can do anything in a PnP session, but people actually do want a sophisticated story they can affect. Which is why the thread was made in the first place. CnC became so desired it got stapled even in places it didn't belong.

This advantage of computer games mostly pertains to the realm of gameworld-building and gameworld dynamism, it is as relevant to exploration as it is to reactivity. Also, I implied in previous posts that if "true C&C" ever comes around to PC it will do so through character diversification, but this diversification would not be enough, as it would have to be linked with sophisticated gameworld systems and design.
Features such as this one that you mentioned are a part of that, and they are a strength indeed, but not one that ensures the success of the quest/dialogue driven school of reactivity that we have been discussing in this thread. The problems of the latter, which I have already discussed extensively on previous posts in this thread, are not compensated for by this feature. If a competent developer comes around and tries to emulate PnP style interactive storytelling through systems-driven gameworld design and character diversification, that'd be an interesting experiment. As of now, however, we are merely talking of hypotheticals.

It compensates all the faults by allowing the game to actually have a story in the first place. You can't have a story without characters, dialogue, events happening. Not being able to go completely off-the rails like in an PnP RPG campaign is compensated by experiencing a good narrative. Game mechanics cannot take care of everything for you. You can have neat things that happen in the story like having your party member get dusted during the resurrection, but it won't be as memorable Blood Baron's death from The Witcher 3.
Actually there is a game series that already adhered to your design philosophy, it was called Sid Meyer Pirates! Every choice in this game is dynamic. Attack British port and Brits will hate you more. Keep attacking Brit ships and their enemies will get stronger and start taking over their cities. One time a ship carrying money was sailing to a British port (and I was enemy of the Brists at the time), after it landed the city grew bigger, which caused it to have a bigger garrison and made it hard for me to take it over. So I reloaded the game, intercepted it and had much easier time. It's a neat little story, but it's hardly Planescape Torment. So you know, it's not like approach to CnC based on systems hadn't been tried here and there through the years, it's just that the result is not one good story player can interact with, but rather hundreds mediocre stories generated on the fly. Which is why games like that aren't discussed on the Codex.

Odd point to make, if anything extra-ruleset actions such as using enemies as human shields is generally easier in PnP than in cRPGs because the latter are limited by the engine.

Yes that was the point. Computers can do more epic, and challenging battles, but PnPs can actually react to uncommon tactical ideas.

Yes, but this only applies to the story-driven school of games. Mechanics-driven games do just fine.

Which ones?

Rather, I'd argue that the obvious follow-up to the failed project of story-driven games is to return to what works: mechanics-driven games. If a vanguard of actually creative devs - instead of cargo cultists - wants to actually push the envelope and try to implement PnP style interactive storytelling in the meantime, more power to them. But that'd be nothing like a Telltale game, even one "done right", because the approach needed to do that (through character diversification and gameworlds) would be inherently different (probably even incompatible) to that which Telltale games take. Again, I addressed this in some of the previous posts.

But they are not a "failed project". They didn't replicate PnP experience perfectly but that's not what they were trying to do in the first place.

Yet Wizardry was great from the get-go, as most fans of the series will tell you: to this day many of them still rank Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord as one of the best, if not the best, in the franchise, and they usually give compelling design-related reasons for this in the process instead of nostalgia. cRPGs based on The Triad worked well from the very beginning, and they continue to be the tried and true approach ro RPG design. And come now, it's not like BIS, Troika, and Obsidian didn't have plenty of chances to iterate on their design philosophy. Again, that doesn't mean I am against experimentation, but when the alternatives to the original paradigm of cRPG design are mostly hypotheticals, it has to be admitted that the best course for the industry would be to go with said paradigm.
That said, I doubt that will happen, despite the buzzwords both traditional cRPGs and cRPGs that seek reactivity lack popular appeal. It seems that the future of the genre lies with the cinematic action RPG approach pioneered by Bioware and picked up by CD Projekt.

The problem with that argument is that Troika and Obsidian games wernen't failures, they keep to be one of the most well-liked RPGs out there. Their problems had nothing to do with the implementation of quests or CnC but rather with that their gameplay being unpolished, due to development difficulties. Baldur's Gate 2 used the exact same approach to RPGs and avoided all those problems due to having a game system that was tested and developed for years before the games was created and having 2 other IE games to be based on. The way to fix things like Arcanum is to better balance combat encounters, spells and abilities, not to complete threw standard CnC out of the window ad replace it with some complicated consequence-simulating systems that's given the track record of Troika would be ever more likely to be broken.
Regarding future of RPGs, it doesn't belong to anyone now. Oldschool games are being made, new games, blobbers, even your mechanics driven games are being made constantly in the forms of titles like Kenshi.

 

[aweigh]

An RPG that has encounters happen randomly is abstracting away a whole layer of interaction, where you could try to pin down where your enemies are and use that for your advantage*

Disagree. Random encounters are used in tabletop for a reason, to simulate ubiquitous attrition. This is an important part of managing player psychology. Most games that use "visible enemies" either give the player too many ways to run around them and avoid engaging them, or they clutter the gameplay with monotonous stealth mechanics that incentivize avoiding the conflict resolution and it can have a negative effect on the flow of risk/reward. By definition random encounters encourage a high risk, high reward set of dimensions that I find preferable.

On the flip side if you make the visible enemies too aggressive and impossible to avoid most of the time, then what's the point of making them visible? Beyond kowtowing to the "MUH IMMERSION!!!" crowd I mean? Now I can certainly understand it from a business standpoint, as there are simply too many morons who will refuse to play a great RPG for the smallest and most trivial of reasons, but I don't agree it is a better design philosophy inherently. Not one bit.

Obviously either way of implementation can go wrong very easily, they might make the encounter rate too retarded, forget to implement ways to run away from encounters, or they might make enemy avoidance too trivial, or an equally worse sin you can end up with a game where every build has to have some form of stealth or enemy-avoidance skillset built-in or necessitated (which is something I personally detest, I absolutely hate it when I realize something is so optimal that it becomes 'essential'); but the big thing is that fighting should be its own reward. Always. If this isn't accomplished then the entire game is at stake.

