Incline Top RPG's 2006 - Present: The Decline to the Current Resurgence

[laclongquan]

Note the golden age rules with two top70 game each year on average. By the standard of survey on top70, we can count.

 

[Joni Odin von Hassenstein]

- Dragon Age: Origins
- The Witcher series
- Alpha Protocol
- Pillars of Eternity
- Wasteland 2
- Neverwinter Nights 2
- Shadowrun Returns
- Fallout: New Vegas
- Age of Decadence

 

[Lacrymas]

Wow, The Decline really hit us hard if we are counting the Twitchers and DA:O as high points. We didn't get a single good RPG in that span of time (2006-2015). MotB is a weird one, it was let down by the awfulness of the engine. We can simply forget that that time ever happened and nothing of value would be lost (with the possible exception of MotB and that's debatable). No-one learned anything and we are still trying to reinvent the wheel with PoE, WL2, D:OS etc; while 1-4 man teams decimate the competition. Uuugghh, I need a drink.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

I agree with those who say that the root and the definitive starting point of the decline was 2002 with the release of the X-Box. It's not only about RPGs, but games in general. Multiplattform ended that brief but super productive period between the late 90s and early 2000s where visionary game studios pushed gaming to the limits in terms of creativity. It was a wonderful period where old genres blended in with new ones, entirely new concepts were explored, and the rapidly advancing technology was used to support creativity not replace it. It might be 'just' the silver age for RPGs, but for me it will always be the golden age of gaming.

It's really just like octavius said, the release of the X-Box was almost as if you woke up in a new reality over night. The year 2000 saw the release of Deus Ex, a testimony to the heights gaming could achieve and - along with other classics from that period - a promise of an even more awesome future. Three years later, and just one year after the release of the X-Box, Invisible War and other games like it gave us a rude awakening from that dream.

When it comes to RPGs another post quem date for the Great Decline would be 2004 and the demise of Troika. What followed was the worst decade in CRPG history, and in hindsight it's pretty amazing that the Codex made it through that period alive, living more on a mix of cynism, bitterness and reminiscence of the good old days than any really hope that things would ever turn around. Personally, the only RPG from that period that I'd count as a classic is Mask of the Betrayer.

 

[United Nations]

No-one learned anything and we are still trying to reinvent the wheel with PoE, WL2, D:OS etc; while 1-4 man teams decimate the competition. Uuugghh, I need a drink.

Reinvent the wheel is right.

Rather than take a step forward, CRPG's have taken 10 steps back (which I see as a good thing).

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Wow, The Decline really hit us hard if we are counting... DA:O as high point.

You got that right. Here's what I said closer to the time and in more depth, should you care for more depth for your understanding:

DAO - A bad game with very good aspects
by LastDanceSaloon » Sun Mar 20, 2011 10:35 pm

Dragon Age Origins is a bad game. No, really, it is. It's terrible on so many levels (excuse the pun). But it's probably the first bad game I've played through where the good points have been enough to keep me happy through the misery.

So, unlike the usual post that runs "the game was good, but this that and the other annoyed me", for the first time ever I am forced to do a post which runs "this game was awful, but this that and the other was great"

Briefly, it's a terrible game because it's thoroughly boring - I honestly didn't care one bit about anyone I was 'saving' from the blight as I seemed to be the only person in the game who gave a rat's exit passage about it.

Doesn't know if it's an open explorer or a linear push - we have a map we can wander around in, but all the fun extra bits are hidden by a condition that you need 14 randomly hidden scrolls to open them.

Has terrible dialogue options - "Get me food and I'll give you a key to great mage treasure", "How do I get you food?", "Get food from prison guard", "ok" *walk two feet to the prison guard* "Hey there guard, can that prisoner have some food?", "No", "Aw, g'won g'won g'won", "No". *Go back to prisoner and kill them to get key*

Totally retarded quests - Find a dead body telling you about some bad guys in a house, go to house, explore more rooms and kill more bad guys than you find at the Lord's estate, quest completed.

Repetative bad guys - Humanoids, more humanoids, even more humanoids, huge great armies of humanoids, and the odd wolf/dog, bear, dragon and revenant.

Irritating cut-off points - Sorry Sten...

Pointless interfaces - Never once made a potion or poison or trap and, as a mage, had no personal use for rune stones.

