Interview Avellone, Ziets, Sawyer, Vincke and Kurvitz on the future of RPGs at Kotaku UK and PC Gamer

[Lurker47]

Ziets is cool, but this opinion is pretty decline. Original Twilight Zone >>> nearly any modern television program. The analogy makes just about the opposite point he wants it to, in my eyes.

No, it is not. I love Twilight Zone to death, but that's because there are few great episodes in the midst of bad fiction. What I can't accept is this statement that tv series and cRPGs both improved:

TV got better and came into its own because creators learned what worked best for their medium, but in the early days, they had to start with what they knew. I see RPGs in much the same way.

That depends. FO, FO2, Arcanum, and PS:T, moved the genre foward, added more stuff and made it more sophisticated in certain aspects. But the recent airpeegees of the likes of Obsidian are bad.

The Twilight Zone may not have had a great story but it was at least charming and not up its own ass. Because of that, simple, goofy sci-fi stories from the 1950's >>>> modern TV shows.

 

[Beastro]

Ziets is cool, but this opinion is pretty decline. Original Twilight Zone >>> nearly any modern television program. The analogy makes just about the opposite point he wants it to, in my eyes.

No, it is not. I love Twilight Zone to death, but that's because there are few great episodes in the midst of bad fiction. What I can't accept is this statement that tv series and cRPGs both improved:

TV got better and came into its own because creators learned what worked best for their medium, but in the early days, they had to start with what they knew. I see RPGs in much the same way.

That depends. FO, FO2, Arcanum, and PS:T, moved the genre foward, added more stuff and made it more sophisticated in certain aspects. But the recent airpeegees of the likes of Obsidian are bad.

The Twilight Zone may not have had a great story but it was at least charming and not up its own ass. Because of that, simple, goofy sci-fi stories from the 1950's >>>> modern TV shows.

You haven't watched it enough then. It had plenty of episodes where it was up it's own ass, usually smashing you over the head with near nonexistant symbolism and allegory behind it's message (Four O'Clock stands out to me, while the old Outer Limits was worse in it's bad episodes)

What made a lot of shows back then stand out was that the production values were terrible that episodes stood out and shone because of the story and writing. Look at the Outer Limit's episode Soldier to see what I mean, which runs spot on as a short story adaptation involving Michael Ansara dressed up like this:

And yet it's such a damn great episode of TV precisely because the main focus is on the Sci-Fi ideas around the idea of a man traveling back in time and being faced with peaceful, modern society. Hell, for once even being able to communicate and learn the guys language take up a big part of the episode, and it's as interesting to watch as the rest of the episode.

It's for this reason that Star Trek TOS stands out in poeple's minds despite being even sillier in it's own way given it's place deeper into the 60s.

IMO, the problem today with TV and movies is comparable to the problem in games over how much graphics dominate, sucking up all the money and manpower leaving things like AI frozen in the 90s.

 

[Quantomas]

All this talk of "tolkienistic fantasy" here and there, ignores the reason why most people like fantasy, the romantic individualism. [..] I mean the notion that an individual has value and can change things based on will power and strength alone.

DeepOcean I agree with this assessment, and I would add that this kind of romanticism is not only good business, it's the decent way to treat other human beings (in this case your players). Trying to persuade people that they are powerless is the ultimate kind of alienation -- you are not merely depriving them of the tangible fruits of their labor, you are trying to persuade them that there are no fruits of their labor, tangible or otherwise, everything is fruitless and everyone is powerless. Even if this were true (and I don't think it is), it is a miserable truth that can be overcome only if we disbelieve. Games are all educational, and one of the best lessons they can teach is confidence and commitment to improvement.

Trying to persuade people that they are powerless is the ultimate kind of alienation

What's interesting is what people do when put in such a position - they rebel.

Ultimately people don't believe in a world that is causalistic and chaotic but rather that they can shape their destiny.

MRY hit the nail on the head. You have to encourage and educate people. When people play games they search for something.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

You haven't watched it enough then. It had plenty of episodes where it was up it's own ass, usually smashing you over the head with near nonexistant symbolism and allegory behind it's message (Four O'Clock stands out to me, while the old Outer Limits was worse in it's bad episodes).

