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Let's speculate about the future of CRPGs

Shin

Cipher
Joined
Jan 5, 2015
Messages
677
We should all adopt a bunch of kids and teach them the RPG gospel and the necessary skills needed to make RPG's. Someone can raise a bunch of writers, other raise a bunch of programmers, a few artists etc. Then we make them develop great RPG's while we sit in the old folks house mumbling about the Infinity Engine and the Great Decline.
 

tuluse

Arcane
Joined
Jul 20, 2008
Messages
11,400
Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Digital distribution and direct marketing to and feedback from the customers will mean that all kinds of niches will be commercially viable and we'll continue to see games work as they have the past 3-5 years where there is something for everyone.
 

Apexeon

Arcane
Joined
Nov 10, 2012
Messages
864
Bethesda Softwarks pays off Brain Fargo and gets the rights to Wasteland 2 then merges it with Fallout to create a 3D action shooter to compete with Halo 22.5 called Outwasted.

Oh wait that was me on the weekend cancel that prediction.
 
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Self-Ejected

Ludo Lense

Self-Ejected
Joined
Nov 28, 2014
Messages
936
Probably that RPG's as we define them now will no longer exist except as a novelty or retrobait. The more story driven games will go down the Telltale cinematic approach with minimalist gameplay to move the plot along (this will be aided by VR since the platform itself sacrifices controls for extra immersion). The more active ones or combat driven ones will be absorbed into the endless undefined blob that the is the action/adventure genre since everything has "progression" anyway even when it doesn't make sense. I do hope that a small fraction of the market will try to embrace fluent death mechanics like some other titles have (X-com, magicka, Soul Reaver etc.). I was thinking you could be make an rpg where you play in the framework of the Jomsvikings and character deaths would fit more nicely in the flow of the game (rather than resisting the temptation to load).
 
Joined
May 6, 2009
Messages
1,875,971
Location
Glass Fields, Ruins of Old Iran
Man you guys hate things so much you hate things that haven't even been conceived of yet.

Quite simply, humans are amazing pattern-recognition machines. They have the ability to recognize many different types of patterns - and then transform these "recursive probabalistic fractals" into concrete, actionable steps. If you've ever watched a toddler learn words and concepts, you can almost see the brain neurons firing as the small child starts to recognize patterns for differentiating between objects. Intelligence, then, is really just a matter of being able to store more patterns than anyone else. Once IBM could build machines that could recognize as many chessboard patterns as a chess grandmaster, the machines became "smarter" than humans.
 
Unwanted

a Goat

Unwanted
Dumbfuck Edgy Vatnik
Joined
Jun 15, 2014
Messages
6,941
Location
Albania
With any lock at least one game in the next five years will become a great BG2 or Troika tier classic. I bet on the game Obisidan will decide to do after PoE.

Larian wants to make Ultima. Obsidian, from what I see, wants to make IWD and Goldbox games over and over again. Bioware wants to make romance sims. Bethesda makes games about hiking. Inexile wants to bandwagon.
The BG2 tier classic you wait for, will be made by guys who are completely out of that clique. Probably 20-something years olds that may have worked in some of mentioned companies as a contractors and fell in love in RPG's during the deepest decline, their first RPG was Fallout3/Oblivion/Mass Effect, then they've went to some forum and got gangraped by the likes of us. Instead of leaving they've decided to learn and play classics. They'll be free of nostalgia and full of fresh ideas while having knowledge about how games used to do stuff long ago.
These will be your next RPG-classic video game devs, not Chris Avellone, not Sawyer, not Fargo, not Vincke. The only developer I can see staying here after these people will get on board is Cleve, as his Neanderthal mental and physical strength will stop every obstacle on his way.

Seriously speaking, the market gets overcrowded really quickly, we see more and more devs wanting to make RPG's now, and I have a feeling that I know what they're doing. The likes of Payday devs and those Cyanide outcasts making RPG about vampires want to get people who got on The Witcher 3 and Skyrim train. So the other side of the market will stay as it is.
"Classic" RPG's will start to bomb. Maybe not in 2015 or 2016 but at current rate later on we'll have huge inflation of those titles and the devs that currently make solid, but not great games will have troubles getting funding.
I'm not even talking about getting into the development - see TSI - they have 100k right now, and even if we'd assume they'll get as huge spike as Underworld Ascendant got later, they will barely get funded. Forget about getting in here if you're a no-name, because people who at first enthusiastically funded a lot of titles, now are burned or won't have cash to pay for no-names while Obsidian or Larian will run their next campaigns.

That means that all currently-running companies will treat kickstarter as a way to get your betatesters on board for free and get paid for allowing them to betatest. You may fund some minor project too. But don't even dream about getting millions of dollars.
 

naossano

Cipher
Joined
Aug 26, 2014
Messages
1,232
Location
Marseilles, France
Maybe we will get an Unity-like open-source engine, with open-source assets, that modders would use freely, with tons of disapointing, unfinished or fan-fiction-like RPG, so the good ones would be sank in the bottom.
 

hiver

Guest


But i dont think that or other new tech will actually improve the RPG genre. As we see in the biggest RPG "revival" kickstarter projects, the design of the games - despite being directly backed by fans of specific types of RPGs is still subservient to the general casual and mass market PR forces.
What this new tech will bring is... more graphikz and extreme emotional engagement based on superficial features.

I guess we can hope for rare pearl in the muck here and there. At least now there is wider field and many lower and middle tier indies can get finances and tools to do "their own thing" then before.
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,024
The way I see it, the real incline requires companies willing and/or able to settle for less. Real RPGs were always a niche genre that required a lot more but paid out a lot less if at all. That's what caused the decline because no sane publisher wanted to invest more and make less.

