While I'm not certain if this game will be up my alley, it's safe to say this is not going to be a game for the hardcore cRPG fan in any way, shape, or form. This has SLAM DUNK written all over it, moreso than Lionheart, Dark Alliance, or DungSeige ever did.
Judging from the secondhand account of the GameInformer article, the gameplay is going to be something like Paper Mario. I don't mind that style, but it takes a certain skill with design to pull off those mechanics, skills Obsidian probably lacks. They'd need to be able to take a combat system that doesn't have a lot of depth and squeeze the most out of it with well designed encounters, fun "set piece" fights, and a good sense of pacing in the encounter rate. And if you've played Obsidian games you know they fail in these departments. For example, look at often they fill games with loads of trash encounters (every single game), how they make awful messes of boss fights (Alpha Protocol being the most obvious offender, though KOTOR 2 does a bang up job...of being terrible in this department), and they really never provide much in the way of memorable, unique, encounters (though, to be fair, J.E. Sawyer's work in Icewind Dale 2 produced some great ones...and some TERRIBAD ones too. If he's working on SPRPG, and it isn't in shitastic Bethesda-enforced design constraints, it *might* have a chance). And if you don't like the Paper Mario style of simple, action-command-driven combat (this is probably 70%, easy, of the Codex), you'll probably hate the game.
Don't expect much in the way of deconstruction of the RPG genre either. Well, at least not the ones "we" tend to think of. Have a look at some of these statements:
-Parker has always preferred silent protagonists in RPG's, so the player’s character will be silent.
-Parker hates unskippable cutscenes.
-The humor will be more focus on the games they have played in the past but Parker mentions that games have lampooned other games before so they don't want to do exactly that instead they are focusing more on RPG's on how big and bombastic they can get sometimes.
-There is a Summon System but they are not able to talk about it. {Ed: Probably refers to summons-as-huge-animated-attacks a la Final Fantasy games}
It seems that RPG, to Parker and Stone, isn't Wizardy/Ultima/Fallout/BG, but jRPGs and newer stuff like WoW, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. Or at least that's what their fanbase (the South Park one) thinks of when they think RPGs. So don't expect anything close to Torment in terms of deconstruction of RPGs, expect something more along the lines of every GameFAGs, IGN, or blog with a TOP TEN LIST OF BIGGEST RPG CLICHES which draws mostly from jRPGs.
Bottom line, this one probably ain't for "us".
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