This. Imagine if they removed all the bad filler episodes.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

DeepOcean I agree with this assessment, and I would add that this kind of romanticism is not only good business, it's the decent way to treat other human beings (in this case your players). Trying to persuade people that they are powerless is the ultimate kind of alienation -- you are not merely depriving them of the tangible fruits of their labor, you are trying to persuade them that there are no fruits of their labor, tangible or otherwise, everything is fruitless and everyone is powerless. Even if this were true (and I don't think it is), it is a miserable truth that can be overcome only if we disbelieve. Games are all educational, and one of the best lessons they can teach is confidence and commitment to improvement.

On the contrary. There is nothing decent about stroking people’s ego and reinforcing the misguided notion that they are special and deserve the world on a silver platter. cRPG gameplay revolves around models the represents peoples abilities in the real world. You reinforce this snowflake mindset long enough and will they start to believe in it, becoming completely unprepared to deal with the harsh realities of life. The developer is not helping anyone. He is helping himself by feeding them comforting lies to make a profit and corrupting their character in the process.

Players are so spoiled by developers nowadays that character progression is meaningless. In most games, they player starts as a chosen one so you can’t tell the difference when game progresses. It never feels like you earned anything. Consequently, when there is real character progression and the player need to earn his progression, he can’t do, because it feels impossible. It shouldn’t, but their tolerance to frustration is in shambles, so what should be hard is perceived as impossible.

In a twisted and cynical way the romantic notion reinforces the idea that regular people are powerless, because you can only achieve something if you are special in some unbelievable fashion that has nothing to do with the harsh reality of things. Naturally it becomes a form of self-defeating and escapist delusion. It brings momentary relief to the insecure but it makes him worse on the long term. You can teach people the value of work and how to surpass obstacles and scarcity of resources, by the way to convey this message in gameplay habits is precisely the opposite of what you are saying. Romanticism will not give people hope. It will give them delusion and make then even more alienated than they already are. They have already being told by the rest of society at large that everyone is special and deserves a trophy. You don’t need games for that.

 

[Mr. Hiver]

No.

Because when you do it in that way it means you are doing it badly.
Thats the cheap, superficial, lousy, one dimensional approach i was talking about previously.

Anyway, considering for what kind of sites the interviews were made for, its not a great surprise what they focus on.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

No. Because when you do it in that way it means you are doing it badly. Thats the cheap, superficial, lousy, one dimensional approach i was talking about previously.

There is no "Hero" archetype in AoD, Hiver.

 

[Blaine]

To Ziets, this slow expansion beyond the realm of twenty-sided dice

This is what im talking about. RNG is holding genre back

-t. Path of Exile aficionado

 

[Mr. Hiver]

No. Because when you do it in that way it means you are doing it badly. Thats the cheap, superficial, lousy, one dimensional approach i was talking about previously.

There is no "Hero" archetype in AoD, Hiver.

I was talking about your description of a Hero, NOT about what AoD had or didnt have.

And you sure as fuck dont play a regular person role in AOD either. You are IN FACT playing a hero archetype in AoD, only NOT of that dumb superficial one dimensional variety as you understand it. Champion of Madoran arena, Grey Eminence of Trader guild plots, Kingmaker of factions, Assasin extraordinare, killer of fucking Gods and so on and so on.
Learn what the term "archetype" really means and stop confusing it for some superficial form of it.

 

[Mr. Hiver]

Cant edit,

Im having a bad hair day so dont piss me off even more. The bad hair consists of three euros in my pocket and some assholes not paying me for last month work already done. Im - this close to start planning night raids with canisters of gasoline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

You start in a common day in Theron - leading into meeting fabulous forces of Quantari demon Gods, other Godlike entities and mythical technologies. And you better get a decisive victory or you get to watch one of many death screens. Admittedly AoD is not much about bestowing boons upon fellow men, unless they are made out of sharp steel, poison and a few actual booms of alchemical bombs, but someone usually prospers when someone else doesnt.

In laying out the monomyth, Campbell describes a number of stages or steps along this journey.

The hero starts in the ordinary world, and receives a call to enter an unusual world of strange powers and events (a call to adventure).
If the hero accepts the call to enter this strange world, the hero must face tasks and trials (a road of trials), and may have to face these trials alone, or may have assistance.

Single or party based, eh?

"At its most intense, the hero must survive a severe challenge," (Ring any bells?) "often with help earned along the journey." (Gee, isnt that familiar?)

"If the hero survives, the hero may achieve a great gift (the goal or "boon"), which often results in the discovery of important self-knowledge.
The hero must then decide whether to return with this boon (the return to the ordinary world), often facing challenges on the return journey. If the hero is successful in returning, the boon or gift may be used to improve the world (the application of the boon)."

