Decline The lack of recovery among American RPGs, visualised with graphs

[Humanophage]

Posted it on Reddit under the title of "The Decline of US cRPGs" so that the console players don't interfere and proclaim how amazing Zelda or Mario or whatever is. Now the Redditors are sperging that only isometric RPGs are cRPGs whereas New Vegas isn't.

 

[Palomides]

"What's a crpg?"

 

[Desiderius]

crap gaem obv

 

[Humanophage]

"What's a crpg?"

First post:

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

so why did wasteland 3 win the 2020 codex GOTY rather than an indie title?

Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children isn't actually an RPG, and many Codexers will immediately dismiss it for being Korean-developed with anime-esque character design, but it's easily the best game (not limited by genre) of 2020.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Something I've noticed, mostly in music, is that whenever a genre or movement loses in popularity to the next big thing, Europe tends to keep that flame alive. Even if technically America has more of a fanbase than Europe, its Europe that has the big festivals and revivals over USA. I don't think this is a situation unique to RPGs, and I couldn't tell you why this is. Maybe its just that America is so big the right people aren't meeting, or the Americans who cared about such things fucked off to Europe.

 

[EvilWolf]

Like it or not, it was very popular amongst normies. The codex is an ideological bubble.
Much of what these games get shit on for was already present in say, BG2. BG2 would be far less popular on the codex if it wasn't for its inertia. Also, there's an inherent bias for old=good, you can see this in e.g., the slow overall rising opinion of DAO.

As a sidenote, you can also see the eastern european influence in the decline in popularity of blobbers, blobbers basically fell off the top list if you compare the top 70 vs top 101.

Exactly what about OG BG2 would be frowned upon? Also old=good holds true since with every release you realize how good you actually had it in the previous releases. See Mass Effect 1 > ME2 > ME3, DA:O > DA2 > DA:I, and Daggerfall > Morrowind > Oblivion > Skyrim. Anomalies in this, DA:I's popularity for example, is due more to either fans of the originals not remembering how good they had it in the past or new blood not knowing about the older games. When TES VI comes out you'll see people praising TES V to high heaven because of how many features they cut in the name of "streamlining". Not to mention how broken Net Immerse will be while trying to handle the vanilla game because Bethesda's heads are too far up their own asses to realize they need to focus on making a new engine instead of keeping the same engine with a drag and drop tier interface so their straight out of degree mill developers can comprehend it.

If Troika had decided to release vtmb on consoles they'd likely would have still been around.
It's amusing that e.g., Bethesda gets shit for selling their games on consoles but Warhorse Studios doesn't.

The answer to "why doesn't america make more niche RPGs?!" is right there in Troika. Maybe you guys should have bought more copies.

Troika was dead in the water before they even released Bloodlines, asking papa Activision for more money would have resulted in the game never being released.

 

[Atlantico]

Exactly what about OG BG2 would be frowned upon?

Romances and crafting, to name a couple.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

How many solo games mirror/mimic the common mmorpg? And I mean down to a near exact formula. If it wasn't solo crpg then you'd swear it wasa mmo. Albeit, nix a mock chat window with asians spamming gold sales and items.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Have you considered that the tastes of the site are biased towards european games because ...europeans make up a majority of the posters?
Big brain moment.

Next we'll have to figure out why 4chan likes jrpgs so much. Surely nothing to do with all the weeaboos.

Your own example, 2020 codex goty: WL3 wins against CP77, not to mention Dungeon of Naheulbeuk. Extreme levels of biasedness, indeed.

Well, in the case of the Dungeon of Naheulbeuk, you have bouncy elf tits. Wait! Are elves considered people or animals? Entrance to furry-dom? Good lord! Hopefully not. (Elf-->anime [hentai]-->demons/goblins/monsters-->furry-->futa-->??? What a horrible thought)

 

[Tyranicon]

I don't know what you guys are talking about. Clearly my hooker RPG will revive American PC RPGs for the next decade.

 

[Johnny Biggums]

Without BG1 we wouldn't have BG3. So, if you think about it, the decline actually started with BG1.

 

[Tyranicon]

I think decline can ultimately be answered by the fact that both developers and publishers are more in tune with what consumers want: endlessly repetitive filler content.

All those good RPGs with interesting characters, C&C, finely-tuned combat systems, etc? Fuck that. Consumers just want to do one boring-ass thing for 700 hours.

Kids are dumb, people over the age of 35 have life things to do (and are still pretty dumb). Plan accordingly.

 

[His Dudeness]

It is all because of console gaming.

 

[Zeriel]

I have previously noted that there is a dearth of good new RPGs from the US, which never really recovered from the console assault in the mid-2000s. Apart from New Vegas, the Great American RPG has been essentially vanquished by the console invasion and then its already struggling form got kicked around by the journos. The US didn't take much of a part in the world-wide recovery from the decline.

