The problem with RPGs

[Panzersharkcat]

I actually hate achievements like that. Wooohooo, I saved the world....wait, why is that thing blinking there? Achievements just ruin cutscenes for me.

The only instance I can think of that worked was in Portal 2.

GLaDOS: Well, this is the part where he kills us!
Wheatley: Hello! This is the part where I kill you!
Chapter 9: The Part Where He Kills You.
Achievement Unlocked: The Part Where He Kills You
Subtitle: This Is That Part

[Stark]

Thats a good example of where the money goes, too - hiring actors, producing cutscenes, all that jazz that wasn't an issue for older games.

You have to get just the RIGHT angle on Miranda's twat, after all

However, it might be seen that this is the cost of doing business these days - you can't make a tile-based game anymore and expect it to make money. If they believe their sales are predicated on the expenisve stuff, certainly they'll focus on that.

[salm]

Lots of the game mechanics have changed over the years, esspecially combat. In the olden days you had to rely mainly on leveling your stats and some tactics. Nowadays combat is a lot more action oriented, tactics are almost entirly gone.
Maybe you´re just no fan of action oriented gameplay.

Are you just really ignorant? The conciet that anything not turn-based is less 'tactical' or 'thoughtful' is something that really should have died when people realised the complexity of MMO combat.

PS if Thanas didn't like 'action oriented gameplay' why would he like AP and Witcher, driven entirely by realtime consoletard twitcher shooter skills?

Oh man, do we all remember how much people complained about Witcher's combat system?

So tactical = thoughtful.

But go on. If you think that older RPG are as action oriented as newer ones your ramblings should continue to be quite funny.

[Stark]

Have you even played the games you're talking about? Are you saying Mass Effect - the game that gave us 'lift dudes up to shoot them' - has driven tactics out of role playing games? Do you honestly think that 'action' reduces 'tactics'?

PS old RPGs were slow and turn based because they were amazingly primitive and based on pnp systems. Ditching legacy shit like that is one of the best things done by Bioware when they made their own IPs. Only a true cretin would think that slowness had some intrinsic value of its own due to 'tactics'.

[salm]

Haha, it´s getting better. Apparently you´re now reading me judging the value of a specific game or mechanic in this thread. Read again, dumb ass.

[Stark]

So when you said 'Nowadays combat is a lot more action oriented, tactics are almost entirly gone' you didn't actually mean that modern games had less tactics?

Ok thanks for playing! Bye bye now! In particular I'd like to thank you for the special brand of cowardice whereby you're prepared to constantly post in a thread without actually adding anything while insinuating that you're being misrepresented. So much easier than actually making an argument!

Quick - say 'subjective'.

[Civil War Man]

I would argue against turn-based combat being "tactical". Pausing the game while you queue your commands is not tactics. Tactics is being able to coordinate your actions and the actions of your allies on the fly. So I would consider an FPS that allows you to issue orders to NPCs to be more tactical than Baldur's Gate.

[Stark]

The term has taken on a distorted meaning for game players, because of games like XCOM calling them 'tactical battles'. In a more gamey sense, even the fastest-paced MMO I've played has way more variety in moves and ability to coordinate and combine them for tactical outcomes than regular RPGs, so it makes no sense even if hes using the word to mean 'have fire resistance'.

[salm]

Heh, can´t make an argument if you keep attacking windmills. That´s really your fault, you know.

Even if there are still tactical elements in RPG the main point that they´re more action oriented remains. That should be obvious but apparently it´s not.
Just because somebody likes some modern games, e.g. The Witcher, doesn´t mean that he likes them as much in general. Rules can have exceptions, as you might or might not know.

[Stark]

Nobody cares about your valuation of 'action'. You said

In the olden days you had to rely mainly on leveling your stats and some tactics. Nowadays combat is a lot more action oriented, tactics are almost entirly gone.

And this is ignorant at best, flat out wrong at worst. You can backpedal all you like. Its alarming that you became violent when I added 'thoughtful' - I mistook you for someone concerned with the level of thought required, rather than someone who just can't handle change.

[Thanas]

I find it pretty bad that when confronted with "this game does not force you to think and consider your options and the story and character design is bad" the response is "obviously you just do not like action games".

[salm]

I find it pretty bad that when confronted with "this game does not force you to think and consider your options and the story and character design is bad" the response is "obviously you just do not like action games".

Is that what you get from "Maybe you´re just no fan of action oriented gameplay." ?

Ok, i have no idea how this went to where it is now but I´m pointing out that combat gameplay has changed significantly in newer RPG in a certain way. This might be the case for you or other people generally favouring older games. It might even only be part of it and it might not be part of it at all.
You listed a bunch of things that are different in modern RPG. This is just another one to consider.

[Thanas]

Is that what you get from "Maybe you´re just no fan of action oriented gameplay." ?

Yeah, I did. Sorry if that is not the case.

Ok, i have no idea how this went to where it is now but I´m pointing out that combat gameplay has changed significantly in newer RPG in a certain way. This might be the case for you or other people generally favouring older games. It might even only be part of it and it might not be part of it at all.
You listed a bunch of things that are different in modern RPG. This is just another one to consider.

I really do not give much about combat. It either works or it does not. I found the 2D maps to be better for group combat simply due to the top down view, but that is about it. I really care more for story and character design.

[Stark]

And combat is one aspect its arguable has seen both a lot of experimentation and a lot of success. I mean if ME3's voice control of NPCs works well, who is going to say that is 'less tactical'?

By contrast, the story/writing/play framework hasn't seen a lot of experimentation and has arguably regressed back to gold-box levels.

