Decline Top 10 best ways to murder an RPG

[Rinslin Merwind]

Conclusion of this thread: murdering an RPG is easy as hell and you can use much more methods than ten.
Also methods of creating good RPG much less numerous and hard to pull off.

 

[buffalo bill]

catering to the masses

 

[what am i doing]

That's only true for bigger teams, though.
Smaller developers don't have the money for voice acting (often not even for marginal voice acting, like just the first line of each dialogue to get a "feeling" for the character). None of them would even try to go for it.
While almost any of the other factors in the voting are still very much "doable" for all developers.

This is true. But, I'm thinking of it as in "what way kills an RPG deadest" not "what way is the most common way for RPGs to die" and in my opinion full voice acting is the best way to kill an RPG. It's also the most aggravating because, you know... you read the text faster than the voice actor is speaking the lines and click next and don't even hear most of the voice acting.

Similarly, bad writing only matters to games that even have noticeable writing.
Many RPGs do fine without.

Call me a storyfag but I do play RPGs mainly for the writing. It's great if an RPG has good gameplay, but it's not what I play them for, and I can sit through some pretty abysmal gameplay if the writing is good.

 

[thesheeep]

Call me a storyfag

You're welcome.

 

[Lacrymas]

There are like 5 games I can name that the writing compensates for the mediocre-to-poor gameplay. VtMB and R, KotOR2, PS:T and Legacy of Kain Blood Omen 1. In the case of LoK, it's not so much the writing, as it is the voice acting that elevates the writing. Other games people mention in this category, but I personally couldn't stomach their gameplay at all - F:NV, Legacy of Kain past 1, Spec Ops: The Line. I'd dare say LoK goes downhill after Soul Reaver 1, it's not about personal faults and characters doomed to emotionally and psychologically torture each other forever anymore, and more about fetishizing and trying to justify the main characters and vampires in general. But I digress, my point is that very few games actually have writing that substitutes for poor gameplay.

 

[Daemongar]

Eh, the refining of skills. Daggerfall -> Morrowind

Like the saying goes: Quantity < Quality
Daggerfall migth have a laundry list of skills and stats. But like a lot of older RPG's, most of them are virtually useless and some are gimmicks, just there to give off an ilusion of complexity while in truth they just make matters more aggravating then they actually need to be - or because their system is an adaptation of some PnP system.
Morrowind cuts down all that fat and tones up what remains.

Cite some examples.

 

[Tse Tse Fly]

Call me a storyfag but I do play RPGs mainly for the writing. It's great if an RPG has good gameplay, but it's not what I play them for, and I can sit through some pretty abysmal gameplay if the writing is good.

Which rpgs in your opinion have writing so brilliant that it makes one willing to tolerate their (supposed) gameplay deficiency?

 

[Sinatar]

1. Level scaling
2. Level scaling
3. Level scaling
4. Level scaling
5. Level scaling
6. Level scaling
7. Level scaling
8. Level scaling
9. Level scaling
10. Level scaling

Honorable Mention: Level scaling

 

[JarlFrank]

Eh, the refining of skills. Daggerfall -> Morrowind

Like the saying goes: Quantity < Quality
Daggerfall migth have a laundry list of skills and stats. But like a lot of older RPG's, most of them are virtually useless and some are gimmicks, just there to give off an ilusion of complexity while in truth they just make matters more aggravating then they actually need to be - or because their system is an adaptation of some PnP system.
Morrowind cuts down all that fat and tones up what remains.

Cite some examples.

The language skills that barely did anything qualify, I'd say.

 

[Falksi]

catering to the masses

Yep, Mass Effect

 

[The_Mask]

As much as I dislike gameplay-oriented people here on the Codex

Then what would you say is the most important aspect of a game if not it's defining aspect?

Your agenda has been acknowledged.

What if I told you, that there are a few people here on the Codex that believe both gameplay *and* story are equally important? And what if I told you that there are people here that can adapt to both any sort of gameplay, and way to tell a story, provided it's not pandering, stupid or a blunt cash-grab attempt?

I love RPGs. I went through pretty much every genre of videogames, and I decided I love RPGs, in all its forms. You make whatever you wish out of that.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

What if I told you, that there are a few people here on the Codex that believe both gameplay *and* story are equally important?

