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Where is innovation in new RPGs?

Grampy_Bone

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The demand for high fidelity graphics

That doesnt explain why small indies are also unoriginal

Valid.

Richard Garriot in 1980: "Imma simulate the entire solar system on an Apple 2 by myself."

Indie devs in 2022: "plz kickstart our non-combat social metroidjustice novel set in the kitchen of a starbucks. (part 2 will expand to the vestibule.) Goal: $970,000."
 

J1M

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It is difficult to have a clear and interesting vision when your team size is so large that everything is decided by committees objecting to specific details.
 

perfectslumbers

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The people who make video games now are people who grew up playing video games and are primarily inspired by video games. You have the same problem in fantasy literature, books like Lord of The Rings were inspired by religion and the authors personal experiences and the mythology of his country. Then kids read Lord of the Rings and their takeaway was "Wow killing orcs with magical swords is so cool!" And those kids grew up to write boring books with hard magic systems and poor prose. The same thing happened with D&D itself, where D&D was once fantastic but by the time we've reached 5th edition it is essentially a parody of itself, as if you described what D&D is to a soybean and that soybean created 5th edition.

The same thing has happened in RPGs. Many of the great RPGs were attempts to turn roleplaying games into a computer format, and there were many different interpretations of how to do that. Whether it's blobbers like Eye of the Beholder, act based isometric games like Baldur's Gate, open world top down/first person hybrids like Ultima, early JRPG's like the first Final Fantasy. But at some point Baldur's Gate happened and System Shock happened and Morrowind happened. And ever since then developers no longer asked "How can I make an RPG into a video game?" Instead they create another Baldur's Gate and another System Shock and another Morrowind.
 

luj1

You're all shills
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Did you guys suddenly forget that games were being produced before mostly for nerds and now for general audience? So desperate to talk about social decline.
This is perhaps one the biggest copes there is in the gaming sphere. Games were made by nerds and therefore they appealed to nerds but no one in 1994 sat down to make a game for some nebulous "nerd demographic". They always wanted the general audience they just were not concerned with the lowest of low denominators.

Also true but he is right in that video games got worse once they stepped out of the niche and into a full blown industry
 

The Wall

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perfectslumbers
I hate that you're right for two reasons:
1)Because you're right. What you wrote might be problem numero uno
2)Because I have to agree with Miss Tinkerbell Mosquito

Nonentheless, new publishers and devs give reasons for hope. MicroProse, 1C, HoodedHorse, New Blood are few names from list of good ones. Like genuinly good ones (good games, not woke). In years ahead, more and more Underrails and Colony Ships will be made. Of that, I'm almost certain
 
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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?
This idea pops up every now and then, and even though it would pretty cool if it happened, making games is harder than it seems, it requires true dedication to see anything noteworthy come to life, even more so if there isn't any remunaration.
 

Harthwain

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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.
False. If the game is good it will be liked despite the bugs and indies have to take risks in order to stand out from the crowd. You can only get complacent and risk-averse only AFTER you made it to the big leagues and can sustain yourself by releasing the same game over and over again.

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.
Pretty much this.

I would also replace "roguelikes and certain niche strategy games" with "indies". They don't have the resources to get AAA+ visuals, so they get by with what they find appropriate for the game and the budget. Most of the time it works out pretty well. Especially if you don't go into 3D (some of the worst looking games are the cheap 3D ones).

So if they can't win the audience over with the visuals what's left for them? Gameplay. They have to be interesting by the virtue of their gameplay as their main draw. This very often means innovating (although not always).

Disco Elysium -- Its portrayal of skills as inner voices of yourself coming to the surface is a novel and well-executed idea that really makes the dialogue and interactions in this game. The thought cabinet as a means of character development and an influence on dialogue throughout the game is also quite novel.
I would rather say that the skills are innovative in the sense that they are tied to your character's ability to perceive what's going on around him (to the point that you will end up missing stuff purely because of this). Very few RPGs even think about the genre that way, although it ought to be obvious for anyone who is aware how RPGs work (especially the tabletop ones, as they are much more dependent on players' activities by their nature than cRPGs due to technical reasons). That's one of the paradoxes of Disco Elysium.

I think you can have a really good RPG on your hands if you hide all information the player is not supposed to have without having access to particular skills at the time (and that's not counting the other practical and more mundane applications of skills!). Imagine someone whispering and you having the ability to hear clearly, meaning you can glean some information (hell, go even deeper: leave it up to the player to figure out what the NPCs were talking about, thereby introducing some detective work) which might be of use in various ways. It's this kind of interactivity that's lacking in games in general and in RPGs in particular.
 

ItsChon

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I don't like using the term innovation. That word has led us to the sate we are now, an industry full of decline. As JarlFrank said, if you want to "innovate", expand and improve upon the key aspects of what makes a great RPG.

