Decline Why 95% of the "modern" cRPG are so lame?

[Darth Canoli]

We already had this discussion.
It's partially cultural, more and more commercial shit cornering the market and the good stuff can't reach the mass audience anymore.
Also game devs tethering on this mass market garbage.

But it's also because of the players.
You grow a child on white industrial bread, fizzy drinks and candy and he'll be perfectly happy about it, he won't even want to eat anything else.

Same goes for video games, no studio with money (they're not AAA they're more like ZZZ) released a good cRPG in 20 years.
The new generations don't even know what a cRPG is, let alone a good one.

They're the perfect consumers for the mass market, they never developed their taste because they're only fed with garbage and they can't get enough of it.

So, when a studio develops something half baked but that looks good and even looks like the real deal at first glance, the fan boys jizz all over themselves.
It's like offering a glass of half filtered Ganges water to someone who only drank Ganges water his whole life.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Because of modern project management practices.

Games with dev teams of 10-20 continue to be more fun than games with dev teams of 100-300.

 

[Ocelot]

Are games becoming more basic or have you refined your taste in RPGs over time?

It's true that AAA games tend to be more bland because they aim for mass appeal. But it's also your taste that's changing over the years.

 

[Reinhardt]

Wolves in Arcanum - deal with it or quit. Wolves in Kangmaker - replaced with patch because of butthurt fags.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Are games becoming more basic or have you refined your taste in RPGs over time?

It's true that AAA games tend to be more bland because they aim for mass appeal. But it's also your taste that's changing over the years.

You're not wrong, there is quite a lot of good RPG that have been released but they lack some UI polish by modern standards or they could use a couple of geniuses to works on their strength and fix their weaknesses to release a masterpiece or two.

But the industry is going the other way because it's easier and the masses like the shit they're making anyway so why bother?
Would they have the skills and talent to make it happen anyway?
20 years of drought, there is a high probability the last great devs didn't pass on their skills and no one can make it happen but a couple of guys feeding of roots in their garage.

 

[Lilura]

Why are you playing current gen RPGs, lmao.

 

[Butter]

I love when these threads get split and I miss out on the original context.

 

[Reinhardt]

original context

Jews did this. Every time.

 

[Zumbabul]

95% of anything is shit. Games are not an exception.

 

[razvedchiki]

why op is so lame?
the best threads about crpgs have already been posted, like the one where some user you probably havent heard of complained that you cant talk your way out of fighting them rats in fallout 1.
thats a subject worth debating.

 

[Reinhardt]

you cant talk your way out of fighting them rats in fallout 1.

You can.

 

[Drowed]

It's true that AAA games tend to be more bland because they aim for mass appeal. But it's also your taste that's changing over the years.

Games with dev teams of 10-20 continue to be more fun than games with dev teams of 100-300.

For me, one post complements the other here. It is much easier to have a single, coherent view when you have a small group of 10-20 people. A company of this size can have a much stronger identity, each employee chosen has a very relevant role in the production of the game and it is much easier to follow the work and ensure that everyone has the same vision about what the final product should be. You know that John is having a baby in 2 months; that Robert is moving house because you went to the barbecue at his house last week; you talked for 4 hours with Ryan about the economic situation of the country. You have a much bigger idea of what each member of the team thinks and wants, both from the game, but also from life.

When you have 200 employees, this is much more difficult. Possibly you didn't even participate directly in hiring more than half of them, and the most probable is that you also can't follow closely their work. I imagine that you probably follow their work indirectly through indicators and statistics and weekly summaries of your managers. The fact that most modern RPGs feel the need to be open world games doesn't help much either, as developers believe they need to fill the game with quests, monsters and collectibles. This will invariably end up diluting any good idea or narrative in a sea of sameness and boredom. The game doesn't have an identity precisely because you have dozens of people with different ideas working on it - and if you pull something in several directions at the same time, you end up not going anywhere.

Not by chance, the majority of the most interesting RPGs of the last decade (among current Codex favorites) have been launched by indie groups, usually with less than 10 people on the team.