I would tell you those people are deluded.
Take away the gameplay you no longer have a game.
Gameplay is what defines games not story.
A game with shit/mediocre gameplay but great story is still a shit/mediocre game. A game with good gameplay and abysmal story is a good game.
Hell there are whole genres of games with little to no story but you'll be hard pressed to find a handful of decent games where the story is of equal, if not higher, importance than gameplay

 

[Lacrymas]

The thing with that is that the gameplay is also limited by the writing. It affects where you go and what you fight, if the writing only takes you through same-y forests and empty fields, the gameplay is also going to suffer by virtue of being repetitive and the player not receiving any other kind of visual input.

 

[Butter]

If you're doing it correctly, the line between story and gameplay in an RPG should be blurred.

 

[Bah]

Filling diversity quotas in development team and listening to twatter.

I almost wanted to place Larian's BG3 into this category, but on reflection, I think their use of a Malaysian studio isn't about diversity, but about cheap labor.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Call me a storyfag but I do play RPGs mainly for the writing. It's great if an RPG has good gameplay, but it's not what I play them for, and I can sit through some pretty abysmal gameplay if the writing is good.

Which rpgs in your opinion have writing so brilliant that it makes one willing to tolerate their (supposed) gameplay deficiency?

If PS:T was written like shit it would be shit. Same, although less grievous, for Arcanum.

 

[Serus]

Call me a storyfag but I do play RPGs mainly for the writing. It's great if an RPG has good gameplay, but it's not what I play them for, and I can sit through some pretty abysmal gameplay if the writing is good.

Which rpgs in your opinion have writing so brilliant that it makes one willing to tolerate their (supposed) gameplay deficiency?

If PS:T was written like shit it would be shit. Same, although less grievous, for Arcanum.

PST is mostly shit as an rpg. Otoh Arcanum has some good gameplay (outside of combat obviously, but it has some great locations/exploration as an exemple, Tarant is one of the best cities in crpgs) - without it, if only writing remained, it would be also shit. Besides PST is one of the very few (and i mean VERY FEW) rpg(-ey) games that has writing supposedly good enough to be be enjoyed on its own. Said supposedly but for the sake of the discussion let's assume it is.

For everyone who wants writing over or equal to gameplay in a game - go f***k yourself and go read a book for once in your life.


Also the poll lacks "KC kills it"

 

[Bohrain]

The thing with that is that the gameplay is also limited by the writing. It affects where you go and what you fight, if the writing only takes you through same-y forests and empty fields, the gameplay is also going to suffer by virtue of being repetitive and the player not receiving any other kind of visual input.

In the real world it's the budget that decides stuff like that. I vividly recall MRY saying that the barbarian Origin got cut from DA:O because they didn't want to allocate time and money for custom animation for the crucifixation scene.

 

[Lacrymas]

That should be planned from that start, I'd think. But in a game like PoE (yes, I know I keep using it as an example, but it got sooo many things wrong it's the perfect exhibit A) where no maps are more or less labor intensive than any other of similar size, I don't see how the budget is the problem. Why did we have to go through like 30 forest and field maps? 15 of those could've been anything else easily without costing more money to make. One of the reasons WM is better is because it features fewer maps in terms of quantity, but they are all quite varied with a lot of stuff to do in them. Even though they were all snowy, the writing took us to cool places and got us to do cool things. The gameplay is the same between base game and WM, but WM is extremely playable, while base game is extremely not.

 

[Alphard]

Filling diversity quotas in development team and listening to twatter.

This. This and greediness. The rest is consequential

 

[Alphard]

In order of butthurt for me (1 being the highest and 10 being the lowest)

1. Lazy fetch/kill quests. I don't mind the first few quest to be run of the mill tasks so you get familiar with the game, but don't ask me to clear an other fucking cave of whatever passes for giant rats mid game.
2. Streamlining the hell out of meaningfully deep mechanics. This seems to be an endemic problem not just in RPGs.
3. Selling the IP to Bethesda, EA, Microsoft or your neighbourhood drug dealer. Every franchise they touch turns into shit.
4. Lvl scaling. Oblivion PTSD
5. JRPG lvl of grinding or Diablo-esque loot. Why do I need to replay the game 10 times or just 1 lvl to get nice loot?
6. Romances. If I want romance I can just read some novel. And if I need to fap I got the Internet.
7. Binary C&C. Such an American view of the world, it's not even funny anymore.
8. Useless items that you can keep in your inventory. I have enough junk in my life I don't need virtual one.
9. Being forced to fight in the latter half of the game when previoulsy we had multiple options. Looking at you VTMB...
10. Having no proper "encyclopedia". It's fine as long as there is way to access world information in the game.