EDIT: Forgot to mention mechanical bloat. Sometimes it simply isn't automatically better to insert every single possible "immersion" mechanic into a game. Having (arguably) less layers of abstraction does not automatically mean better, or even necessarily more complex. What If I prefer my thief to be able to hide in combat during his turn in order to strike the next turn from the shadows, but I don't care about being able to avoid enemies? It's a hard choice to make, because you can't just implement both things and call it a day, they require attention. There can be different implementations of this though, which can work out greatly. I'm reminded of Wizardry 4 and how Trebor chases you around throughout the game, or how in Elminage: Gothic (and a few other games) exceptionally high-level enemies are visible and can chase you while the rest of the normal encounters are traditionally random.

 

[Infinitron]

Ventidius Another thing: I'm curious to know where Divinity: Original Sin fits in your taxonomy.

Larian leaned further towards the direction of "Black Isle-style" with the sequel, I think, but when the first game came out, this is how a big Wizardry fan felt about it:

Okay, so after playing for 40-something hours, I can safely say this is the best isometric RPG since late 90s. It's also the only isometric RPG to have me addicted since forever - I'm more of a Wizardry gal as you know. It's differently structured compared to those classic iso RPGs, for sure, but that's also what's so refreshing about it. It builds on some pretty different mechanics compared to those RPGs, and manages to weave them into a polished, coherent whole. It's just amazingly impressive. Not something I'd expect from Larian, to be entirely honest.

In general, like I said earlier, for me, personally, this is the first game in more than 15 years to make me interested in "full-fledged" isometric (non-TRPG) RPGs again. So there's that. You just need to know just how much I prefer first person RPGs these days to appreciate that

At the same time, I also couldn't disagree more with all the Baldur's Gate comparisons that pop up. This game comes from an almost entirely different design school, and with an entirely different structure. In its interaction mechanics, it pushes CRPGs forward as a whole -- my expectation bar for W2 and PoE has been really raised much higher now due to all the neat things this game has/innovates on -- but with regard to its structure, I see it as an evolution of the 1980s RPGs like Ultima or Deathlord. It's pretty exciting. It's also great that, while building on that "old school" mentality, it generally does its own thing with regard to structure, exploration, interaction, etc., instead of being just a carbon copy of anything. That's also impressive and laudable.

 

[ebPD8PePfC]

Disagree. Random encounters are used in tabletop for a reason, to simulate ubiquitous attrition. This is an important part of managing player psychology. Most games that use "visible enemies" either give the player too many ways to run around them and avoid engaging them, or they clutter the gameplay with monotonous stealth mechanics that incentivize avoiding the conflict resolution and it can have a negative effect on the flow of risk/reward. By definition random encounters encourage a high risk, high reward set of dimensions that I find preferable.

Attrition can be done with visible enemies, but it's rare to see it because it requires smart design and careful balance, and even than players usually hate it ("all my healing is gone and I still haven't fought the boss, what is this shit game???"). You also assume a distinction between fighting and avoiding fights, as if those are two distinct modes of play, and while this is usually true for cRPGs but it doesn't have to be. Most roguelikes implement all of those actions in the same space, and stealth and attrition are usually done much better in them than in RPGs - Infra Arcana for example excels in in that regard.

 

[smaug]

There’s something a little absurd about parts of this conversation. At this point, a blobber with little to no C&C or reactivity is practically in a different genre compared to an ARPG with tons of C&C and reactivity (CCR? RCC?). They do very different things and while there’s some overlap in the fan base, their audiences are also pretty different.

When MRY wrote that big piece on RPG writing a few months ago, he gave me the perfect rebuttal to this “we should return to gold box era design” foolishness:

“I think there are some people whose response would be that this is an argument to return to the much slimmer text of RPGs before the mid-90s and to focus on other means of story-telling than dialogue. That is a whole other debate, and one that's a little hard for me to wrap my head around because it is at least a little bit like saying, "If you find fantasy novels too long-winded, you should just watch fantasy movies." There obviously is a huge swath of players who like dialogue-tree-based RPGs, and so I think trying to abandon the form altogether is probably not a great idea.”

Let me put it this way: when Fallout came out, it was a goddamned revelation, at least for some of us. I’d previously played M&M 3 & 4, Wizardry, and dozens of JRPGs. Fallout was doing shit none of those games did, within a structure that really made you feel like you were playing this particular character you’d created. Among other, more important features, you could tell everyone to go fuck themselves! That may sound like a trivial feature, but I crave that kind of role playing.

Reading old posts from 2002 & 3 here, it’s amazing how quickly Fallout, PST, and Arcanum changed perceptions of the genre in prestigious circles. Within a few years, you had St. Proverbius and Vault Dweller arguing that Baldur’s Gate 2 was an adventure game, not an RPG, because it lacked build-based reactivity and had little meaningful C&C.

I don’t care about what makes an RPG; this is a question of taste. If you love blobbers, you want more blobbers. Good for you guys, but why not just say that instead of trying to prove that CRPGs would be better if developers focused on making modernized blobbers?

Are most golden age CRPGs true CRPGs at all? Or, to you are they just a different genre from Fallout and onward? I understand what Ventidius was saying about how he was justifies Golden Age CRPGs design and to dismiss it as a genre entirely conflicts with historical definitions.

I could be completely wrong, please clear this up, thanks.

 

[Alex]

An RPG that has encounters happen randomly is abstracting away a whole layer of interaction, where you could try to pin down where your enemies are and use that for your advantage*

Disagree. Random encounters are used in tabletop for a reason, to simulate ubiquitous attrition. This is an important part of managing player psychology. Most games that use "visible enemies" either give the player too many ways to run around them and avoid engaging them, or they clutter the gameplay with monotonous stealth mechanics that incentivize avoiding the conflict resolution and it can have a negative effect on the flow of risk/reward. By definition random encounters encourage a high risk, high reward set of dimensions that I find preferable.

On the flip side if you make the visible enemies too aggressive and impossible to avoid most of the time, then what's the point of making them visible? Beyond kowtowing to the "MUH IMMERSION!!!" crowd I mean? Now I can certainly understand it from a business standpoint, as there are simply too many morons who will refuse to play a great RPG for the smallest and most trivial of reasons, but I don't agree it is a better design philosophy inherently. Not one bit.

Obviously either way of implementation can go wrong very easily, they might make the encounter rate too retarded, forget to implement ways to run away from encounters, or they might make enemy avoidance too trivial, or an equally worse sin you can end up with a game where every build has to have some form of stealth or enemy-avoidance skillset built-in or necessitated (which is something I personally detest, I absolutely hate it when I realize something is so optimal that it becomes 'essential'); but the big thing is that fighting should be its own reward. Always. If this isn't accomplished then the entire game is at stake.

