This has actually been a pretty undersaturated genre for the past 10 years while we've had quite a number of traditional RPGs. Fallout 4 in 2015, Mankind Divided in 2016, Outer Worlds in 2019, and Cyberpunk in 2020, that's pretty much it.
For that matter, Vannevar Bush led a team at MIT that created the Differential Analyzer in the 1930s:The entire assumption to trace steampunk to "The Differential Engine" (who was a split work of Gibson & Sterling) is just a blatant ignorance of works pioneered by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. The term actually was coined way earlier, by writers like Tim Powers and Kevin Jeter.
- 1987 K. W. Jeter in Locus Apr. 57/2
Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for Powers, Blaylock and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of that era; like ‘steam-punks’, perhaps.
That said, mechanical calculations were a thing up till '70, as Curta calculators were mass produced up until then. Gibson mentions them in Pattern Recognition.
Kingdom Come Deliverance (2018) as first person slasher?
yeah , for now it will remain to be seen how much of an rpg this game will be
It will be "RPG" just like in this song:
Also Prey and Brigand: Oaxaca in 2017.
Mechanical men are a common retrofuturist trope.
I don't give a rat's arse about the genre's conventions, but as Tyranicon explained, the whole idea is kinda derp. I mean, they're going full retard with this one, as the nigger on a treadmill example shows. So the last thing anyone will wonder about with this game might be how their automatons work.
“cRPGs, as commonly taken, are not possessing of superior writing, stories, nor characters.”
How does this gem have sub 700 views?
I know!
In fact is even worse - RPG have awful stories because are written by mostly awful writers. Exposing their "skill" in modern games is a great tragedy.
The cyberpunk dystopia we've been expecting since the 1980s already arrived in the 2010s, except with terrible aesthetics compared to iconic 80s cyberpunk such as Max Headroom:
The design problem of ARGs is that they never end.
How does this gem have sub 700 views?
I know!
In fact is even worse - RPG have awful stories because are written by mostly awful writers. Exposing their "skill" in modern games is a great tragedy.
So a few things.
1. Despite a lot of cRPGs being barely disguised books, lots of RPG enjoyers still don't have a true grasp on writing quality.
2. The old wave of cRPG writers seem to be comprised mostly of people who wanted to share their TTRPG campaigns, or failed novelists.
3. The new wave of cRPG writers are people who watch Critical Role and/or former games journalists that weaseled their way into a real job.
4. 50-90% of writing in vidya will probably be automated within the next few years. "No way" you might say, but from what I've seen of how low writers are in the dev totem pole this is absolutely going to be true. This will have the catastrophic consequence of reducing the number of amateur-level writers, or those just starting out. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing in the long run is yet to be seen.
5. The future will be AI slop written for an under-educated mass of dopamine seeking youths trained to be cashcows.
So good news. That cyberpunk dystopia we've been expecting for a century now is right around the corner.