Using a game like Underrail as an example, innovation would be to expand the noncombat portions of the game. This should be done by making more quests that aren't expressly combat related as we saw in the "secret" quest line. How about some quests that introduce puzzle mechanics to the game which will lead to more lore or useful items or really anything. There is no more innovation that needs to be added to the game then that and new locations, quests, and perhaps building upon the existing systems.

Let's pivot to games like BG or IWD. I want a new module, with new quests, locations, and some tweaks to the engine. Disco Elysium? Add some more "combat-like" encounters and give us a new story with a new setting.

It's not rocket science, and it's precisely because of "innovation" that we've had so much decline. I think a big part of this is because it's difficult to expand on something you've already built. When you're just starting out planning a game, the writing, the encounters, everything, is fresh and new and you're full of ideas. The second time around, you've already implemented so much of the good shit, it's hard to think of new ways to implement them. Instead of biting the bullet and figuring it out, people try to cover up these holes with "innovation" out of sheer laziness and creative bankruptcy. Here's hoping something like Underrail: Infusion, will prove it can be done.

EDIT: I haven't played it yet, but judging by the positive reviews, KotC 2 went ahead and did exactly this.
 

The Wall

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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?
This idea pops up every now and then, and even though it would pretty cool if it happened, making games is harder than it seems, it requires true dedication to see anything noteworthy come to life, even more so if there isn't any remunaration.
Agreed, it would be a Herculian challenge. At the same time all it would take is few Codexers with vision and strong dedication, others could help in three ways:
  1. If you've got programming, artistic or similar hard skill, welcome abord! Writting is something we'd the least want help from, for few reasons. One of them being that 2-3 writers is already enough, if not more then enough. Unfortunately everyone wants to write, few wanna code
  2. Ok. No problemo! You still wanna be part of project and RPG history? We'll help you learn to code or learn to use engine, so you could be content creator. Or QA
  3. You ain't got time for any of that. But you still wanna see Arcanum 2, Darklands 2, Gothic 3 , Fallout 3 or proper Cyberpunk/Warhammer Fantasy PnP cRPG etc be made? Then good Codex Sir, your capital can be of great help! It can buy people with skill and time you don't have and your help would be much much appreciated. You could donate, you could invest that money... All options are on the table
Of course, all of this must be packaged in such a way to give people confidence, and infect them with hype, core group of people simply must earn trust. Financially stupid would be to make this RPG and locate this team anywhere else but: in Balkans or Eastern Europe

Best part about this dream? It can become real
 

Lagole Gon

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Pathfinder: Wrath
Solasta personality system was a neat new-ish idea... kind of.
It was fun to watch characters you created introduce themselves.
But it gets old rather fast, results be rather bland by design and it's a considerable effort for rather mediocre results.

I think it would be better and easier to:
- Just make it more or less like IWD, but with free character selection during dialogues/interactions.
- Slap some class/character/race reactive barks/dialogues/comments on it. Elf enters a dungeon: "Oh boy! I sure do hate being underground like a dorf!". More violent barks for evil characters etc. Sparse and simple interactions when entering a location or camping.
And that's it. Simple stuff. It's weird nobody did a "reactive voice pack". Well, I think Kenshi did this? But... without voices.
 
Last edited:

The Wall

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ALALOTH: Champions of 4 Kingdoms will do something that original Black Isle's Fallout3 was supposed to have: competing parties who'll go after main quest in parallel with you. Some will be aggressive and burn everything around them, some will fight alongside you, some will be passive, some will seek your destruction

Finally! Chris Avellone's idea comes to life
 

Gregz

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

Innovation is a good word for artistic talent. Most studios have been bought out and destroyed by jewry. You need to find talented designers who are making games for the joy of it, not to push a pozzed narrative. Small studios and modders are the ones making great games today.

For instance, I found a silly $2.99 game that has more soul than anything I've seen put out by a AAA studio in years:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1794680/Vampire_Survivors/
 

Faarbaute

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Mar 2, 2017
Messages
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I'm waiting for the late zoomer/post zoomer generation that grew up playing Minecraft to go into game dev. It might turn out shit, but they should, atleast in theory, appreciate abstraction.

Worse case they'll end up making the same mistakes as previously, where they will obsess on undoing the necessary abstraction of games, in favor of making it all REAL. In any case, we won't really be worse off than we are now and there is always the chance for one of them to, even if accidentally, stumble onto something great.

This all precludes me single-handedly revolutionizing the genre, of course.
 
