Felipepepe on the history of the term "CRPG"

[Atlantico]

Eh, if this was real-time only I would agree, but pause makes it both tactical and manageable enough (which is more than you can say for some blobbers).

Unlike "blobbers" RTWP games actually exist.

"Blobber" is a made up bullshit term that you can't even define. Faggit

 

[luj1]

Unlike "blobbers" RTWP games actually exist.

"Blobber" is a made up bullshit term that you can't even define. Faggit

I used to prefer "dungeon crawler"

 

[Roguey]

Not everyone was so idiot in the late '90s. Fallout 2 was published in the end of 1998.

Fallout was a b-title no one was paying attention to so Tim Cain could do whatever he wanted.

Guys like Sawyer and Gaider have mentioned that turn-based games died out because retailers refused to order them in large amounts based on the (incorrect) vibe that they were archaic. Fallout Tactics, real-time with a clumsy turn-based option. Arcanum, another real-time mode. Did get away with turn-based ToEE which also got hit by the retailer lack of enthusiasm.

 

[CyberWhale]

Japs don't play computer games, therefore JRPGs can not be CRPGs.

Surely they do play console RPGs.

 

[luj1]

Not everyone was so idiot in the late '90s. Fallout 2 was published in the end of 1998.

Fallout was a b-title no one was paying attention to so Tim Cain could do whatever he wanted.

Guys like Sawyer and Gaider have mentioned that turn-based games died out because retailers refused to order them in large amounts based on the (incorrect) vibe that they were archaic. Fallout Tactics, real-time with a clumsy turn-based option. Arcanum, another real-time mode. Did get away with turn-based ToEE which also got hit by the retailer lack of enthusiasm.

Troika was probably the best RPG developer of all time. Lets be real here. Sawyer is a footnote.

 

[Mortmal]

Unlike "blobbers" RTWP games actually exist.

"Blobber" is a made up bullshit term that you can't even define. Faggit

I used to prefer "dungeon crawler"

It's easier to call them Dungeon Master clones or Wizardry clones : two different subgenres. Dungeon crawler or blobber doesn't work, as those terms are too loosely defined.

 

[luj1]

Well blobber is a newer term. Originated like post-2005 on some forum probably. Personally I dislike it. Meanwhile the problem with "dungeon crawler" is that some games which are *nothing* like Wizardry or DM/EotB (such as Diablo) are also dungeon crawlers.

 

[Ninjerk]

I will call all such games what all the troglodytes call them these days--that which I fought for so long...

Spoiler

RPG game

 

[Tyranicon]

Well blobber is a newer term. Originated like post-2005 on some forum probably. Personally I dislike it. Meanwhile the problem with "dungeon crawler" is that some games which are *nothing* like Wizardry or DM/EotB (such as Diablo) are also dungeon crawlers.

Just call them first-person, grid-based, monolithic party, dungeon crawling RPGs if you don't want to use a single term.

If people don't want to use shortcuts for whatever reason, then they need to spell it out.

 

[behold_a_man]

it's only with humanities/arts people that getting a thought is some kind of extravaganza level of event.

Cauchy has become unbearable. Every Monday, broadcasting the known facts he has learned over the week as a discovery. I believe there is no historical precedent for such a talent writing so much awful rubbish.

Do you think Cauchy was a humanist?

 

[LarryTyphoid]

Genres are marketing terms. "If you like this game, you'll like this other game." They don't mean anything else because you cannot sensibly put Ultima 7 and Wizardry 7 in the same genre while also excluding Dragon Quest or Megami Tensei, except that the players of the prior games probably think that anime is gay

 

[Luke Skinwalker]

CRPG = Chinese RPG, e.g. Black Myth Wukong.

