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The Limit Break - new RPG column by Kat Bailey at Rock Paper Shotgun

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
The former editor of USgamer. Let's see how awkward it gets.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2021/01/13/there-and-back-again-why-rpgs-matter-more-than-ever/

There and back again: why RPGs matter more than ever
So many roles, so little time

90
90
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In a 2019 interview with Retronauts, inXile Entertainment founder Brian Fargo recalled what Interplay hoped to accomplish in Tales Of The Unknown: Part 1, the seminal RPG more commonly referred to by its subtitle: The Bard’s Tale.

“We were trying to set a mood and build a sense of being there… that there was a world… in our own primitive way,” Fargo said. “You started off in a bar; you got to walk around outside, you had to go down to the dungeons, so you felt like you were living in a world; you weren’t just thrust into a wireframe dungeon and that was it.”

Like many game developers of that era, Fargo got his start with Dungeons & Dragons, and transferring the flavour of those late-night sessions to games was his animating desire. In that same Retronauts interview, Fargo talked about how pioneers like Wizardry began as something to play on the nights when the D&D group couldn’t convene, then quickly became much more. “It had all the rules and all the trappings that made it great, but it didn’t have the same latitude… it was linear in fashion… but boy was it fun.”

It didn’t take long for the ambitions of the nascent PC RPG genre to grow beyond simple dungeon dives. With barely 48 KB of RAM at their disposal, developers like Fargo, Michael Cranford, and Richard Garriott sought to build worlds that challenged our assumptions about what was possible in games, producing complex conversation and morality systems as early as 1985—the year that Nintendo released Super Mario Bros on the NES.

These days, technology has caught up with the fevered imaginations of gaming’s early pioneers, but the genre continues to push boundaries in other ways. That is truer now than ever, with games like Disco Elysium, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, and a raft of high-quality indies all offering their own unique perspective on the role-playing experience. I would go as far as to say that if you want to understand modern gaming, you kind of have to understand RPGs.

That’s why I’m here. Hello, my name is Kat Bailey, and I’m the former Editor in Chief of USgamer and the current host of Axe of the Blood God, a podcast devoted to appreciating RPGs in all their forms. Most people know me for my Japanese RPG coverage, but as someone who spent the better part of her adolescence playing games on a Pentium 200, I have a deep appreciation for where PC RPGs came from, and how they continue to influence so much of game design today.

I’m introspective by nature, not to mention a bit of a history nerd, so when RPS asked me to produce this fortnightly column, my mind naturally turned to putting everything that’s happening with this wildly complex genre into context. Right now we’re in the middle of a renaissance for role-playing games, with fascinating games being released at every single level. What’s more, RPGs are big business. Probably the single largest piece of gaming news in 2020 was Microsoft’s surprise purchase of Bethesda for more than $7.5 billion, bolstering an already high-powered collection of RPG developers that includes inXile Entertainment and Obsidian.

Todd Howard, one of the main creative forces behind The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, was taken aback by the massive reaction to Microsoft’s acquisition within the gaming community. “I grossly underestimated the impact in the larger gaming community,” Howard told GamesIndustry.biz. “I was naively surprised at how big it landed and what it meant in the larger context of games, but I was happy with the feedback we saw. A lot of people saw it as a big positive thing, the same way we do.”



It was indeed a “big thing.” Acquiring two of the biggest franchises in all of gaming will tend to get people to sit up and take notice. It was also a long time coming. Fallout and The Elder Scrolls both got their start during what I might call the Silver Age of RPGs, when studios like BioWare and Black Isle Studios in the west, and Square and Enix in the east, were busy defining the modern era of RPGs. Calling The Elder Scrolls “ramshackle” was probably overly charitable – a good portion of Daggerfall was flat out broken – but it nevertheless resonated with players in the same way that Ultima had a decade before, paving the way for the series to truly succeed once technology became sufficiently advanced (of course, that didn’t stop The Elder Scrolls series from continuing to be overly broken, but that’s another discussion).

Like so many others, I discovered these games when they made their way to console and found a mass audience. I remember the excitement of stepping into the Capital Wastes for the first time, and of encountering a dragon in Skyrim. I also remember the thrill of exploring the Star Wars universe at the helm of the Ebon Hawk, and the many sleepless nights I spent writing guides for Dragon Age: Origins and Fallout: New Vegas. I found their sense of possibility arresting – a feeling that was later enhanced by the waves of mods that would come to define their individual communities.