Joined
Jun 23, 2020
Messages
202
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?
This idea pops up every now and then, and even though it would pretty cool if it happened, making games is harder than it seems, it requires true dedication to see anything noteworthy come to life, even more so if there isn't any remunaration.
Agreed, it would be a Herculian challenge. At the same time all it would take is few Codexers with vision and strong dedication, others could help in three ways:
  1. If you've got programming, artistic or similar hard skill, welcome abord! Writting is something we'd the least want help from, for few reasons. One of them being that 2-3 writers is already enough, if not more then enough. Unfortunately everyone wants to write, few wanna code
  2. Ok. No problemo! You still wanna be part of project and RPG history? We'll help you learn to code or learn to use engine, so you could be content creator. Or QA
  3. You ain't got time for any of that. But you still wanna see Arcanum 2, Darklands 2, Gothic 3 , Fallout 3 or proper Cyberpunk/Warhammer Fantasy PnP cRPG etc be made? Then good Codex Sir, your capital can be of great help! It can buy people with skill and time you don't have and your help would be much much appreciated. You could donate, you could invest that money... All options are on the table
Of course, all of this must be packaged in such a way to give people confidence, and infect them with hype, core group of people simply must earn trust. Financially stupid would be to make this RPG and locate this team anywhere else but: in Balkans or Eastern Europe

Best part about this dream? It can become real
Maybe we should make a new thread in the workshop for people willing to learn and help to teach others about game development, art, writing and music. It could be the push some here need to actually make something cool. We could call it "The Codex Academy" or some shit like that.
 

Robotigan

Learned
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Jan 18, 2022
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397
This thread has become an insufferable circlejerk of confirmation bias. A cursory glance at game credits reveals most of the rainbow-haired women and minority hires work as artists and animators. Probably the least troubled aspects of contemporary gaming. No one complained about Cyberpunk's art direction, for instance. The engineers are still a whiter sausage fest than a Metallica concert.
 

Ravielsk

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Feb 20, 2021
Messages
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As JarlFrank said, if you want to "innovate", expand and improve upon the key aspects of what makes a great RPG.
JarlFrank is obviously correct but the problem with modern games(not just RPGs) is that this is exactly what they have been doing for over a decade. They have been iterating and expanding on the aspects of previously successful games but the selection of games they are using as a basis is only this tiny outcropping of giga-sellers that usually succeed for reason that tended to be external to the game itself. Third-person shooting, open worlds or even procedural generation went through a lot of mechanical improvements and changes since the 90s nobody can really deny that. The problem is that you can only built only so much on top of one idea before you just start threading water. This is how you get something like Gears of War 1 and Uncharted 4 which are separated by 10 years of iteration yet are essentially identical in terms of actual gameplay.
Same with open worlds where the latest hottest innovation is Elden Ring realizing that it can pace the world a bit by simply gating some chunks of it behind bosses. Which is a idea fresh from 2001! Otherwise you are looking at a slew of Assassins creed clones that simply use the open world map for artificially stretching game time via checklist grinding.

Innovation is achieved by both expanding on old ideas and adding some of your own. Otherwise far enough down the line you are just making copies of copies.

No one complained about Cyberpunk's art direction, for instance.
That is a lie. Plenty complained how it went from its blade-runneresque aesthetic(showed in its announcement trailer) to its current neon tumblr dubstep video. You just dont hear much about it because the artistic downgrade is the least of that game's problems.
The engineers are still a whiter sausage fest than a Metallica concert.
Hate to break it to ya but white≠based RPGcodex racist. The white dudes making games today are not the same dudes who were making them in the 90s as most of them either retired or died(as they were already not that young when they started around the time of Amiga).
 

J1M

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
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?
This idea pops up every now and then, and even though it would pretty cool if it happened, making games is harder than it seems, it requires true dedication to see anything noteworthy come to life, even more so if there isn't any remunaration.
Agreed, it would be a Herculian challenge. At the same time all it would take is few Codexers with vision and strong dedication, others could help in three ways:
  1. If you've got programming, artistic or similar hard skill, welcome abord! Writting is something we'd the least want help from, for few reasons. One of them being that 2-3 writers is already enough, if not more then enough. Unfortunately everyone wants to write, few wanna code
  2. Ok. No problemo! You still wanna be part of project and RPG history? We'll help you learn to code or learn to use engine, so you could be content creator. Or QA
  3. You ain't got time for any of that. But you still wanna see Arcanum 2, Darklands 2, Gothic 3 , Fallout 3 or proper Cyberpunk/Warhammer Fantasy PnP cRPG etc be made? Then good Codex Sir, your capital can be of great help! It can buy people with skill and time you don't have and your help would be much much appreciated. You could donate, you could invest that money... All options are on the table
Of course, all of this must be packaged in such a way to give people confidence, and infect them with hype, core group of people simply must earn trust. Financially stupid would be to make this RPG and locate this team anywhere else but: in Balkans or Eastern Europe

Best part about this dream? It can become real
This would only work if you could find programmers and artists from Eastern Europe or South America. You'd never be able to extract full time hours from high quality coders when they have to choose between your project and the compensation plans at American big tech companies.
 

Arbiter

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Entire innovation budgets are allocated to new rendering techniques because that is what sells games.
 

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