EDIT: Forgot to mention mechanical bloat. Sometimes it simply isn't automatically better to insert every single possible "immersion" mechanic into a game. Having (arguably) less layers of abstraction does not automatically mean better, or even necessarily more complex. What If I prefer my thief to be able to hide in combat during his turn in order to strike the next turn from the shadows, but I don't care about being able to avoid enemies? It's a hard choice to make, because you can't just implement both things and call it a day, they require attention. There can be different implementations of this though, which can work out greatly. I'm reminded of Wizardry 4 and how Trebor chases you around throughout the game, or how in Elminage: Gothic (and a few other games) exceptionally high-level enemies are visible and can chase you while the rest of the normal encounters are traditionally random.

Do you actually disagree with what I said, though? It seems you just prefer the abstraction, especially in this case. My whole point was that abstractions can get in the way of an RPG sometimes, especially when they fail to conform to what they supposedly represent. But as far as they go, random encounters you couldn't see before they happen are pretty harmless in that regard, of course depending on how they are implemented. It should be noted that any kind of simulation has some kind of abstraction built into it, since we don't know the specifics of how everything in the universe works (and even if we knew, I believe mathematics wouldn't be enough to simulate everything). The issue is when a particular way to represent something disrespects the imaginary world the game is trying to establish in the players' minds. A pretty common example of this is when you have a game where magic is supposedly powerful, dangerous and versatile, and yet all you can do with it are elemental attacks that aren't even much more powerful than a simple sword.

 

[RaptorRex888]

True RPG's are defined by the limitations placed on the character you have created rather than the allowance's afforded. True C&C should take this into account, whether through gameplay or story - choice and consequence should make you feel their reverberations in every meaningful action you take. That is why lamentable scenarios such as none-viable builds forcing a restart or a dialogue choice made hours ago affecting the story in a way you don't like make the opposite, positive versions of these all the more wonderful.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Are most golden age CRPGs true CRPGs at all? Or, to you are they just a different genre from Fallout and onward? I understand what Ventidius was saying about how he was justifies Golden Age CRPGs design and to dismiss it as a genre entirely conflicts with historical definitions.

I could be completely wrong, please clear this up, thanks.

I mean, they were here first, they can be CRPGs. The question of what is an RPG has been argued to death in other threads and isn’t very interesting. But they’re obviously distinct sub-genres. If you want a blobber, you’re not going to be satisfied by something that isn’t a blobber. If you want a game with lots of choices and reactivity, you’re not going to be satisfied with something that doesn’t give you those things. Grouping both kinds of games together as CRPGs makes them sound fungible, when they are anything but.

It’s just a matter of taste. No need for anyone to write a twenty page essay explaining why one sub-genre is objectively superior and the other should be deprioritized.

 

[smaug]

Are most golden age CRPGs true CRPGs at all? Or, to you are they just a different genre from Fallout and onward? I understand what Ventidius was saying about how he was justifies Golden Age CRPGs design and to dismiss it as a genre entirely conflicts with historical definitions.

I could be completely wrong, please clear this up, thanks.

I mean, they were here first, they can be CRPGs. The question of what is an RPG has been argued to death in other threads and isn’t very interesting. But they’re obviously distinct sub-genres. If you want a blobber, you’re not going to be satisfied by something that isn’t a blobber. If you want a game with lots of choices and reactivity, you’re not going to be satisfied with something that doesn’t give you those things. Grouping both kinds of games together as CRPGs makes them sound fungible, when they are anything but.

It’s just a matter of taste. No need for anyone to write a twenty page essay explaining why one sub-genre is objectively superior and the other should be deprioritized.

My opinion is CnC is great on top of good gameplay, for example, Pathfinder Kingmaker I would think does this well.

 

[Ventidius]

It's not a problem. It's something that video games can do infinitely better than standard PnP RPG's which is their strength, and which is why that approach keeps getting used. Sure, you can do anything in a PnP session, but people actually do want a sophisticated story they can affect. Which is why the thread was made in the first place. CnC became so desired it got stapled even in places it didn't belong.

It compensates all the faults by allowing the game to actually have a story in the first place. You can't have a story without characters, dialogue, events happening. Not being able to go completely off-the rails like in an PnP RPG campaign is compensated by experiencing a good narrative. Game mechanics cannot take care of everything for you. You can have neat things that happen in the story like having your party member get dusted during the resurrection, but it won't be as memorable Blood Baron's death from The Witcher 3.

It compensates those faults for people who care about stories in games, for people who play games primarily for the gameplay, it isn't enough. It is interesting that you bring The Witcher 3 up, as it is a classic example of a "why not rather read a book/watch a movie instead?" situation, it is a game that is utterly bankrupt in terms of gameplay and quite frankly very much on the popamole side of things. TW3 is basically a nu-Biowarean game with marginally better story elements. At least games in the BIS/Troika/ITS style tried to link gameplay and story in many ways, such as making quest resolutions and dialogue choices somewhat dependent on character build. In Witcher 3, the only way this happens is through the Axii sign and that doesn't even make that much of a difference. A game like TW3 that only relies on the strength of its story may be enjoyed by many, even here at the Codex (where it was shamefully voted as one of the greatest RPGs, thankfully at least we have the downvote thread), but that doesn't make it a quality game any more than the fact that people enjoy power fantasy and romance-based games proves that games of that sort are good. Games of this kind probably must exist because the market requires it, but that doesn't change the fact that they are decline. Mind you, this is not my view on BIS/Troika style games, I think the latter more or less accidentally paved the way for this (which is one of my main points), but they are inherently different from Mass Effect/The Witcher 3 style popamole storygames. I will elaborate further on this below.

Actually there is a game series that already adhered to your design philosophy, it was called Sid Meyer Pirates! Every choice in this game is dynamic. Attack British port and Brits will hate you more. Keep attacking Brit ships and their enemies will get stronger and start taking over their cities. One time a ship carrying money was sailing to a British port (and I was enemy of the Brists at the time), after it landed the city grew bigger, which caused it to have a bigger garrison and made it hard for me to take it over. So I reloaded the game, intercepted it and had much easier time. It's a neat little story, but it's hardly Planescape Torment. So you know, it's not like approach to CnC based on systems hadn't been tried here and there through the years, it's just that the result is not one good story player can interact with, but rather hundreds mediocre stories generated on the fly. Which is why games like that aren't discussed on the Codex.

