Decline Why 95% of the "modern" cRPG are so lame?

[Takamori]

Well this thread went places huh?
As for something to add besides diet and corpo life. The culture around gaming that the dev have to tell exactly what to do and hold your hand through the entire experience, creating this artificial feeling of a themepark inside the game. "Oh this is where I should explore", "Oh this is where I should go do combat", "I should follow the build the game almost yelled at me to do", instead of just letting the person experience the game and let the merit of level design and linguistics be put into test.

 

[Joggerino]

Why did no one make an RPG where you can respond to fetch quests with "Fuck off, I'm not your errand boy"?

 

[Lawntoilet]

Why did no one make an RPG where you can respond to fetch quests with "Fuck off, I'm not your errand boy"?

You can say that almost word-for-word in Dragonfall, at least a couple times early in the game.

 

[Joggerino]

Why did no one make an RPG where you can respond to fetch quests with "Fuck off, I'm not your errand boy"?

You can say that almost word-for-word in Dragonfall, at least a couple times early in the game.

After early game you just kill them on the spot?

 

[NerevarineKing]

Wait until the Codex finds out about all the shitty RPGs in the 80s like all the Ultima clones.

 

[Lawntoilet]

Why did no one make an RPG where you can respond to fetch quests with "Fuck off, I'm not your errand boy"?

You can say that almost word-for-word in Dragonfall, at least a couple times early in the game.

After early game you just kill them on the spot?

Doesn't have any fetch quests after that.

 

[vota DC]

Why did no one make an RPG where you can respond to fetch quests with "Fuck off, I'm not your errand boy"?

Mount and Blade 1 has that reply when they ask you to deliver a message to another lord.

 

[bandersnatch]

Dear Stendhal (or the person that now goes by madhouse?),

Let's try to keep the threads on topic please. Or at least start your own thread or something about how awesome your are and how you rocked back in high school. Most people know that those who make outrageous claims on forums hiding behind alias' are full of it and usually just trolling. After all, if you were for real and actually believed the stuff you are trying to sell to everyone, you would just use your real name like Cleveland has the balls to do. People aren't usually daft enough to believe someone claiming to be a tough guy that hides behind an alias. That's from the cowards playbook. And changing your alias multiple times on forums is reserved for the trolliest of trolls. Furthermore, no man would call another man a cunt. That's an insult only women call each other! You just outed yourself. LOL

Now can we just get back to this nice decline thread... it was actually pretty fun before the rulers came out!

 

[Joggerino]

Why did no one make an RPG where you can respond to fetch quests with "Fuck off, I'm not your errand boy"?

Mount and Blade 1 has that reply when they ask you to deliver a message to another lord.

Yeah, i remember that It's a bit different though because in warband you are a nobody so it's appropriate. I think when you pledge allegiance to their king they straight up tell you its beneath you to do errands.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Why did no one make an RPG where you can respond to fetch quests with "Fuck off, I'm not your errand boy"?

You can say that almost word-for-word in Dragonfall, at least a couple times early in the game.

Way before, Prelude to Darkness did it at least once (the old man's fetch quest in the first village)

 

[Goldschmidt]

This thread will go straight to retardo-land where the future generations to come can chew on it.

 

[Ol' Willy]

I like how mods didn't intervene. Like, hey man, you brought it on yourself willingly, now face the consequences!

 

[typical user]

My guess is most of the games currently are so big in scope that creating something unique is simply not possible. Any trace of soul or passion is washed out because of meetings, yearly-evaluations, deadlines and other corpo-stuff.

 

[Burning Bridges]

For example Darkest Dungeon showed that it is possible to create something great with very little resources. But then they stopped half way because everyone is a lazy cunt and competition is nonexistant.

 

[anvi]

Because they were much cheaper to make in the 90s when people could handle isometric views and stuff. Nowadays everything gets compared to Call of Duty and Battlefield and whatever else, so every game needs fancy graphics which is expensive. It leaves less money for the gameplay, but most importantly, it means that they can't aim at niche audiences anymore. To recover all those costs, they need as many sales as they can get, and making a game that is difficult or confusing or overwhelming to ANYONE is a lost sale... So they make it easy, welcoming, and mindless, so they sell 10 million units and can make Dumb Game 2 that sells 20 million units.

That's all "the decline" is. It was the mainstream-ification of the gaming industry. The classics were made by teams of 50 nerds who wanted to make a great game and some profit. Now games are made by sweatshops of 200 people grinding out the hours to make a dumb but slick product that sells more units than their last product.