Now, what exact form this archetype takes is changeable and adaptable to myriads of conditions, but the core of this archetypal myth remains the same across all time and all cultures of humanity.
Because it is an ideal of meaningful existence.

 

[MRY]

In a twisted and cynical way the romantic notion reinforces the idea that regular people are powerless, because you can only achieve something if you are special in some unbelievable fashion that has nothing to do with the harsh reality of things.

I think you're missing the gist of what I'm saying. In my opinion, the most powerful romantic individualism is the picaresque story, where the protagonist starts with nothing -- often not even with any special skills, though sometimes he has those -- and achieves great things despite these humble beginnings due to a mix of hard work, cheekiness, and ability to see through the hypocrisy of the world around him. Another powerful romantic individualist story is the Horatio Alger one, which again begins with a character who has nothing except his moral virtue and work ethic. Neither of these stories depend upon, and indeed they would undermined by, the protagonist having divine favor at the outset. (Indeed, this is one of many ways in which the Harry Potter books are "broken" from a narrative standpoint, though they get by with clever naming and adolescent pleasures.)

The kind of stories that I was expressing distaste for are less common in games than in literature, but they're the ones that imply that the protagonist's striving was all for nothing, that it served only to open him up to greater humiliation and sadness, and that in the end we're all just slaves to impersonal forces and mindless passions.

 

[mondblut]

I wonder how many times they have lauded "streamlining" and pined for perfect "roleplaying" of a holodeck as the medium's ideal?

Protip ya'll - this genre is called "CRPG", not "CLARP".

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

In my opinion, the most powerful romantic individualism is the picaresque story, where the protagonist starts with nothing -- often not even with any special skills, though sometimes he has those -- and achieves great things despite these humble beginnings due to a mix of hard work, cheekiness, and ability to see through the hypocrisy of the world around him

Huh? That's a very glass-half-full description of the genre. More often they end how they started, and if something is achieved by the protagonist, it's by virtue of luck rather than character. But I'd say the heart of a picaresque story is that you have a flawed but likable protagonist with a serious learning disability (the classic picaro never learns!), and the main thrust of these stories is more about the fickleness of fortune than the hero getting ahead or accomplishing anything. Something like, say, Tom Jones, is a picaresque with a twist, but even Tom only gets part of his happy ending by being a generally nice guy, the rest is because he had the good luck to have the right mother. To the extent our picaro is redeemed either by religion or by love or by money, it's kind of a departure. The classic picaresque ending has the hero right back where he started.

You have to squint pretty hard to see the picaresque in the same light as a Horatio Alger story, except insofar is neither genre contains much in the way of character growth. A cock-eyed optimist might say the moral of an Alger story is that virtue and tenacity can accomplish anything, but what I take from Alger is that character is destiny: his heroes practically emerge from the womb brimming with the protestant work ethic, little embryonic eagle scouts. I don't think that's a particularly helpful lesson.

Plus, nihilistic stories serve a purpose, too. After all, to some extent we are all slaves to impersonal forces and mindless passions. We need stories where the striving was all for naught as a kind of vaccination, because it's inevitable that people will face these circumstances in real life. Romantic individualism does not prepare you and there's nothing quite so broken as a romantic who's had his dreams crushed.

Equanimity is at least as important as tenacity and romantic individualism can be somewhat counterproductive at fostering the former. Not sure how you'd ever work this into a game and still make it fun, though.

 

[zaper]

What Kurvitz wants to see is a complete revolution, imagining RPGs that take decades or even a hundred years to make, flagging and reacting to every tiny thing you do. He envisions RPGs becoming a new mode of literature—programmed literature—putting programmers and novelists together to tell stories that literally span generations. It’s improbably ambitious and far-fetched, but still incredibly tantalising.

This, but less developer-centric.

I don't want to read someone's idea of what a good story is, I want to make my own tale through my deeds and decisions.

I don't want to be an spectator of "powerful cinematic experiences in gaming", I want action and reaction, with long term consequences.

I don't want to be the slave of a fixed plot with a few cosmetic branches on the way. I want to create a character from scratch and try to make my mark on a world. I want to die without succeeding and then create a new character to try it again, and perhaps pass through the looted body of the previous character one day. Or find that it has been turned into a zombie.

That's why UO RP servers were the thing that most captivated my imagination. Playing with the notion that permadeath was just around the corner, the friendships and rivalries that came with it, the evolving timeline which you could influence with your character's actions, the plots and betrayals, the stakes...

To this day, nothing compares to it.