 

[Bruma Hobo]

Genres are marketing terms. "If you like this game, you'll like this other game." They don't mean anything else because you cannot sensibly put Ultima 7 and Wizardry 7 in the same genre while also excluding Dragon Quest or Megami Tensei, except that the players of the prior games probably think that anime is gay

I disagree. Games like Ultima 7 and 8 play nothing like proper RPGs should, but RPGs like Wizardry I, Ultima IV, Quest for Glory I, Daggerfall, Planescape: Torment, Gothic, Bloodlines, Skyrim, Divinity: Original Sin, and even Disco Elysium (come at me), despite their surface-level differences are clearly part of the same family of games, unlike JRPGs like Dragon Quest, or action hack-and-slash games like Diablo.
Seriously, if I wanted to play a role-playing game made in Japan, I would rather play Captain Tsubasa 2: Super Striker (that is, a grind-heavy anime sports game), than Final Fantasy VI or Chrono Trigger.

 

[onemananadhisdroid]

Not everyone was so idiot in the late '90s. Fallout 2 was published in the end of 1998.

Fallout was a b-title no one was paying attention to so Tim Cain could do whatever he wanted.

He could... until that one time he almost couldn't. https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fallo...off-when-he-told-them-how-much-it-would-cost/


Still amazed that every trendhopper aiming for the "larger audience" at any cost still goes the "moar action" route, by the way. That may have made sense back in 2005, when Jimmy Xbox and Johnny GeForce playing lotsa GTA and Gears Of War were actually the biggest crowd out there. But ever since, millions have been playing TB games on their mobiles -- and "moar action" type of games have become completely dime a dozen, as even Ubisoft's checkbox open worlders haven't been able to go without sum looting and leveling anymore since forever.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

I disagree. Games like Ultima 7 and 8 play nothing like proper RPGs should, but RPGs like Wizardry I, Ultima IV, Quest for Glory I, Daggerfall, Planescape: Torment, Gothic, Bloodlines, Skyrim, Divinity: Original Sin, and even Disco Elysium (come at me), despite their surface-level differences are clearly part of the same family of games, unlike JRPGs like Dragon Quest, or action hack-and-slash games like Diablo.

How are Disco Elysium and Skyrim in the same family as Ultima 4, but not Dragon Quest which is a direct clone of Ultima? If anything, Disco Elysium is the very distant ancestor of Ultima after generations of racemixing while Dragon Quest is maybe a direct bastard child that still looks almost exactly like the father

 

[Bruma Hobo]

I disagree. Games like Ultima 7 and 8 play nothing like proper RPGs should, but RPGs like Wizardry I, Ultima IV, Quest for Glory I, Daggerfall, Planescape: Torment, Gothic, Bloodlines, Skyrim, Divinity: Original Sin, and even Disco Elysium (come at me), despite their surface-level differences are clearly part of the same family of games, unlike JRPGs like Dragon Quest, or action hack-and-slash games like Diablo.

How are Disco Elysium and Skyrim in the same family as Ultima 4, but not Dragon Quest which is a direct clone of Ultima? If anything, Disco Elysium is the very distant ancestor of Ultima after generations of racemixing while Dragon Quest is maybe a direct bastard child that still looks almost exactly like the father

On a surface level, Dragon Quest plays like Wizardry and Ultima, but you have to remember that RPGs are about letting the player write their own story (or at least providing an illusion of that kind of collaborative storytelling). Unlike Wizardry and Ultima, Dragon Quest never really attempted to offer that experience, and this became evident as most of its successors turned into linear storyfag games with no concern for providing the player with the illusion of agency.

For instance, here's how Ultima accomplished such an illusion (min 31:00):
https://invidio.us/mPYJqJhE9ts?t=1861


Dragon Quest never attempted anything like that.

 

[mondblut]

Dragon Quest is maybe a direct bastard child that still looks almost exactly like the father

But it's got extra chromosomes and fetal alcohol syndrome from its vietnamese prostitute of a mother.

 

[Beans00]

This thread is feliepepleb, and infinitron desperately trying to be relevant, as the people shun them.

 

[Harthwain]

How are Disco Elysium and Skyrim in the same family as Ultima 4, but not Dragon Quest which is a direct clone of Ultima? If anything, Disco Elysium is the very distant ancestor of Ultima after generations of racemixing while Dragon Quest is maybe a direct bastard child that still looks almost exactly like the father

Disco Elysium is based on a homebrew PnP RPG and done in the style of Planescape: Torment (which is based on yet another PnP RPG). It would be hard to get a purer cRPG than that.

