Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.
"This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.
While many noticed how adventure games died in the early to mid 1990s, most did not recognize their rebirth a decade later. RPGs and FPSs each assimilated parts of the corpse, only later to be transformed into something else. Mechanics became simplified, twitch controls became intermediated, all perspectives became shouldered third-person, engagement of gaming became passified by the "cinematic experience", and all was homogenized. When the dust settled, there was only the story, which became the focal point.
In death, adventure games became more powerful than any of us every imagined. In time, they twisted their hosts into adventure games without anyone noticing. Hence the confusion and ambiguity on what an actual RPG is. Hence the confusion of whether game play or story is more important to an RPG. The truth is, all games now are not RPGs. All games now are adventures, like the early days of yore. Storyfags just lack the awareness, within and without, to recognize it.
Adventure games = a genre where you progress the plot by solving inventory puzzles.
There are even adventure games with no plot, just puzzles. Myst and its clones.
Your analysis is therefore wrong, since the passive cinematic trash has no puzzles.
No puzzles = not an adventure game.
Your response has given me pause. There are a myriad of games, old and new, which I regard as adventure games...but are probably more strictly classified as platformers. I will have to contemplate this. Even still, the vast majority of point and click adventures were highly central to the story. For example, Loom and Monkey Island are primarily adventure games. Point-and-click were just limitations of the era. Again, I will have to contemplate this.
Text adventures, which came long before point and click, were also filled with puzzles. Many of them quite obscure and hard, made even harder because of the parser. The point and click adventures of the late 90s died out on the one hand becuase players craved more action games, on the other hand because the puzzles had become beyond obscure and went right into the ridiculous (check the cat moustache puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3, for example). Even during the mid 90s when FMV adventure games became all the rage, with pre-recorded actors instead of drawn sprites or 3D models, the genre didn't ditch its puzzles. Check the Tex Murphy games as examples, or Phantasmagoria.
Modern revival adventure games also have puzzles, even if they're story focused and the puzzles are rather "light". They are a necessary element of the genre.
Then there's the whole Myst subgenre, as I already mentioned. Barely any story at all, only puzzles, and they've always been considered adventure games.
The only adventure games that have no interactive puzzles and all story are those new Telltale ones.
When you have bad story but good combat, game is not good. But when you have good story and bad combat, game can be enjoyable. So having good story is paramount in making good rpg.
Having a good engaging story keep you interested in the game. What is the point of having good combat in lousy driven story? One can argue that in almost all rpgs stories are lousy so all that left is good combat. Those people identify themselves as combatfags.
between at least two forces, one of which the player controls
to some extent
= a game
yes, A combat. Not even several combats. Not even combat within the context of something else. Just combat.
Battleship is a game. A fairy tale is not a game. Elminster in Myth Drannor is not a game. War and Peace is not a game.
With that out of the way, let's talk about if good story can make a bad game more tolerable, wether that game is constituted by combat or puzzle solving or something else.
A game whose essence is combat, but the combat is bad, may have no story to speak of, or one that requires very little player input or time investment (e.g. there are no dialogue options and very little text and even the cutscenes are short). IMO this is the option most likely to make the game salvageable. The game is very straightforward about what it's trying to do, and you probably never have to look around for long before getting into another combat, which means the game is rubbing its shortcomings into your face. IOW, it's very easy to identify what's wrong with the game, or rather, why it is that YOU don't enjoy it. Maybe it's obvious you found a degenerate playstyle™ and you're just steamrolling things; maybe you're not exactly steamrolling everything but your playstyle still makes the game mostly too easy; that's probably even worse. Like equipping ranged weapons on everyone in BG and mostly autoattacking shit to death before it can reach you or hurt you much with arrows, and which is still very effective against individual spellcasters (though it's already getting kind of chancey), but against several spellcasters, it may result in a party wipe. Now you might discard your autoattack-with-ranged-weapons tactic altogether and play the game differently; even though most of the game doesn't ask for it. IOW you can still try to identify the way the game was meant to be played, which may be more enjoyable than playing it in a way that wasn't expected by the devs or that they just didn't bother to balance the game against.
If a game has bad combat and good story, that just kind of expounds its problems. You may want to learn more about the story and maybe influence it; but reading a story =/= playing a game, and influencing a story can be more effectively done in a CYOA than an RPG. An RPG, due to its mechanics, may even keep you from influencing the story in ways you wish and which would be theoretically possible because you'd have to beat certain encounters that you can't/ don't want to beat or because of certain stat/ alignment/ faction requirements. At any rate, you have to slog through the actual game to experience the story; which just doesn't make for good entertainment, even if the story was better than RPG stories tend to be.
If a game has bad combat (and bad everything else that makes it a game) and bad story, first of all it's easier to avoid making that purchase. Let's say some people you trust actually realized all that. And even if you bought it, there's no reason to ever go back to it and waste more of your time on it.
You can aim for the middle of the road here but it's not the wisest choice. Vanilla BG - the only BG there is - was an interesting case in that it didn't do anything particularly well, but it did enough different things tolerably enough to
1. fool reviewers
and
2. make me go back to it a few times trying to get more enjoyment out of it. There's character creation, but you create only one. There's a bit of character building, but you can max all relevant stats at char creation, and what happens afterwards is p. underwhelming (like weapon specialization and distributing some thief points). Character progression is slow and if you dual class, it takes a lot of time for you to actually achieve that character. You can multiclass, but it's going to be a long time before you come into your own. There are dialogue choices, but they don't require much thought and aren't exactly well written. And there's story, which isn't too bad by RPG standards but not good enough to warrant slogging through the game.
So IMO that leaves you with 3 options:
- focus on 1 or 2 game aspects (like combat or puzzles) and go light on the story. Dialogue choices can tie into game aspects so you may want to rely on those more than on exposition to convey the story.
- focus on story but go light on the game aspects. Maybe favor skill/ stat checks over full blown combat. When combat happens, it shouldn't take too long to resolve either way.
- cram a lot of different things into the game and try not to make any of them offensively bad. Possibly not a good choice most of the time. I'd say it didn't work that well for BG but others would disagree; I'd say it worked very well for BG2 and PoE(2).
Personally I think the "how" is more important than the "why". Eg: Blackguards is gud, witcher 2 is bad. Nowadays I'm glad there is YouTube and I don't need to play that game ever again to enjoy the story.
