1eyedking Top 10 things that RPGs don't do anymore

[Lord Azlan]

I think one of the best things we have lost, not only in RPG, is the panic, paranoia and FEAR by not being able to save at any time you want.

Bards Tale was great at this. And going back games like Wasteland and Alternative Reality Dungeon did this too.

When you can't save when you want to - it becomes a completely different game.

Been playing Alien Isolation recently. Not my usual cup of tea. Consoled to death. Crappy engine. Linear plot. Guns floating in mid-air. Tedious back and forth.

But God Help Me, I am going to hide under this table for as long as required because of the Alien finds and kills me, I lose more than an hour of gaming.

I think without the ability to save (scum) the games become more immersive. You can lose members of your party.

I even vaguely remember (my poor old memory) that in some games I carried dead characters around until I was strong enough to revive them or had a power or spell to bring them back.

Didn't we used to lose party members and then hire new ones or create others because that guy you nurtured for a few levels is DEAD?

Swords and Sorcery - Underworld - DEFINITIVE EDITION. Played that recently and I just remember saving all the bloody time as around any corner there could be a one shot kill that demolished your whole party. Obviously there is a balance to be struck somewhere. But if you could only save in the inns - would the game been more immersive? I think so.

Games that encourage you to save often? GET LOST.

Greater Immersion? Who loves you baby!

 

[eXalted]

Actually killable party members. In any modern rpg party members just get up after any kind of battle and are all líke "lol didn't hurt"

Just like A Dance with Rogues!
Seriously, this module is created by one person and it is full of companion interactions. And they can die permanly in a simple battle and not in scripted events.

 

[vonAchdorf]

So, I've been thinking about writing another clickbait article about RPGs, this time on ideas & concepts that were common, but now vanished. I mean, beyond good combat, fun dungeons, actual good writing, etc...

Riddles: Who can forget Betrayal at Krondor's chests, or that riddle the Baldur's Gate Genie made:

A princess is as old as the prince will be when the princess is twice as old as the prince was when the princess' age was half the sum of their current ages.

I remember reading a idiot game designer talking about how he doesn't do riddles anymore because people just Google then answer. That's bullshit, might as well not make a game at all since people will watch it being streamed.

This kind of riddles also became unpopular in P&P RPGs. Partly because they often were 4th wall breaking and partly because of the whole player / character skill discussion.

In general, they don't do 4th wall braking stuff that much anymore, while I think in the early days if was carried over from P&P play, were it naturally happens during player banter. In RoA some of that content came directly from P&P groups, IIRC.

Also mystery: In RoA or Darklands you didn't really have easily visible weapon or item stats (like complete info on mouse over, preferably in comparison to your equipped gear). Boots and a bedroll? No easy indication that you need them.

 

[marcuz]

I agree with all of them being a loss, except riddles: those could be or could be not depending on the flair of the game, imho.
A game could do without them if natural text / language that you would need to express them could not fit in the game, unless the dev could find a way to express the same concept not verbally.

Still, all in all, I would use them sparingly, or in optional areas.

I remember an ancient Italian adventure game for Amiga and Pc, Profezia, where there's a mathematical riddle that changes the solution via a couple of variables at each play, and still, after 20 years, with the solution in front of me, it makes no sense

 

[Grif]

I agree with all of them being a loss, except riddles: those could be or could be not depending on the flair of the game, imho.
A game could do without them if natural text / language that you would need to express them could not fit in the game, unless the dev could find a way to express the same concept not verbally.

Still, all in all, I would use them sparingly, or in optional areas.

I remember an ancient Italian adventure game for Amiga and Pc, Profezia, where there's a mathematical riddle that changes the solution via a couple of variables at each play, and still, after 20 years, with the solution in front of me, it makes no sense

The first Mass Effect also had a Tower of Hanoi thing, among other puzzles they had included in the game and I remember those being a thing occasionally in the past as well.

 

[GuiltyofBeingTrite]

Requiring the player to read. I don't know when this trend ended - but it happened sometime between Morrowind and Oblivion release dates, that's always been the huge thing missing, at least in AAA games.

 

[pippin]

In Oblivion, part of the main quest requires you figuring out contents of a series of books, you have to crack a code. You receive help by an npc though, but still, it doesn't work like other quest related pieces of text in the game, where selecting them automatically updates your questlog with the required info.

 

[Nyast]

Haven't really seen any evidence that the Grimrock devs are unhappy with the sales of Grimrock 2.

Sure, I'm very happy they can keep working, but Grimrock 1 sold 950k copies on Steam while Grimrock 2 sold 350k.

You don't look at that and go "TIME FOR GRIMROCK 3!"

