Where is innovation in new RPGs?

[The Wall]

I'm serious, where is it? What was last RPG that introduced something innovative? For example: In Fallout type of game, you should be able to operate all old tech. Cars, bikes, vertibirds... Any vehicle. Provided you can make it work which should be hard, if not miracle. What was the last fantasy RPG with innovative spells? Freeze surface of water so that for limited time you can roleplay Jesus and walk on it. Use fireball to open basic wooden doors etc. Why there isn't innovation in fantasy city simulation? Ships should be moving into harbor, you should be able to travel by ship the same way you can ride horse, carts - pulled by horses, oxes or some fantasy beasts should be entering and leaving city gates while at night some monsters could attempt attack on city walls and guards would fight them off. City should be part of living world. In modern RPGs everything seems so much nailed to the surface, Potemkin backgrounds. New fighting technics for fighters? Where are they? In most RPGs you consider yourself lucky if throwing knives is an option. Owning shop, lending money, investing into trade caravans, robbing fantasy bank. Building your own castle. Million possibilities. Talking about possibilities in high-fantasy setting could be thread of its own

Engines, dev tools, capital, tutorials and knowledge how-to do all these things are all more available then ever before. Small and medium publishers are in dozens, Steam Early Access gives option of early income flow, Youtubers are free advertisers, there is even Kickstarter and Eastern European countries offer great programmers for low cost. Why hasn't new Black Isle studio / Troika / Interplay already been born on the market? Maybe it's only matter of time

 

[Disciple]

The demand for high fidelity graphics probably makes most of those features you mention very hard to implement. Even modest indie games made by a small team are routinely trashed if they have what a majority of consumers consider to be "less than adequate" graphics.

Roguelikes and certain niche strategy games are your best bet for that kind of innovation.

 

[The Wall]

Yeah, that must be one of major reasons. I'm surprised small-medium dev teams from Eastern Europe aren't working on innovative RPGs with graphical fidelity on lvl of Gothic 2/Morrowind. That's good enough graphics to garantee you 1M+ sales if game is good yet those graphics aren't demanding today and allow room for innovation. That's golden balance for me

TLDR: Indie teams should today be perfectly capable to make Oblivion, Gothic 3 and Fallout 3 we were promised or expected but never got

Imagine Oblivion: ACTHUALLY GOOD Edition

 

[Hobo Elf]

Innovation in a genre where all everyone seems to want are more Baldur's Gate or Fallout clones. And now Disco Elysium clones even though it's not an RPG.

 

[The Wall]

People don't know what they want. You gotta feed them Incline. Morrowind/Gothic 2/Oblivion kind of game, with innovation in world simulation and on reasonable scale (your playground is duchy or county not entire kingdom) with dynamic quest generation and 100+ hand made quests with multiple not only outcomes but ways to solve it, good art direction, good writing, good combat system (copy paste everything that worked, connect it and add your spices) plus PnP inspired character development. Such thing can be made today by indies. It would be beautiful and sell 2M+ copies on Steam easily. Not to mention all the expansions that would follow, be released yearly, while now bigger, separate team would work on next project in Unreal5

I repeat: Oblivion/Gothic 3 graphical fidelity with strong art direction. Your first game as an indie shouldn't graphically compete with Forza. It should be Skyrim++*

*+ RPG innovation
+good story

 

[The Wall]

Hey, CodexBros! Why don't we seriously estimate whether such endeavour is possible, where, how and for how much money and if answer is YES! we don't gather capital and open our own indie RPG Studio?

Let's be faster then Obsidian in making Skyrim Killer

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

Larian is arguably attempting to give you all most of these things in D:OS 1, 2, & 3. Their degree of success is questionable, but they're giving it a good go. As to base/building and playing house, there are an abundance of RPGs that do exactly this. Economic management is generally not a valuable feature for the genre. 4X games are much better suited to that sort of thing. The amount of incremental features RPGs have gathered over the decades is tremendous. How much value many of them add is questionable. Many of them have been found to be poor return for the investment.

I think one of the overlooked issues is the market's intolerance for jank. If a game is buggy, it will not sell well. Reputation spreads swiftly online, and is often mercilessly dashed. Innovation requires risk taking. Risk taking will incur bugs.

 

[The Wall]

Yeah, very good points raised. I guess it can be summed up as: good and innovative RPGs ask for Devs with balls

P.S. Everything about Larian's world simulation design is wooden. They don't even have day/night cycle. Really disappointing

 

[LizardWizard]

You gotta feed them Incline. Oblivion

 

[S.torch]

Valuing "innovation" like something inherently good is stupid. There's technically more changes between Fallout 1 and 3 than between 1 and 2, yet they're infinitely better than 3.