 

[Darth Canoli]

I love when these threads get split and I miss out on the original context.

It wasn't, my mind did the split, the hivemind knows what i'm talking about.

why op is so lame?
the best threads about crpgs have already been posted, like the one where some user you probably havent heard of complained that you cant talk your way out of fighting them rats in fallout 1.
thats a subject worth debating.

Maybe you can start a more interesting conversation about talking rats into doing you a blowjob?
Did you already tried to talk rats into something?

Isn't there a talking rat somewhere in Fallout?
You'll be happy to know there is one in ATOM but the spoilers stop here.

 

[LudensCogitet]

The problem is not limited to cRPGs.

Neither developers nor players can figure out what games are supposed to be for, and the goal they've settled on with pretty broad concensus seems to be something like "Make the player feel good for as long as possible".

Aside from the complete meaninglessness of this goal, you can also achieve it just as easily (more easily really) by dumbing people down so they feel good about crappy, low effort things.

Jonathan Blow and Marc Ten Bosch are the only devs I really know of that even have a conception of the purpose of video games beyond "get the player to feel emotions and keep playing". And they don't make RPGs.

 

[razvedchiki]

Joined:
Jun 8, 2018

 

[Lilura]

20 years of drought, there is a high probability the last great devs didn't pass on their skills and no one can make it happen but a couple of guys feeding of roots in their garage.

Maybe stop chasing after everything that's new. The best can't be beaten:

 

[TemplarGR]

Why are you playing current gen RPGs, lmao.

I need the autism button for cases like this.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Not by chance, the majority of the most interesting RPGs of the last decade (among current Codex favorites) have been launched by indie groups, usually with less than 10 people on the team.

Maybe you can't achieve it with 150 people or maybe you need to adapt your management system to do it.
Also, about half the crew not being hired by the lead designer, is it so hard to take the time to do it, at least for the writers and game designers?

And even if for some reason it's impossible for a huge team, why not doing it with a team of 40-50 people?

There is a market and this is the only way to get one's name up there with the RPG designers pioneers and geniuses of the 20th century.

The problem is not limited to cRPGs.

Neither developers nor players can figure out what games are supposed to be for, and the goal they've settled on with pretty broad concensus seems to be something like "Make the player feel good for as long as possible".

Aside from the complete meaninglessness of this goal, you can also achieve it just as easily (more easily really) by dumbing people down so they feel good about crappy, low effort things.

Video games is a hobby, feeling good about playing one isn't taboo, the quality of the content is the problem.

Maybe stop chasing after everything that's new. The best can't be beaten:

It's all a matter of taste, isn't it not?
For me, we reached the peak with Dark Sun (settings, combat, quest design), M&M III (exploration, game design), Wizardry 8 (combat, exploration, character creation and dev, world), ToEE(combat), KotC(combat), PST (world, story, NPC), Prelude to Darkness (quest design)...

Also, i'm an optimist and some devs are proving me right as we speak.

 

[LudensCogitet]

Video games is a hobby, feeling good about playing one isn't taboo, the quality of the content is the problem.

Feeling good about them isn't taboo. Of course you feel good about playing a good game.

My point is that the prevailing "wisdom" amount game developers is that making the player feel good (or feel / experience _something_) is the goal of a video game in itself.

This is a meaningless, shifting goalpost that is actually easier to achieve when your players have lower standards.

 

[Lilura]

It's all a matter of taste, isn't it not?

It's a matter of good taste and bad taste.

For me, we reached the peak with Dark Sun (settings, combat, quest design),

Dark Sun is not peak D&D campaign setting: Greyhawk is. And Dark Sun cRPG represents peak combat and quest design, lmao? Not even close. Fallout smashes it to pieces in every single way.

ToEE(combat), KotC(combat)

Mentioning these two but not JA2 or Silent Storm is a joke, lmao. And KotC is nowhere near on par with ToEE.

 

[JarlFrank]

Because of modern project management practices.

