This is changing. Looking back over RPGs from the last few years, a trend is evident. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and, more recently, Mass Effect all pursue a more direct, visceral means of representing action, searching for an immediate feedback that circumvents the prominence of PnP mechanics. Increasingly, the RPG is relegating tabletop conventions to the background in favor of the ultimate goal: complete immersion.
I wouldn't call that a change at all, at least not for all the parties involved in making those games. First of all, people need to understand that whether first person, over-the-shoulder third person or a cursor-driven interface, it's just a matter of choice. Choice of view style has no bearing on the game core, with or without direct controls that come with instant feedback.
Likewise, you can't put those three games in the same pot just because they have same to similar view styles with a focus on instant feedback. Despite having a first-person view, Bloodlines' core still lies in the PnP. All the game mechanics are tied to character skills over player skills. For this same reason, the game has been criticized by many people who expected an upfront shooter and were upset when their manual player skills didn't help them with the "shooter" aspects of the game. This was simply a failed understanding of the game's core rules, where the most important rule is that whether a character can succeed in an action in the first place, is determined by the character's skills, not the manual player skills. Therefore to carry out any activity, you need a character suited to that activity, not activities that can be bent and twisted to suit to any character, which would lose the identity of being a character in such a situation.
Oblivion is the anti-thesis of this. Every single "RP" game mechanic in the game, every single mechanic that's tied to character skills (and thus the sole reason this game is categorized as an RPG) can be overrided with "mini-games".
Traditionally, *you* are the character you play; not vice versa, so whether you can overcome any given meta-task depends on your character's skills. If you are skilled in lockpicking, you can try to lockpick a lock and if you are a brute, you can try to break the lock instead.
Not in Oblivion though. It doesn't matter what type of character you are, as you can succeed in any given meta-task through mini-games, which completely rely on manual player skill, and even when you don't use the mini-games, ultimately all character builds in the game leads to a "good at everything" type of build. There is no "miss" in combat. You swing, you hit. Completely unconnected with the character's abilities. If you miss, it's only because of your manual player skill, not because of some in-game mechanic which provides your enemy to dodge your attack. You hit, always, thus you project your own playing self into the game, not play the meta-character you're supposed to be playing.
The game lets you create a meta-character and allows you to override that character. The only connection that's left between the character and its meta-specifications is trivial details like how much damage you deal when you unmissably hit (which makes it only a matter of time and patience to beat any enemy).
I haven't played Mass Effect, but I get the impression that it's somewhere inbetween these two games. As for these approaches being a trend, I'd like to remind you that another upcoming RPG from Bioware, Dragon Age, won't be like any of these three games and had Troika, the creators of Bloodlines, not went bankrupt, their next game, for which they have even put out a playable prototype demo, was going to be a mainly cursor-driven third person game (with the supposed ability to swith camera to cater to mainstream, I imagine). As for Bethesda, they have been doing first-person ever since early 90s.
Talking to the developers of this new breed of RPG, it’s clear that they think that this change in direction is using the medium to better achieve the core act of roleplay itself.
As I said, there is no "inherent change" in direction, but rather a "inherent failure" of perspective on game genres by game developers. The so called "core" of any game type is what makes that game belong to that certain genre. A strategy game has strategical management at its core and if you change that somehow, under the pretentious name of "giving a new direction", it only means that you're not making a strategy game.
At the core of RPGs lie the PnP heritage, which basically means the separation of manual player skill and the in-game character skill. The degree by which the game takes into account the manual player skill can vary, but can not be overridden completely
(edit: Oops, this should be the exact opposite. Silly me). Otherwise, it removes the importance of skills and blends with other action/arcade games. If game developers, by doing away with the PnP core, believe that they are giving a new direction to the genre, this is only their and the market's unexplainable juvenile claim to the genre acronym "RPG", as what they do unquestionably falls into other genres.
It's similar to how the politicians are afraid to say that "we are oppressive fascists who don't give a shit about what you or anybody else think so we'll have it our way and fuck the shit out of anyone who opposes the slightest bit", and call themselves protectors of freedom and democracy, while conducting all kinds illegal and immoral activities under the name thereof. Just admit you're a fucking fascist pig! Millions of morons you won't stop following you all of a sudden.
“One of my chief disappointments with many existing RPGs is the amount of pen-and-paper mechanics that they still employ,” says Ed Del Castillo, the president of Liquid Entertainment, developer of the upcoming Rise Of The Argonauts.
If Castillo's comment stopped right there, this could be an acceptable stance as the only problem he has would be the "amount" of PnP heritage in core rules. Unfortunately, he goes on to say some silly things.
“Sometimes I feel like the computer is being used as nothing more than a glorified calculator. The player is still micro-manipulating the character’s stats, equipment, skills and bonuses. The problem with this is two-fold. First, the player is spending too much time in menus and not as much time in the game world, which dissolves the fiction very quickly. Second, most of the rewards aren’t visual; they end up being micro-bonuses which are seen in a menu or paper doll or equipment screen but are rarely visualized in the game.