Kickstarter and digital distribution changed all that, providing independent funding and distribution. Some companies would grow too big for the niche and would have to move out and try their luck in the AAA game. Other companies that can resist the urge to grow can do well there.
 
Joined
Jun 20, 2014
Messages
906
Location
Malaysia
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
We should all adopt a bunch of kids and teach them the RPG gospel and the necessary skills needed to make RPG's. Someone can raise a bunch of writers, other raise a bunch of programmers, a few artists etc. Then we make them develop great RPG's while we sit in the old folks house mumbling about the Infinity Engine and the Great Decline.

Just make it yourself, dude. Don't you want to bring incline with your own hands?
 

PhantasmaNL

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Nov 20, 2012
Messages
1,653
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria
More good (ish) TB RPGs from indies and kickstarters. AAA wil produce more and more action and console oriented shit, at some point they will drop the "rpg" label since it really makes no sense anymore at all.

Now can someone please make / kickstart the follow up to VtMB?
 

zwanzig_zwoelf

Guest
Majority of indies: "Classic pixel roguelike RPGs every day!" as in "crappy rpgmaker jrpgs with nothing in common with roguelikes".
Minority of indies: "We just want to make games that we'd love to play" aka "we'll probably never finish this game".
AAA devs/publishers: "Call of Duty with char progression and c&c!" as in "now everything is an RPG and it sells".
Japs: "Final Fantasy XXX with kawaii boys and homosexual scenes to show that we care about LGBT!" as in "SJW crap sells like hot cakes".
RPGCodex: "Everything is shit, fuck this gay Ea... oh, last bug is almost fixed in Grimwah, I'll escape this stinking planet as soon as I play the full version!"
 

Jaesun

Fabulous Ex-Moderator
Patron
Joined
May 14, 2004
Messages
37,241
Location
Seattle, WA USA
MCA
Now can someone please make / kickstart the follow up to VtMB?

Thankfully we are are in luck!

B5pdOsNIAAAo2ry.jpg:large


:takemymoney::takemymoney::takemymoney:



:negative:
 

Lady_Error

█▓▒░ ░▒▓█
Patron
Joined
Oct 14, 2012
Messages
1,879,250
VR and pleb consoles kill the niche gaming market and we must wait for another reboot?

VR won't kill the niche gaming market. In fact, many of the first VR titles are being created by indie developers.
 

turul

Augur
Joined
Mar 2, 2011
Messages
149
cRPGs may continue to exist as indie games as well as on mobile platforms. Actually mobile platforms seems to be a well suited home for crpgs, due to many people don't want to play a fast arcade game on a touchscreen, but could go for a puzzle or an rpg with more to read and think, than swiping all over like a retard, or shaking his phone.

On computers of desktops and laptops , our fate tied to consoles unfortunately. I'm not even sure about the future of ANY rpgs, beside MMO's, which seem to be good cash cows.

In many aspects, the last few action rpgs (DA : I, Mass Effect 4, ) were actually financially risky and not as profitable as they were previously. Bethesda could pull off another Skryim, But beside the endless copy paste corridor shooters with endless dlcs , rpgs - especially single player- are too much trouble and too long development cycle for less return, than a cheaply thrown together MMORPG. They could be released as a beta or alpha and call it a full game (with a full price and monthly suscription) and let it be fixed with the help of the free beta testers who actually pay to beta test (If you play MMOs , that's you.) So it's single player rpgs in general are at the risk of going away. Yes, they can make Mass Effect 4 or 5, but it's gonna be more like "Friends" in 3D, beyond any slight indication of being an rpg or having any rpg element. If there are boobs in there, people gonna buy it.

So enjoy what you have now. Perhaps the next ones will only be available in google store or itunes for your iphone 7 or samsung galaxy s10 . People with the special wish of wanting to play a crpg, will have depend on kickstarter or a bored geek on linux, who smokes too much weed.
 
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mhm32167

Educated
Joined
Apr 10, 2013
Messages
29
The RPG room tech demo (https://share.oculus.com/app/the-rpg-room ) was pretty cool and using your head to control the camera feels quite natural, but the controls in VR don't currently lend themselves well to complex RPGs. Using a keyboard/mouse in VR feels awkward. We'll see if the steam VR controller solves some of the current input problems. Otherwise good RPGs will probably stay outside the realm of VR.
 

Zed

Codex Staff
Patron
Staff Member
Joined
Oct 21, 2002
Messages
17,068
Codex USB, 2014
On computers of desktops and laptops , our fate tied to consoles unfortunately.
But is it really?
Games can do extremely well on just computers, especially niche games like sims (cities skylines) and tacticool (neo-xcom) games.
 

zwanzig_zwoelf

Guest
On computers of desktops and laptops , our fate tied to consoles unfortunately.
But is it really?
Games can do extremely well on just computers, especially niche games like sims (cities skylines) and tacticool (neo-xcom) games.
Almost anything can do well on computers, except modern kiddos think it's a Facebook/Solitaire machine today.
 

Lady_Error

█▓▒░ ░▒▓█
Patron
Joined
Oct 14, 2012
Messages
1,879,250
The RPG room tech demo (https://share.oculus.com/app/the-rpg-room ) was pretty cool and using your head to control the camera feels quite natural, but the controls in VR don't currently lend themselves well to complex RPGs. Using a keyboard/mouse in VR feels awkward. We'll see if the steam VR controller solves some of the current input problems. Otherwise good RPGs will probably stay outside the realm of VR.

Yeah, the RPG's in VR will obviously have to be 1st person perspective. And how do you simulate turn-based combat in VR? It seems destined to be flooded with real-time action games.
 

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