Of course, I'm being fucking nostalgic. There were a lot of problems as well, some which persist to this day, others that got even worse.

But at its best moments, it was the greatest fucking thing in the world, something so compelling and engaging that I would put everything aside just to experience.

 

[ScrotumBroth]

Chasing the dragon comes with the RPG territory.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

I don't want to read someone's idea of what a good story is, I want to make my own tale through my deeds and decisions.

I don't want to play in egotistical themepark either. The alternative to a bad story is not generic fiction, but a good story. The freedom of gameplay means nothing if you don't care about the characters and the gameworld.

 

[Lurker47]

Ziets is cool, but this opinion is pretty decline. Original Twilight Zone >>> nearly any modern television program. The analogy makes just about the opposite point he wants it to, in my eyes.

No, it is not. I love Twilight Zone to death, but that's because there are few great episodes in the midst of bad fiction. What I can't accept is this statement that tv series and cRPGs both improved:

TV got better and came into its own because creators learned what worked best for their medium, but in the early days, they had to start with what they knew. I see RPGs in much the same way.

That depends. FO, FO2, Arcanum, and PS:T, moved the genre foward, added more stuff and made it more sophisticated in certain aspects. But the recent airpeegees of the likes of Obsidian are bad.

The Twilight Zone may not have had a great story but it was at least charming and not up its own ass. Because of that, simple, goofy sci-fi stories from the 1950's >>>> modern TV shows.

You haven't watched it enough then. It had plenty of episodes where it was up it's own ass, usually smashing you over the head with near nonexistant symbolism and allegory behind it's message (Four O'Clock stands out to me, while the old Outer Limits was worse in it's bad episodes)

What made a lot of shows back then stand out was that the production values were terrible that episodes stood out and shone because of the story and writing. Look at the Outer Limit's episode Soldier to see what I mean, which runs spot on as a short story adaptation involving Michael Ansara dressed up like this:

And yet it's such a damn great episode of TV precisely because the main focus is on the Sci-Fi ideas around the idea of a man traveling back in time and being faced with peaceful, modern society. Hell, for once even being able to communicate and learn the guys language take up a big part of the episode, and it's as interesting to watch as the rest of the episode.

It's for this reason that Star Trek TOS stands out in poeple's minds despite being even sillier in it's own way given it's place deeper into the 60s.

IMO, the problem today with TV and movies is comparable to the problem in games over how much graphics dominate, sucking up all the money and manpower leaving things like AI frozen in the 90s.

It's still better than shit like Black Mirror. Twilight Zone never felt pretentious to me; on-the-nose, maybe but I just don't get the vibe of SUPER SERIOUS SELF IMPORTANCE THESE ARE FOR REAL STORIES YOU GUYS

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

It's still better than shit like Black Mirror. Twilight Zone never felt pretentious to me; on-the-nose, maybe but I just don't get the vibe of SUPER SERIOUS SELF IMPORTANCE THESE ARE FOR REAL STORIES YOU GUYS

But it often took itself incredibly seriously and some of those Rod Serling monologues were super self-important, in some cases much more so than Black Mirror. Go watch the fallout shelter episode.

If you'd watched The Twilight Zone at the time it came out, you would've objected to the same things you're mentioning with Black Mirror. I think the cheap (by the standards of today) production values are misleading you by giving you the sense that The Twilight Zone was much campier than it ever intended to be.

 

[Beastro]

It had a spirit that was for the most part in balance, but it's clear Serling had some ardent opinions on things that leaked through, especially in his monologues.

He made a good show, but I doubt he'd have been someone enjoyable to be around personally, most likely chewing your eat off telling you how he thought things should be,

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

If you'd watched The Twilight Zone at the time it came out, you would've objected to the same things you're mentioning with Black Mirror.

"But is old so is different" pretentious logic. In the movies thread there are dozens of glowing reviews of these bad, awful movies. People believe that they are more sophisticated for watching old movies that most people ignore nowadays. They are biased by time, obscurity. The same guy who will not hesitate for a second to trash a recent cash grab will recommend a obvious cliche movie from the 70s. 90% of their recomendations is tripe. I don't even pay attention to their excuses anymore. Their rationalizations are all made up with anti-contemporary bullshit conjured up from thin air. The main difference between The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror is that the first one has few great episodes among an ungodly amount of filler episodes, and most of the great episodes all contain some sort of social commentary, moral lessons, etc., while in the last you have fewer episodes, but they don't vary so much in quality and are more focused on the potential dangers of technology. Any person who badmouth Black Mirror and praises The Twilight Zone is deluded and can be safely ignored.

