Psilon said:
I'd probably pick EVN, Geneforge 2, and TOEE as my Big Three this year.
I'm with Psilon here. Those are my three picks, again because there's really nothing better. EVN is hardly an RPG--Saint only reviewed it in the first place because the game calls itself an RPG. ToEE is great and all, but it also is lacking in the RPG department and probably isn't the game I was building it up to be in my mind. Geneforge 2 is neat, but why is the only game released this year that's really good not a major box-on-shelves title?
Bah. Here's hoping 2004 knocks our socks off... though there's nothing on the horizon that really looks neat. Vampire might be good, but it's still not my dream game. Granted, there's a bajillion unannounced projects we're all salivating at, but given that they're still unannounced, the odds of them coming out in 2004 are slim. Frankly, I think the coming year will probably suck, too, barring something really unexpected coming out of left field (Troika: "Hey, guys! We made Fallout 3 after all. It's PC exclusive, single player, turn based and we're distributing it free via the web! Enjoy!"). Strap those RPG belts tighter and think up yet another variant you haven't played in Fallout yet.
So basically, when people talk to you about how Fallout and Diablo revitalised the RPG genre, giving us the vigorous genre we all enjoy today, punch them in the face. Frankly, the vaunted RPG renaissance lasted from Fallout to Fallout 2 and then pretty much fizzled out. Yeah, Planescape Torment was good, but it was more of an adventure game with bits of horrible combat tossed in. Ditto Arcanum, though with some more freedom and probably a worse interface. There are isolated bits of goodness here and there, but make no mistake: this remains an extremely lean time for quality CRPGs. Were I more inclined towards dramatics, I might even say it's a fucking Dark Age.
The cause for this, I think, certainly does not lie in a lack of titles being produced. Looking only at the sheer volume of games being made, you'd think RPG fans would be hopping with joy. The problem is more that the bar seems to have been lowered. RPG-starved gamers played Baldur's Gate waaaaay back in 1998 and, since they didn't have anything better to play with, loved it. BioWare, seeing how well received their frankly average game was, started getting full of themselves, thinking they were pretty hot shit when it comes to making CRPGs. Other developers follow suit: How hard can it be to make a completely linear game in a hackneyed fantasy setting where plot holes aren't a problem ("Hold on, Writer Ted. This part makes no sense." "Don't sweat it, Writer Tom! We'll explain it all away with magic! That particular character happened to have an appropriate kind of Talisman at the time." "Hey, great, Ted! Let's go have a drink at the bar downstairs to celebrate mediocrity!") and all you need to keep the player's attention is lots of overpowered magical items (see how handy magic is?) and elaborate spell effects (the infamous
particle effecks)? Not very fucking hard at all, they say!
CRPG developers think they can get away with making CRPGs that are really just adventure games (though, hell, those could stand a touch of freeform gameplay, too. What if Guybrush wants to join with LeChuck and conquer the Carribean, huh?) with combat tossed in. Why? Because BioWare has distilled it to a science and all their products sell enough copies that if you lined them up and stacked them up into a neat wall in orbit, you could block out the very sun. And that's why we're just not getting the games we want to play.
The problem here is that unlike problems in BioWare's games, nobody's left us a convenient journal or datapad explaining exactly what we have to do to get past this challenge. Right now, all the big name developers are, well, BioWare. With Black Isle dead (hey, I thought they could have made something decent, given the chance), the only places we might get any decent games are Troika--who can't get a decent publisher to save their lives--or Russian/Polish/Whatever companies who all seem to want to make ripoffs of Fallout but with a twist--horribly broken English! Ausir rocks pretty hard, sure, but he can't translate all these games. And I don't even want to think of mentioning the reprehensible Japanese developers. The less said about them, the better.
So, what's our goal: good RPGs. How do we get those? Well, we need companies to make good RPGs. Fine, but how do you make a good RPG? Ah, that's where it gets tricky. People who know what they're talking about can tell you what makes a good RPG. We've gone over it endlessly all over these forums. But the people who are essentially leading the CRPG genre at the moment don't know. All BioWare can do is make the same game again and again with different names for NPCs and items. What we need is a breath of fresh air into the genre, something that's not a real time combat focused fantasy CRPG. And yes, folks, Star Wars most definitely counts as fantasy. We need developers to have freedom to make the game they want to make: no publisher, manager or liscence owner should ever be in a position to limit a development team in the production of their game just because they're looking for a
SLAM DUNK instead of an actual
good game. That leads to Icewind Dale games aplenty. And we need publishers, developers, reviewers, retailers and most importantly consumers--hey, this whole economy revolves around those of us actually exchanging money for products and services, right?--to understand what a real CRPG is, because it sure as hell isn't what we're getting now.