Unvaried equipment - You can have a ring with +10% fire damage or +10% cold damage or pay 100 gold pieces to have one of only two rings which have anything approaching fun attached to them. Same with all the other pieces of equipment. Swords/axes and shields have the biggest variety with maybe 5 or 6 to choose from.

And a no option stat management requirement - 3 stat points per level up, but you need to put them all in magic in order to get spells and spellpower to make the spellcaster effective. Any spare are just tokens to increase health or mana in willpower and constitution by nominal amounts.


And yet the game remains immesnly playable, in the most part.

This is mainly down to the fact that mages are such fun to do battle with. It really isn't that long at all before you've reached then end of a spell tree and got a few fun spells to play with. Not to mention a staff which actually deals real damage from the get go which can be used both in close or long distance combat with no restriction either way.

Having got used to the fun'ness of the mage, the general dungeon crawl nature of the game becomes much more manageable and enjoyable. No matter where you go and what you do, each road leads to a room maze of tightly cramped bad guys ready to be slaughtered.

To which leads the primary hook of the game - earning enough cash to buy the only decent equipment in the game (though tanks can find decent armour sets free if they look hard enough).

In some RPGs the cash element is really quite pointless, often ending the game with 1,000,000 unused gold pieces to which you stop bothering to loot items and often just leave stuff lying around as it's not even worth the effort to walk it back to the dealer. In this game however, you just never have quite enough money.

To conclude, this is quite a fun little odd jobbing dungeon crawl RPG which shines in this respect between the Lothering and Landsmeet phases, but is otherwise pretty forgettable.

------------------------------------------------

Funny tag-line :laugh:
LastDanceSaloon
Posts: 274
Joined: Sat Jan 24, 2009 3:59 pm

 

[pippin]

I've actually read more than a handful of bad reviews and negative retrospectives when it comes to DAO. I don't think the game was bad per se, it's just that it was too bland, in true Bioware fashion. Everything is bland, nothing is risky, nothing is dangerous, and the good guys win at the end while singing the american canadian anthem. Hell, it's kind of funny that they finally got to show tits in one of their games as late as 2014, when they were the ones who introduced the romances as something meaningful in their games.
There are people who are hardcore fans of DAO, but for me those are like a new version of those who got to knew what rpgs were like with ff7 or kotor1.

They do release their games in relatively bug free states, so that's good.

 

[Telengard]

The Xbox was an utter failure, and earned Microsoft only a lot of ridicule for even daring to take on the Sony juggernaut. At the time, everyone wanted a piece of that sweet Sony pie. After FF7 and Tomb Raider, Sony didn't even have to go around paying PC developers to switch over to making Playstation games, as they had been doing up until then. Everyone just chose to do it themselves.

It was quite a time. Made possible by more PC players buying games that had been made for Playstation than buying games made for PC. And when gamers were told what would inevitably result from that choice, they declared, 'It doesn't matter if they switch to making Playstation games, as long as the games are this fun.' Whelp, you got your wish.

 

[octavius]

The Xbox was an utter failure, and earned Microsoft only a lot of ridicule for even daring to take on the Sony juggernaut. At the time, everyone wanted a piece of that sweet Sony pie. After FF7 and Tomb Raider, Sony didn't even have to go around paying PC developers to switch over to making Playstation games, as they had been doing up until then. Everyone just chose to do it themselves.

It was quite a time. Made possible by more PC players buying games that had been made for Playstation than buying games made for PC. And when gamers were told what would inevitably result from that choice, they declared, 'It doesn't matter if they switch to making Playstation games, as long as the games are this fun.' Whelp, you got your wish.

Yep, PC-tards turning consoletards didn't help.
I remember a guy at work who was addicted to Half-Life. So I downloaded some user made maps for him, showed him how to install and run them, but his eyes were glazed and he got that far off Homer Simpson look. Shortly after he bought an X-Box, 'cause "it's not so complicated".
In retrospect I wonder if I drove him to The Dark Side. As Yoda said The Dark Side is "quicker, easier, more seductive"...

 

[United Nations]

The Xbox was an utter failure, and earned Microsoft only a lot of ridicule for even daring to take on the Sony juggernaut. At the time, everyone wanted a piece of that sweet Sony pie. After FF7 and Tomb Raider, Sony didn't even have to go around paying PC developers to switch over to making Playstation games, as they had been doing up until then. Everyone just chose to do it themselves.

