Interview "I'm going to reinvent roleplaying games again": Richard Garriott Interview at Gather Your Party

[Dexter]

I think LB's idea is that all this talk about powerful interactions and having asynchronous play, is because he is attempting to get to what makes P&P games tick. A big problem I see in MMOs is that the little interactions people have are usually not important for the game. They are "weak" instead of "powerful" in that they affect very little about gameplay. They are also bound by the people who are interacting. Anything cool two people roleplaying together can come up won't affect peple playing at other times, unless you have a way for player to affect each other asynchronously.

UO was really closest to this I've ever seen and it's fucking sad that it's barely been tried since, the only "bigger" game where players have influence over the world nowadays is EVE.
UO was really a "world building" excercise and experimentation and also had micro- and macroeconomic systems around scarcity and prices differing between regions because of it and imo the danger being always there while travelling outside of any city without the ability to yell "guards" and the way one could be labeled as a Murderer and basically be socially outcast and rely on oneself and social circles to survive outside.
It also had the ability for players to interact with the world in the way of building houses, ships and the likes as well as being a crafter and for instance keeping a sheepherd or other animals penned in for materials, being able to make things like tables, chairs etc. one could even place inside the world at any point, just sucked that there was a rather short decay of that for what... 10 or 15 minutes?
And being 2D and tilebased it even offered the tools for GMs and the likes to quickly create new content and locations, there was especially some impressive stuff going on in some of the Free "Shards" that game spawned off, some of which I believe are likely still going today.

Those are systems they should have explored, instead they went with sandboxy level-grinding treadmill environments where players are all but castrated in their possibility to interact both with each other and the world Everquest style. The hundred pound gorilla that was World of Warcraft just consolidated that direction for now nearing 8 years and they're still not ready to try something new e.g. see "The Elder Scrolls Online" which is again turning into a fucking joke: http://e3.gamespot.com/video/6380873/

That this shit is still going even to date after 15 years: http://www.uoherald.com/ and remains profitable for EA to run despite it being the first "real" big graphical MMO (and not just graphical MUD) while being hopelessly outdated in that way and also EVEs success and continued growth should give them to think...

 

[Excidium]

The term "LARP" is only used by gamists (aka combatfags) who refuse to enjoy a game because there is no real reason to exploit the (generally easily exploitable) mechanics to win battles.

AKA RPG fans.

Haha, no.

 

[Excidium]

RPGs aren't all about mechanics and never were, if that was the case D&D would have stopped being relevant when much better systems were released over the past decades. The mechanics just exist to help you simulate the game situations with more accuracy.

 

[Infinitron]

Mondblutians vs C&Cfags. IT'S ON.

(btw, why isn't this a standard emoticon???)

 

[Excidium]

Don't call me a C&Cfag, I don't give a shit about C&C, at least on the way it's usually implemented in CRPGs.

 

[Infinitron]

Don't call me a C&Cfag, I don't give a shit about C&C, at least on the way it's usually implemented in CRPGs.

I was trying to call you something less insulting than "storyfag", TBH

 

[Excidium]

Well I'm not any sort of -fag, those people should just gtfo of my genre. Just want rush from one encounter to the next? Play a fucking strategy game. Just want to go from point A to point B to read the next part of the story? Play a fucking CYOA. And don't even get me started on those people that just want to bake virtual bread...

 

[mondblut]

RPGs aren't all about mechanics and never were, if that was the case D&D would have stopped being relevant when much better systems were released over the past decades. The mechanics just exist to help you simulate the game situations with more accuracy.

The majority of D&D fanbase isn't even aware those "much better systems" exist. When some "Petite schoolgirls in pink panties RPG" becomes a multimillion dollar franchise with movies and press scandals around it, then they might consider comparing them.

As a matter of fact, the vast majority of RPG players in general don't have a faintest idea of what supposedly makes one system "better" than another one, nor do they care. They just play whatever they and their gaming buddies know. The "Beholderquest is better than Labyrinths and Lamers because of (50 pages of boring rant)" crowd makes up about 0.00001% of the RPG market base, most of them being failed game designers themselves who haven't rolled a die in a decade, and just suffer from a lifetime butthurt that their own awesomest RPG system ever didn't sell a 10 copies printing run.