Using Codex popular opinion as evidence of the supposed inferiority of that kind of design won't quite do though, given that we all here know that the Codex, as a whole, has a heavy bias towards story-oriented games. In any case, the kind of design in question (interactive storytelling translated to gaming) is to a large extent as much of a hypothetical as Cain and co.'s ideal. Yes Pirates! in many ways overlapped with it, but was still far from being a complete (or at least sufficiently multifaceted) platform for interactive storytelling through roleplaying in the way we were discussing earlier. What I suggested as the standard that cRPGs should return to was that of traditional RPGs founded on the triad(combat, character-building, and exploration), due to the fact that it is a tried and tested formula, in other words, the paradigm of Wizardry and the like. I'll repeat what I've already said before in this thread, that does not mean I am against experimentation (even of the Cainist style), so should some visionaries come up with a viable plan to make digitized interactive storytelling a reality, more power to them. In fact, if this were to actually happen we'd finally have an alternative model to traditional cRPGs that would be just as worthy of them as being counted as emblematic (as it happens in PnP.)

In any case, PS:T is not really a substitute for a game like Pirates! or a PnP campaign based on interactive storytelling. The former is all about the story, while the latter are about player agency and freedom. Someone interested in the former may not be interested in the latter, and vice versa.

Yes that was the point. Computers can do more epic, and challenging battles, but PnPs can actually react to uncommon tactical ideas.

And yet, a comparison between PnP RPGs and cRPGs that center on combat, exploration, dungeon-crawling, and character-building is a much closer match than the lopsided contest that is interactive storytelling in PnP vs the same thing in cRPGs, and even if you think that PnP is superior in this area, the difference is probably not large enough to compensate for the fact that, much like how reactive cRPGs give you easy access to better-than-average writers for your campaign, gameplay-centric cRPGs get you easy access to better-than-average dungeon/encounter designers for your dungeon crawl/combat romp.

This is exacerbated by 1) the fact that the "compensation" the first case is not even a substitute for what was lost: better writing is no substitute for interactive storytelling, someone seeking the latter might not be satisfied with the former, and vice versa; and 2) the fact that interactive storytelling relies far more on player imagination, agency and freedom than in the skills of the DM to work. Sure, you need a competent DM no matter what sort of campaign you are setting up, but you need a special kind of autist who excels at all sorts of number crunching and systems mastery to set up a decent power curve, a properly complex and challenging dungeon that retains design elegance, etc.

Finally, as you point out, each of them has their strenghts, so one may prefer one or the other depending on which strengths one values more. The important thing is that in both cases we are talking about gameplay strengths.

Which ones?

The Wizardry series, the Gold Box games, the M&M series, Betrayal at Krondor, Jagged Alliance 2, the non-PS:T IE games, TOEE, the Proudfoot games, KOTC, and a bunch of the Japanese blobbers. That's without even mentioning modern Western examples, since these tend to be a bit more controversial. I've probably missed some others as well.

But they are not a "failed project". They didn't replicate PnP experience perfectly but that's not what they were trying to do in the first place.

If they don't aspire to interactive storytelling, then what? Passive storytelling windowdressed as interactive? Well, that's what Mass Effect and The Wicther 3 do. Sure, the latter is slightly more sophisticated than Mass Effect in terms of writing, but it's still essentially schlock compared to actual good writing. It's no longer even a question of reading a book/watching a movie instead, but rather the fact that most games don't even cross the minimum threshold necessary for a story to be engaging. Even if you lower your standards and compare it to comic book writing, most videogame writing - including that in The Witcher 3 - is subpar. If some folks enjoy the writing in these games, far be it from me to tell them how to have fun, but that doesn't change the fact that it is not nearly sophisticated enough to warrant being the centerpiece or raison d'etre of a game.

Despite my views on the whole BIS design project, at least I respect this: they actually tried to make storytelling into a feature of gameplay instead of just banking on the fact that people would play their games just - or primarily - for the story. And their goal in this enterprise was to achieve interactive storytelling. I think the way they went about it was misguided and hasn't yet succeeded, however, they and their successors haven't given up and might even someday, for all we know, succeed (I am skeptical, but who knows, right?) But at least I can appreciate that they understand this obvious point: games are about gameplay. That makes them far better than the likes of CD Projekt or nuBioware in my book, but still doesn't change the fact that I don't think their way is the way to go for the industry.

The problem with that argument is that Troika and Obsidian games wernen't failures, they keep to be one of the most well-liked RPGs out there. Their problems had nothing to do with the implementation of quests or CnC

Yes, this is indeed part of the problem and I discussed why it was in the first post you responded to.

but rather with that their gameplay being unpolished, due to development difficulties. Baldur's Gate 2 used the exact same approach to RPGs and avoided all those problems due to having a game system that was tested and developed for years before the games was created and having 2 other IE games to be based on. The way to fix things like Arcanum is to better balance combat encounters, spells and abilities, not to complete threw standard CnC out of the window ad replace it with some complicated consequence-simulating systems that's given the track record of Troika would be ever more likely to be broken.

And why is it unpolished? Don't you think it is a bit too much of a coincidence that, barring a partial exception or two, this is the case in virtually all games of this sort? More likely, you have two radically divergent design principles (the triad-based game foundation and the "C&C" superstructure) that clash with and sabotage each other when they are forced together, especially when funds are very limited. Baldur's Gate is not really comparable because the C&C was mostly cosmetic and the franchise was ultimately more akin to traditional cRPGs but with RTwP and some illusion of reactivity.

The notion that a game with both a polished triad-based foundation and extensive C&C in the BIS style is viable suffers from the "perfect game syndrome" way of thinking that posits that games can excel - not merely achieve adequacy, though that is often hard enough - at multiple major design goals at the same time. A classic example is people that want games with both a great strategy and tactical layer at the same time, not realizing that to the extent that tactical skill can compensate for strategic incompetence, and vice versa, one of the two layers is necessarily undermined.

An example of how this design goal clash happens in cRPGs: content gating. If your quest/story choices have consequences, then that means that the content that you experience will change depending on your choices. An example of this is Wasteland 2, where you are given the choice of saving the Ag Center or Highpool. This is good design from the point of view of the "C&C" school because it means that your choices matter: they change the content you experience and also the way a questline plays out. However, in the process you are cheating the combat/exploration focused audience of a whole area and set of encounters and thus impoverishing their experience. Basically, for story choices to really make the narrative experience different for diverse paths, you have to deny one of those paths content in the form of dungeons, areas, and encounters that the combat/exploration oriented player may want to enjoy. This is a major problem that goes beyond simple budgetary restrictions(while also exacerbating them), and it isn't the only one either.