Some of the biggest "innovations" alone are responsible for massive decline in the medium (like modern graphics).

 

[Robotigan]

Mechanics in simplified or old school games are too abstracted to feel substantial. You might have twenty class dedicated to projectile throwing alone but if the only difference in game feel is a weapon jpeg and a few stat modifiers, who really cares?

Mechanics in large, contemporary games are too expensive to create a lot of variety. If takes thousands of manhours to create the assets for a single class, you're not gonna be able to make a bunch of them.

Marrying the two requires coming up with some savvy programmatic solutions to speed up workflow. Maybe you can design a throwing physics system where the projectile's trajectory and impact is informed by its physical properties then combine a generic throwing animation with a procedural system for configuring the weapon grip. But these are all super tough problems that will probably turn out very janky on a first attempt. Unfortunately, it's difficult to advertise an impressive system like this because it will look worse than a studio using the slower method to custom animate everything and have less options than a studio using the old method to print out weapon icons. It'll take considerable investment and several iterations to get it to that fanciful end state where you can drag and drop weapon models and everything works seamlessly and looks great, but by then it'll be an old news mechanic that everyone else has copied.

Basically, audiences need to learn to accept the jank that comes with doing something novel.

 

[d1r]

Ohhh there is a lot of innovation on the gaming market, though it's not the innovation you actually want to see.

Publishers have been investing a lot of brainpower on how to swoop every last penny out of your pocket with games like Diablo Immoral.

 

[Lord_Potato]

Despite having rather basic graphics, one of the recent most interesting games I saw the other day is A Legionary's Life.

I'd love to see another game like this, but with romances.

FTFY

 

[Dhaze]

I think it is in no small part caused by an industry-wide need to change things up with every new game a studio creates.

Studio XYZ develops a game for pc. They are beginners who create everything from scratch: engine and assets and systems/mechanics. This, of course, requires a lot of time and effort. In this game there might be some innovation or there might not be; it is this studio's first game and creating one's first game is a massive learning experience all its own, so I understand—and in fact appreciate—if they want to nail the basics before tackling more experimental stuff.

Then Studio XYZ creates a second game, in what is becoming a franchise. Now is the perfect time for innovation, as they can build upon the first game with betterment as a focus, and are more experienced when it comes to development.
But five years have gone by, and the assets need be recreated—because otherwise a thunderously vocal subset of players will complain the game looks like shit. Previously-used textures and models and lighting have to be rebuild from the ground up, on top of entirely new ones being required.
Also, the developers want to add a few mechanics they couldn't fit into the first game. Nothing grounbreaking or innovative, but simply stuff they didn't have the time or know-how required to implement.
Better graphics and new mechanics might force an upgrade of the engine.
And they also want the game to be on console, not only on pc.

To all this effort we add potential pressures from the publishers, or unexpected financial difficulties, or some veteran developers leaving the studio for whatever reasons, etc etc...

And we end up with game number 2. It is a bit prettier on the surface but deep down remains quasi-identical to game number 1, with not much or indeed none at all in the way of innovation, because so much time was consumed by other, somewhat more practical things.

And because it was new and hard to conceptualise and create, what little innovation there might be doesn't have the same level of polish as the rest of the game. So more players complain about that new stuff being unneeded; "More of the same," they write in all-caps.

Then perhaps Studio XYZ is in good enough shape to consider creating game number 3. Or perhaps its devs have had enough. Or perhaps they went bankrupt. Or this, or that; few studios make it past a couple of games.

In the end, I think a lot is required to beget good, sound innovation.

 

[JarlFrank]

Valuing "innovation" like something inherently good is stupid. There's technically more changes between Fallout 1 and 3 than between 1 and 2, yet they're infinitely better than 3.

Some of the biggest "innovations" alone are responsible for massive decline in the medium (like modern graphics).

Good innovation means to take the basic principles of a genre and think them to the next level.

RPGs are about character creation, character customization, world exploration, questing, dungeon crawling, and making consequential choices.