Games with dev teams of 10-20 continue to be more fun than games with dev teams of 100-300.

Yeah I worked in a small team before, and I met a guy at uni who worked at Crytek as part of a 100 people team.

The difference in workflow and who does what kind of work is gigantic.

I worked on complete quests from start to finish: coming up with characters, placing them in the towns and dungeons, writing all their dialogue, writing the quest log entries, even determining what reward you'd get in the end and which encounters you met on the way. One full quest made by one person. All quests were designed like that: someone in the team was assigned to do a quest in location X, and then he/she would come up with the whole thing from scratch. There was brainstorming with other team members, of course, but the final product of your work was all yours.

The guy I met who worked at Crytek worked as narrative designer there and what he did was mostly coordinating the team and making sure all the different writers were on the same page. The way they worked was that the exact same character would have a dozen writers who'd all just write and handful of lines for that character. Each cutscene would be written by a different guy. Nobody in the team could point to one specific character, one specific mission, one specific event etc and say "I made that", the writers and level designers there only made small parts of everything. In the end you'd have one character whose lines were written by 10 different writers and stitched together by the project manager.

Of course you're not going to end up with anything interesting when that's how games are developed. There is no creative process anymore. It's assembly line manufacturing. You make a few little parts but you will never identify with the finished product because you barely had any control over its shape. There's no creativity in a product designed by committee.

 

[LudensCogitet]

The guy I met who worked at Crytek worked as narrative designer there and what he did was mostly coordinating the team and making sure all the different writers were on the same page. The way they worked was that the exact same character would have a dozen writers who'd all just write and handful of lines for that character. Each cutscene would be written by a different guy. Nobody in the team could point to one specific character, one specific mission, one specific event etc and say "I made that", the writers and level designers there only made small parts of everything. In the end you'd have one character whose lines were written by 10 different writers and stitched together by the project manager.

This all sounds like soul draining hell, like it was designed to make lifeless shlock that made the authors miserable.

 

[Lord_Potato]

Sure there were few good AAA rpgs in this period. But lots of good AA and indie titles. I had lots of fun with Underrail, Atom, Age of Decadence, unoffical Fallout 2 successors (Resurrection and Nevada), Shafowrun games, Fallout New Vegas, the Witchers.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Because of modern project management practices.

Games with dev teams of 10-20 continue to be more fun than games with dev teams of 100-300.

Yeah I worked in a small team before, and I met a guy at uni who worked at Crytek as part of a 100 people team.

The difference in workflow and who does what kind of work is gigantic.

I worked on complete quests from start to finish: coming up with characters, placing them in the towns and dungeons, writing all their dialogue, writing the quest log entries, even determining what reward you'd get in the end and which encounters you met on the way. One full quest made by one person. All quests were designed like that: someone in the team was assigned to do a quest in location X, and then he/she would come up with the whole thing from scratch. There was brainstorming with other team members, of course, but the final product of your work was all yours.

The guy I met who worked at Crytek worked as narrative designer there and what he did was mostly coordinating the team and making sure all the different writers were on the same page. The way they worked was that the exact same character would have a dozen writers who'd all just write and handful of lines for that character. Each cutscene would be written by a different guy. Nobody in the team could point to one specific character, one specific mission, one specific event etc and say "I made that", the writers and level designers there only made small parts of everything. In the end you'd have one character whose lines were written by 10 different writers and stitched together by the project manager.

Of course you're not going to end up with anything interesting when that's how games are developed. There is no creative process anymore. It's assembly line manufacturing. You make a few little parts but you will never identify with the finished product because you barely had any control over its shape. There's no creativity in a product designed by committee.

That is the reason a quest NPC in a small indie game more often gives the feeling of conversing, not with a real person, but with an NPC created by a real person. This could be a lesson for big companies, but they seem to be doing fine as it is.

 

[Thonius]

Because devs are lame, they played lame games and thought they are cool (subjective I know, but if you're feed on McDonalds and cola you gonna become fatlard, same with brain food). Also corporative culture.