Regarding future of RPGs, it doesn't belong to anyone now. Oldschool games are being made, new games, blobbers, even your mechanics driven games are being made constantly in the forms of titles like Kenshi.

I haven't played Kenshi, it does seem like a nice experiment and I might get around to it at some point, but Wizardry is more like what I had in mind, as I explained above. And yes, the fact that there is a lot of variety these days is encouraging.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

but it won't be as memorable Blood Baron's death from The Witcher 3.

You are a terrible person for letting him die.

 

[Ventidius]

There’s something a little absurd about parts of this conversation. At this point, a blobber with little to no C&C or reactivity is practically in a different genre compared to an ARPG with tons of C&C and reactivity (CCR? RCC?). They do very different things and while there’s some overlap in the fan base, their audiences are also pretty different.

Different subgenres perhaps, but to the extent that both types of games are driven by character systems, they are both RPGs. It's true enough that they are sufficiently different that it becomes apples and oranges, in a way. This does not challenge the notion that some sub-genres are more representative of the overall genre than others though. Total War is a very popular franchise that sets itself apart from most strategy games by emphasizing a real-time combat layer instead of the strategic one. It is very much a part of the genre and has a large following, yet it seems reasonable to me to say it is less representative of the genre than some older, and/or more strategy-focused subgenres such as 4X games or Grand Strategy. HoMM-likes are another good, albeit perhaps less popular, example of this kind of situation.

And mind you, none of this even implies that there is a perfect correlation between how representative a game is of its genre and how good it is. You can have good, even great, games that are eclectic and/or experimental and bad games that are conventional.

When MRY wrote that big piece on RPG writing a few months ago, he gave me the perfect rebuttal to this “we should return to gold box era design” foolishness:

“I think there are some people whose response would be that this is an argument to return to the much slimmer text of RPGs before the mid-90s and to focus on other means of story-telling than dialogue. That is a whole other debate, and one that's a little hard for me to wrap my head around because it is at least a little bit like saying, "If you find fantasy novels too long-winded, you should just watch fantasy movies." There obviously is a huge swath of players who like dialogue-tree-based RPGs, and so I think trying to abandon the form altogether is probably not a great idea.”

Let me put it this way: when Fallout came out, it was a goddamned revelation, at least for some of us. I’d previously played M&M 3 & 4, Wizardry, and dozens of JRPGs. Fallout was doing shit none of those games did, within a structure that really made you feel like you were playing this particular character you’d created. Among other, more important features, you could tell everyone to go fuck themselves! That may sound like a trivial feature, but I crave that kind of role playing.

Reading old posts from 2002 & 3 here, it’s amazing how quickly Fallout, PST, and Arcanum changed perceptions of the genre in prestigious circles. Within a few years, you had St. Proverbius and Vault Dweller arguing that Baldur’s Gate 2 was an adventure game, not an RPG, because it lacked build-based reactivity and had little meaningful C&C.

The point here seems to be that there are a lot of people that enjoy this sort of game, and thus it deserves to exist. How does that controvert anything that I've been saying? That sounds reasonable to me, and I don't even think that the BIS/Troika/ITS school represents a degenerate design trend in the way that I argued that The Witcher 3/Mass Effect style story-based cinematic games are. I am somewhat skeptical of whether it can achieve some of its design goals in the long term and have given my reasons for thinking this is the case, I also think it did contribute more or less indirectly to the rise of cinematic/story-based games like Mass Effect, but that doesn't impeach its own design, but rather connects to some of the wider points I have been making about the industry and the fandom. At the end of the day though, if there are a lot of folks who love these games and want more of them, I'd say that's fair enough and that they have a right to get them.

I've also noticed that the view that older games such as Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlod are not RPGs has declined among even this crowd, which is a positive development that I consider more important than people agreeing with me that traditional RPGs are the most representative subgenre. The latter is simply my take on this, and I have made my case for it. If others disagree, fair enough.

When all is said and done, I neither hate the BIS/Troika/Obsidian/ITS devs and their fanbase, nor do I wish they stop doing and playing what they love. I even like some of the games produced by this milieu. I simply think that the genre, especially now, could use a bit of a back to basics moment, as I previously said. The good news is that, thanks in part to the progress in recent years of areas such as the accessibility of developer tools, digital distribution platforms, and the indie scene, we'll have plenty of different games catering to different audiences, so we'll all get our fill. Probably. Hopefully. That said, I do regret, as I have already mentioned a few times, the increasing predominance of the cinematic/popamole paradigm, but I'm hardly alone in that.

I don’t care about what makes an RPG; this is a question of taste. If you love blobbers, you want more blobbers. Good for you guys, but why not just say that instead of trying to prove that CRPGs would be better if developers focused on making modernized blobbers?

Come now, we may disagree on some things, but let's not resort to relativism. Surely, you'll agree that there is such a thing as a quality product as distinct from a subpar one, and by the same token some products that more closely represent a genre than others. Otherwise, we'll end up like this guy.

 

[Ventidius]

Ventidius Another thing: I'm curious to know where Divinity: Original Sin fits in your taxonomy.

Larian leaned further towards the direction of "Black Isle-style" with the sequel, I think,

It didn't seem that way to me, in fact, I think the most "BIS-style" part of the D:OS series was Cyseal, as it was heavily structured around questing. D:OS 2 actually seemed more traditionally-structured to me, since the whole thing was mostly about combat and exploration, and there wasn't really anything like Cyseal at all.

but when the first game came out, this is how a big Wizardry fan felt about it:

Okay, so after playing for 40-something hours, I can safely say this is the best isometric RPG since late 90s. It's also the only isometric RPG to have me addicted since forever - I'm more of a Wizardry gal as you know. It's differently structured compared to those classic iso RPGs, for sure, but that's also what's so refreshing about it. It builds on some pretty different mechanics compared to those RPGs, and manages to weave them into a polished, coherent whole. It's just amazingly impressive. Not something I'd expect from Larian, to be entirely honest.