catering to the masses

The root cause of most of these points is greediness. Either by reducing production costs, or shifting to a larger but less demanding more casual market, the focus is on maximizing the profit, no matter if the game suffer from this.
There is no more love and passion about developing games, only strategies to increase monetary gain.
The answer to the thread is "other: greediness"
Number 2 most deadly disease is bowing to the (anti)fascists of politic correctness. They don't write anything deep and meaningful anymore because that would offend someone, and will guarantee heavy negative press and financial isolation for the studio

 

[Daemongar]

Eh, the refining of skills. Daggerfall -> Morrowind

Like the saying goes: Quantity < Quality
Daggerfall migth have a laundry list of skills and stats. But like a lot of older RPG's, most of them are virtually useless and some are gimmicks, just there to give off an ilusion of complexity while in truth they just make matters more aggravating then they actually need to be - or because their system is an adaptation of some PnP system.
Morrowind cuts down all that fat and tones up what remains.

Cite some examples.

The language skills that barely did anything qualify, I'd say.

Well, I'm going to go back to a point I always make, but nobody agrees with me so I'll keep it brief.

RPGs need some of the clutter. Inventory management, semi-useless skills, resting to get spells back, provisions, random numbers, cellar rat missions, junk items, locked doors, random magic, and crappy NPCs. Whittle it all away and you get Skyrim. Language skills were useless, I'll agree, but they could have also have made them useful/able to be improved. They didn't fix the skills, they just removed them.

Yep, they streamlined the game by removing something that was broken. Diablo 3 is streamlined, but not many would say D2 stats sucked.

 

[Daidre]

The root cause of most of these points is greediness. Either by reducing production costs, or shifting to a larger but less demanding more casual market, the focus is on maximizing the profit, no matter if the game suffer from this.

Imho, some big companies often tend to inflate budgets for their top dev studios give them waaay more money that is required to make a good game in any genre. It still boggles me how teams with millions $ of budget could never find a couple of writers to clobber together a story that won't send audience into endless cringe and wont fall apart after first chapter.
Look at Anthem for example. EA was giving Bioware money and creative freedom for a 3(!) years expecting them to create something great and barely asking for result. But studio squandered all this money, then spent another 1.5 years in the brutal crunch and produced some poo. And went to journos to whine about cruel pressure from EA - what a horrible people, after 4 years of paying salaries they dared to ask for result!

 

[Alphard]

The root cause of most of these points is greediness. Either by reducing production costs, or shifting to a larger but less demanding more casual market, the focus is on maximizing the profit, no matter if the game suffer from this.

Imho, some big companies often tend to inflate budgets for their top dev studios give them waaay more money that is required to make a good game in any genre. It still boggles me how teams with millions $ of budget could never find a couple of writers to clobber together a story that won't send audience into endless cringe and wont fall apart after first chapter.
Look at Anthem for example. EA was giving Bioware money and creative freedom for a 3(!) years expecting them to create something great and barely asking for result. But studio squandered all this money, then spent another 1.5 years in the brutal crunch and produced some poo. And went to journos to whine about cruel pressure from EA - what a horrible people, after 4 years of paying salaries they dared to ask for result!

Big conpanies use a lot of budget on everything that help sell the game : marketing ( including paid reviews and comments) , graphic, pandering to whatever current political trend is, "user friendliness" ( read dumbing down everything) , etc and disregard everything else, except for one or two well done things that help game differentiate from the others Once they built enough hype, they don't care if the game disappoints, until they made huge profit.
Worst case scenario they could buy another successfull emergent studio and milk another ip

 

[Necroscope]

Games these days have uninspired stories because they're made by uninspired people. By "uninspired stories" I don't even mean good, book quality stories, but something of genuine passion. Take some old jRPGs for example, like Chrono Trigger - the story is completely ridiculous and even childish, but it's so offbeat and imaginative that it quickly catches your interest. I think it's also due to the fact that games back in the day had integrity - music, art direction, gameplay were like one body. Today games are developed by huge teams and there may be less communication and less mutual understanding of what they're doing, hence games turn out so generic and soulless. Plus there's all this pandering to the lowest common denominator (focus on SPECTACULARITY and EPICNESS) and political correctness.

... But even non AAA studios fail to deliver. Pillars of Eternity seemed like a more than usual story focused franchise, but despite all the pretentiousness and text bloat, it utterly failed to make the story feel personal to the player.

We, storyfags, are doomend and shunned.