It was quite a time. Made possible by more PC players buying games that had been made for Playstation than buying games made for PC. And when gamers were told what would inevitably result from that choice, they declared, 'It doesn't matter if they switch to making Playstation games, as long as the games are this fun.' Whelp, you got your wish.

I was under the impression that Xbox One > PS4, no?

 

[StrongBelwas]

I was under the impression that Xbox One > PS4, no?

The only time Microsoft won was the Seventh generation. The Xbox One has been blown away by the PS4 this generation, 40 million PlayStation 4s vs. Microsoft suddenly no longer declaring sales numbers, but EA let slip they have internal estimates of 55 million consoles altogether out there so do the math. The PlayStation 2 was by far the top dog of the Sixth Generation, with 155 million units vs. Xbox's 24 mill.

 

[Neanderthal]

I always thought decline started wi Black Gate an Serpent Isle, they were peak an introduced a lot o streamlined elements, an everythin after were clear regression. IE were dumbed down massively in comparison, except Torment which went Fallout path. Thought Div Div an first Witcher were quality in that they tried to recall the classics, not thought much o owt else bar a few standouts.

 

[United Nations]

I was under the impression that Xbox One > PS4, no?

The only time Microsoft won was the Seventh generation. The Xbox One has been blown away by the PS4 this generation, 40 million PlayStation 4s vs. Microsoft suddenly no longer declaring sales numbers, but EA let slip they have internal estimates of 55 million consoles altogether out there so do the math. The PlayStation 2 was by far the top dog of the Sixth Generation, with 155 million units vs. Xbox's 24 mill.

PS2 you are right about.

I switched over to PC right when the next generation after that hit.

Shit, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver is still my all-time favorite game.

I would put that right up next to Quake and probably Fallout 2 & Baldur's Gate 2.

 

[SniperHF]

Haven't seen anyone mention Risen yet.

Final popamole fight aside, good game. Yes I'm sure some of you would call it decline/popamole regardless but fuck you. I even like the dungeon crawly parts though they are a bit too long.


I haven't finished it yet but Div 2: Flames of Vengeance is pretty decent but it has trash combat and even more trash progression but the city is pretty cool and makes up for it.

 

[Joni Odin von Hassenstein]

Haven't seen anyone mention Risen yet.

Final popamole fight aside, good game.

Because it was such a disappointment to me after the Gothic series.
Sure, gameplay was good. But the atmosphere was so incredibly dull as the story was just okay-ish in the beginning and non-existant towards the end.
So certainly playable yes. But nope, no big incline game for me.

 

[Siveon]

We didn't get a single good RPG in that span of time (2006-2015)

Knights of the Chalice, Prelude to Darkness, Geneforge 4-5, Age of Decadence, Underrail, etc. Maybe you're only talking about bigger releases, but I thought the late 7th/early 8th generation (the 'current resurgence') was/is a pretty good time for RPGs. It's no Golden Age, but if I may allude to comics as Telengard has been doing, it's a decent Bronze Age. Maybe I just have low standards.

At the very least we have games with actual budgets in the future to look out for, and there are more developers getting audiences to buy said games.

 

[Lacrymas]

We didn't get a single good RPG in that span of time (2006-2015)

Knights of the Chalice, Prelude to Darkness, Geneforge 4-5, Age of Decadence, Underrail, etc. Maybe you're only talking about bigger releases, but I thought the late 7th/early 8th generation (the 'current resurgence') was/is a pretty good time for RPGs. It's no Golden Age, but if I may allude to comics as Telengard has been doing, it's a decent Bronze Age. Maybe I just have low standards.

At the very least we have games with actual budgets in the future to look out for, and there are more developers getting audiences to buy said games.

I wasn't including the releases in 2015 in that estimate. Isn't Prelude to Darkness really old? Haven't played Geneforge (isn't this like 2001?) or KotC.

 

[Parsifarka]

Why are we assuming the decline has stopped? Grimoire still hasn't been released and a swallow doesn't make a summer. I would wait to see how BT4 turns out before sanctifying those days we're living.
I think Might & Magic IX could be a good milestone, a paradigmatic symptom of decline among the dates of XBOX and so on.
Also, Hard to be a God (2007) is one of the best ARPG ever made (not that it means much); a rushed mess with lovely ideas and setting. The plot as chaotic but interesting and full of jokes, you could disguise to walk unnoticed (sometimes) and shoot lasers. And if someone is willing to include DA:O with its horrendous combat system, we should throw in anything done by Vogel those years.