There is both a valid and an invalid ciriticism here. Players "micro-manipulate", also known as meta-gaming, only if you allow them to. You can have a game with a very complex PnP core and still not give them opportunities to actively meta-game. This has more to do with game design than any amount of X rules you have at the core. You can make a wonderfully deep and complex core and make it a terribly fun game to play if you get the connection between the core complexity and player interface right. So it's just a matter of design.
However, he's completely valid in saying that "rewards aren't visual", that "such and such are rarely visualized in the game". Unless you're making an ASCII roguelike or a similarly abstract graphical representation (therefore not completely ruling out the non-visual abstractisation), you need to keep up with times and tell your player "visually" that he just failed or succeeded in a meta-task. Your "character", not *you* through manual skill, evaded an incoming sword swing only because (s)he was able to due to his skills? Take the time to implement an appropriate animation so when you see it in-game, there will be no question marks in your head as to what just happened.
“The Argo team is more focused on ‘visual storytelling’. We don’t have +3 swords in Argo: we have maces that knock the enemy back, spears that impale him, and swords to cut him in half. We feel that the best rewards are the ones you can see. We’re giving the player a fulfilling experience rather than fulfilling the expectations of a genre.”
Whether one has +3 swords in his game and can or can not see the effects of these visually is an utterly unrelated issue. There's absolutely no reason why you couldn't have a "+3 Sword of Eye-Ripping", use it in the game to attack a character and visually see it ripping the eyes of your enemies, or visually see your enemies evading your swing, and know what, all of that would still be PnP to the bone. So, Castillo's remark here is way-off. On other words, Castillo only wants to make a God-of-War knock off, and wants to call it a RPG just because the game will probably have inventory, some minimal and negligible dialogue. Tell me motherfucker, will I ever be able to use "social activities" to progress the game, or is it a grind game with %90 combat as game content?
“Without a major technology breakthrough, making a videogame as freeform as a PnP game is impossible,” says Chapman. “Take Oblivion, for instance. After questing for the Mages’ Guild, I’ll eventually want to become the leader. Fine, that can be programmed into the quests. But then, what if I want to cast an illusion and become the king? Or research new spells that allow me to fly? In tabletop RPGs, if a character wants to steal a horse, then kill it and use the meat as a distraction so wolves won’t chase him, the gamesmaster can resolve the plan simply and easily. In videogames, anticipating that kind of out-of-the-box thinking would require hundreds of man-hours, and wouldn’t be cost-effective.”
It’s not simply a case of videogames inadequately approximating the freedom inherent in PnP gaming and aimed for in MMOGs – it’s more that they have the exact opposite relationship with freedom. The PnP game adopts rules to chaperone the imagination of its players, whereas the videogame has inherent restrictions that it is trying to exceed. The fact that the latter is a more rigidly structured experience is a double-edged sword, however – while it cannot account for the range of player action possible in a PnP game, it is possible to create a more tailored and immersive experience. It is towards this end that we see recent videogames eroding the visibility of their mechanics, hiding hit points and other statistics behind more streamlined graphical representations in an effort to achieve greater player immersion.
Player freedom and the idea of immersion are issues of which Bethesda Software, the developer of Oblivion and Fallout 3, is acutely aware. “It’s obviously something that’s had a big impact on us and the way we’ve approached our games,” says Bethesda’s vice president of marketing, Pete Hines. “Let the player create the character they want and go out and make their own choices. Go where you want, do what you want. You decide how to deal with problems and what to do next.
“But in a videogame it is at least somewhat important that you do not allow the player to break the game, either intentionally or unintentionally. So I don’t know how much we can do away with the rules, but we do the best to bend and stretch them as far as possible to allow people the most freedom possible. I don’t know how far we can stretch that freedom, but I assure you we plan to find out.”
Here is another instance of misguidance. Tabletop gaming surely is free of the technical limitations of video games. However, there is always a story, some motivation and a very specific direction the band of players are facing. As per the game rules, you can always try to do the wildest things you want, but they have to have a connection with the context which have imaginary limits self-imposed by all the players.
In the above example, you either just don't decide that you will cast an illusion to become the king -you just don't-, or the game campaign is set to cater to that kind of possibility. If you try to do that kind of stuff in a tabletop experience, something that doesn't fit in with the self-imposed limits at hand, there is a good chance you will alienate other players and that they won't want to have any tabletop gaming session with you again unless you learn to fit in and find another way to prove your different approaches.
You may be playing a character who has a certain race as his or her natural enemy, giving you a special kind of motivation against members of that race, with related meta-bonuses. However, that doesn't grant you the right to ridicule the game by deciding to charge into each and every member of that race you get to see. More importantly, for every new tabletop campaign, there is a steady progress towards a definite end, surrounded by thematic rules.
These unspoken, self-imposed rules of tabletop gaming are the perhaps one of the most important aspect of it being a "social" activity in a "small circle" and is just as good as the technical limitations in a video game. So, as long as the designers are able to stay within-context as far as freedoms go, a single-player gaming experience with complex possibilities isn't the far and unreachable peak of a mountain.