In general, like I said earlier, for me, personally, this is the first game in more than 15 years to make me interested in "full-fledged" isometric (non-TRPG) RPGs again. So there's that. You just need to know just how much I prefer first person RPGs these days to appreciate that

At the same time, I also couldn't disagree more with all the Baldur's Gate comparisons that pop up. This game comes from an almost entirely different design school, and with an entirely different structure. In its interaction mechanics, it pushes CRPGs forward as a whole -- my expectation bar for W2 and PoE has been really raised much higher now due to all the neat things this game has/innovates on -- but with regard to its structure, I see it as an evolution of the 1980s RPGs like Ultima or Deathlord. It's pretty exciting. It's also great that, while building on that "old school" mentality, it generally does its own thing with regard to structure, exploration, interaction, etc., instead of being just a carbon copy of anything. That's also impressive and laudable.

I've read some of the posts Crooked Bee has written on this and I think she hits the nail on the head in her analysis of the exploration and environmental interaction. I definitely agree that it was both innovative and well-designed. However, in a sense, I would say that the overall structure of both D:OS games was overall traditional in nature, because progress in the game mostly consisted of combat and exploration, much like in traditional RPGs. The only exception to this, as I said, was Cyseal, which - like Athkatla in BG2 - was an island of quest-driven game structure in a game otherwise driven by combat and exploration. Of course, Cyseal made effective use of the environmentally interactive mechanics in order to set its questing apart from something like Athkatla, but the overall structure was quest-based.

I think the important innovation here, specifically, was the way the exploration itself was structured, which also affected the relationship between combat and exploration. D:OS was novel in that it was, IMO, the first time in which an isometric RPG with tactical party combat had actually good exploration, and it achieved this through Ultima-inspired environmental interaction and simulationism. I am usually firmly in the camp that the first BG did not have good exploration, simply moving around in empty wilderness areas does not good exploration make. Yes, there were a few interesting encounters here and there, such as Bassilus, but you could have easily have had those with fewer, smaller areas and nothing of value would have been lost . But BG was not unique in that regard, this was a problem for virtually all isometric/top-down tactical/squad RPGs, it was merely more noticeable in BG due to the amount and size of the areas. Sometimes, isometric games managed to deliver decent exploration, but only by adopting the dungeon-crawling format like IWD did. Other than that, first-person games like the M&M series or Morrowind were much better at overland exploration, because it was easier for them to foment player involvement beyond simply clicking and uncovering the fog of war.

D:OS changed this because it managed to promote player involvement in overland exploration without the use of dungeons or FPP, and it did so through environmental interaction and non-linearity, which allowed the player to do all sorts of weird things, sequence breaks, creative navigation and approaches to encounters, etc. In that sense, the D:OS games proved that overland exploration was viable for isometric, party-based tactical games. I can see how this may appeal to a Wizardry fan, as Wizardry is as much about exploration as it is about combat, despite the fact that many often misconstrue Wizardry fans as "combatfags". Of course, the interactive overland exploration of D:OS was quite different from the dungeon exploration of Wizardry. But it was great in its own way nonetheless, and both styles are similar in that, like all exploration, they strive for player involvement, even if they take different approaches towards achieving it.

Of course, there were some problems. Especially in the second game, the diablo-like itemization went so far that it hurt the exploration by making it harder to punch above your weight in combat and explore more freely. Nonetheless, even while playing blind, it was often possible for me to beat encounters above my level and equipment range and perform some interesting sequence breaks. I killed a guy who I think was a boss in Arx as he tried to escape Reaper's Coast by entering his area in RC - a large one - through its edge instead of the entrance by teleporting, which meant I didn't have to fight him in Arx. That was a memorable one. So I think even in D:OS 2 the exploration was, despite that flaw, much better than in most isometric games.

Now, I think that this type of exploration is indeed innovative in the context of the gaming medium, but that doesn't necessarily make it non-traditional. This may sound like an odd thing to say, but I think this kind of Ultima-style systems-driven environmental interaction and the imaginativeness it foments is very faithful to the spirit of PnP, and the creativity possible in the latter's exploration. So while it is something that had never been seen before in traditional cRPGs, IMO it is not non-traditional. It's more like a traditional RPG principle that took a long time to be translated into videogames.

That said, while I do think that the D:OS games have, overall, a traditional structure based on the triad of combat, character building, and exploration; I also think they have some non-traditional elements, but mostly in their mechanics, not in their overall structure. I am talking, of course, of the cooldowns, diablo-like itemization, and in the case of D:OS 2 also the armor system and the round-robin initiative. I am not really a huge fan of these systems, not only because they are not traditional (I like some non-traditional systems like those of the Etrian Odyssey series), but because they misuse abstraction and are inelegant. The character system itself IMO is also not very good (and it declined in the second), but the system of skills (which D:OS 2 expanded) somewhat compensates for this, to an extent. Still, even in the case D:OS 2, these issues are not enough to ruin the game for me, or even the combat, though it does prevent them form being counted as fully traditional games. So I'd say that they are overall, in my taxonomy, partially traditional: traditional in their structure, but not in their systems.

As for the effect they had on the industry, these are games structured according to the triad that have sold numbers that most contemporary non-action RPGs don't even come close to matching, which proves that games for people who mostly like to explore and engage in turn-based combat are not only for a niche within a niche, but can also appeal to a wider audience. However, I may well be misreading the situation, as apparently a lot of the people who buy these games don't even finish them, and a lot of others seem to play them for the story. Apart from, that I also hope some of their most misguided mechanics such as the round-robin initiative and the diablolike itemization don't influence other turn-based RPGs. On the whole, however, I think that they have inclined the industry somewhat.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

There’s something a little absurd about parts of this conversation. At this point, a blobber with little to no C&C or reactivity is practically in a different genre compared to an ARPG with tons of C&C and reactivity (CCR? RCC?). They do very different things and while there’s some overlap in the fan base, their audiences are also pretty different.

Different subgenres perhaps, but to the extent that both types of games are driven by character systems, they are both RPGs. It's true enough that they are sufficiently different that it becomes apples and oranges, in a way. This does not challenge the notion that some sub-genres are more representative of the overall genre than others though. Total War is a very popular franchise that sets itself apart from most strategy games by emphasizing a real-time combat layer instead of the strategic one. It is very much a part of the genre and has a large following, yet it seems reasonable to me to say it is less representative of the genre than some older, and/or more strategy-focused subgenres such as 4X games or Grand Strategy. HoMM-likes are another good, albeit perhaps less popular, example of this kind of situation.

And mind you, none of this even implies that there is a perfect correlation between how representative a game is of its genre and how good it is. You can have good, even great, games that are eclectic and/or experimental and bad games that are conventional.