What I didn’t know was that RPGs – PC RPGs in particular – were suffering a quiet identity crisis. In the 2000s, BioWare shifted over to console, and familiar names like Interplay closed up shop. In the process, it became very difficult to pitch the sort of RPG that had been so successful in the 90s. “I remember when we were working on the Black Hound and the original Fallout 3, we were moving to 3D but still staying isometric, and we had people asking why we weren’t going fully 3D,” Obsidian designer Josh Sawyer told me shortly before the release of Pillars Of Eternity. “The publisher mentality shifted away from making isometric to 3D games. They just died for a very long time.”



The era was exemplified by Mass Effect, a wonderful game that was happy to borrow from the 90s RPGs of yore – you could even get the main villain to shoot himself in the head ala The Master in Fallout – but nevertheless seemed embarrassed by its roots. The same could be said of Bethesda’s RPGs, which eliminated their most esoteric elements in the name of accessibility. Obsidian Entertainment, the direct descendant of Black Isle Studios, continued to prize in-depth RPG experiences, but it suffered from a surfeit of ambition and a lack of resources.

It wasn’t until the following decade, with the surprise success of fiddly dungeon crawlers like Dark Souls, that RPGs found a way to strike the balance. Crowdfunding certainly did its part, as did the explosion of digital distribution and the proliferation of more powerful tools. Streamers and YouTubers, too, helped to popularise games like Undertale, which took familiar genre trappings and subverted them with unique and interesting choices of their own.

Meanwhile, the PC and console ecosystems came together in the 2010s, but not in the way that publishers might have expected. In recent years success has flowed out of platforms like Steam, where Divinity: Original Sin and other games like it are continually refined before being released to larger audiences on consoles. The flow has run the other way as well. Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest – classic franchises that got their start on console – have thrived on PC. In 2020, Persona 4 Golden, an enhanced version of a 12-year-old PlayStation 2 RPG, found great success on Steam, prompting Sega to announce that it was planning additional ports.

Console or PC, western or eastern, all of these games have one thing in common: they use stats, systems, and storytelling to let players find their own stories, fostering communities by giving players a sense of ownership over their worlds. In a world with boundless entertainment options, developers have come to realize that the game that does the best job of holding your attention wins, and that’s what RPGs have done for more than 40 years. Just ask Ubisoft, who have functionally turned Assassin’s Creed into an open-world RPG, or Bungie, who have repurposed the D&D dungeon crawl in the service of building its almighty “endgame content.”

One way or another, games are still chasing the same high as the RPGs of the 1980s – the feeling of camaraderie and boundless possibility that sat at the core of the very best D&D sessions, inspiring an entire generation of developers. I’d like to keep exploring that. Over the next few months I’ll be talking to developers, seeking out unique community stories, and delving into the best the genre has to offer. I’ll also be working to surface some of the smaller RPGs that might be worth your attention amid the constant flood of new releases.

Whatever form games take in the future, I’m sure RPGs will have a large part to play, as they always have. When Gary Gygax and Don Kaye took their love of wargaming and applied it to fantasy adventuring, they were unknowingly creating the unpinning for not just the RPG genre, but gaming at large. That’s worth understanding more deeply.

So thanks for joining me on this journey. Let’s see what’s out there.
 

Takamori

Learned
Joined
Apr 17, 2020
Messages
875
Like every game news outlet I have zero interest.
As for the opening article a big meh, shallow information to say that she is into RPG industry?
 

kreight

Guest
Does this media still have that gay practice of banning people? You will not know you've been banned. You will still be able to login and comment but your comments will not be visible.
 

Takamori

Learned
Joined
Apr 17, 2020
Messages
875
Does this media still have that gay practice of banning people? You will not know you've been banned. You will still be able to login and comment but your comments will not be visible.
Shadowbans still a thing far as I know. No one dared to legislate and put some sort of order in the Silicon Valley power.
 

kreight

Guest
I remember one day they declared they wanted to make their website "white-list only" to boost their add revenue. You xan still read it with ad blocker so I guess that didn't go so well.
 

Tyranicon

A Memory of Eternity
Developer
Joined
Oct 7, 2019
Messages
5,874
why RPGs matter more than ever


Why does everyone always have to pretend that the things they like are some kind of cosmicbrain artform necessary for the continued evolution of mankind? It's a fucking game genre.

