Innovation in RPG genre

[c2007]

The idea that suffering and scarcity is necessary for quality product is so Y2K. It is actually retarded.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The idea that suffering and scarcity is necessary for quality product is so Y2K. It is actually retarded.

This is why your name will never be remembered.

 

[Jackpot]

It's because the primary audience of CRPGs are aging boomers clinging on to the memories of their soon-to-be forgotten games, and the primary audience for the rest of RPGs are ADHD-ridden zoomers that want meaningless experience systems tied to their button-mashing zombie-killer simulators.
Games that have meaningful role-playing depth and strategy are relegated to pathetically copying either Badlur's Gate or Fallout, right down to the outdated graphics, UI, and combat systems.
The rest of the games categorized as "RPGs" are mostly open world action games with a tacked-on skill/leveling system and maybe some incredibly un-subtle choice and consequence.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Innovation brought us microtransactions, obligatory online and gatcha games. Innovation is dead.

 

[Tavernking]

You must go back to Gygax times and question everything he designed and twist it around a little bit, experiment. That's what I'm doing. I'm not saying my game will be good but it's extremely innovative.

 

[Gregz]

Hades was one of the most successful and innovative RPG-adjacent games released last year. Sometimes innovation requires cutting across multiple genres.

 

[bandersnatch]

The only innovation you are going to get from todays woke RPG designers is a character creation screens where you can play a chick with a dick like in Cyberpuke 2077. Tomorrow those same woke designers you give your money too will be "innovating" by making games were you get to kill off all the white people or send them to the gulag. They may be already making those type of games?

 

[Machocruz]

Let's keep it real, most of these posers making CRPGs today don't even play tabletop. So they have no roadmap for where to go or what the possibilities are.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Because the cost to innovate, aka take risk with developers' money and time, has risen so much from the past.

In the past where you make games over all with 2D art assets, the cost of making a game is low comparatively because everyone make the same kind of 2d art.

But now with most big studios utilize 3D assets, you cant just make do with 2D art any more, or gamers would not look at you.

So any professional developers gotta invest a big part of their time and money into making 3D assets. Which raise the cost

With that kind of money, noone dare risking with innovation, aka burning money for no gain.

I think it's more simple than this. There isn't innovation like in the past because the genre, CRPGs, really isn't an active genre anymore. It was a active genre in the '90s and very early 2000s, so you had developers trying new things and iterating to bring people in. There was competition. But the CRPG kind of died with adventure games and the RTS in the early 2000s along with the PC market of the time. Now the genre may as well be a nostalgia act. The goal, by and large, isn't to iterating on what was happening and pushed things forward like it was before, now it seems to be to make something like that thing you remember from the late '90s. This is even true in large sure thing projects like Diablo 3, (yeah I know, it's hack and slash and not a proper CRPG) which I doubt cost much of anything in comparisons to other games that made the kind of money it did; like if you told me in 2000 that a third Diablo would take 12 years to come out and they wouldn't advance on the core idea of the series gameplay one bit I don't think I would've believed it. Likewise I was pretty surprised when Blizzard first showed off Starcraft 2 and instead of having any big new idea, (like StarCraft did, and Warcraft 3 originally had) or even some big old idea from some other RTS, it just seemed to be a 3D remake of the first game with a new jetpack unit; but then the genre wasn't dead in 1998 and 2002 like it was in 2010.

I'm also going to completely disagree with this:

But now with most big studios utilize 3D assets, you cant just make do with 2D art any more, or gamers would not look at you.​

I guaran-fucking-tee some of these projects with 3D assets would have gotten way more attention and had far more eyes on them if they had nice 2D art as opposed to being 3D. That Wasteland remake, which looks like total shit, never had even half the eyes on it or had anywhere near the amount of people talking about it as 2D games from the last five years like Into the Breach, Darkest Dungeon, Blasphemous, Cuphead, Shovel Knight, Blazing Chrome, River City Girls, Streets of Rage 4, and that new Ninja Turtles beat em up that's coming out. The same goes for the bigger Wasteland 2 too, likely that third game as well. Unless you're doing something really stylistic looking with the 3D, or it just looks really fucking good, for like the last 13 or 14 years you'll probably get more attention with 2D than 3D. I'd bet that if that Wasteland remake was a 2D sprite based game that looked like that 2019 homebrew Sega Genesis game Xeno Crisis, or like Shadowrun on the Genesis, that it would've had more coverage than like one preview article on RockPaperShotgun, and you'd have people sharing images of it on Twitter talking about how great the pixel art is...and it would probably cost way less than whatever they spent. Could probably even say the same about Wasteland 3 as well, which also isn't exactly the best looking of games.