 

[Darth Canoli]

For example Darkest Dungeon showed that it is possible to create something great with very little resources. But then they stopped half way because everyone is a lazy cunt and competition is nonexistant.

Halfway to where?
You realize we're talking about RPG here?

anvi I know i'm going to regret asking but still: CoD?

 

[Burning Bridges]

Halfway to where?

Halfway to finishing it.

In Early Access it ticked all boxes of a great RPG, but they somehow stalled half-way. It started being repetitive after 20-30h playtime. If you compare such half-finished attempts with the amount of first class content that was in Arcanum or Jagged Alliance 2 it's just staggering.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Halfway to where?

Halfway to finishing it.

In Early Access it ticked all boxes of a great RPG, but they somehow stalled half-way. It started being repetitive after 20-30h playtime. If you compare such half-finished attempts with the amount of first class content that was in Arcanum or Jagged Alliance 2 it's just staggering.

But do you think it is worth doing? I have been building some prototypes here of similar games in different genres alongside my various flavors of Grimoire set in other contexts like POST-ATOMIC.

I had the same experience you did. You would not want to play Darkest Dungeon for 100 hours. If it was around 20-40 hours of play would it be a pretty good deal for say $19.95 if the combat was good and the story was engaging? I am thinking of doing Lovecraft game along these lines as well. I want to do things that are different in RPGs but not if they are ultimately boring.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Cleve, I find it hard to argue with you about this topic since you have been the one mocked in Jagged Alliance 2.

As to Darkest Dungeon the comparison is rather wether Apocalypse Now would still be a classic if it ended after 6.5 minutes. I personally would not think this to be the case.

 

[Burning Bridges]

And maybe you can explain to us why Sirtech made their games much too good and went down as a result.

In the end the answer is probably just one of the rules of capitalism. If a company makes a Rolex and sells it for 50$ will eventually go broke. Likewise, any game like Jagged Alliance 2 should have cost at least 500$

The ultimate irony is that I bought JA2 in a bargain bin for 1€

 

[kangaxx]

This thread is the most autistic thing I've seen on the forum so far. Incredible.

 

[Burning Bridges]

You ain't seen nothin yet

 

[Darth Canoli]

And maybe you can explain to us why Sirtech made their games much too good and went down as a result.

In the end the answer is probably just one of the rules of capitalism. If a company makes a Rolex and sells it for 50$ will eventually go broke. Likewise, any game like Jagged Alliance 2 should have cost at least 500$

On this, we can agree.
Back in the days, NEO GEO sold their cartridges for a fortune, like 700-800€ if i remember correctly (euros didn't exist back then though) and they could because their console was an actual home arcade and their joypads were the most robust but simply the best on the market (arcade joypads).

Was their business model a good one though?
I have no idea but i don't see them anymore on the console market, sure, they still release games but they didn't develop more consoles as far as i know.

Knowing that, i bought my Wizardry 8 (Sirtech) copy 15€ or so in a second hand store back in the days, a real steal and I think its real value was probably on par with these NEO-GEO cartridges.

But were anyone going to buy it for 700€?
Maybe a couple of fans but for this price and in a CD format, piracy would have killed them even faster (while it's way more difficult to pirate cartridges and i don't think it was even possible back then)

Still, some games should be sold way more but wouldn't they lose customers over this?
Wouldn't piracy kill their business model faster than light?
It probably would.

Kickstarters alleviate this, of course, as long as you're not promising too much physical rewards, that's probably the way to get more money from your work, nowadays.

So, the conclusion is no, a game like JA2 wouldn't have sold so well for 500$, nor would have Wizardry 8 but you could probably make a mobile game for hipsters that would sell for a fortune, there's a shitload of retards paying 5 times the price to get apple computers and smartphones, i'd tap this market and milk it to death.

And then, with the money, if you didn't lose your soul in the process, you can make JA 3 or Wizardry 9.

 

[Burning Bridges]

It is the same as with flight simulators.

People endlessly complain that there is no new content but in cases where it is available you need to invest north of 1000€ to have a good experience.

You could provide any desired infrastructure if you could permanently employ a team of capable developers for 10-20 years - including fantastic rpgs. But schmucks want something that would either cost 1000$ or require a hefty monthly subscription for under 40$. Because that is the maximum amount a hoi polloi can spend at the end of the week without feeling severe pain. So they get only the kind of trash we are used to.

In the old days developers had not understood this themselves and worked like dogs at a huge loss in time and money. Therefore nowadays all good developers no longer work in gaming, because there is much better money and work conditions in other fields.

That's basically all that has changed. Games nowadays are trash, not luxury items.

 

[anvi]

jk lol