 

[Siveon]

I wasn't including the releases in 2015 in that estimate. Isn't Prelude to Darkness really old? Haven't played Geneforge (isn't this like 2001?) or KotC.

I could've sworn it was release in the mid-2000s, but the oldest post on the Archive was 2002, so, that's out. However, the later Geneforge games definitely came out in the time period you mentioned, but started in like... 2002? Arguably there was games like Lords of Xulima, Shadowrun, Swords and Sorcerery, Paper Sorcerer, Fallout: NV (duh), a number of roguelikes, you get the gist.

I don't like playing the optimist, but I would be pretty down if all the games that came out in the past decade or so disappeared.

 

[Lacrymas]

I could've sworn it was release in the mid-2000s, but the oldest post on the Archive was 2002, so, that's out. However, the later Geneforge games definitely came out in the time period you mentioned, but started in like... 2002? Arguably there was games like Lords of Xulima, Shadowrun, Swords and Sorcerery, Paper Sorcerer, Fallout: NV (duh), a number of roguelikes, you get the gist.

I don't like playing the optimist, but I would be pretty down if all the games that came out in the past decade or so disappeared.

Lords of Xulima - Haven't played it, but I thought the Kritical Kodex Konsensus was that it isn't all that good?
Shadowrun - mediocre to a painful degree
Fallout: NV - First Person Shooter
Swords and Sorcery - pretty much a mobile game (unless I'm thinking of another game?)
Paper Sorcerer - Haven't played, but heard it was grindy as all hell.

The problem is that most devs put all their eggs into a single basket (most popularly combat) but can't design that basket very well, so we get boring title after boring title even today. Devs also focus too much on mainstream design choices to boost sales rather than making a coherent and intelligent game, if they can even make such a game. AoD, UR and SitS fill me with hope, but hope is a cruel mistress.

 

[Zetor]

I guess it just depends on your favorite sub-genre.

My favored sub-genre (SRPGs) had a renaissance with the KS era: KOTC / Blackguards / Invisible Inc / Telepath Tactics and maybe Banner Saga are all amazing, and there are a lot of promising titles on the way, plus a lot of games I haven't played yet. In comparison, that sub-genre was a barren wasteland on the PC before 2009 except for maybe TOEE if you consider it an SRPG (Gorky 17? nu-PoR? lol).

 

[Siveon]

Swords and Sorcery - pretty much a mobile game (unless I'm thinking of another game?)

You probably are, but most people consider pure crawlers to be simplistic anyway.

While I will admit the games mentioned aren't well rounded games (3 of them are dungeon crawlers), I think they're fine for what the set out to do. Not exactly great, and some might not even worth a full run (Xulima is really fucking long), but good. So we don't have the same tastes, but that doesn't mean these games aren't without some merit.

Fallout: NV - First Person Shooter

Hey, so was V:TM - Bloodlines.

My favored sub-genre (SRPGs) had a renaissance with the KS era: Blackguards / Invisible Inc / Telepath Tactics, maybe Banner Saga are all amazing, and there are a lot of promising titles on the way.

I can't believe I forgot to mention those games as a SRPG fan (though mostly on the Japan side).

 

[Lacrymas]

You probably are, but most people consider pure crawlers to be simplistic anyway.

Ah, right, I was thinking of another game. Still - Release Date: 15 Dec, 2015

Hey, so was V:TM - Bloodlines.

Yeap, that's why I don't consider it an RPG. Well, there are a lot of different reasons for why I don't, but this is one of the main ones.

It's not about taste though, it's about a well-constructed game. You can't go criticizing horror movies if you don't "like" them as a genre. Though that's your (general you) problem, not a problem of the medium, it's YOU who should change to like stuff, not the other way around, provided that it's well-made. I don't like FPSes, but I like Half-life because it's a well-made game for example.

 

[WhiteGuts]

Yeap, that's why I don't consider it an RPG. Well, there are a lot of different reasons for why I don't, but this is one of the main ones.

So you picked the dumbest and shallowest reason ?

 

[Lacrymas]

So you picked the dumbest and shallowest reason ?

I have very strict definitions of what constitutes an RPG, contrary to most people here. It's not a shallow nor a dumb reason in any way, not to mention that it's one of many reasons. It's a good game, it's just not an RPG, at most it has RPG elements.