Skyrim is considered RPG by the mainstream because it is part of The Elder Scrolls series.

Arena's manual literally starts with "Remember the old pencil-and-paper RPG's?" with the game being essentially the Dungeon Master for the player, giving him unlimited choice to play as he wishes. And while the series declined, the framework is in which they operate is very similar (although more restricted since Morrowind due to shift to a more narrative-focused experience).

 

[LarryTyphoid]

...you have to remember that RPGs are about letting the player write their own story (or at least providing an illusion of that kind of collaborative storytelling).

This is a very vague and abstract way to define a genre. Dragon Quest 3 gives the player more choice than a game like Skyrim and that's barely even a matter of debate. Megami Tensei even has C&C with different joinable factions. There is absolutely no reason to put Shin Megami Tensei and Wizardry in two different genres besides "I think anime is gay", which is valid enough so you might as well just say that. And the claim that any of the Wizardry games were about "letting the player write their own story" is very dubious; Wizardry 1-5 at least are basically just mechanical obstacle courses like most old JRPGs

Arena's manual literally starts with "Remember the old pencil-and-paper RPG's?" with the game being essentially the Dungeon Master for the player, giving him unlimited choice to play as he wishes.

That's just lipservice. Arena doesn't give the player "unlimited choice" any more than the average RPG. You just go through dungeons, kill monsters, and watch your numbers go up. You could remove character creation entirely and the gameplay would not substantially change. You could take Arena, replace the customizable character with an anime man, and absolutely none of the game's actual substance would be affected but somehow people would claim that this surface-level change has transformed Arena into a JRPG.

I don't care much about JRPGs but I think this distinction is very silly. You just hate the Japanese! It's okay to hate the Japanese! But let's not pretend like Disco Elysium shares any more DNA with Wizardry 1 than the literal dozens of Japanese Wizardry games which directly use it as a foundation. You might as well take the Sawyer approach of denying that Wizardry 1 is an RPG at all if you want to die on that hill.

 

[Bruma Hobo]

...you have to remember that RPGs are about letting the player write their own story (or at least providing an illusion of that kind of collaborative storytelling).

This is a very vague and abstract way to define a genre. Dragon Quest 3 gives the player more choice than a game like Skyrim and that's barely even a matter of debate. Megami Tensei even has C&C with different joinable factions. There is absolutely no reason to put Shin Megami Tensei and Wizardry in two different genres besides "I think anime is gay", which is valid enough so you might as well just say that. And the claim that any of the Wizardry games were about "letting the player write their own story" is very dubious; Wizardry 1-5 at least are basically just mechanical obstacle courses like most old JRPGs

I believe genres are defined not by game mechanics, but by what the author was trying to accomplish with them. Because of this, it can sometimes be difficult to draw a clear line between true role-playing games and other forms of entertainment that use stats, but at least this way I don't have to pretend that games like THIS are RPGs:

You can use RPG mechanics to pursue very different goals, and I believe that's exactly what Japan did. Even when their games inherit prestigious mechanics from Western titles, those mechanics are rarely used to achieve the purposes for which they were originally conceived. After all, it's no coincidence that the more a Japanese game departs from the formula established by Wizardry I, the less it resembles a true RPG. And again, I don't hate anime, and I actually think games like Shin Megami Tensei and Uncharted Waters can be considered rare exceptions among the vast number of non-RPGs produced in Japan.

The first Wizardry game, for instance, is one where a few unlucky critical hits can turn a simple expedition into a memorable odyssey, and where permanently losing a character (or even the entire party) can feel like a personal tragedy, creating a player-driven narrative in the process. This is *not* the kind of experience that Dragon Quest provides, despite sharing many of the same mechanics: Wizardry and Ultima succeeded brilliantly where the original Dragon Quest and its many clones didn’t even attempt to compete. Later entries like Dragon Quest III may have adopted more complex mechanics, but their creative focus was clearly elsewhere, and unsurprisingly Dragon Quest IV and V ended up playing more like visual novels, much like later Final Fantasy games, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, and so on.

