Strategy games are better RPGs than RPGs

Thanks for bumping this thread, it was a really good read apart from the HoMM6 derail. I wish there were more threads and discussions like this on 2016 Codex.

 

Age of Ice mod for Civilization IV was a complete RPG

 

You're not given control of a ruler and you don't have a limited perspective. It's an abstraction of a government, like a normal strategy game only without the direct control of units.

 

RPGs started off as a sub-genre of war games, which was a sub-genre of strategy games, so technically yes, RPGs, especially traditional RPGs, draw a huge amount from strategy games and all the early RPGs were simply small-scale war games with a larger emphasis on story. It's nice to see people who understand this evolutionary process.

That said, modern RPGs are not a sub-genre of war/strategy games, because the emphasis on story & character development has made them very different from modern day war/strategy games. Simply put, you can think of traditional RPG systems as war game systems scaled down to the level of individual units instead of armies - ie, that traditional RPG combat is just small-scale war gaming. But you can't think of the storyfag aspects of RPGs as a development from war games, because that aspect actually came from adventure games.

Thus, traditional RPGs could be thought of as the bastard child of war games and adventure games with a vastly expanded unit customization system. Practically all that you find in traditional RPGs, could be found in war games/adventure games, but the combination of the two is unique to traditional RPGs. On the other hand, action RPGs, such as Diablo and Dark Souls, involve a third genre in the mix - action games, and in doing so, are less similar to both war games and adventure games.

 

Will Crowther on Colossal Cave Adventure:

Early adventure games (e.g. Zork) didn't possess much, if anything, of a story, but simply provided a combination of exploration and puzzle-solving. Thus, even if "traditional RPGs" had developed from adventure games rather than vice versa, this could not have been the source of story-telling in RPGs. Non-emphasis on story in early adventure games reflected the non-emphasis on story of RPGs.

 

To me one of the main dividing lines between CRPGs and Strategy games (some of which have better tactical combat and character building than the majority of CRPGs) that CRPGs in general are not crippled by bad poor AI, but almost every Strategy game is.

 

The cause of this is easy to pinpoint. First of all, pretty much all RPGs are asymmetric - the player (or his team) is pitched against overwhelming forces. This means computer opponent can have advantage by design, which hides some of its programming flaws. Most strategy games, however, are symmetrical - all players, human or AI, start from the same point and are given the same set of rules. Obviously human players have an enormous advantage then.
Second thing is that AI can provide a challenge and be noteworthy on a tactical level, where all it controls is a couple of goblins with an ability or two and the rules are rudimentary. When it comes to a bigger scale - composing and moving armies, the whole economical layer and so on - especially if there are also tactical battles using another set of rules - it fails and it is easy for everybody to see.

 

I think there's an amazing opportunity for the total war combat system combined with more traditional rpg elements. Has anyone here played the mark of chaos game? It was kind of amazing, though very limited, in it's story campaign before they took your glorious empire army away and gave you some gay elves instead. I've had little fun in real time with pause systems but this is a good combat system and makes me feel like a real commander.

 

Yeah, this is why I mainly play campaigns, or stand alone maps that are quest maps or otherwise unbalanced.
And ultimately why I don't spend so much time playin the Civ games as I otherwise would have done.

Bad tactical AI is less easy to forgive than poor strategic AI, chess computers being the ultimate in tactical AI.
Sure CRPGs are usually have more variables than chess, but still it's possible to have good AI, as the Sword Coast Startegems mod for the BG games prove. So it's rather frustrating to witness the poor tactical AI in a game like Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic, which is a better CRPG than most pure CRPGs, and have a better combat system than 99% of CRPGs.

And it's also one of the reasons why I like turn based blobbers; even with lots of options in combat, due to the combat being abstract the AI does not need to be good.

 

When it comes to video games, adventure games emphasized storytelling before CRPGs did. The oldest CRPGs you find are all dungeon crawlers with minimal story, while many early adventure games started with a mystery plot and then developed it through the course of the game. They also introduced the keyword dialog system and, therefore, the first interactive dialog in games.

But you could indeed argue that PnP RPGs were the source of inspiration for adventure games, as adventure games don't actually have an obvious PnP precedent aside from PnP RPGs. Even so, traditional CRPGs emerged later than both early dungeon crawlers and early adventure games. The first CRPGs were not "traditional RPGs" as we'd think of them. But they were also not action RPGs in the sense of Diablo. They were, in fact, the closest CRPGs have ever been to their war gaming beginnings: strictly turn-based, rule-based combat simulators.

 

In the start of your post you try to define RPGs in general. Your definition is a combination of two popular opinions:

1. RPGs are all about character development
2. RPGs are all about Choices and Consequences

These two opinions aren't saying what RPGs "really" are, but what certain people expect for them.

But the RPGs for me are all about stories, worlds and characters. Thats what I want from the so-called role playing genre, thats what I expect for them.
But what are you saying in your post is that RPGs is less RPGs than strategy games because RPGs are all about "defining a character or party".

You think that all people in Codex have the same taste in games? RPG means Deus Ex, means Knights of the Chalice and means Diablo. Everybody likes rpgs for different reason. Some like storytelling and some like tactical combat. Some people like the RPG element of customisation.