They are indeed apples and oranges. If you want to say the gold box games are more representative of the genre, knock yourself out. In fact, this is part of my point. One type of game is less of an RPG, one type is less representative of the genre—works for me. But how distant does it have to get from your definition before you recognize that a comparison with Wizardry and its children is not particularly useful (aside from determining “RPGness” which as you’ve mentioned, doesn’t necessarily tell you very much).

My point is really about lineage as much as anything else. There’s very little Wizardry in something like the Mass Effect series, and viewing the latter as a bastardized version of the former is a mistake.

Once RPGs were blobbers, then they started getting more experimental and messing with the formula etc... That strikes me as inaccurate. WRPGs entered a severe decline in the mid-90s when we had our own mini dark age. When the genre came back thanks to Black Isle, BioWare and the rise of the ARPG, there had been a profound rupture with the past. BG played like command and conquer. Fallout went back to the pen & paper well and came out with a whole new formula. Deus Ex played like a first person shooter.

If you’re trying to analyze everything as part of an unbroken lineage of CRPGs, you’re working from an erroneous assumption. Fallout and its children are trying to capture a different facet of the p&p experience. They weren’t riffing on the gold box games, they were riffing on GURPS.

When MRY wrote that big piece on RPG writing a few months ago, he gave me the perfect rebuttal to this “we should return to gold box era design” foolishness:

“I think there are some people whose response would be that this is an argument to return to the much slimmer text of RPGs before the mid-90s and to focus on other means of story-telling than dialogue. That is a whole other debate, and one that's a little hard for me to wrap my head around because it is at least a little bit like saying, "If you find fantasy novels too long-winded, you should just watch fantasy movies." There obviously is a huge swath of players who like dialogue-tree-based RPGs, and so I think trying to abandon the form altogether is probably not a great idea.”

Let me put it this way: when Fallout came out, it was a goddamned revelation, at least for some of us. I’d previously played M&M 3 & 4, Wizardry, and dozens of JRPGs. Fallout was doing shit none of those games did, within a structure that really made you feel like you were playing this particular character you’d created. Among other, more important features, you could tell everyone to go fuck themselves! That may sound like a trivial feature, but I crave that kind of role playing.

Reading old posts from 2002 & 3 here, it’s amazing how quickly Fallout, PST, and Arcanum changed perceptions of the genre in prestigious circles. Within a few years, you had St. Proverbius and Vault Dweller arguing that Baldur’s Gate 2 was an adventure game, not an RPG, because it lacked build-based reactivity and had little meaningful C&C.

The point here seems to be that there are a lot of people that enjoy this sort of game, and thus it deserves to exist. How does that controvert anything that I've been saying? That sounds reasonable to me, and I don't even think that the BIS/Troika/ITS school represents a degenerate design trend in the way that I argued that The Witcher 3/Mass Effect style story-based cinematic games are. I am somewhat skeptical of whether it can achieve some of its design goals in the long term and have given my reasons for thinking this is the case, I also think it did contribute more or less indirectly to the rise of cinematic/story-based games like Mass Effect, but that doesn't impeach its own design, but rather connects to some of the wider points I have been making about the industry and the fandom. At the end of the day though, if there are a lot of folks who love these games and want more of them, I'd say that's fair enough and that they have a right to get them.

I've also noticed that the view that older games such as Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlod are not RPGs has declined among even this crowd, which is a positive development that I consider more important than people agreeing with me that traditional RPGs are the most representative subgenre. The latter is simply my take on this, and I have made my case for it. If others disagree, fair enough.

When all is said and done, I neither hate the BIS/Troika/Obsidian/ITS devs and their fanbase, nor do I wish they stop doing and playing what they love. I even like some of the games produced by this milieu. I simply think that the genre, especially now, could use a bit of a back to basics moment, as I previously said. The good news is that, thanks in part to the progress in recent years of areas such as the accessibility of developer tools, digital distribution platforms, and the indie scene, we'll have plenty of different games catering to different audiences, so we'll all get our fill. Probably. Hopefully. That said, I do regret, as I have already mentioned a few times, the increasing predominance of the cinematic/popamole paradigm, but I'm hardly alone in that.

I don’t care about what makes an RPG; this is a question of taste. If you love blobbers, you want more blobbers. Good for you guys, but why not just say that instead of trying to prove that CRPGs would be better if developers focused on making modernized blobbers?

Come now, we may disagree on some things, but let's not resort to relativism. Surely, you'll agree that there is such a thing as a quality product as distinct from a subpar one, and by the same token some products that more closely represent a genre than others. Otherwise, we'll end up like this guy.

What is the comparison for? You want to determine what’s more of an RPG, I think that’s a waste of time. You want to decide what’s a better product—I say better for what? It’s undeniable that these two sub genres scratch very different itches. Mass Effect is a way better action game than Wizardry, while Wizardry has way better menu mediated combat. It’s like comparing a car to a boat: are you trying to drive or to sail?

to;dr the silver age/renaissance was less an evolution of golden age CRPGs and more a hard restart. talking about them like they belong to the same genre obscures far more than it illuminates.

 

[Ventidius]

But how distant does it have to get from your definition before you recognize that a comparison with Wizardry and its children is not particularly useful (aside from determining “RPGness” which as you’ve mentioned, doesn’t necessarily tell you very much).

My point is really about lineage as much as anything else. There’s very little Wizardry in something like the Mass Effect series, and viewing the latter as a bastardized version of the former is a mistake.

Once RPGs were blobbers, then they started getting more experimental and messing with the formula etc... That strikes me as inaccurate. WRPGs entered a severe decline in the mid-90s when we had our own mini dark age. When the genre came back thanks to Black Isle, BioWare and the rise of the ARPG, there had been a profound rupture with the past. BG played like command and conquer. Fallout went back to the pen & paper well and came out with a whole new formula. Deus Ex played like a first person shooter.

If you’re trying to analyze everything as part of an unbroken lineage of CRPGs, you’re working from an erroneous assumption. Fallout and its children are trying to capture a different facet of the p&p experience. They weren’t riffing on the gold box games, they were riffing on GURPS.

It's very odd that you think that I insist on "comparing" C&C RPGs to traditional RPGs, or that I think there is some kind of unbroken lineage (when part of my point about the decline was about the loss of that very lineage.) I said a while back that so long as reactive RPGs stick to their own experimental sector of the market, I don't see any problem with them doing whatever they want, and obviously they should then only be judged by the standard of the design goals that they set for themselves. To the extent that I was "comparing" the styles, it has mostly been in the context of my discussion of both the widespread (both in the Codex and elsewhere) notion that RPGs are primarily about C&C, and of the role of that notion on the decline of RPGs, a topic that is quite relevant to the OP of this thread, and has little to do with judging Fallout or Mass Effect by the standard of Wizardry. If you don't embrace that notion, as you don't seem to, then I don't see why you should find this conversation "absurd", as you put it in the post I was responding to.

