Davaris
RPGs cost a lot of effort even without graphics. Writing a cohesive, interesting world and characters, a large amount of side content (because the audience of RPG pretty much makes it mandatory to have it and will bitch about any game being too short. It's already a miracle Fallout 1 could become the cult classic it is despite the lack of content, and loads of codexers in fact prefer Fallout 2 because it has "more content" despite much of it being garbage content like the hubologists), balancing systems which requires a decent amount of eating your own dog food or having other people play test..
I know the history of Fallout's development and the scrapping of GURPS, but truthfully, so what? It doesn't change the fact that most of the top 10 games have really bad gameplay and Fallout is one among them. I don't look at the why but the final result. RPG as a genre got a notoriety for clunk, jank and exploiting and it's really not for no reason.
No, nobody comes into game development looking into it as a get rich quick strategy but people still money to live. Most people can't just leave their day job so they rely on external funds, traditionally this was publisher funding devs so profitability of games always mattered and a niche nobody wants to deal with is not going to see much funding. Crowdfunding might help your vision of randos making their own games, but for now most of it is used to fund known crappy aimless veterans like Obsidian rather than people like Styg (in fact, Underrail wasn't crowdfunded and is one of those rare case of people putting their own blood and sweat and taking some financial risks of their own).
Anyone HERE could could make RPGs exactly the way they like in their spare time, if they didn't care about graphics. Caring about graphics is what stops everyone doing it and that is my point.
What stops people is talent, interest and financial security (the latter determines how likely someone is to just outright quit their day job and put blood into making something of their own if they were neither employed by a studio or funded by kickstarter).
Even if you could discard 1 and 3, interest still matters. "Make rpg the way they like" is a workable tagline for people who work as game devs but when you say anyone here you're losing it. Most people want to play games, not make them. The idea of putting the amount of effort you have to work into a RPG for a game that you wouldn't even be interested to play because you know it from the back of your hand as your creation is not exciting many.
And finally, the image of people like Jeff Vogel can only come to mind when you come up with the idea that anyone could make their dream RPGs provided they don't care about graphics. No, not anyone can. The talent/skill criterium comes up first.
Vogel's games are so average, in every way outside of C&C, it's hard to understand how he managed to keep reselling the same reskinned shit over the years. Writing is barely passable, there isn't much charm to the characters and the vocabulary is rather basic. Geneforge's setting is interesting but that's about it. Combat is neither horrible nor great, just working, albeit getting long in the tooth and repetitive after a while but so are most RPGs so I'll cut it some slack.
Ultimately seeing your dream rpgs being made on this very real planet earth is more akin to seeing the right alignment of the stars that happens once every millenias. There is just too many circumstances that must be gotten right before someone out there, with the right level of talent, skill and taste, gets the will to make something and succeeds.
And so far, much of crowdfunding got people to feed on nostalgia drivel that doesn't fully understand what made the classics great despite their many many flaws. Instead of pioneering the genre the way the originals did, to add onto the genre and not just remain stagnant, they just ape them in all the wrong ways.
When I look at the gameplay mechanics of something like Wasteland 2 I feel appalled. This is as deep as they think a game with so much combat needs to be? So fucking boring.
Games like Fallout, Arcanum were great in spite of their mediocre, repetitive mechanics because they pioneered many things. They're among the first games with so much reactivity and freedom not just of exploration but action and branching within quests. They were cause of a lot of "you can actually do this in a game?" moments that can't be reproduced. It's like virginity, you don't get it back after experiencing sex.
The genre is stuck with many devs just trying hard to mimick a certain era of RPGs without understanding context or desire to push the genre forward.
Graphics whoring really has nothing to do with the general stagnation that goes way past the world of AAA shit regurgitated by Bioware and Bethesda.
RPGs are difficult to make right, there's naturally loads less great amateur attempts than, say, platformers. Edmund McMillen is making a decent living out of games whose designs look ugly, low prod value and nasty on purpose. There's no reason why RPGs devs couldn't.
Your insistence on blaming graphics is just the blinders fans of the genre put on to avoid looking at the convoluted history of the genre (which includes the constant joke question "what is a rpg" that couldn't exist for other game genres because other genres never had any identity issues) and the fact that basically all the great games of their own top 10 are things they would themselves often describe as "flawed, unpolished gems" because reasonable people realize even those great games had some serious issues going that needed to be fixed. And the fix for PST wasn't to remove most combat entirely the way TTON did, lol, wtf. The biggest issue of the genre is that people who were responsible for its classics don't even understand what made their own games great to begin with, and what part needed to be fixed, and how. TTON didn't turn into garbage because they put too much budget into graphics. It was garbage because they didn't know what they were doing. Just the choice of setting (numenara) was already starting from the wrong foot. Numenara has no charm whatsoever.
@
hpstg
When other games add what they call "rpg elements" it's usually to the detriment of the game itself and added as padding to make the game lengthier, which only contributes negatively to the general perception of the genre itself.
