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I don't know where you got that out from, but that's not what I was talking about.
Ctrl-F -> Wizardry = no results
Therefore, you're making shit up. What I was talking about was specifically about Wizardry and it specifically mentioned public opinion.
Also, I see you're one of those calling people who don't like the shit games you like "grognards". Not surprising with a Pillars of Eternity avatar, I guess.
Just call them "retards", and fuck off with this stupid "omfg resistasnt to change grongards not liek muh good gaem". Jeez.
Always, and I mean always when they say this, they mean they want to change it to get more people in.
But they always word it make it sound like those that don't like it just don't know a good thing when they see it.
Otherwise what can they mean by "resistant to change"? Surely, nobody wants bad changes, so they must be referring to good changes, they always change for the better, we just don't get it!
I don't know where you got that out from, but that's not what I was talking about.
Ctrl-F -> Wizardry = no results
Therefore, you're making shit up. What I was talking about was specifically about Wizardry and it specifically mentioned public opinion.
Also, I see you're one of those calling people who don't like the shit games you like "grognards". Not surprising with a Pillar
Just call them "retards", and fuck off with this stupid "omfg resistasnt to change grongards not liek muh good gaem". Jeez.
His argument is that most people (as in the lowest common denominator) don't think it's an RPG, therefore it's not an RPG anymore. That's the essence of it.
If people thought you need romanced for a game to be RPG would you also think that deserves "serious consideration".
It’s the same interview the original Wizardry comment was taken from. His Wizardry comment is in response to the second or third question, right at the top for fuck’s sake.
To make it clear: Josh says by the standards of 1980, Wizardry was an RPG—by the standards of public opinion, Wiz was an RPG. But by his standards that have nothing to do with public opinion, it’s not an RPG. He’s not saying an RPG is whatever gets called an RPG by the masses, he’s saying literally the EXACT OPPOSITE.
Since when is grognard meant as an insult or as something dismissive? Yeah, if you like ‘80s dungeon crawlers, you’re a grognard. If I liked ‘80s dungeon crawlers, I would be happy to call myself a grognard. And I have a Deadfire avatar because it looks like me, minus the horns and half the hair.
But I didn’t start posting in this thread to evangelize for Obsidian. I got reeled in because it drives me nuts when people demonstrate an obdurate resistance to learning how to read. And every step of the way people like you have wildly misinterpreted everything that comes out of Sawyer’s mouth. It’s lunacy. He could agree with you in every particular and you’d find some Orwellian way to interpret it as an attempt to further casualize the genre.
Pick one Stalker game for me to play it, I don't have time to play all of 'em and my only experience was trying the first minutes of Shadow of Chernobyl years ago
Pick one Stalker game for me to play it, I don't have time to play all of 'em and my only experience was trying the first minutes of Shadow of Chernobyl years ago
Same reason TV and films need to evolve. Doing the same thing over and over again in the same way gets boring.
--> tangent
Consider the "classic" cRPG formula: isometric game with tactical turn-based or RTwP combat, a protagonist and companions whose abilities are constrained by stats, skills, and equipment, and a story that's structured around a main quest and sidequests. This allows for anything from Fallout to Planescape: Torment while the gameplay remains easily recognisable by anyone familiar with the formula. And I certainly believe there's a lot of stuff that could be done with this formula: it doesn't have to be Chosen One Saves The World (again).
But.
The formula does have a quite a lot of unspoken assumptions to it. For example, it's assumed that combat will be the main system, with most things -- stats, gear, etc. -- affecting combat effectiveness. This also assumes that you'll be spending a lot of time in combat. And a power curve is also implied: as you improve your character and gear, you'll get more effective at combat and be able to overcome tougher enemies.
This means that as long as you're sticking to this formula, your game will necessarily involve lots and lots of murdering and it will be a power fantasy: you'll end up stronger than when you started. And this is pretty constraining! If you're trying to do anything else than a "hero's journey" of some kind, you will have to jump through some major hoops. It also really often happens that the end of the game turns into a tedious slog because you "have to" have the opportunity to test all those shiny skills and gear you've so painstakingly acquired. Even PS:T did this, and suffered for it: the slog at the end is clearly the weakest part of the game, and it would have been weak even if they had managed to put in better encounters.