However, I think it is worth revisiting this issue because we can now see the dynamic showing just how radical and swift the collapse was. So I added the region and years to the data from the most comprehensive vote so far. Some games are a bit ambiguous when it comes to region (like AoD), but it is clear enough that they are not primarily American.

At the same time, back when US RPGs were genuinely alive in the Golden Age, they truly secured their place in the pantheon and are much more distinguished than any recent entries.

Version with labels, followed by the relative proportion of US RPGs by period in terms of total points and frequency.

Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened.

I think you could make an argument that this was related to the golden age of tabletop RPGs in the West. They were a big deal back then, everyone played them, it even influenced FPS design with Doom and its spinoffs famously having "dungeon-like" design by level designers who played D&D. If you look at all the CRPGs that went over to JP and became big, they're basically all derived from tabletop, usually 100% directly. And the appearance of Western tropes in JRPGs is actually almost entirely owed to this, like D&D item and god names in every JRPG since.

Then tabletop declined and started aping the success of videogames, and that ceased to be an influence. I suppose one could compare this to the famous saying in the anime industry that it got worse because people were no longer drawing from real life experiences, and just copying other anime. It does often feel like that is the case with video games in general now--people are copying other (modern, bad) videogames, they're not drawing on inspiration from outside of that sphere of life.

This reminds me of when I was replaying LOL 2 & 3, there is an "it factor" to them that is not explicable in the gameplay or basic systems. The LOL2 menu includes a tribute to a guy, Rick Parks, who died while working on LOL2--he was the head artist and was also responsible for the (gorgeous for the time) art of LOL1, and Eye of the Beholder. He's fairly typical of the time for videogames: an artist who was talented and known primarily outside of the gaming space. One of his paintings hung in Trump's properties. Or look at Harlan Ellison: a big-name, elite cultural name of a writer drawn to the medium in the 90s because it was new and interesting. There was a lot of that back then.

 

[Netch]

I think you could make an argument that this was related to the golden age of tabletop RPGs in the West. They were a big deal back then, everyone played them, it even influenced FPS design with Doom and its spinoffs famously having "dungeon-like" design by level designers who played D&D. If you look at all the CRPGs that went over to JP and became big, they're basically all derived from tabletop, usually 100% directly. And the appearance of Western tropes in JRPGs is actually almost entirely owed to this, like D&D item and god names in every JRPG since.

Then tabletop declined and started aping the success of videogames, and that ceased to be an influence. I suppose one could compare this to the famous saying in the anime industry that it got worse because people were no longer drawing from real life experiences, and just copying other anime. It does often feel like that is the case with video games in general now--people are copying other (modern, bad) videogames, they're not drawing on inspiration from outside of that sphere of life.

This reminds me of when I was replaying LOL 2 & 3, there is an "it factor" to them that is not explicable in the gameplay or basic systems. The LOL3 menu includes a tribute to a guy, Rick Parks, who died while working on LOL3--he was the head artist and was also responsible for the (gorgeous for the time) art of LOL1, and Eye of the Beholder. He's fairly typical of the time for videogames: an artist who was talented and known primarily outside of the gaming space. One of his paintings hung in Trump's properties. Or look at Harlan Ellison: a big-name, elite cultural name of a writer drawn to the medium in the 90s because it was new and interesting. There was a lot of that back then.

And nowadays games are trying their best to copy films instead of other games. I think a lot of this behavior stems from this bizarre perception that games aren't a legitimate artistic medium in and of themselves, probably because of how relatively new games are. Because of this, developers hire big name actors, make a big deal whenever a movie adaptation is made, try to make their games as cinematic as possible, etc (a lot of this is more the industry in general rather than specifically RPGs, of course, but I think the point is relevant). There was a lecture Warren Spector gave where he said something to the effect of how important it is that games focus on and emphasize doing what only games are capable of (i.e. interactivity, player choice, etc). There's a reason early immersive sims were so inspired by tapletop games, and that's because video games themselves are inherently, in regards to interactivity/reactivity, a watered down version of what the tapletop gaming experience can provide.

I think if the game industry at large were to recognize the intrinsic uniqueness that games provide and hone in on those aspects of design, we would see a massive shift. But as you said, most of the industry is more interested on aping what's already been done better by games in the past/other artistic mediums than actually innovating.

 

[Saravan]

The key takeaway from this thread is if you talk shit about eastern europeans be prepared to receive an avalanche of retarded ratings.

 

[Atlantico]

The key takeaway from this thread is if you talk shit about eastern europeans be prepared to receive an avalanche of retarded ratings.

The Witcher 3 sucks rocks and Polish women are dogs.