 

[Renegen]

RPGs aren't all about mechanics and never were, if that was the case D&D would have stopped being relevant when much better systems were released over the past decades. The mechanics just exist to help you simulate the game situations with more accuracy.

That's very nice and all but 90% of time spent playing D&D is spent arguing about rules during combat, so no, people don't play it to LARP as a paladin.

 

[Excidium]

RPGs aren't all about mechanics and never were, if that was the case D&D would have stopped being relevant when much better systems were released over the past decades. The mechanics just exist to help you simulate the game situations with more accuracy.

That's very nice and all but 90% of time spent playing D&D is spent arguing about rules during combat

From my personal experience it's the same with every game.

And I honestly never know what exactly codexers mean by "LARP".

Game != simulation.

It's the opposite, even for flight sims.

Simulationists like myself would disagree.

 

[lmbarns]

Ah man UO was so fucking badass. Stat loss, pking, anti-pking, griefing, scamming, bounty hunting, who knew decades later the sequels would be facebook html5 browser based with far shittier graphics and less real time(ajax updates) than 15+ years prior.

Guilds, factions, all that shit was epic and now you farm resources in some stupid RTS bullshit called "Lord of Ultima". I used to be a huge fan of Richard Garriott but he might as well be dead now, he had the resources to do whatever in gaming he wanted at the perfect fucking moment and he sold out.

 

[Dexter]

Ah man UO was so fucking badass. Stat loss, pking, anti-pking, griefing, scamming, bounty hunting, who knew decades later the sequels would be facebook html5 browser based with far shittier graphics and less real time(ajax updates) than 15+ years prior.

Yeah... I remember thinking, "If they can do this NOW, like literally 5 years after the WWW came into existence, just imagine what they could do in the future with improved technology, AI and once gaming and the internet is much bigger and they're getting better at making games!"

Then we got WoW and the rest is history, oh boy was I wrong...

Nowadays my view towards game development is more along to "Imagine the worst thing that can happen, and within 2-3 years it will likely do within the AAA market" e.g. like this shit: http://www.hiwiller.com/2010/04/29/if-mario-was-designed-in-2010/

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/media/30409/4/1.png
http://www.gamereactor.de/media/56/_395601.jpg
http://www.gamereactor.de/media/95/zusupermario_439581.jpg
http://www.gametrailers.com/side-mission/files/2012/06/miiverse.jpg

At the moment I'm imagining cloud-based gaming where shit only streams over the net, with rental ability and even more inundated by DLC and "social", also likely so dumbed down in the gameplay department that the Xbawks crowd will feel alienated, but the big publishers won't give a shit because they got an even bigger market now. Also more flailing around of arms and screaming at your gaming utensils.

 

[Excidium]

That's like the history of video games.

 

[Alex]

(...snip)
As a matter of fact, the vast majority of RPG players in general don't have a faintest idea of what supposedly makes one system "better" than another one, nor do they care. They just play whatever they and their gaming buddies know. The "Beholderquest is better than Labyrinths and Lamers because of (50 pages of boring rant)" crowd makes up about 0.00001% of the RPG market base, most of them being failed game designers themselves who haven't rolled a die in a decade, and just suffer from a lifetime butthurt that their own awesomest RPG system ever didn't sell a 10 copies printing run.

I don't know mondblut. While I disagree with you on other stuff on this thread simply because we have different definitions of what an RPG is, I think pretty much every GM has to wear the "game designer hat" a bit, at least if the game is to be called and RPG. Maybe you never mess with the thick of the rules, but whenever you are preparing to run an adventure, even if you didn't make it yourself, you have to consider what are the things in it that make it worth playing.

So, maybe an specific GM never considers how confusing it is that AC models both the ability to resist damage with armors and the ability to avoid damage with dexterity, while HP represent the ability to absorb and avoid damage, concepts that have a lot of intersection. But he will certainly consider other stuff then. Maybe he will think about how his game design intercts with the player's abilities, such as thief skills or the spells a M.U. may have memorized. Or he will consider how the denizens of the dungeon relate to the major objectives of each character.

