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

JarlFrank

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The guy I met who worked at Crytek worked as narrative designer there and what he did was mostly coordinating the team and making sure all the different writers were on the same page. The way they worked was that the exact same character would have a dozen writers who'd all just write and handful of lines for that character. Each cutscene would be written by a different guy. Nobody in the team could point to one specific character, one specific mission, one specific event etc and say "I made that", the writers and level designers there only made small parts of everything. In the end you'd have one character whose lines were written by 10 different writers and stitched together by the project manager.

This all sounds like soul draining hell, like it was designed to make lifeless shlock that made the authors miserable.

Now you know why a lot of modern open world games are filled with paint-by-the-numbers generic repeatable missions all over the place. That's the type of content such work conditions produce. You can't put a lot of creativity into your job, so you make it easy on yourself by just copypasting the same formula over and over and over again. Cool, made three "quests" today (each of them exactly conforming to the template issued by our corporate overlords), time to go home and get blackout drunk to drown out the void in my soul!
 

Twiglard

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My point is that the prevailing "wisdom" amount game developers is that making the player feel good (or feel / experience _something_) is the goal of a video game in itself.

Hey, there aren't many games that make me feel any strong emotions. But when they do, I love it.
 

Dycedarg

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The guy I met who worked at Crytek worked as narrative designer there and what he did was mostly coordinating the team and making sure all the different writers were on the same page. The way they worked was that the exact same character would have a dozen writers who'd all just write and handful of lines for that character. Each cutscene would be written by a different guy. Nobody in the team could point to one specific character, one specific mission, one specific event etc and say "I made that", the writers and level designers there only made small parts of everything. In the end you'd have one character whose lines were written by 10 different writers and stitched together by the project manager.

Of course you're not going to end up with anything interesting when that's how games are developed. There is no creative process anymore. It's assembly line manufacturing. You make a few little parts but you will never identify with the finished product because you barely had any control over its shape. There's no creativity in a product designed by committee.

It would be interesting to know if working for Obsidian and Inxile is just as bad as working for Crytek. Many people, including myself, had high hopes for games such as Pillars of Eternity and Wasteland 2. That didn't work very well. Is the process to blame for those games' mediocre writing? Or did they just choose the wrong people to be in charge of the narrative?
 

kreight

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The general idea is that western gamedev is busted. It's out of ideas. When you are out of ideas, you start putting politics into games. The same with movie industry. I can't remember the last time I watched a new western movie.

And the thing is it was neve actually good. The marketing was good and there were no competitors.

High time for new studios to rise and shine.
 

samuraigaiden

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The Kickstarter narrative of recreating the classics and reviving the genre probably doesn’t help. If anything, it leads devs to question their original ideas in light of what they think fans expect. It’s not a good mindset for creativity and innovation.

When we think of the classics, like the games Lilura always mentions, they were all facing forward, not retreading old ground.

Jagged Alliance 2 wasn’t trying to revive the spirit of JA1, it aimed to top it and be better in every way.
 
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Tihskael

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Just wait until the Godd redeems himself.

hczmd8sir4v41.png
 

lycanwarrior

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But it's also because of the players.
You grow a child on white industrial bread, fizzy drinks and candy and he'll be perfectly happy about it, he won't even want to eat anything else.

Don't forget the soy, which is why are seeing an epidemic of "soy boys" LMAO...
 

lycanwarrior

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Sure there were few good AAA rpgs in this period. But lots of good AA and indie titles. I had lots of fun with Underrail, Atom, Age of Decadence, unoffical Fallout 2 successors (Resurrection and Nevada), Shafowrun games, Fallout New Vegas, the Witchers.

This.

Unfortunately, I don't see AAA game studios ever catering to the hardcore/traditional CRPG market.

And no, CP2077 doesn't count lol.
 

JarlFrank

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It would be interesting to know if working for Obsidian and Inxile is just as bad as working for Crytek. Many people, including myself, had high hopes for games such as Pillars of Eternity and Wasteland 2. That didn't work very well. Is the process to blame for those games' mediocre writing? Or did they just choose the wrong people to be in charge of the narrative?

I have no personal experience with and don't personally know anyone who worked at mid-size A to AA studios, such as inXile and Obsidian. They're not full-on AAA but they're not small either. I'd assume that their workflow is closer to AAA than to indie teams with 10 people though.