God, the cringe.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

Dungeon Master
Patron
Joined
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Messages
11,760
Journalist said:
When Gary Gygax and Don Kaye took their love of wargaming and applied it to fantasy adventuring, they were unknowingly creating the unpinning for not just the RPG genre, but gaming at large.
Poor Dave Arneson must be rolling over in his grave.

blackmoorsmall-jpg.63430
 

TheBreadcrumb

Novice
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Messages
22
''Rockpapershotgun''
Stopped reading there. God I hate gaming ''journalists''

this is the thing calling you an incel online
da1f4b551a1490c3a3fb83984be627f8
Jokes on her(?), I'm voluntary celibate. I bet she's(?) the same kind of person who complains about women in video games looking ''unrealistic'' IE: more attractive than her(?).

Speededit: Misspelling
 
Last edited:

Aarwolf

Learned
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Dec 15, 2020
Messages
439
RPGs in title. Images taken from Mass Effect, Disco Elysium, Deadfire and Fallout 3 (i guess, maybe it's F:NV).

So at best we have two RPGs here (DE and F:NV), at worst, none (if we don't count DE as RPG, and if it's F3, not New Vegas).

Yeah, that saved me couple of minutes of reading this thing, thanks for the heads up Rockpapershotgun!
 

Jigby

Augur
Joined
May 9, 2009
Messages
332
The last time I registered anyone from RPS was when they had Gillen and Corbett. Gillen turned out to be an SJW, but in the old days he did deliver a great Solium Infernum AAR so he probably does have some non-normie genes. But this new breed of journos, ugh... It's normies through and through
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
The last time I registered anyone from RPS was when they had Gillen and Corbett. Gillen turned out to be an SJW, but in the old days he did deliver a great Solium Infernum AAR so he probably does have some non-normie genes. But this new breed of journos, ugh... It's normies through and through

Yeah I'd rather watch some indepenent youtuber, read CRPG Addict, or browse the Steam upcoming releases page on my own, which gives me more information than these "professional" journalists ever could.
 
Self-Ejected

Thac0

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I'm very into cock and ball torture
The article is bad. There is some really strange stuff in there, like calling Yakuza 7 innovative and boundary breaking? Yakuza 7 has simpler gameplay than Dragon Quest V from 1992 on a systems level lol. It was made as an April Fools joke to overlay a well known beat em up with slight rpg elements with an extremely traditional turn based rpg system. Am I too generous in assuming she meant that switch? Or just namedropping new rpgs to increase clicks. But it is not as bad as you edgelords make it out to be.

Journo said:
.
Like so many others, I discovered these games when they made their way to console and found a mass audience. I remember the excitement of stepping into the Capital Wastes for the first time, and of encountering a dragon in Skyrim. I also remember the thrill of exploring the Star Wars universe at the helm of the Ebon Hawk, and the many sleepless nights I spent writing guides for Dragon Age: Origins and Fallout: New Vegas. I found their sense of possibility arresting – a feeling that was later enhanced by the waves of mods that would come to define their individual communities.

This is so casual it hurts.

Journo said:
.
That’s why I’m here. Hello, my name is Kat Bailey, and I’m the former Editor in Chief of USgamer and the current host of Axe of the Blood God, a podcast devoted to appreciating RPGs in all their forms. Most people know me for my Japanese RPG coverage, but as someone who spent the better part of her adolescence playing games on a Pentium 200, I have a deep appreciation for where PC RPGs came from, and how they continue to influence so much of game design today.

Also this is a bit strange. This is a 1996 CPU if google does not deceive me, but the only remotely old RPG she mentions is Fallout 1 on the context of Mass Effect? The Infinity Engine should really have been explained in the Article.

Journo said:
What I didn’t know was that RPGs – PC RPGs in particular – were suffering a quiet identity crisis. In the 2000s, BioWare shifted over to console, and familiar names like Interplay closed up shop. In the process, it became very difficult to pitch the sort of RPG that had been so successful in the 90s. “I remember when we were working on the Black Hound and the original Fallout 3, we were moving to 3D but still staying isometric, and we had people asking why we weren’t going fully 3D,” Obsidian designer Josh Sawyer told me shortly before the release of Pillars Of Eternity. “The publisher mentality shifted away from making isometric to 3D games. They just died for a very long time.”