 

[laclongquan]

Darkest Dungeon, from where I look, is pretty innovative, even if it replicate some ideas from far past. (Innovation compared to WHAT? and WHEN? is always the criteria).

But gamers only look at it, the few that they are, thanks to the pretty quality art asset. Something I bet cost a pretty penny and a lake of sweat to come out.

Underrail. Coming out in the early 2000s it would have been greeted as the next Fallout, not 2010s. But nowaday who would look at it. And not because of gameplay. It's the dank, dark and above all, cheap looking art assets that kill their interest. EVERY video review play it at 19201080 resolution when the ideal look would have been 640x480 or worse 800x600.

Time changes, gentlemen! Nowaday people have high threshold for art quality. Art is not everything, but without it noone would look at you. This is no longer the 90s, let alone 80s.

Innovation? Innovation is just a marketing buzzword to lure customers in. BUT let me tell you, gamers are not that hot for innovation. You can try for it if your "art" demand it, but dont be surprised if it's not enough to retain gamers.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Nowaday people have high threshold for art quality.

Style over substance, nothing new at all

 

[V_K]

The idea that suffering and scarcity is necessary for quality product is so Y2K. It is actually retarded.

Suffering purifies the soul.

 

[Sweeper]

Let's keep it real, most of these posers making CRPGs today don't even play tabletop. So they have no roadmap for where to go or what the possibilities are.

Who gives a fuck about tabletop? Go back to your weird friends nerd. CRPGs are for friendless autists.

 

[laclongquan]

Nowaday people have high threshold for art quality.

Style over substance, nothing new at all

You sounds highminded but if youhave to choose between a shit game with great artstyle and a great game with great artstyle which would you choose?

Yeah, I dont think so.

 

[ValeVelKal]

Darkest Dungeon, from where I look, is pretty innovative, even if it replicate some ideas from far past. (Innovation compared to WHAT? and WHEN? is always the criteria).

But gamers only look at it, the few that they are, thanks to the pretty quality art asset. Something I bet cost a pretty penny and a lake of sweat to come out.

Underrail. Coming out in the early 2000s it would have been greeted as the next Fallout, not 2010s. But nowaday who would look at it. And not because of gameplay. It's the dank, dark and above all, cheap looking art assets that kill their interest. EVERY video review play it at 19201080 resolution when the ideal look would have been 640x480 or worse 800x600.

Time changes, gentlemen! Nowaday people have high threshold for art quality. Art is not everything, but without it noone would look at you. This is no longer the 90s, let alone 80s.

Innovation? Innovation is just a marketing buzzword to lure customers in. BUT let me tell you, gamers are not that hot for innovation. You can try for it if your "art" demand it, but dont be surprised if it's not enough to retain gamers.

People only play highly artsy games as shown by the success of Rimworld, Minecraft, Factorio, TFL,...

Oh well. Maybe it is just good old old people saying that younger people have no taste and everything is shit because different ?

 

[Testownia]

Where's the third option - "We need to go back"?

 

[laclongquan]

Darkest Dungeon, from where I look, is pretty innovative, even if it replicate some ideas from far past. (Innovation compared to WHAT? and WHEN? is always the criteria).

But gamers only look at it, the few that they are, thanks to the pretty quality art asset. Something I bet cost a pretty penny and a lake of sweat to come out.

Underrail. Coming out in the early 2000s it would have been greeted as the next Fallout, not 2010s. But nowaday who would look at it. And not because of gameplay. It's the dank, dark and above all, cheap looking art assets that kill their interest. EVERY video review play it at 19201080 resolution when the ideal look would have been 640x480 or worse 800x600.