When I interviewed Swen before the release of Divinity Original Sin 2, he said there's about thirty writers working on the game. It's not an exceptionally huge game though - what does it need THIRTY writers for? The writers were even working from different locations as Larian had several studios at that point: one in Ghent, one in Dublin, one in St. Petersburg (IIRC). With so many people in so many locations, coordination becomes harder than when you work with a small team that lives close together.

When I worked on Realms Beyond, that was even before the successful Kickstarter so there were fewer people on the team, maybe 10 at max. We coordinated online and regularly talked about setting details, quest brainstorming, etc. Even with a small team you had to do lots of communication since different people had to coordinate their efforts: when you write a quest, you have to coordinate with the level designer who builds the town your quest is set in, and you both work off each other - you give instructions to the level designer on what you need for your quest (I need a hunting lodge for the local huntress and she has to have a dog at her side), the level designer gives you some ideas on what to do with your quest (I placed a little toolshed next to her hunting lodge, there's some items in there that might come in useful in your quest idea, maybe you can add the option of letting the player steal them), etc etc. This kind of coordination works very well in a small team, everyone can work off each other and there's a definite personal note in each quest, after some time you will easily be able to identify who made which quest and which location because everyone has their own style of quest and area design.

Now imagine the same with three, four or even up to ten times as many people. Coordinating like that is going to be much harder. You're probably not going to talk directly to all of your colleagues, instead you'll just talk to the lead guy and he will consolidate all the suggestions and give people the okay or tell them to change their ideas. You end up with internal inconsistencies much more easily, and there's a high likelihood that the game story will feel disjointed rather than every quest harmonizing with each other and with the locations it's set in. Someone might be working on a dungeon you don't even know exist, and the questgiver is a character living in the same building you are currently designing... but you don't know this NPC is going to be placed there. With a larger team, it's impossible to know what everyone else is doing. When you have a team of 10 or 20 people in total, you are always aware of what the others are working on.

Ah yes, John is currently building a cave network... Lydia is writing the characters of the noble house of Greywinter... I have an idea for a quest involving an old artefact once owned by that family, and it got lost in the ancient caves... gonna talk to John and Lydia and throw some ideas at them, maybe we can work on a quest together!

Meanwhile in a big team of 100+ people you're more likely to think: John? Lydia? Who are these people? Have I met them before? Are they new hires or were they always here? I don't remember. Eh whatever, they're probably working on areas of the game far away from the one I'm working on so it's none of my business!

When Obsidian and inXile had big name writers like Chris Avellone or Patrick Rothfuss work on their games, they didn't have them design a consistent area, or questline, or whatever - they had them design companion characters. Those are usually rather disconnected from everything else in the game (apart from the mainquest, to which they will occasionally react). While companions will often comment on things and have their own personal companion quest, they don't have to be integrated as closely with the world as a lengthy questline would have to be, or a location. You don't have to coordinate with level designers as closely as you would if you were to write a questline, because once a companion is recruited he is part of your party, no longer part of the world around you. While designing a questline often means level designers have to build new dungeons according to your design, designing a companion means you just have to look at the finished main quest outline and have the companion react to the characters and places the player comes into contact with.

This seems to be a general trend in bigger companies with lots of writers and designers on the team. You don't coordinate as much, instead you work on snippets that can stand on their own to some degree because that reduces the amount of required coordination (because coordinating your creative work with other team members does take a lot of time).

In the end, large teams means you end up with many cooks who aren't fully aware of what the other cooks are doing, all tossing their own spices and ingredients into the same bowl.
 

purupuru

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95% of any genre during any era is lame. One just forgets about the older mediocre games, as one should.
Also I can't fathom how anyone can think that Arcanum's wolves is anywhere nearly as dangerous as Kingmaker's. The golems would have been a far better example.
 

AwesomeButton

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This seems to be a general trend in bigger companies with lots of writers and designers on the team. You don't coordinate as much, instead you work on snippets that can stand on their own to some degree because that reduces the amount of required coordination (because coordinating your creative work with other team members does take a lot of time).
Like I said, modern project management practices.

You have agile tv series, agile videogame development, everything has to be modular, interchangeable, like in a McDonald's assembly line. That's how and why we get the opposite of quality.

But again, the masses don't know better, can't tell the difference. Give them a coherent story and gameplay that complement each other, a "good game" and they won't appreciate it.

(See my signature)
 

eli

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We already had this discussion.
It's partially cultural, more and more commercial shit cornering the market and the good stuff can't reach the mass audience anymore.
Also game devs tethering on this mass market garbage.

But it's also because of the players.
You grow a child on white industrial bread, fizzy drinks and candy and he'll be perfectly happy about it, he won't even want to eat anything else.

