Editorial IGN cry over spilt RPGs

[DarkUnderlord]

Tags: Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

IGN have taken a look at <a href="http://au.pc.ign.com/articles/101/1019606p1.html">the five best and the five worst</a> RPGs released recently for the PC (they also did Xbox and other consoles as well but meh, find those yourself). Have some selective quoting so you know where this one goes:
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<blockquote>Rather than outline a list of the greatest RPGs ever, we've decided to take a look back at the best and worst the genre has had to offer over the last five years.
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Bethesda Softworks' epic Elder Scrolls roleplaying series...
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Peter Molyneux made a lot of promises about his ambitious roleplaying game and, fortunately for us, he delivered on most of them.
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As great as Oblivion was, it was only a dress rehearsal for Fallout 3.
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BioWare's take on the science fiction roleplaying game may have had some rough spots, but the overall experience was one of the most captivating and original experiences of the year.</blockquote>
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That's the good. Now here's the bad:
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<blockquote>Here's a real piece of crap. Roleplaying games are defined by their characters and their story and Call for Heroes has neither.
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Grind a few levels, warp back to town and sell your loot. Now repeat that formula about a thousand times and you'll have a good idea of what it's like to play The Chosen: Well of Souls.
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Dungeon Lords: Is it fun? No. Is it polished? No. Is it even finished? No.
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As enjoyable as the series has been thus far, Piranha Bytes' Gothic III was a huge letdown.</blockquote>
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Are they doin it rite or doin it rong? You decide!
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Spotted @ <a href="http://www.gamebanshee.com">GameBanshee</a>

 

[gromit]

I've been playing G3 with Community Patch 1.7.2, and it's downright criminal of them to not mention it, given this is a retrospective and not a review. 700 commits makes a big difference, although melee and dialogs are still a little goofy (but thankfully secondary to exploration.)

Calling it one of the five worst is petty harsh even for the vanilla version; there've been some real stinkers in these five years.

 

[Shannow]

They are diong it wrong. It should have been: We all know that recent RPGs sucked. Bad. But there were some that sucked more and some that sucked less. Now instead of presenting you with the usual top ten advertisment drivel as we usually do, we are going to pick some games and more or less arbitrarily divide them into meh and crap:
Meh:
G3, a rough gem that needed lots of polishing and a different engine.
MotB: a rough gem that needed some polishing and a completely different engine.
The Witcher: Did more with the crappy engine than was to be expected. Had some nice attention to detail, but the atrocious combat killed it.
MEh: Needed more sex, boobz, bad one liners and lots of alcohol to be a truly good b-movie persiflage.
Halo: At least you could play the role of master chief.

Crap:
Fable: Molyneux made promises.
Failout3: Nominated for worst dialogue snippets and worst character system in RPGs. Also nominated as most boring gameplay and exploration evar.
Oblivion: Intelligent people didn't even bother playing it. Needed more fixing by the community than G3 although Bethesda didn't have PB's problems.
Dungeon Lords: Wasn't fixed by the community. Otherwise might even have made the meh list.
Gaming journalists: Worst RPG...no...worst game ever. Copying press releases and gushing over the crap that gives the most advertising money is not gaming. It is a fucking crime against humanity.

There, gave this drivel much more attention than it deserved and only because I'm trying to evade serious studying. Need more self-discipline...

 

[MetalCraze]

As great as Oblivion was, it was only a dress rehearsal for Fallout 3.

Hahaha oh wow - I already see this when Bethesda churns out their next piece of shit that is best game of all time this year
"As great as Fallout 3 was, it was only a dress rehearsal for Elder Scrolls 5"

Bethesda Softworks' epic Elder Scrolls roleplaying series

Peter Molyneux made a lot of promises about his ambitious roleplaying game and, fortunately for us, he delivered on most of them.

Roleplaying games are defined by their characters and their story

So basically what IGN retards are saying is that only those games that let you LARP like those morons in the woods while sitting in the comfort of your basement - are to be considered RPGs?

Also 5 years? It looks more like "best game evers of 2008" and stuff related to that hype.

 

[Rhalle]

As much as people round the Kodex hate Oblivion, I have to defend it as being as basically being an old-school title (at least in 2009), real RPG or not.

And to be honest, it makes me sad to know that TESV will be Fallout3 with swords (unsheathed this time, surely-- they will just disappear into thin air with a flick of the mouse wheel); that is, it will be /4 the length of Oblivion, have ten times the elided shit for DLC, and feature a lazy MMO-like world construction with cookie-cutter 'points of interest'.

Moreover, it will be absolutely chock full of colorless, insipid, pro forma imitation Bioware boilerplate dialogue trees that consoletards will insist on appreciating as gaming art, since the tards loved them so much in (and bought so many copies of) FO3.