Time changes, gentlemen! Nowaday people have high threshold for art quality. Art is not everything, but without it noone would look at you. This is no longer the 90s, let alone 80s.

Innovation? Innovation is just a marketing buzzword to lure customers in. BUT let me tell you, gamers are not that hot for innovation. You can try for it if your "art" demand it, but dont be surprised if it's not enough to retain gamers.

People only play highly artsy games as shown by the success of Rimworld, Minecraft, Factorio, TFL,...

Oh well. Maybe it is just good old old people saying that younger people have no taste and everything is shit because different ?

Of your examples, only Minecraft fit the bill as pre2010s game. The others are lukewarm received at best, and all are very niche games. AKA not commercial success.

 

[JarlFrank]

There isn't innovation like in the past because the genre, CRPGs, really isn't an active genre anymore. It was a active genre in the '90s and very early 2000s, so you had developers trying new things and iterating to bring people in. There was competition. But the CRPG kind of died with adventure games and the RTS in the early 2000s along with the PC market of the time. Now the genre may as well be a nostalgia act. The goal, by and large, isn't to iterating on what was happening and pushed things forward like it was before, now it seems to be to make something like that thing you remember from the late '90s.

Yeah that's a good point. There was a big cutoff point in the mid 00s when the genre was mostly dead. New devs who want to resurrect the genre (or old devs returning, like Fargo's gang or Cainarsky) want to recreate the hits of their childhood, or recreate the hits they made in the past. And that's where they stop - at recreating.

There is no pushing forward of the design ideas put forward in those older games. You can see such pushing forward in games of the time, with Arcanum pushing the design principles of Fallout to the next level, and BG2 being an improvement of its predecessor in every way - but nowadays it's usually just people trying to make another Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment etc. One of the most obvious examples is Torment: Tides of Numenera. It misunderstood what made PST great (huge wordcount!! many many many words!!!) and ended up being a complete mess with its themes. Where PST had a few central themes, Numanuma is just a collection of weird shit put on top of a main story that rips off PST's. Except that it doesn't even feel half as engaging and personal as PST's story did. The devs responsible for it just wanted to make "another PST" and applied a cargo-cultish method of copying everything to the letter and hoping that works.

But mere copying is never going to create a masterpiece.

 

[ValeVelKal]

Of your examples, only Minecraft fit the bill as pre2010s game. The others are lukewarm received at best, and all are very niche games. AKA not commercial success.

Factorio got 2.5 millions sales, which I believe is more than say XCOM2 in PC. RimWorld I only find a mention that they passed the 1 million threshold but they are consistently in the “top 100 most played” on Steam since released - currently around 50.

Want other examples of massively popular ugly games ? Among Us. Roblox.

 

[baud]

Darkest Dungeon, from where I look, is pretty innovative, even if it replicate some ideas from far past. (Innovation compared to WHAT? and WHEN? is always the criteria).

But gamers only look at it, the few that they are, thanks to the pretty quality art asset. Something I bet cost a pretty penny and a lake of sweat to come out.

Underrail. Coming out in the early 2000s it would have been greeted as the next Fallout, not 2010s. But nowaday who would look at it. And not because of gameplay. It's the dank, dark and above all, cheap looking art assets that kill their interest. EVERY video review play it at 19201080 resolution when the ideal look would have been 640x480 or worse 800x600.

Time changes, gentlemen! Nowaday people have high threshold for art quality. Art is not everything, but without it noone would look at you. This is no longer the 90s, let alone 80s.

Innovation? Innovation is just a marketing buzzword to lure customers in. BUT let me tell you, gamers are not that hot for innovation. You can try for it if your "art" demand it, but dont be surprised if it's not enough to retain gamers.

People only play highly artsy games as shown by the success of Rimworld, Minecraft, Factorio, TFL,...

Oh well. Maybe it is just good old old people saying that younger people have no taste and everything is shit because different ?

Of your examples, only Minecraft fit the bill as pre2010s game. The others are lukewarm received at best, and all are very niche games. AKA not commercial success.

Rimworld had already sold 1 million games in 2018 and on Steam spy it's in the 2 - 5 million bracket.
The Factorio devs had recently said they sold 2.5 million games

That's not AAA numbers, but for indies, that's solid

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Darkest Dungeon, from where I look, is pretty innovative, even if it replicate some ideas from far past. (Innovation compared to WHAT? and WHEN? is always the criteria).