[Bakustra]

What I wonder is, "How do we get out of this"? Because as it stands there are good reasons why the formula works and why it will continue to work, so it looks like the only way would be for independent developers to spring up, much like how independent films shifted Hollywood significantly in the 1960s and 1970s. But indie RPGs tend to be niche because most of them are jRPG-inspired, they are more difficult to make than other games because of their relative length and effort necessary to make things better, and most indie developers with talent don't seem to be interested in doing them. But that may be a consequence of limited knowledge on my part.

[Stark]

As a side effect of the pining for 'tactical', a lot of the low-budget RPGs are dungeon crawlers and other story-light stuff. The 'classic' RPG, of a squad of dudes running around doing quests, almost seem a dead letter now that any game (Dead Island, Borderlands, etc) can take on the same framework. The core idea of a world in which the player makes a story (the core of western RPGs anyway) remains, but that's totally obliterated by the big names like ME and Skyrim.

This is the world where people seriously talk about there being no room for fantasy games in a world with Skyrim.

[Thanas]

What I wonder is, "How do we get out of this"? Because as it stands there are good reasons why the formula works and why it will continue to work, so it looks like the only way would be for independent developers to spring up, much like how independent films shifted Hollywood significantly in the 1960s and 1970s. But indie RPGs tend to be niche because most of them are jRPG-inspired, they are more difficult to make than other games because of their relative length and effort necessary to make things better, and most indie developers with talent don't seem to be interested in doing them. But that may be a consequence of limited knowledge on my part.

I would think a massive personal creative turnover would be necessary. I mean, you get very few people calling the shots at the large companies and these people have done so for several years.

Maybe trying some new competent writers would be the key here. Or adapting some well-established books, like the witcher did.

[Eleas]

What I wonder is, "How do we get out of this"? Because as it stands there are good reasons why the formula works and why it will continue to work, so it looks like the only way would be for independent developers to spring up, much like how independent films shifted Hollywood significantly in the 1960s and 1970s. But indie RPGs tend to be niche because most of them are jRPG-inspired, they are more difficult to make than other games because of their relative length and effort necessary to make things better, and most indie developers with talent don't seem to be interested in doing them. But that may be a consequence of limited knowledge on my part.

What I'd like to see is one of those game-changers that come around once or twice in a generation, like the "first-person sneaker" or what have you. Remember, that was while the market was being saturated with Quake clones. Enter a small(well, -ish) company with a different concept that they played to the hilt (in the case of Thief, the concept of stealth).

So what we're looking for is something built pretty much from the ground up, a game that gathers much of what the old-schoolers feel is missing in today's offerings, merged with any innovations that would improve the presentation. Here is a good example of the idea in action.

[Civil War Man]

The term has taken on a distorted meaning for game players, because of games like XCOM calling them 'tactical battles'. In a more gamey sense, even the fastest-paced MMO I've played has way more variety in moves and ability to coordinate and combine them for tactical outcomes than regular RPGs, so it makes no sense even if hes using the word to mean 'have fire resistance'.

It's pretty trivial to have tactics in multiplayer games, since players' actions aren't scripted. Comparing single player to single player and multi to multi is more meaningful in that regard. For all its faults, I'd use Republic Commando as an example of tactics in a single player game. You could theoretically leave your squad to the whims of the AI, but the fights will be much smoother if you go through the effort of issuing orders.

[Stark]

Puttig aside coordination because you're right, the underlying mechanics have advanced a hell of a long way from DND clones, to the point where MMOs basically wrote the dictionary on talking about tactics in computer games simple because of all the interactions between buffs and debuffs and roots and spikes and conditional procs and shit. Modern RPGs inherit his stuff and so a certainly not dumbed down combat-wise.

[Bakustra]

What I wonder is, "How do we get out of this"? Because as it stands there are good reasons why the formula works and why it will continue to work, so it looks like the only way would be for independent developers to spring up, much like how independent films shifted Hollywood significantly in the 1960s and 1970s. But indie RPGs tend to be niche because most of them are jRPG-inspired, they are more difficult to make than other games because of their relative length and effort necessary to make things better, and most indie developers with talent don't seem to be interested in doing them. But that may be a consequence of limited knowledge on my part.

I would think a massive personal creative turnover would be necessary. I mean, you get very few people calling the shots at the large companies and these people have done so for several years.

Maybe trying some new competent writers would be the key here. Or adapting some well-established books, like the witcher did.

Eh, I think that you'd probably have to get rid of management at this point, since at the very least the current formula is a winner and these games are expensive to make. The Witcher itself was, now that I think about it, essentially independent in terms of being produced outside the "system" of video games in general. But then you'd have to fire practically everybody or replace double-duty creative positions with actual writers- but on the other hand, the writers you'd be able to hire probably wouldn't be that good and wouldn't necessarily be good with writing for video games, especially RPGs.

[TronPaul]

I think one of the major problems is the loss of stylized characters (or the focus on realism). I can't say I remember anyone's name or face in my 20 hours of playtime in Skyrim. Compare that to TF2, where each character is immensely stylized and differentiated. It's not an RPG but all the characters, even the announcer, are more memorable than the any character out of the Bethesda games.

It reminds me of watching this intro to Full Throttle. I never played it, but I watched that cutscene all the way through and I really enjoyed it and got connected to the characters. I wish I enjoyed point and click adventures more, that game looks fun.

[Thanas]

I think one of the major problems is the loss of stylized characters (or the focus on realism).

What realism? I can count on my hand the number of characters who felt real in the last few RPGs.

[TronPaul]

What realism? I can count on my hand the number of characters who felt real in the last few RPGs.

What I mean by realism is the visual realism. The characters and setting need to look "real" (even though the characters have dead, soulless eyes). I think that current development practice puts too much effort into this area, detracting from gameplay and world building needed for an RPG.

[Thanas]

Eh...no. No way do the characters look real. Unless you think chainmail bikinis are realistic.