 

[Bruma Hobo]

Depends on the man, I guess. Some genuinely loved the medium that can do so much more number-crunching, some just tolerated the "limitations" they had to work around while realizing their "innovative vision". It is perfectly clear the Garriott himself loved D&D solely for an ability to put on his robe and a wizard's hat and didn't gave a rat's ass about memorizing to hit tables - hence, his "vision" was to make larping games from day 1, the precious few RPG mechanics increasingly absent from the later Ultimas were only there because he didn't have Gamebryo and Radiant AI back in the day. Storyfags gonna storyfag no matter the medium.

I like roguelikes... Am I a storyfag too? Yes, I'm very butthurt.

Ultima was always about freedom of choice, emergent gameplay, resource management, world and NPC interactivity and problem-solving situations (sometimes allowing the player to create new paths using the game rules). That's not storyfaggotry, that's not LARP, that's gameplay as important as stats in P&P gaming, and what Garriott wanted to bring to computers some time ago. Unfortunately for you that's not combat either.

 

[Excidium]

Doc Savage

What you fail to realize is that your narrow view on RPGs puts you on the same level as the kind of people you hate.

Simulationists like myself would disagree.

Most cRPGs ever released fail to keep me interested, even if I keep trying. Struggled a whole fucking lot to finish the BG series, and I had to skip all the expansions.

And you were accusing someone of trolling for disagreeing with you, a guy who can't bear to play an rpg, on an RPG board.

It's not my fault most CRPGs are either primitive in design or hybrid abominations.

 

[Mortmal]

I agree with mondblut on what he's saying but the characterization is shaky.


The second ultima 7 let you start to choose things like sexual preference sounded death knell for RPGs. Suddenly it opened the door for a whole new type of player, who was becoming big in the PnP world but was just as much of a bane there.

Come on that funny scene where the enchantress pull you towards her using fireworks, thats not decline, its one more little detail in a fantastic story . The ultima were very sophisticated game, and theres a big difference with todays games. A bioware game, mass effect, will allow you ton of romances but very little world interactivity , ultima 7 allowed you to be gay or lesbian( omg the outrage!) in one or two conversations, it allows you to modifiy your character look at will, but within a fully interactive world.Allowing romances without sacrificing any gameplay i have no trouble about it , the more complex the game gets the better it is.
Again you belongs to the very narrow minded mondblutian school of rpgs where only a wizardry clone or gold box is worthy to be named a rpg, i respect you prefer those kind of games, but to me thats just a subgenre amongst other and in no way superior.
Theres more than one or two that played in the late 80's , about a dozen people on the codex.I did play pen and paper and people were already obsessed in how their character look,handrawing gorgeous amazon characters, so if you really want the start of decline start there n the 70's.

 

[FrancoTAU]

Well, that's the first time I ever heard someone accuse Ultima 7 Pt2 leading to the decline of cRPGs.

Garriott deserves harsh criticism of pretty much anything he's said or developed in the last 15 years. But the people trying to say that he was only ever a good businessman who lucked into great games are way off base. The dude had a 10 year stretch where he was brilliant. The industry is full of a big idea guys, but there are arguably only a couple guys who pulled off more than a couple great games. Garriott and Molyneaux are two of them.

 

[Excidium]

Ultimas are still RPGs. Loved Ultima series. The point was that it opened up a whole can of worms, people who instead of enjoying those little touches as little touches are playing just for that stuff.

Then the focus goes from making a solid, interesting, challenging game of the genre to streamlining all that icky stuff away so that you get more fans.

I don't think that can was opened until Bioware came along, but yeah, that was the fall of CRPGs.

That's something that happened in the game industry as a whole, though, cRPGs just suffered the most from it because of all the wrong connotations of "Role-Playing Game".

 

[Mortmal]

No the problem started when games are not longer a work of art by passionate , but an industry product with a single guideline ; a budget, a product that must generate x amount of money in y amount of time, the content of it being meaningless .
Decline does not come from baking bread in your rpg, nothing would prevent a 3D modern rpg with the possibilies to do that AND a realistic fencing system. Decline does not come from consoles either , nor tablets, again nothing preventing making as deep and complex a game as possible, remember what was needed to run wastelands, a c64, a pc with cga video card, an apple 2 , any 8 bit machine . Todays tablets are powerbeast compare to that imagine what could be possible to do .
Oh and , amongst many inteactive things, you could use a shovel and dig up holes in wasteland, was it decline and the beginning of the end already ?