Same goes for video games, no studio with money (they're not AAA they're more like ZZZ) released a good cRPG in 20 years.
The new generations don't even know what a cRPG is, let alone a good one.

They're the perfect consumers for the mass market, they never developed their taste because they're only fed with garbage and they can't get enough of it.

So, when a studio develops something half baked but that looks good and even looks like the real deal at first glance, the fan boys jizz all over themselves.
It's like offering a glass of half filtered Ganges water to someone who only drank Ganges water his whole life.
because women and chads;
1554665372553.jpg

wnkrtf
 

Dycedarg

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When Obsidian and inXile had big name writers like Chris Avellone or Patrick Rothfuss work on their games, they didn't have them design a consistent area, or questline, or whatever - they had them design companion characters. Those are usually rather disconnected from everything else in the game (apart from the mainquest, to which they will occasionally react). While companions will often comment on things and have their own personal companion quest, they don't have to be integrated as closely with the world as a lengthy questline would have to be, or a location. You don't have to coordinate with level designers as closely as you would if you were to write a questline, because once a companion is recruited he is part of your party, no longer part of the world around you. While designing a questline often means level designers have to build new dungeons according to your design, designing a companion means you just have to look at the finished main quest outline and have the companion react to the characters and places the player comes into contact with.

This sounds incredibly bad, but it explains one of the the things I noticed in modern AA rpgs: the companion characters are usually completely dissociated from the main narrative. The biggest example I can think of is PoE, where most of your party doesn't seem to have any connection with the Hollowborn crisis. Since the writers have little knowledge of where the lead designers want the main story to go, it stands to reason that they'll just do their own thing and hope it can somehow be inserted into the final product. What a mess.

Anyway, thanks for the answer. It's always interesting to see how the sausage is made. And it's a shame most companies, even mid sized ones, are using a fordist model for game development.
 

Takamori

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Yeah corporate practices and RPGs not being profitable compared to popamoles, so less companies taking risks because in their cost/production sheet the value won't be worth it. The public for those RPGs usually are people with a more demanding taste so much more easier to fuck up and get your product classified as shit, while other games can get away with the "its fun at least", RPG can be destroyed in several ways, writing is shit, combat is shit, itemization is shit , character building is shit and so on.
 

Takamori

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Also regarding the soy comment like I think this is part of corporate practice, marketing of the good ol trend of "ethical" consumption of product, product must be virtuous like me etc.
 

Dycedarg

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Yeah corporate practices and RPGs not being profitable compared to popamoles, so less companies taking risks because in their cost/production sheet the value won't be worth it. The public for those RPGs usually are people with a more demanding taste so much more easier to fuck up and get your product classified as shit, while other games can get away with the "its fun at least", RPG can be destroyed in several ways, writing is shit, combat is shit, itemization is shit , character building is shit and so on.

The model you describe makes sense for giant like EA, Ubisoft or Bethesda; not for mid sized ones. Sure, setting up an assembly line allows EA to churn out Fifa, Madden or Battlefield games every year, which will net more than a billion dollars in profit. But it doesn't work so well for the likes of Inxile and Obsidian. Had Microsoft not bought them out, Inxile would probably be long gone. The question is why do they still follow a method that is clearly not working for them. Meanwhile, some smaller studios seem to making better and more successful games.
 

Raghar

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Racism. In old RPGs it was about fast breeders orcs vs most of else. It was fun juicy, and fight for survival, or for loot depends on which side party was. Orcs didn't have loot before they got it, thus a party was either on side of survival, or butchering attacked countries to get loot. Or on third side and fighting against both.

It was quick dirty, and old alliances evaporated quickly just because orcs overpopulated and needed more money AND F*A*M*E. Burning down a large city gives F*A*M*E for decades.

Now of course the equation was simple. Slow breeders like non orcs would take longer to replace loses from war, fast breeders like orcs can even losing 30 percent of population replace in few decades. And proper orc society basically works well only when nearly everyone is orc or similar, and they keep theirs traditions.

Nowadays thinking about different species is something people are not able, they were nannied to think different color variations are the same genetics, and mixing everyone into one pot will not cause degradation of previously existing cultures and genetics.

But that also makes games bland and less realistic. It's no longer different species, that have mostly military interaction, and there are sensible reasons for that. It's a random person painted in different color, or with different decorations. It's no longer a world where cats dogs and goats are living, it's a world where cat has dog decoration and is saying wouf.
 