The tabletop gaming world is quite different. While we still have plenty of hardcore combat-heavy games fully in tune with their wargaming heritage, there are plenty of others. There are games that focus on non-combat skills, investigation, and unraveling mysteries (Call of Cthulhu). There are "story games." There's larping which fades into improv theatre. There's stuff like Fria Ligan's offbeat games, Tales from the Loop for example. There is no reason I can see why cRPGs should continue to stay in the really small box that's been built for them.
If cRPGs could evolve to produce variants that are out of this box then that would be awesome (and of course it doesn't mean there couldn't continue to be games inside the box; it's not like monkeys stopped existing when humans evolved).
And yeah, that's why Disco Elysium is so fucking awesome. It absolutely is a RPG. It just goes back to the roots of role-playing and then takes off in a new direction. We need more of that.
Of course, it's more likely that "evolving" just means making a BETTER hiking simulator, with REAL soil erosion and actually properly reactive AI, like Oblivion promised but better.
The point, in case zealots ever want to accept it, is that your tastes are not the only tastes in the world. Really, I know this may be hard to believe, but if you like playing a turn-based game set in three counties of Utah in 2242, and you like miniguns but don't like lasers, and you like the ratio of combat to dialogue to be about 4:1, and you like cars that look more like Buicks than Pontiacs, and you think 50s-style monsters are okay but 50s-style aliens aren't, and you think Max's jacket from Mad Max is okay but the football pad armour isn't, and you don't like it when italics are used in dialogue but you do like it when boldface is used, and you want it to be longer than 100 hours but no longer than 120 hours, and like games to be non-linear but only to a point, and like big cities, but only two because four is too much BUT HEY NOT THAT ONE, and you like the desert but don't mind a little grass BUT HEY NOT THAT MUCH BECAUSE IT'S NOT FALLOUT...I am terribly, terribly sorry, because we are not going to make a game just for you. We're not trying to make a game for everyone. Really, we aren't. But we're not making a game just for you and ten other angry guys with tastes that are narrower than a hallway in a camp of pygmy dwarves.
This is some moronic bull Prime Junta. It would imply that RPGs have been doing the same thing over and over. We have so many different directions they have already gone that they are effectively evolving without *snigger* Sawyer's help.
The bigger problem is that RPG devs are resistant/unable to change, save for some new comer indie devs. If you ask the current RPG devs what kinda game they wanna make their answers will be something derived from DnD or some perfectly nice setting with MAGIC in it. In their free time they are still playing DnD with their colleagues more than anything else which they've been doing for the last 30 years. They can't fucking think anything else, their imaginary world is limited to tolkien fantasy and star wars syfy, next up on their list is bringing elves and dwarfs to modern day.
This is some moronic bull Prime Junta. It would imply that RPGs have been doing the same thing over and over. We have so many different directions they have already gone that they are effectively evolving without *snigger* Sawyer's help.
CRPGs evolved dramatically for the first twenty years. But aside from action RPGs getting more bland, the genre really hasn’t changed very much for the last 15 odd years. Just substitute the word incline for evolution if this particular piece of verbiage bothers you so much. But who the hell would deny that the genre has stagnated since, say, Troika went under?
Devs have spent the last five years simply trying to get back to where we were in the late ‘90s. This is a worthy goal, but back in the ‘90s they were trying to break new ground. Wanting more of that should not be controversial, and pointing out that we haven’t broken much new ground lately should be obvious.
The bigger problem is that RPG devs are resistant/unable to change, save for some new comer indie devs. If you ask the current RPG devs what kinda game they wanna make their answers will be something derived from DnD or some perfectly nice setting with MAGIC in it. In their free time they are still playing DnD with their colleagues more than anything else which they've been doing for the last 30 years. They can't fucking think anything else, their imaginary world is limited to tolkien fantasy and star wars syfy, next up on their list is bringing elves and dwarfs to modern day.