You say that RPGs are not enough RPGs because they don't satisfying your definition. And that we need also to change what Codex is all about to fit your personal tastes.

Sounds logical to you?

 

How does it feel to watch Codexia burn before your own eyes?

 

And with that account name, too! I'm looking forward to plenty of "edgy" posts about how BG2 and Fallout 2 suck. Because, you know, those are opinions no one's ever dared to air on the codex before.

 

"
Strategy games are better RPGs than RPGs"

Wrong! In fact, dead wrong!
Fuck story, fuck character progression, fuck quest, fuck everything that is RPG. I am just talking about one single aspect that RPG beat RTS like a rented mule.

Can RTS have nekkid females running around on screen? Does it? No? if I want to have army of nekkid females fighting, moving, can I rely on RTS? Nooooo. I have to rely on RPG.

 

They don't but this is more of an oversight as this alone doesn't usually set off people's "this isn't an rpg" alarm. But in a sense it's actively straying from what an RPG should be doing because it's glossing over the possibility of having reactivity surrounding the disposable PC's identity.

 

There's a recent game that did just that, Dragon Age: Inquisition. You should check it out.

 

I wasn't aware anyone had called DAI a strategy game in the first place? Wikipedia calls it an ARPG.

 

Hey, I like those Rome Total War mods. I haven't fired that game up for years. Thank you 2011.

 

Rogue, Wizardry, and Dungeon Master are "traditional CRPGs", if anything can be considered a "traditional CRPG"; and if they aren't "traditional CRPGs", the term is meaningless and should never have been used. Dungeon-crawling constitutes a combination of exploration and combat using a small number of differentiated characters, the essence of RPGs since the creation of the genre with the publication of original three-booklet D&D in 1974.

As for the introduction of a focus on story into CRPGs, although this tended to come later for the RPG genre than for the adventure game genre, it was part of a general transformation of video games towards a more cinematic nature with an emphasis on story. This is something that affected most video game genres; even first-person shooters found themselves with drastically simplified level design and numerous lengthy cutscenes for the player to watch without interaction. Early text-based adventure games were dominated by exploration and puzzle-solving, with the attempts in the mid-80s at making more story-focused interactive fiction selling relatively poorly and the entire text-based subgenre then collapsing in favor of graphical adventure games. In pen-and-paper RPGs, the trend towards story over gameplay began in the mid-80s, and had far more of an effect on CRPGs than developments in the clearly-differentiated adventure game genre.

 

Doom and Quake, the biggest FPS games of the early 90s, still had paper-thin plots and no storytelling whatsoever. There was no *general* move in the 80s towards storytelling in video games. You're right about the PnP inspiration for both genres, but adventure games were and are fundamentally more suited to traditional forms of storytelling than CRPGs for the simple fact that CRPGs were and are tactical combat simulators, and as such necessarily constrained in the settings & stories they're capable of implementing.

Adventure games have no such limitation, exploited the fact that they had no such limitation, and advanced much further than CRPGs in their level of storytelling early on, even though I'd give credit to CRPG developers for certain innovations, such as having the story change based on the player character's chosen race/class/background. In terms of the video games industry, adventure games were easily the most advanced storyfag games, and are therefore a solid candidate for inspiring everyone else. Now, you could argue that forces outside of the games industry and technology itself were driving games to improve their storytelling, but the fact of the matter is that adventure games did it first, and a large % of the "role models" for video game storytelling were, in fact, adventure games until the genre's demise in the early 2000s.

Of course, action games actually played a larger role in the development of "cinematic" storytelling because they had the biggest budgets for animation and lip-synching. AAA CRPGs got that side of their storytelling - and for that matter, the technology behind it - from those games and their engines.

 

Seems to me he'll fit right in and provide some quality entertainment until he earns some tags in the next few months, rage posts in the Site Feedback threads, gets Prospered, and then banned/ragequits. That seems to be the natural order of things, anyway.

And back on topic, while I don't agree that strategy games in general are better RPGs than single character RPGs, I will say that there are fine strategy RPGs out there that I consider a solid part of the genre and very enjoyable, such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms 8 and 10, and games like Sengoku Rance. I'll just end my discussion at that, as this thread is leaning dangerously towards 'what is an rpg?' territory.

 

Interesting thread. Personally I'd say that main advantage of strategy games is abstraction. With rpgs there is lots of fascination about each character, each character needs to tell his own life story, have some side quest, be fuckable or just have some kinda daily routine. All this gets in the way of actual gameplay while strategy games usually dodge this problem entirely and can have stronger basic game design.

As for talks about strategy games having shit AI - thats why you have multiplayer.

 

Nice to see the Codex has such continuity.

 

My biggest LARPing experience was as Rokossovsky in War in the East where I set up an entire personal system of rules as to how other corps would behave. That was the only true LARP I've managed to do.

Given how shit warscape is and the botched grand strategy features every game, I'd say TW should go into that direction. Problem is that the wealth of factions would be cut drastically as individual campaigns would either have to be too short or get released as $LC. Either way, we'd end up getting jew'd again.