But gamers only look at it, the few that they are, thanks to the pretty quality art asset. Something I bet cost a pretty penny and a lake of sweat to come out.

Underrail. Coming out in the early 2000s it would have been greeted as the next Fallout, not 2010s. But nowaday who would look at it. And not because of gameplay. It's the dank, dark and above all, cheap looking art assets that kill their interest. EVERY video review play it at 19201080 resolution when the ideal look would have been 640x480 or worse 800x600.

Time changes, gentlemen! Nowaday people have high threshold for art quality. Art is not everything, but without it noone would look at you. This is no longer the 90s, let alone 80s.

Innovation? Innovation is just a marketing buzzword to lure customers in. BUT let me tell you, gamers are not that hot for innovation. You can try for it if your "art" demand it, but dont be surprised if it's not enough to retain gamers.

I wouldn't really say Darkest Dungeon was innovative, even from a presentation standpoint you had games around that time doing similar things. But it is a satisfying gameplay loop; even if they get in their own way more often than not, and never really quite fleshed out most aspects of the game.

I can't find any exact numbers on Darkest Dungeon's budget other than it being over 300k. That may just be the heads of the studio not taking pay during development, and a loan they got before the Kickstarter, but I wouldn't imagine it being much more than that unless they completely mismanaged the project. I'm not particularly impressed with the Spine animation in the game, but it's whole Mike Mignola stylization is nice, and it definitely got people in the door that may otherwise have completely overlooked it.

Underrail would've had the same kind of reaction in the early 2000s. Remember, Arcanum and The Temple of Elemental Evil were both knocked for looking old on release, and even compared unfavorably visually to 3D games that ended up aging pretty poorly.

 

[laclongquan]

Both Roblox and Minecraft has their initial release on 2000s, generally pre 2010s era of heightened art awareness. So they get their initial gamer base in early and out of the way, which help their blocky art a great deal.

Note they change their art from the initial blocky style into something else more modern, also help a great deal with newer gamer base.

Note also that Dwarf Fortress still keep their initial art and where does DF stand now in regarding new gamers' base?

Underrail would've had the same kind of reaction in the early 2000s. .

Wrong. In the 2000s people are not in the business of setting default rez for game at 19201080 for their 55inch LCD screen. 800600 at the very least, and generally 1024768. Which would have helped their game's overall art sense a great deal instead of the current mode.

You can just set Fallout1/2 at 19201080 and see what does that rez take your top 1/2 game regarding art sense.

 

[ValeVelKal]

Both Roblox and Minecraft has their initial release on 2000s, generally pre 2010s era of heightened art awareness. So they get their initial gamer base in early and out of the way, which help their blocky art a great deal.

Note they change their art from the initial blocky style into something else more modern, also help a great deal with newer gamer base.

Note also that Dwarf Fortress still keep their initial art and where does DF stand now in regarding new gamers' base?

Underrail would've had the same kind of reaction in the early 2000s. .

Wrong. In the 2000s people are not in the business of setting default rez for game at 19201080 for their 55inch LCD screen. 800600 at the very least, and generally 1024768. Which would have helped their game's overall art sense a great deal instead of the current mode.

You can just set Fallout1/2 at 19201080 and see what does that rez take your top 1/2 game regarding art sense.

The core demographic of Roblox is 9 to 15, still today.
Minecraft is 2011 and Roblox 2006 indeed but the later picked up much later (like Among Us did to an extent). In any axe, does it mean that the decline you mention and focus on graphics is from 2012 + ?

By the way speaking of RPG Undertale is 3.5 millions copies. Very innovative. Deep C&C you cannot savescum again. Combat. But the art was weird so the ‘Dex hated it.

 

[V_K]

By June 2015, over 12 million copies of Terraria were sold across all platforms,[74] with that number increasing to over 35 million by the end of 2020

That's 23 million sales over the past 5 years only for a game that looks like this:

 

[JarlFrank]

That's not AAA numbers, but for indies, that's solid

For indies, that's "I'm going to retire and buy a yacht" numbers.