 

[Menckenstein]

General British should've been court martialed, tried for treason and executed by now.

 

[Mortmal]

The problem to you is not the problem to me necessarily because obviously people like excidium want something different than an old school RPG since he doesn't even like them.

If games like fallout are the old school to you then of course you look at the decline starting there but much was lost before then we've not seen since. U7 was a great game but it was the first game that was really significantly simplified for RPGs that was still good. Then they saw "hey we don't even have to do this stuff at all. Since it costs money and it's not necessary, we'll just skip it from now on." And skip it they did!

Won't even touch bioware since anything after BG series wasn't RPG at all, for same reasons. We got some dialog and cutscenes so it's an RPG? lol

No far from it , the first one was most likely faery tales adventure on the amiga, or maybe times of lore wich was clearly labeled as an ultima light. That never prevented more sophisticated games to appear after .
The decline started with the bankrupcy of good studios or/and them being bought by EA (origin, westwood , bullfrog, microprose etc..) ,decline not only for the rpgs but for every video games genre at least in the west, the final nail in the coffin was troika death . Strangely nowadays the most oldschool and satisfying games i played came from japan , dark souls and dragon's dogma the japanese devs working mainly on consoles seems not affected by this why?
So what causes those good studios to fall ? Obvious answer, not enough sales!
Everyone was exchanging floppy disks in the schoolyard, barely anyone bought anything. The decline in my opinion is simply because the developpers were not paid for their work , and shafted by both the pirates and also their editors, so much creavity crushed. You remember how it was anticipating the new bullfrog or origin game,how salivating we were, i ll never feel like that again for any game studio.

 

[lmbarns]

Well Origin was bought by EA too. Prior to that they had a solid franchise built using talent and resourcefulness, EA just eats them (small studios) up into a marketing machine that makes money, no passion for what they do, no going out on a limb or taking risks, it's all decided by financial interests and minimizing risk by having the broadest audience and using the same formula that made them money previously.

Even on Youtube, if you look at any truely good WIP's done by individuals or small teams, they typically end up going to work for one of the big studios rather than fleshing out their refreshing vision.

 

[Infinitron]

You're both wrong. The decline became inevitable only when it became feasible to develop multiplatform games. The justification for dumbing down and declining games is the need to appeal to a wider audience.
As long as games were PC-exclusive, that wider audience simply didn't exist, so dumbing down was pointless and counter-productive (see: the last two games in the Ultima series).

The "opening up" of a huge new audience of consoletards by the XBox was the turning point. In the RPG genre, the decline was heralded by two games - KOTOR and the Morrowind XBox port. When those games were a success, the genre was officially doomed.

 

[Mortmal]

You're both wrong. The decline became inevitable only when it became feasible to develop multiplatform games. The justification for dumbing down and declining games is the need to appeal to a wider audience.
As long as games were PC-exclusive, that wider audience simply didn't exist, so dumbing down was pointless and counter-productive (see: the last two games in the Ultima series).

The "opening up" of a huge new audience of consoletards by the XBox was the turning point. In the RPG genre, the decline was heralded by two games - KOTOR and the Morrowind XBox port. When those games were a success, the genre was officially doomed.

Multiplatform games always existed and were always feasible Thats like saying games were turn based cause we couldnt do them real time . Once upon a time the big thing , the thing that was selling was arcade games , everyone wanted to play r-type, ghost and goblins and such. Guess what all of those were ported equaly on every support possible from the c64 and amiga , to the nes and supernintendo.The was no loss of gameplay in any of them except lesser graphics on 8bit machines.That multiplatforming never prevented excellent exclusives appering on each of the platforms .You are too pc focused, there was a hell lot more than that before.
No the decline start cause the good games were not selling nearly enough thus the need to cater to a wider audience and generate profits.Decline is not a matter of platform or hardware, its just financial reasons. In fact you should be just grateful they released their xbox and gettings its ports, or you wont be playing anything at all except pc indies sucking more or less. And dont tell me again nothing of value would be lost , thats a big fucking lie, according the megathreads for each of those games here, the interest of codexers for bethesda , bioware and blizzard games is immense.

You want to reverse the tide ? Well buy good games , maybe fund some of those kickstarter projetcs and pray its enough.