Well keep in mind Grimrock2 was more expensive, and also Grimrock1 sold cheap, so a lot of those 1+ million sales probably didn't bring as much money as originally. In terms of revenue G2 probably sold less than G1, but how much is hard to say, but I think it was still very worthwile. Their company isn't big and they don't have that many employees; at 350k sales for G2 they probably got 7M$, plus the leftovers of G1, and for what ? 20 employees ? I think there would be a lot of indies that would dream of generating millions of dollars out of their titles. So, relatively to G1, yeah G2 did less; but in the absolutely sense, G2 was still a big success. I wouldn't be surprised if we had a Grimrock 3 at some point later on.

 

[CryptRat]

Some recent games have riddles.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Some recent games have riddles.

What be stinky, smelly and brown?
Sunburnt skunks?

 

[Lord Azlan]

I appreciate the modern games are more accessible than in the past.

Things like font sizes are one thing but Difficulty Levels are something else.

It would be interesting to breakdown the Codex top 70 by those that had difficulty levels and those that didn't.

It could be that with difficulty levels (and in some games the ability to change that on the fly) and infinite save points games developers lose something about their game that would have made it unique or more immersive.

Beating a game and then unlocking other levels, difficulties or content is cool.

But maybe having everything available to the player in one sitting can stop the game being unique?

 

[Bonerbill]

Sure, I'm very happy they can keep working, but Grimrock 1 sold 950k copies on Steam while Grimrock 2 sold 350k.

You don't look at that and go "TIME FOR GRIMROCK 3!"

Pretty sure most of Grimrock 1's sales were from bundles and discounts. I know I got grimrock from a humble bundle a few years ago. No way a niche dungeon crawler like grimrock would sell that many copies on its own. Look at the steamspy stats; over 1/3 of the people who own the game didn't play it.

 

[MicoSelva]

Grimrock is entirely made as a throwback to old dungeon crawlers.., it's kind of expected that it would re-thread some of these ideas.

Sadly, the poor sales of Grimrock 2 probably means it will be a looooong time before we get more of that

Bonerbill is right. That takes bundles and discounts into account. LoG2 actually sold around 250K copies before reaching Humble Bundle and jumping another 100K up. LoG1 was discounted to hell many times (and also included in various bundles). Actual revenue generated from those games might be not that different.

 

[bloodlover]

C&C and reading. Because most (all?) AAA games have voiced dialogue, it narrows down the number of dialogue lines offered. Players should be able to make meaningful decisions not just yes/no/romance. Most of the time the answers are black or white and there is only a thin line of grey. Pls stop assuming that your players are idiots.

Being able to manually take notes on the map and journal. You find a chest, mark it on the map. You find a bed where you can rest, mark it on the map. You find some puzzle, mark it. Of course this requires big and complex dungeons. I've always loved being able to take notes about anything that I might find useful.

Memorable party characters. I often see threads like this and people usually name the same characters all the time and most of them are from old games. The Mass Effect series offered a plethora of party members yet none of them feel as close as Sulik to the player.

SF settings. This was mentioned before and the first thing that comes to mind is Mass Effect. How about a cyberpunk RPG? Or a mix between both, like Wizardry. I don't understand why producers associate RPG - generic fantasy themes.

The game being hard if you suck at it. Like Gothic.

 

[Murk]

Artistic UI like shihonage said. The Flash looking UI stuff irks me. It's a minor gripe, but it really does bug me. Games like Fallout, Lionheart, P: Torment, Arx Fatalist, etc. have great looking UIs (sometimes at the cost of functionality). A balance of the two would be great.

Misinformation that isn't remedied immediately. Good example: Risen 1 and how the bandits make a compelling case against the inquisition. Bad example: BG 2 and the feuding families in Trademeet that both want a relic, only for the neutral "good" option to literally pop up in front of your face before you enter the single room tomb to retrieve it.

Obscure but permanent game altering (ruining) choices: Ultima's armageddon spell, divinity 1's sword in the stone.

Interactive environments that aren't a gimmick: Ultima, Arx, Divinity/ies.

Characters that actually help you, but are not companions/joinable: Witcher(s), Gothic, etc.

A faction worth giving a shit about: really, only gothic/risen 1 comes to mind here.

 

[Malpercio]

1) Good itemization

 

[Goral]

Fallout 1 had features that I love but which aren't used any more.