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Takamori

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Yeah corporate practices and RPGs not being profitable compared to popamoles, so less companies taking risks because in their cost/production sheet the value won't be worth it. The public for those RPGs usually are people with a more demanding taste so much more easier to fuck up and get your product classified as shit, while other games can get away with the "its fun at least", RPG can be destroyed in several ways, writing is shit, combat is shit, itemization is shit , character building is shit and so on.

The model you describe makes sense for giant like EA, Ubisoft or Bethesda; not for mid sized ones. Sure, setting up an assembly line allows EA to churn out Fifa, Madden or Battlefield games every year, which will net more than a billion dollars in profit. But it doesn't work so well for the likes of Inxile and Obsidian. Had Microsoft not bought them out, Inxile would probably be long gone. The question is why do they still follow a method that is clearly not working for them. Meanwhile, some smaller studios seem to making better and more successful games.

I think the smaller is the keyword, given what I read from JarlFrank post it helps those small studios to coordinated so they know what the fuck is happening inside the game.

In pure theory, the ideal would be have a small crew to do the heavy labor of developing story, concept art and systems. After all this is solidified, have the bigger team to tackle on asset creation, animations and so on would be a matter of just implementing the document. In the current way you have large team doing everything and the games end up looking like Frankenstein monster so you have "good writing parts" but its overshadowed because you have several clueless people doing writting in other parts too
 

Tyranicon

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If you're looking for good RPGs from AAA or even some AA devs, you're looking in the wrong places.
 

Takamori

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If you're looking for good RPGs from AAA or even some AA devs, you're looking in the wrong places.
AAA no fucking way indeed, CP2077 proved that once again.

AA this is me being fabulously optimistic but inXile at least did a good job for Wasteland 3, I enjoyed my time there. As for Obsidian, after New Vegas brain leak losing the key players in writting they never recovered, that would require a revamp in the writting team or at least hire experienced names to manage the current one to not fuck up.
 

Darth Canoli

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Yeah I worked in a small team before, and I met a guy at uni who worked at Crytek as part of a 100 people team.

The difference in workflow and who does what kind of work is gigantic.

I worked on complete quests from start to finish: coming up with characters, placing them in the towns and dungeons, writing all their dialogue, writing the quest log entries, even determining what reward you'd get in the end and which encounters you met on the way. One full quest made by one person. All quests were designed like that: someone in the team was assigned to do a quest in location X, and then he/she would come up with the whole thing from scratch. There was brainstorming with other team members, of course, but the final product of your work was all yours.

The guy I met who worked at Crytek worked as narrative designer there and what he did was mostly coordinating the team and making sure all the different writers were on the same page. The way they worked was that the exact same character would have a dozen writers who'd all just write and handful of lines for that character. Each cutscene would be written by a different guy. Nobody in the team could point to one specific character, one specific mission, one specific event etc and say "I made that", the writers and level designers there only made small parts of everything. In the end you'd have one character whose lines were written by 10 different writers and stitched together by the project manager.

Of course you're not going to end up with anything interesting when that's how games are developed. There is no creative process anymore. It's assembly line manufacturing. You make a few little parts but you will never identify with the finished product because you barely had any control over its shape. There's no creativity in a product designed by committee.


Thanks for sharing this, i had no idea they were working like this.
But it shouldn't be a surprise, retarded management practices and workload organization leads to retarded games.

I really think even a big studio could mana for a project and let them organize their workload in a way that makes sense.
Also, word count shouldn't be a goal, better to write less with an average higher quality.

If a single studio pulled something like this off; a big budget non dumbed down cRPG; it could be a game changer.

Maybe the few indie devs working on ambitious projects right now are going to inspire a new generation?
 

Takamori

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Maybe the few indie devs working on ambitious projects right now are going to inspire a new generation?

Sadly with everything in this market they require some sort of spotlight, aka marketing. For example I'm almost sure that Space Colony is gonna be a good product, but given the lack of interest from the mainstream media outlets will it be able to reach the full market just by the quality of the product itself? So getting a good product is just a step, we complain that companies spend more money in marketing instead of the game itself but its for a reason. You have to constantly dangle the carrot in front of the retards and tell then to consume product.

Its a fucking nightmare :negative:

edit: cut the part that I would make a point regarding inspiration, to inspire sadly something must be seen by a large public so you have more chance to spark interest in the right talent.
 

kreight

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You keep circle jerking the same shit over and over and over and over - Obsidian, InExile, Bioware, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Baldurs Gate, [put some other old murican shit in here]. That's it. You are in the fucking loop. Get over it.
 

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