The era was exemplified by Mass Effect, a wonderful game that was happy to borrow from the 90s RPGs of yore – you could even get the main villain to shoot himself in the head ala The Master in Fallout – but nevertheless seemed embarrassed by its roots. The same could be said of Bethesda’s RPGs, which eliminated their most esoteric elements in the name of accessibility. Obsidian Entertainment, the direct descendant of Black Isle Studios, continued to prize in-depth RPG experiences, but it suffered from a surfeit of ambition and a lack of resources.

It wasn’t until the following decade, with the surprise success of fiddly dungeon crawlers like Dark Souls, that RPGs found a way to strike the balance. Crowdfunding certainly did its part, as did the explosion of digital distribution and the proliferation of more powerful tools. Streamers and YouTubers, too, helped to popularise games like Undertale, which took familiar genre trappings and subverted them with unique and interesting choices of their own.

Meanwhile, the PC and console ecosystems came together in the 2010s, but not in the way that publishers might have expected. In recent years success has flowed out of platforms like Steam, where Divinity: Original Sin and other games like it are continually refined before being released to larger audiences on consoles. The flow has run the other way as well. Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest – classic franchises that got their start on console – have thrived on PC. In 2020, Persona 4 Golden, an enhanced version of a 12-year-old PlayStation 2 RPG, found great success on Steam, prompting Sega to announce that it was planning additional ports..

Best part of the article. Short examination of beginning and end of the decline for kasuls. Strange focus, not even mentioning Pillars of Eternity and harking on rpgmaker trash with Undertale instead?

Overall I have read much worse from mainstream journos. The last block really saves the article from just being meaningless dribble about herself.
Why does her face look like she is in a wrong aspect ratio tho?
 

Au Ellai

Educated
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Jan 18, 2017
Messages
40
We seriously shilling the most retarded of retarded websites to ever exist now? RPS is cancer on cancer. Nothing they say, have said, or will ever say in the future is worthy of having a single word read by anyone with a functioning brain, let alone worthy of being shared on a forum.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
We seriously shilling the most retarded of retarded websites to ever exist now? RPS is cancer on cancer. Nothing they say, have said, or will ever say in the future is worthy of having a single word read by anyone with a functioning brain, let alone worthy of being shared on a forum.
12987.jpg
 

Sergiu64

Arcane
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Joined
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Messages
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Location
Sic semper tyrannis.
RPGs in title. Images taken from Mass Effect, Disco Elysium, Deadfire and Fallout 3 (i guess, maybe it's F:NV).

So at best we have two RPGs here (DE and F:NV), at worst, none (if we don't count DE as RPG, and if it's F3, not New Vegas).

Yeah, that saved me couple of minutes of reading this thing, thanks for the heads up Rockpapershotgun!

Deadfire is not a RPG now?
 

Aarwolf

Learned
Joined
Dec 15, 2020
Messages
439
Deadfire is not a RPG now?

It mimics one, but it's not. Deadfire creates illusion od choice - you've got stats, but they are meaningless - each class is equally strong and equally boring to play. You've got story and choices, but in the end you have nothing to say - Eothas will do what he wants to do and you can only chat with him about it. First Pillars gave you some kind of choice and agency, in Deadfire you are only a spectator, truly a watcher - but I don't know if that was intention behind it.

So, for me (and mind it, I backed it) it's not RPG, it's visual novel, and not a good one. It has walls of meaningless text, it has characters acting outside of setting, and it has plot separated from the rest of the game, being in contrary even. On one hand you've got this world threatening god and on the other pirate-themed expolarion thing, muddled with colonial questions, but viewed not through the eyes of people who lived in the period and had different points of view about it (mostly about cost efficiency and so on), but through the eyes of XXI century californians, who had patchy at best knowledge about the issue, but also very strong ideological view. I, for one, condemn most european countries for what they done to native Americans and Africans, but would very much welcomed better and more deep analysis of said issue, and not the poster caricature of things.

tl;dr: Deadfire is not RPG, because it doesn't give you real choices, gameplay wise or storywise, and it's story is shallow and disjointed mess.
 

Dycedarg

Learned
Joined
Dec 14, 2020
Messages
153
So, let's see what our intrepid journo did on her very first column:
  • Spent a good portion of her article talking about Inxile and Obsidian
  • Spent even more digital ink on Bethesda and Bioware
  • Called Dark Souls a "dungeon crawler"
  • Praised Undertale
Other than that ocean of idiocy, she tried to condense the whole history of rpgs, both japanese and western, in a single small article. That went as well as expected.
 

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