Bullshit. The problem is that 99% of developers only implement fluffy character building, superficial combat system, etc. and deliver a subpar action game whic they call cRPG. That's not a surprise. If you look at their steam accounts and interviews, most of them don't play cRPGs in their spare time*. They dislike their own genre. You can choose any setting you want. The problem is the lack of any meaningful cRPG mecahnics. SR has a fresh setting, but is a shallow iPhone game with no cRPG meat in it. I thought that Battle Brothers would be boring because they used goblins, skeletons, etc., but the simple fact that they tried to implement an engrossing cRPG mechanics easily compensate the reused theme.
* Avellone only play retarded games in his spare time and want to develop games from other genres. Mitsoda want to develop games from other genres, etc, etc. If veterans of the industry that are supposed to be the luminaries of the genre are so dismissive about cRPGs, you can't expect an ounce of good gameplay from them.
Or maybe they like to pose as nerd geeks because that's what most people here wanted to see. I know a lot of people who have tons of boardgames and DnD books, but don't play them anymore. If they took a picture and posted on the internet as a proof they are playing these games you would probably believe that's true. You can tell that they are not playing these games because they are incapable of making a decent combat system. Unless, of course, you want to believe that they are making shitty combat systems on purpose.
The only thing that is dead is the interest in the genre. People are socially motivated to assess cRPGs using more popular genres as a standard. It's as if fans of rap were criticising classic music for being boring and outdated, and composers were delivering remixes of Mozart and calling this classic music to please these people. In fact, they are not only doing this, but they are also inviting other composers to do the same, because that's what classic music needs, they say. What a bunch of hooey. That's not what the genre needs. That's what players and developers who hate cRPGs need.
Taylorism is neither of the above and has the worst of the both worlds. It has the apparence of a traditional game, but none of its real complexity. It's a cheap knock off of the real article made by uninspired and burnout developers who wanted to do something else.
Pen and paper gaming is a perfect source of inspiration for cRPG creation and if your game is trying to replicate the PnP experience and even remotely manages to approximate it in a computer game, then you've got a really goddamn good game on your hands.
Pen and paper gaming is a perfect source of inspiration for cRPG creation and if your game is trying to replicate the PnP experience and even remotely manages to approximate it in a computer game, then you've got a really goddamn good game on your hands.
Then they should start to play other pen & paper games more often instead of 2e, 3e, 3.5, 5e I keep hearing when I have just basic idea what they refer to
Its not about ruleset, tis about theme, world, lore whatever else.
Pen and paper gaming is a perfect source of inspiration for cRPG creation and if your game is trying to replicate the PnP experience and even remotely manages to approximate it in a computer game, then you've got a really goddamn good game on your hands.
Then they should start to play other pen & paper games more often instead of 2e, 3e, 3.5, 5e I keep hearing when I have just basic idea what they refer to
Yeah, roasts aside, 90's era throwback RPGs are basically a dead end. That's nice if you're a fan of playing retro RPGs, but not so much if you're a dev who is bored of making them.
Still, one wonders how making a game with story reactivity and deep combat are mutually exclusive. Surely you can do both, even within the framework of top-down dialogue box / tactical combat RPGs. Tyranny seemed quite promising in that regard, and it was made with a tiny budget.
I disagree with this. We've seen at least 3 major evolutions of RPGs in the last decades:
-MMORPGs (now mostly dead after the WoW singularity)
-Cinematic (Think KoToR, Witcher 1&2, and Mass Effect, now also dying)
-Open World (Goes all the way back to Ultima but new tech makes exciting things possible)
The genres are essentially consolidating; we're seeing Cinematics and Open World styles merge (like the Witcher 3). Developers are also putting online features into everything. Shit, even JRPGs are getting in on the racket with FF15. Naturally it becomes hard to compete as budgets balloon to insane proportions; other than Bethesda and Bioware, what American company is even making mainstream RPGs anymore? Instead everyone is just slapping XP bars into everything. Only euro-RPGs (ELEX, KCD) are trying to compete directly. It's also possible these mainstream AAA RPGs are just going to go away, getting subsumed into other genres like FPS and action games.
I would love it if Obsidian made their own Open-world Skyrim-killer instead of begging Bethesda for scraps or wallowing in the 90s. Kickstart THAT.