 

[Maxie]

Unlike "blobbers" RTWP games actually exist.

"Blobber" is a made up bullshit term that you can't even define. Faggit

I used to prefer "dungeon crawler"

Careful. You will suffer consequences if you use the term "imsim"

 

[Harthwain]

That's just lipservice. Arena doesn't give the player "unlimited choice" any more than the average RPG.

Not true. It does provide more freedom to the player than narratively-driven RPGs and RPGs that limit your character's development (by restricting your class, for example). Which, by the way, is what jRPGs tend to do.

You could remove character creation entirely and the gameplay would not substantially change. You could take Arena, replace the customizable character with an anime man, and absolutely none of the game's actual substance would be affected but somehow people would claim that this surface-level change has transformed Arena into a JRPG.

You could raise that argument (that the gameplay wouldn't change substantially if we were to remove character creation) against Oblivion or Skyrim, or even Morrowind, but not against Arena. The difference between a character who can use magic and the one who can't is massive. The inherent resistance to paralysis that Elves have as their racial trait is also very good.

I don't care much about JRPGs but I think this distinction is very silly. You just hate the Japanese! It's okay to hate the Japanese! But let's not pretend like Disco Elysium shares any more DNA with Wizardry 1 than the literal dozens of Japanese Wizardry games which directly use it as a foundation.

I doubt people are going to say Disco Elysium has links with Wizardry 1. However, it is very easy to prove Disco Elysium's link with the RPG genre and you could something similar for Wizardry 1 as well, even if the results are different given how each game functions.

 

[Falksi]

"Blobber" sounds wank, simply because it reminds me of a woman being "on the blob".

 

[Cross]

Genres are marketing terms. "If you like this game, you'll like this other game." They don't mean anything else because you cannot sensibly put Ultima 7 and Wizardry 7 in the same genre while also excluding Dragon Quest or Megami Tensei, except that the players of the prior games probably think that anime is gay

If that was true, you'd see more JRPG fans be interested in playing older CRPGs. Instead, I've seen numerous forum posts by JRPG fans (outside of this forum, obviously) saying something along the lines of "Mass Effect was the first western RPG I liked."

JRPGs obviously borrowed features from Ultima and Wizardry, but they're implemented in such a way that the similarities end up being mostly superficial. The top-down overworld in JRPGs was clearly inspired by Ultima, but unlike Ultima, most JRPGs are on rails with little room for exploration.

Most JRPGs have Wizardry-style combat, but this makes them less similar to CRPGs, not more. If there is a "default" style of combat in CRPGs, it's not Wizardry-style combat, but D&D-esque grid-based combat with individual character movement. And JRPG combat is only superficially similar to Wizardry anyway, with most of the variance and randomness stripped out.

...you have to remember that RPGs are about letting the player write their own story (or at least providing an illusion of that kind of collaborative storytelling).

This is a very vague and abstract way to define a genre. Dragon Quest 3 gives the player more choice than a game like Skyrim and that's barely even a matter of debate. Megami Tensei even has C&C with different joinable factions. There is absolutely no reason to put Shin Megami Tensei and Wizardry in two different genres besides "I think anime is gay", which is valid enough so you might as well just say that. And the claim that any of the Wizardry games were about "letting the player write their own story" is very dubious; Wizardry 1-5 at least are basically just mechanical obstacle courses like most old JRPGs

C&C as you seem to be defining it is not a CRPG thing. Having multiple "routes" and multiple endings is more of a JRPG/visual novel thing. CRPGs are not defined by C&C anyway, they are defined by certain mechanics and design decisions.

It's funny that you bring up Wizardry as a counter-argument. Even Wizardry, starting with 5, lets you pickpocket from NPCs, attack and kill them and converse with them through a text parser. All of these mechanics are virtually non-existent in JRPGs, with one or two exceptions, and even then it's just partial (Dark Souls lets you kill NPCs).

So obviously, CRPGs are mechanically distinct from JRPGs.