So innovations should look at what we already have in these aspects, and move forward to make these aspects even better.
Proper innovation regarding character creation and customization can be seen in Daggerfall and Morrowind (sadly those features were stripped out in later entries to the series): Daggerfall had a very complex character creation system where you could mix and match various boni and mali. Making an OP character made gaining XP slower but making a gimped character made it faster. You could mix and match strengths and weaknesses to create the kind of character you want, like inability to regenerate mana in the sunlight because you only wanna use magic in dungeons and at night, or inability to equip heavy armor because you plan for a lightly armored char. Both games, DF and MW, also offered spell customization where you could create your own spells based on effects you already learned. Make a custom fireball that does more damage by combining it with a weakness to fire effect. Very cool. Both games also offer a ton of equipment slots and allow you to wear clothing and armor at the same time, which is not only cool for dressup but also lets you combine different armor and clothing pieces based on their enchantments. If you do it right, you can get 100% magic resistance in Morrowind just from your equipment!

World exploration and dungeon crawling benefit from good level design and innovative uses of modern 3D engines. Verticality, my boy! More RPG dungeons should be designed like fan-made Quake and Thief maps, for example. Lots of really good shit in those. Also features like climbing, items like grappling hooks or Thief-style rope arrows, spells like levitation and high jump or abilities like Dishonored's blink, all of those contribute to make navigation of the environment more interesting. Ultima Underworld from the early 90s still has one of the best-designed dungeons ever made, how come modern designers can't copy that - or make something better??

Quests and choices would also benefit from some innovation. Fetch and kill quests are generic and boring, give us more! It's funny how the only innovators in that field are tiny indie studios like the guy behind the upcoming Space Wreck, which combines heavily scripted C&C-heavy quests that have multiple outcomes with a very flexible game system inspired by immersive sims, where you can use the game's physics and NPC AI to solve quests in interesting ways. The game is set on a low gravity space station so kicking someone makes them float away until they hit an obstacle. NPCs will investigate noises and pick up items they see on the floor. Lots of systemic elements that combine with the C&C of the quests to offer almost limitless possibilities to the player.

THAT is innovation. There are so many ways to push RPGs forward to reach even higher points than they did with the old classics. But only few developers are doing that. Most of the bigger studios just copypaste the old games without even understanding what made them great (see: Pillars of Eternity and Torment: Tides of Numenera), let alone pushing the design ideas of those classics to the next level.

 

[Lord_Potato]

I'm serious, where is it? What was last RPG that introduced something innovative?

Fallout 4 had settlement building. Mixing action RPG with city builder was innovative. It wasn't fun though.

 

[JarlFrank]

I'm serious, where is it? What was last RPG that introduced something innovative?

Fallout 4 had settlement building. Mixing action RPG with city builder was innovative. It wasn't fun though.

That's why RPGs should innovate in their core features, not add extraneous stuff.

(besides, FO4 just cloned the city builder part from Minecraft and other survival games)

 

[Darkozric]

Innovation is a double edged sword.

 

[Comte_II]

There is innovation in rpgs! They have strong slaying women yaaassss queeeeen slay! They have people of color now and even homosexual storylines and heroes. Love stories! Choice and consequences! Morally gray! I mean gay!

 

[The Wall]

Time span between Oblivion and Fallout 3 was only 2 years. Reason for that was because programming wise, Fallout 3 WAS Oblivion with guns. We need more stuff like that. Less starting from scratch and more games done on same foundation. Your next game doesn't have to look 10× better. Instead add more weapon types, improve questing, make world more alive and place story in new setting. Time span of 10+ years between Elder Scrolls/Fallouts is plain retarded. Also a huge opportunity for others to capitalise on

 

[Falksi]

Agree with the sentiment, but I'll give credit for the approach to Nu-X-com. It didn't work as well as it should, it's nowhere near as good as the originals, but it did at least try to merge old school with nu-school and snagged a decent audience in the process.

Bard's Tale 4: A Directors cut did similar too.

But I am scraping the barrel there for sure. Neither did anything revolutionary or mindblowing either.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Where's the innovation in old RPGs?

 

[Tel Velothi]

I think the reason we find games boring and not spend that much time in them anymore (as in our childhood for example) is that they've became less and less innovative. In general, not only RPGs.
I mean how many games can you play that are basically a copy from another one, excluding textures and models?

It's like new movies/tv series. Same camera shots, the same way actors express their emotions, etc. Compare that to a Taxi Driver (1976) or other "artsy" classics. It's so unique. Now it's like every movie is the same.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I mean how many games can you play that are basically a copy from another one, excluding textures and models?

do you want me to break out a list of diablo clones?

 

[JarlFrank]

I mean how many games can you play that are basically a copy from another one, excluding textures and models?

do you want me to break out a list of diablo clones?

I mean, there's a reason I stopped playing the genre.