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Decline Top 10 best ways to murder an RPG

Which is the most effective way of killing off an RPG?

  • Character development that can easily be comprehended by a table fern

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    155

user

Savant
Joined
Jan 22, 2019
Messages
835
How would you go about murdering an RPG and losing money in the process, if you really wanted to, for some reason?
 

Riddler

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jan 5, 2009
Messages
2,353
Bubbles In Memoria
While there are other things that bother me more I feel like appropriating something popular and then turning the beloved aspects of the the property to shit to be the most effective.

You both ruin what was good and piss off anyone with a pre-existing interest in the game and earn unending negative marketing.
 

Dorateen

Arcane
Joined
Aug 30, 2012
Messages
4,332
Location
The Crystal Mist Mountains
  1. Fixed protagonist
  2. Developer companions
  3. Romances
  4. Any other form of manufactured emotional engagement
  5. No dwarves
  6. "modern sensibilities"
  7. Cinematic "gameplay"
  8. Diminishing the role of combat (taking away kill xp or generally discouraging it, etc.)
  9. Deviating from established rulesets
  10. Handholding
 

Catacombs

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Aug 10, 2017
Messages
5,928
Listening and implementing every piece of advice tweeted by armchair game developers, implementing micro-transactions for critical quest items, and rushing through development. Oh, recruiting EA for "help" would definitely expedite the death.
 

DJOGamer PT

Arcane
Joined
Apr 8, 2015
Messages
7,354
Location
Lusitânia
It comes down to "Lazy fetch/kill quests (ad nauseam)" and "Streamlining the hell out of meaningfully deep mechanics".
And between the two I don't know wich to vote, since I find them equally important components in RPG's.
Excellent quest design can overcome lackluster mechanics, but an RPG with amazing mechanics can be great for a lot of time due to how good it plays - even if it has no worthwhile quests to support the gameplay's depth. Although the latter can be solved with proper expansion/conversion mods, while bad gameplay can't.

Diminishing the role of combat

This is actually a good thing.
RPG's whose only well designed and fun aspect is it's combat are boring and painfully flawed games.
 
Last edited:

Tito Anic

Arcane
Shitposter
Joined
Dec 27, 2015
Messages
1,679
Location
Magalan
LVL scaling
Proceduraly generated
Unity
Easy
Anime
Political correctness
Boring combat
Bad loot
Boring NPC's
No C&C
Linear
No classes
 
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Dorateen

Arcane
Joined
Aug 30, 2012
Messages
4,332
Location
The Crystal Mist Mountains
Diminishing the role of combat

This is actually a good thing.
RPG's whose only well designed and fun aspect is it's combat are boring and painfully flawed games.

Hardly. The hobby was invented about exploring dangerous environments and fighting monsters, birthed from rules driven wargaming. That is the foundation to build upon. Take well designed and fun combat away, and you've got something else entirely.
 

BlackGoat

Arbiter
Joined
Sep 15, 2014
Messages
505
I've noticed that cringey writing (especially when combined with full/extended voiceovers) is the fastest way to make me physically incapable of playing a game (tho I did manage to force my way thru Outer Worlds)
 

user

Savant
Joined
Jan 22, 2019
Messages
835
While there are other things that bother me more I feel like appropriating something popular and then turning the beloved aspects of the the property to shit to be the most effective.

You both ruin what was good and piss off anyone with a pre-existing interest in the game and earn unending negative marketing.

You both murder the rpg and shit on its grave. Very good point.

I think this is an interesting poll with good options, but you should allow us 3 votes to get a better data picture.

Too late, let the kodex gods edit it.
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
It's always a combination of things that ruin or make a game. You can have the best combat system ever devised, but if the art design is mobile-tier, the quests are all the fetch variety, the writing raises your grandmother's corpse only to shit in its mouth, and the engine has a worse smell, it would still be unplayable.

It would also depend on what you mean by kill. If you mean its popularity, we see how Bethesda, Bioware and Blizzard are murdering their franchises - complete apathy and lack of self-awareness. Sometimes focusing on graphics to the detriment of everything else, sometimes having no plan at all (due to apathy and indecisiveness), sometimes just plain bad luck.

As for killing a game for the Codex, that's a more difficult question. I'd say the first big thing is mangling the start of the game (PoEs), it's usually the writers who are most at fault, followed by the level designers. If the start is playable, then it's the writing in the sense of when it's TOO bad (PoEs, D:OSes, Wasteland 2, Numanuma, etc.). When that is okayish, it's the combat system, I'd say the biggest hurdle is if it's too repetitive and mindless, which a lot of recent RPGs have fallen into. If THAT is also okayish, I guess it's art direction, there's nothing worse than low budget 3D Unity-looking game. Everything else can be overlooked I guess.
 
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Glop_dweller

Prophet
Joined
Sep 29, 2007
Messages
1,164
*Other:

Re-imagine [re-implement] it for a non:RPG-centric audience. In essence, to use its [gutted] virtual pelt as a new coat for a different game; to bank on its former reputation.
 

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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Black Goat Woods !@#*%&^
Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I'm not sure what you really mean by "kill an RPG". Do you mean make it unsalable? Less appealing to a wide audience? Less appealing to hard core grognards? Less appealing to press critics? Less marketable in general? Less profitable per unit sold? There are all kinds of things you could mean by that.

I voted for "lazy quests", as a specific to the more general "lazy content". There are a lot of RPGs out there - to my way of thinking the best way to "kill" one is to make it unremarkable, mediocre, invisible. There are places in the market for easy games, cutscene/voiceover-heavy games, anime games, fanservice games - basically every option you list means repelling one audience while catering to another, which is fine - but having lazy, nothing content doesn't cater to anyone.
 

DJOGamer PT

Arcane
Joined
Apr 8, 2015
Messages
7,354
Location
Lusitânia
Diminishing the role of combat

This is actually a good thing.
RPG's whose only well designed and fun aspect is it's combat are boring and painfully flawed games.

Hardly. The hobby was invented about exploring dangerous environments and fighting monsters, birthed from rules driven wargaming. That is the foundation to build upon. Take well designed and fun combat away, and you've got something else entirely.

What you are talking about are Dungeon Crawlers, not RPG's.
RPG's are (or should be) like Deus Ex, where combat is just one of multiple playstyles, or "Roles", allowed by the mechanics and level/quest design.
Also by your definiton that "RPG's" lacking a emphasis on combat are "something else", would mean that jRPG's are prime examples of what an RPG is and should be, while games like DX and Morrowind aren't.
The prominence of combat in those early cRPG's is somewhat to the fact that combat mechanics/rules were easy to emulate in computers.

Besides if you want games with a heavy focus on combat you are better served with other game genres like action games or strategy games.
 
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Zarniwoop

TESTOSTERONIC As Fuck™
Patron
Joined
Nov 29, 2010
Messages
18,651
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
The guys who voted for lack of romance and waifus must be joking

The Codex is full of millennials, their even more annoying, yeeting and tiktok-ing younger brothers (zoomers) and trannies.

It's no joke unfortunately.
 

The_Mask

Just like Yves, I chase tales.
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Joined
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Messages
5,898
Location
The land of ice and snow.
Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I helped put crap in Monomyth
As much as I dislike gameplay-oriented people here on the Codex, because most of them are edgelords, the idea of an RPG without a decent "skeleton" of gameplay and solid mechanics, is a nightmare for me.

I can't imagine playing an RPG without at least a reasonably solid gameplay.
 

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