All FO3 has is a consistent and realized aesthetic; without the visuals the game is garbage. Mass Effect-- a bargain bin shooter with little actual game content but nice cinematics and characters that were not just FedEx terminals-- was much better, relatively speaking.

 

[JarlFrank]

The games on the "bad" list are actually better than the games on the "good" list. At least Gothic 3 is a LOT better than FO3 and Oblivion, and Dungeon Lords was more enjoyable than Oblivion too. Also, funny how the other two games on the "Boo, this sucks" list are cheap Diablo clones nobody ever heard of. Oh, and *all* of the games on the "boo this sucks" list had been made by smaller developers who don't have the hype and bribe budget that the big ones who made it into the "BEST EVAR" list.

Not surprising.

 

[MetalCraze]

Oblivion, I have to defend it as being as basically being an old-school title (at least in 2009)

Old school is now 3 years old? What
No, sorry man - old school title is KotOR, not this shit

 

[Emotional Vampire]

Now look what you've done, my brain is coming out of my ears

 

[Azrael the cat]

Oblivion, I have to defend it as being as basically being an old-school title (at least in 2009)

Old school is now 3 years old? What
No, sorry man - old school title is KotOR, not this shit

Well Arena did come out quite a while ago now. Bethesda just hasn't caught up to the next-gen gameplay that was made possible by the technical advances that followed Arena, such as turn-based gaming, and Interplay-style dialogue trees.

 

[Rhalle]

Yeah, it's not old-school in the KOTOR or BG2 sort of way, I agree.

But it seems to me that Oblivion-- with its huge single-box content and proper expansions and legitimate PC pedigree with a direct line of descent-- marks the the end of an era, and so might very well be justifiably lumped with the older games.

This especially once we get a full picture of FO3's sorry influence on the genre in the coming years.

Fallout 3, the hype triumphant, wrongly will be viewed as revitalizing an outdated genre and will be the granddaddy of a vast number of episodic, DLC-riddled cinematic ShooteRPGs for morons.

So to me it seems that it's Oblivion that really stands on the threshold, that it marks a definite transition from a PC world to a console world; and, moreover, that it still points backwards more than it does forwards.

Even with its keyword dialogue and actiony combat, Oblivion will ultimately appear to belong in the company of Baldur's Gate, believe it or not, more than it will with whatever ShooteRPG cash grab flavor of the month we will see, every damn month, in the coming years.

Like the man says, 'Oblivion was just a warmup': warming up for 1/4 the content, complete consolification, the complete absence of any text that takes more than one second to read-- much less engaging text or difficult themes, psuedo-RPGness with fourth-grade reading level branching trees (one day they will all just switch to colors so there will be no reading-- doesn't AP stoop to this ridiculous bullshit already?) and a veritable fucking tsunami of nickel-and-dime DLC.

Once the prodigious and retarded spawn of FO3 hammers the shelves (and digital distributers) over the next decade-- this unfortunately includes TESV-- we will be begging for an Oblivion. Seriously.

 

[SerratedBiz]

In b4 Oblivion is just as bad as FO.

 

[JarlFrank]

Actually Oblivion was even more dumbed down than FO3.
FO3 at least was more fun to play than Oblivion. Both were shit, though, especially design-wise. You cannot tell me that Oblivion's horrible HORRIBLE level scaling, quest compass and popup windows can in any way be associated with oldschool RPGs.

 

[Elite]

But it seems to me that Oblivion-- with its huge single-box content and proper expansions and legitimate PC pedigree with a direct line of descent-- marks the the end of an era, and so might very well be justifiably lumped with the older games.

A thousand copy-pasted hyper-generic dungeons are a poor substitute for content.

But yes, you're right that it had solid expansions. Like the super important "Horse Armor" download.

 

[Claw]

Random comment:

It never ceases to amaze me how popular Fo3 is. There are just so many people who seem to love it. They're everywhere, <s>like</s> vermin.

 

[Rhalle]

But it seems to me that Oblivion-- with its huge single-box content and proper expansions and legitimate PC pedigree with a direct line of descent-- marks the the end of an era, and so might very well be justifiably lumped with the older games.

A thousand copy-pasted hyper-generic dungeons are a poor substitute for content.

But yes, you're right that it had solid expansions. Like the super important "Horse Armor" download.

Random dungeons as side-content didn't bother me that much, to be honest.

And, arguably, Horse Armor was the least offensive piece of DLC we will ever see: it came (and was presumably created) after the game was released as a response to what the community wanted.

From now on, however, the guys in marketing will be intentionally developing bits of crap in parallel with the main game for sale later, as well as just cutting things out of the main title in order to sell it as 'post-release' content if it looks like they need to take up some slack for the profit margin.