What is the comparison for? You want to determine what’s more of an RPG, I think that’s a waste of time. You want to decide what’s a better product—I say better for what? It’s undeniable that these two sub genres scratch very different itches. Mass Effect is a way better action game than Wizardry, while Wizardry has way better menu mediated combat. It’s like comparing a car to a boat: are you trying to drive or to sail?

Again, there is no comparison here, if anything, just a categorization, which in turn has been an useful tool in order to better explain my views on the topic raised by the OP. Why is that a problem?

Also, my comment about relativism was not made in order to attack C&C games in favor of traditional RPGs, but to make the broader point that it is possible to accept that we all should just stick to the stuff we like without necessarily falling into a philistinism that rejects the very idea of quality.

to;dr the silver age/renaissance was less an evolution of golden age CRPGs and more a hard restart. talking about them like they belong to the same genre obscures far more than it illuminates.

I wouldn't go as far as calling it a "hard reset", as there were plenty of love letters to and/or holdovers of the old-school, such as TOEE and Jagged Alliance 2. Indeed, even the BG and IWD games are arguably largely traditional cRPGs, except for a few features (RTwP, and in the case of BG2, the heavily quest-structured Athkatla). It was a gradual process, but yes, it was during this period that the lineage was broken.

 

[Infinitron]

It didn't seem that way to me, in fact, I think the most "BIS-style" part of the D:OS series was Cyseal, as it was heavily structured around questing. D:OS 2 actually seemed more traditionally-structured to me, since the whole thing was mostly about combat and exploration, and there wasn't really anything like Cyseal at all.

Indeed, even the BG and IWD games are arguably largely traditional cRPGs, except for a few features (RTwP, and in the case of BG2, the heavily quest-structured Athkatla).

Seems like we've suddenly switched to another topic. This thread was about C&C in RPGs, but now you're talking about "heavily quest-structured" town areas as the primary marker of what you've designated as non-traditional RPGs.

These things can be related - a town with lots of quests is a natural place to put lots of C&C - but they're not the same. I don't think Athkatla actually has much C&C.

I described D:OS 2 as leaning more heavily towards the Black Isle "C&C RPG" model because of its greater emphasis on reactivity in dialogue.

 

[Ventidius]

Seems like we've suddenly switched to another topic. This thread was about C&C in RPGs, but now you're talking about "heavily quest-structured" town areas as the primary marker of what you've designated as non-traditional RPGs.

These things can be related - a town with lots of quests is a natural place to put lots of C&C - but they're not the same. I don't think Athkatla actually has much C&C.

I indeed think that quest-driven structures are a marker of non-traditional RPGs, though not necessarily questing as a side-feature (many traditional-style dungeon crawlers feature this.) But yes, this does not necessarily relate to C&C directly.

I described D:OS 2 as leaning more heavily towards the Black Isle "C&C RPG" model because of its greater emphasis on reactivity in dialogue.

Ah, yes. In this sense it did indeed hew closer to the BIS approach.

 

[Darth Canoli]

The whole thread: TL;DR

Specially when Harvey Birdbrain posts so much ...
Just seeing his avatar while scrolling down pains me.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

I'm not suggesting that a focus on C&C is what hurts a game, but rather that when it's it is what is solely purported to make the game in question an RPG the result is low quality. You can see this phenomenon at least as far back as Mass Effect. The sole quality that was purported to make the Mass Effect games RPGs was C&C. Everything else was thrown to the fire and the result was some of the most base popamole the genre had yet seen.

The reason why is that the combat system is the foundation of every solid cRPG. You need proper character progression, itemization, resource management, and all those factors will gravitate around the combat system. The games that were influential in the C&C front (FO, FO2, PS:T, and Arcanum) had tons of combat. The more engrossing, complex and demanding the combat system is, the better is the end product. What we have now is the worst of both worlds: games that promise choices and reactivity when you have none with a simplistic and superficial combat system in them. The worst offenders in my book are not the known popamoles such as Mass Effect, because you can tell that they are not the real article from a mile. What piss me off are games such as the Shadowrun series. These games have no cRPG meat in them and they are paraded around as the resurgence of the genre. They are as shallow as it gets.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

How do the later ME games compare to the first one? No spoilers, please.

Play the first two and kill yourself at the end of ME2. It's the canon ending. ME3 shall not be discussed.

Or better yet, play none of them. That worked for me just fine.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

I could go on and on. My point is that C&C has seemed to become the defining feature of the genre, and much to the genre's detriment. It seems to me that developers are compensating for their total lack of innovation by shoving something in our faces that has been a given in RPGs for decades. Since the braindead masses and gaming journalists know no better, it works.

The cold war between grognards and storyfags is a real thing, guys. It should be obvious by now that most cRPG developers don’t have the faintest idea of how to develop an engrossing combat system. They aren't compensating for anything. That's what is a cRPG in their heads. That's the only thing they know how to do. Having narrative designers and cRPG writers as professions didn’t help.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

ME1>3>2
2 has the worst parts of 1 and 3 jammed together with none of the good parts(1's RPG mechanics/exploration, 3's combat/vastly better AI) combined with a bunch of really, really shitty minigames. You spend the entire game just rounding your team up then the game ends with a huge 'wtf?' boss that is never mentioned again at all. And if a game having a bad ending(3) is enough to make it irredeemable, then we should reevaluate underrail.
Even worse, the entirety of ME2 could be simply removed from the plot and nothing would change. You could play ME1->Arrival->ME3 and barely miss out on anything sans ME2 cameos in ME3.

 

[Xunwael]

...the entirety of ME2 could be simply removed from the plot and nothing would change. You could play ME1->Arrival->ME3 and barely miss out on anything sans ME2 cameos in ME3.

Meh, liked that about ME2. Plot was just 'ride around in space doing space cowboy things'. None of this convoluted, incoherent 'save the world galaxy'-bullshit distracting you from the character-stuff that they were actually still kinda good at at the time. Should've just stuck to doing that, if they were planning on keeping the franchise going.

 

[Alexios]

All of the ME games are terrible.