 

[OSK]

On this site you always have to check the game's country of origin after reading positive reviews. So much Eastern European shovelware and mainstream bullshit gets circlejerked around here. And CDPRtards are the worst.

If Oblivion was made in Poland it would be considered an RPG Codex classic.

 

[Ravielsk]

The American industry can never recover because it embraced a dysfunctional business model of treating everything and everyone as disposable, people, hardware, brands or even their audiences. Quality products of any kind require experienced and passionate people to make them and you cannot have experienced and passionate people when you rotate 90% of your staff every 3 years. You also can never produce anything good when you come at things with the attitude of "well, some dumb fuck will buy this". If the maker has no respect for his work or audience then the best that can come from that mentality is a inoffensive piece of shit.

Yes, in the short term this attitude can produce massive profits for a handful of lucky scammers but besides them almost everyone else ends up on the rocks. For reference check how many studios went under when they tried to "go mainstream" during the PS360 era and compare that to these graphs. There is a direct correlation between embracing a POS attitude towards your own industry and its decline.

 

[mondblut]

You can only say this if you're using a goalpost-moving definition of the term "revive".

And you're using a goalpost-moving definition of the term "RPG", so?

The fact is that the Codex front page gets a new "X is an upcoming isometric turn-based tactical RPG inspired by Y" newspost once a month on average these days, something that would have been considered a fantasy a decade ago.

A decade ago none of this shit would pass as RPGs.

 

[Zeriel]

The American industry can never recover because it embraced a dysfunctional business model of treating everything and everyone as disposable, people, hardware, brands or even their audiences. Quality products of any kind require experienced and passionate people to make them and you cannot have experienced and passionate people when you rotate 90% of your staff every 3 years. You also can never produce anything good when you come at things with the attitude of "well, some dumb fuck will buy this". If the maker has no respect for his work or audience then the best that can come from that mentality is a inoffensive piece of shit.

Yes, in the short term this attitude can produce massive profits for a handful of lucky scammers but besides them almost everyone else ends up on the rocks. For reference check how many studios went under when they tried to "go mainstream" during the PS360 era and compare that to these graphs. There is a direct correlation between embracing a POS attitude towards your own industry and its decline.

Decline in quality maybe. Not decline in profits, and that's all they care about. The gaming industry is bigger than ever, and now bigger than every other media industry.

 

[Ravielsk]

Decline in quality maybe. Not decline in profits, and that's all they care about. The gaming industry is bigger than ever, and now bigger than every other media industry.

Ah, but you see this is why I typed "Yes, in the short term this attitude can produce massive profits for a handful of lucky scammers". You need to understand that the industry and its growth is yet again just another scam. If you were to examine the sales numbers and profits of top players and then measured them against everyone else you could easily spot the discrepancy. On one hand you have Fortnite with 6 - 12 mil. players and on the other you have Paladins struggling to maintain a measly 15k players . How is this possible? Both games target more or less the same demographic, Paladins comes from a more established and experienced F2P studio, they even look vaguely similar. So why is one so big while the other is barely a thing?

Because the supposed industry growth is entirely fictional. What grew were these very specific pockets within the industry like sports games, COD, WoW or now Fortnite but that happened in complete isolation largely because of factors that had nothing to do with the games themselves. Meaning these pockets might be highly profitable but are entirely disconnected from the rest of the industry. A COD fan will never buy anything but COD, WoW player will not play another MMO and Fortnite kiddies will only play Fortnite. The existence of these pockets is effectively irrelevant to the rest of the industry. It would be as if the movie industry made the choice to stop making anything but Avatar clones because Avatar sold so well.

This approach already resulted in one crash during PS360 era that basically wiped well over half the industry. The media simply did not bother reporting it as such. Currently it would not shock me if another came in a couple of years as the conditions(financial crisis, incompetent management, over-inflated budgets, reliance on demographics that do not exist) certainly are similar.

 

[fantadomat]

Incline is hard for kwans......

 

[good fucking shit happen]

The American industry can never recover because it embraced a dysfunctional business model of treating everything and everyone as disposable, people, hardware, brands or even their audiences. Quality products of any kind require experienced and passionate people to make them and you cannot have experienced and passionate people when you rotate 90% of your staff every 3 years. You also can never produce anything good when you come at things with the attitude of "well, some dumb fuck will buy this". If the maker has no respect for his work or audience then the best that can come from that mentality is a inoffensive piece of shit.

Yes, in the short term this attitude can produce massive profits for a handful of lucky scammers but besides them almost everyone else ends up on the rocks. For reference check how many studios went under when they tried to "go mainstream" during the PS360 era and compare that to these graphs. There is a direct correlation between embracing a POS attitude towards your own industry and its decline.

Decline in quality maybe. Not decline in profits, and that's all they care about. The gaming industry is bigger than ever, and now bigger than every other media industry.

The customer is always right.