It's the exact opposite the game developers need to stay away from, giving the players unconditional freedom without any consequences. Oblivion, for instance, suffers from this severely as a game completely built on pretenses. If you need advice or any degree of "make-believe" concerning your in-game identity (and not visual representation of the game -should make that clear) for a game on how, or even what (!) to role-play in a game, then that game is as good as a RPG as Minesweeper is, and therefore, just about any video game in existence. "I'm role-playing some convict who's forced to race in huge driveway arenas using A-class cars, therefore Need for Speed is a RPG!" Does this sound familiar? Fine, imagine, make-believe and "role-play" all you want, no harm in that, but for fuck's sake, please don't call it a RPG.
Hines suggests that much of what can make videogaming a transparent, believable experience is predicated on enabling a purer and more direct kind of roleplay, eschewing immersion-breaking mechanics like turn-based combat, and dependence on stat screens. But removing the abstraction of PnP introduces new challenges: since they rely on visual representation rather than imagination, videogames have to reconcile the disparity between a player’s desired action and his avatar’s capabilities in a way that is clear and avoids frustration.
“PnP games are about being limited by what your character can do,” explains Hines. “You make choices, but what usually ends up determining your success or failure is your character and a roll of the dice. That’s a tougher thing to balance in a videogame as we try to walk the line between having the player meaningfully interact with the world around you, and having the skills and abilities of your character determine your success or failure. We’ve already talked about this a bit with Fallout 3, where we want the condition of the weapon you are using, and your character’s skill with using that weapon, to determine whether or not you can kill that creature over there – not your ability to put crosshairs on a target and pull the trigger.
Bethesda's unique way of shitting on RPG mechanics is nothing new here. Here he talks about avoiding the frustration where there is a problem in matching player's desired action and the avatar's, character's capabilities. The real solution is to provide multiple facets to support the general groups in a skill set. A diplomatic character doesn't fight but convinces others to fight for him or her. In Bethesda games, all characters unavoidably fight and since the traditional and ideal design makes it unlikely for a diplomatic character to survive an old-school fight, that shouldn't happen in their game. This, "everyone can do anything" ideal is the core of Bethesda's supposed RPGs.
“Because you’re manipulating this avatar within a videogame, there’s a layer of feedback that has to be provided to the player, visually, that you don’t have to deal with in a PnP. You attack, roll dice; if you get a good roll you hit. If not, you miss. It’s pretty cut and dry. You may curse the roll but there’s no questioning what happened, unlike in a game where you may say: ‘Wait, my sword passed right through him’, or: ‘He was right in my crosshairs, why did I miss?’ I think we did a pretty good job of it in Oblivion where the player has control over what’s happening, but ultimately your character, and his or her equipment, abilities, etc, determines whether you succeed or fail.”
This is one of the most idiotic stances against the PnP cores of RPGs. As I mentioned before, you can provide all the visual representation side of the things without any problems. They did this wrong in Morrowind. They were either too stupid or forgetful to make animations for when any character would evade a hit or when any character would fail to hit a target. So, instead of fixing that, they adopted the "shooter" mentality that's 100% success. Please, no. In a game that has %100 success and where the only variable is the efficiency of the action, it's only a question of 10 hits vs. 100 hits. If that, repetition until completion, instead of providing alternatives to bypass that combat encounter through other ways (pay others to do it for you, sneak past, use politics to have your opponents imprisoned or whatnot) is what passes as "fun" and "entertainment", then I shit on your perception of fun and entertainment.
Ultimately, it raises the question of how the medium best serves the purpose of roleplay. “I think technology has expanded what we can do in terms of roleplay, not limited it,” counters Hines. “It takes things that were done in abstraction and brings them to life vividly. We’ve gone from NPCs in roleplaying that stand around and provide info like talking kiosks to characters that move around the world, interact with each other, and so on.
Something that has been realised in video games as early as a decade ago, and to a much better state than they have done.
and choice of firstperson view is entirely geared toward delivering information to the player intuitively, rather than by reams of statistics.
Every gamer who will play Oblivion should remember this everytime they are forced to a pop-up text message, which is like every step of every quest in the game. Very Intuitive.
Increasingly, the dependence upon statistics and other abstracted means of representation is becoming an albatross, insofar as singleplayer videogames are concerned – strangely so, for a medium whose strengths are in direct interactivity and immediate visual feedback. In fact, games that make the best of these qualities have a better chance of truly fulfilling the only important goal of those tabletop games: the ability to imagine yourself in another’s shoes – the freedom to choose a role.
I'll go back to playing Ninja Cartographer in Minesweeper and Maximus the Gladiator of the driveway arena in "Need for Speed" then. No meaningless statistics or dice-rolls at all. Great RPGs!
Do gamers flock to these newer, next-gen, streamlined, styles because they are better, or do they go to these games because what they once loved is no longer available? I think there is room for arguing in favor of necessity here. Modern cRPGs are different, but that doesn't make them better in terms of role-playing.(Maybe so in terms of LARPing.)