1) Tell me about button - You could learn some VERY interesting things that way, first time I did that and it worked I was blown away. Developers don't do that any more because not many people were smart enough to use it and notice hidden content. But this wasn't just a cool feature, it could be very useful and it's plain to see that creators took the effort to polish it. For example you could have written "angels" or "angel's" and you would get the same answer, same goes for caravan/caravans, etc. What's more, Aradesh didn't know about Master and Rhombus didn't know about Vault 13 which was logical. Trying to find out what they knew and making educated guesses was part of the fun for me but today we have all the answers and just click on them. Consolization is way too common nowadays and keyboard is used much too rarely.

2) Time limit - I realize I'll be in minority here but the way it was in Fallout was great. Tyranny time limit is shitty and doesn't do much but in Fallout 1 it actually increased replayability because it was rather hard to do everything in one playthrough. It also prevented the player from using cheesy tactics and for example sleep-spam to heal (in Fallout 2 stimpacks were practically useless when you had PipBoy and 13 years or more to look for GECK, lol) or mindless wasteland exploration with no regard to reality (who in his right mind would go into a wasteland blindly) hoping you will find something interesting at some point. It could also be used for infinite resources and XP in Fallout 2. In Fallout 1 time limit added a bit of adrenaline and was forcing us to watch what we're doing, especially in the first playthtrough when we didn't know if we could even find water chip. But the truth was, we had plenty of time so it wasn't frustrating.

3) And yeah, as someone said earlier having an RPG with no fags is very rare these days. While I could understand that they would be in some leftists societies having them in post-apocalyptic setting is just retarded (Wasteland 2, Fallout 2, Bethesda Fallouts), even fags would go straight if they would be one of the few survivors. In general we have too much leftist propaganda in games and often it's very heavy-handed.

 

[bloodlover]

Yeah time limit was such a great idea in Fallout 1 that they eventually patched the game and almost removed it completely.

 

[Goral]

Yeah time limit was such a great idea in Fallout 1 that they eventually patched the game and almost removed it completely.

Yeah, and Tell me about button was so great that they didn't add it in Fallout 2. Your point? Retards were whining that 500 days was too little so they've patched it and dumbed it down same goes for "Tell me about" button, why add it when only 5% of players were smart enough to use it?

 

[felipepepe]

Time limit made things like hiring the water merchants relevant... I thought I was a genius hiring them, them the game said "yeah, but now people know where your vault is..."

Oops.

 

[an Administrator]

Didn't Tyranny have time-limit?

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Isn't this all getting a bit off-track really. Turning into a thread for people to mention obscure one-off things that a game they liked once implimented (Ie: lets sperge about Fallout and Arcanum for 200 pages... again) instead of its intended desire of a more general opportunity to mention the more big picture problems, such as the afore mentioned things like humour and itemisation. felipepepe ?

 

[Melan]

Generous amounts of superfluous content: Due to staggering dev costs, we tend to get less and less outside the core game. Gone are the extra-well hidden NPCs, secret levels and even side branches, since all is in service of the main plot. Doesn't apply so much to the TES games, but elsewhere, Ultima's immense wilderness areas and Fallout's extra content are a thing of the past.

 

[MRY]

Item-based UI: Think Stonekeep, Lands of Lore, Ambermoon/star or Albion - you only had a on-screen compass if you bought/ found a in-game compass. I always thougt this was a cool concept.

No quest compasses.
Nuff said.

At first I thought this would make a good joke, but then I realized that item-based quest compasses would actually be kind of neat.

(We actually have one, in a sense, in Fallen Gods.)

 

[Baron Dupek]

RPGs these days (and games in general) feels more like job than adventure.
Like - gather quests, do them by killing/finding/other menial activity, scratch them and get back to town via fast travel system.
Scratching things from to-do list (aforementioned list have features like quest compass and double-clicking on the task show your objective on the map), in general.

Hidden character? Heck, there is rarely hidden anything these days, like notes or pile of rocks to pick. Why bother with something that less than 10% people do? Too much hassle in crunch infested industry. And we don't have resources/time/permission from other departments or manager.

All that because devs (no matter if indie or big AAA one) threat customers (rarely players) like idiots.

All these neat stuffs Felipepepe mentioned are no more also because engine limits (and even if these things were possible they would take too much time to make and they could bring the risk of crash and bugs) and it don't need to be Unity shit or else...

bonus
getting weird, mysterious items or something that you not met requirements or not designated for your class.
That's why I found Inquisitor (2012) refreshing.

I remember reading a idiot game designer talking about how he doesn't do riddles anymore because people just Google then answer. That's bullshit, might as well not make a game at all since people will watch it being streamed.

one and done
but I already mentioned that - people would rather pass these things and don't threat puzzles and more difficulty moments as something to challenge against. Or get some mental stimulation or whatever.
Just another obstacle to scratch that title from backlog...