 

[Fenix]

SF-titles like Mass Effect

Is is really sci-fi?
Because I feel it's fantasy in disguise.

Basically, I don't think we need a revolution, but rather we need the mainstream (of RPGs, which in itself is a niche) to include more diversity from the existing, more diverse niche-titles

And you need a revolution to make this happen.

Quite the opposite - Vincke and the furry guy can talk about the future of RPGs, but not Avellone, Sawyer and Ziets - they haven't had a voice in shaping the future of RPGs for a long time, their last projects were just coasting on nostalgia and slightly updated old mechanics.

That's why I mentioned Age of Decadence and Underrail, because those guys did more for the future of RPGs but still the journos keep ignoring them and keep asking irrelevant people what they think about the direction, velocity and the destination of a train as they watch it leaving the station with a new engine driver, new conductors and passengers.

Sort of disagree. They still did more for genre then Stig, who just adhered to the roots and supported genre while it was in coma.

Underrail's new exp system was quite innovative

Agree, but I'm sure some of its parts existed before.

 

[DalekFlay]

Reading this entire thread over breakfast pork omelette the only thing obvious is that people's ideas about incline are as varied as their ideas about women and politics. I'm sure Pillars of Eternity was someone's holy grail of cRPG incline while for me it was kind of meh. On the contrary the Shadowrun games rubbed my belly like a newborn pup while I've seen others here call them shit.

Unlike, say... a Deus Ex clone, which would be fairly straightforward, a "classic cRPG revival game!" has a lot more questions around it and decisions to make. Each of those decisions will please one person and displease another. Add in a flooded market and the fact most people are also playing modern games too (admit it you fucks) and you have a recipe for risk which even something as seemingly safe as Pillars 2 couldn't avoid.

 

[Lurker47]

It's still better than shit like Black Mirror. Twilight Zone never felt pretentious to me; on-the-nose, maybe but I just don't get the vibe of SUPER SERIOUS SELF IMPORTANCE THESE ARE FOR REAL STORIES YOU GUYS

But it often took itself incredibly seriously and some of those Rod Serling monologues were super self-important, in some cases much more so than Black Mirror. Go watch the fallout shelter episode.

If you'd watched The Twilight Zone at the time it came out, you would've objected to the same things you're mentioning with Black Mirror. I think the cheap (by the standards of today) production values are misleading you by giving you the sense that The Twilight Zone was much campier than it ever intended to be.

It had a spirit that was for the most part in balance, but it's clear Serling had some ardent opinions on things that leaked through, especially in his monologues.

He made a good show, but I doubt he'd have been someone enjoyable to be around personally, most likely chewing your eat off telling you how he thought things should be,

Honestly, I think it had more to do with the presentation. Black Mirror episodes feel like little HBO miniseries and try to have "denser plots", I guess. Twilight Zone was a pretty cut-and-dry anthology set-up which is a little easier to stomach. I admit a lot of it comes from stuff that wasn't intentional (like the effects) but the structure makes it feel a lot more humble too.

A lot of modern TV feels like it's written by people who wanted to write a book but didn't and so they cram in so much surface level shit that can be "analyzed". Much of this comes from my own sense of intuition but I've never seen a 15 minute analysis of a single character in a Twilight Zone episode. I think, in part, that's due to how it's written though there's obviously other factors.

 

[Fenix]

Does it really do what it was intended to do?

It does.

Future is bright.

Future is grim, We all gonna die.

A lot of RPGs in unique settings are coming out soon and if they succeed more will follow.

And that's a rare moment since late 90s, and on the other hand cusualisation and process of merging genres in one huge non-distinctive mainstream monster meatball whare you have everything and and in same time nothing continues.
And which vector will win is a big mystery even for huge optimists.

They should feel bad about themselves.

Probably they don't because they feel like "I gave birth to you, so I could kill you if I want".

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

It does.

It reduces a little, because each oddity has a limit. This allows the player to do grind until he hits the limit.

Future is grim, We all gonna die.

Common misconception about the meaning of life. If a life has a meaning, the fact that it ends does not make it vain. Conversely, if a life has no meaning, it can be extended forever and will still be worthless.

Probably they don't because they feel like "I gave birth to you, so I could kill you if I want".

They didn't give birth to the cRPG genre or the standards of the genre, so they have no right to kill it. They only thing they can kill is their own reputation.