Pics and video below related, a game I came across on a game engine forum that seems to have heavy influence from Arcanum & steampunk. The engine focuses on isometric style games.
Games like that don't tend to really fall into the RPG realm anymore, you either get action games or set piece type games in that sort of setting from what I've seen. But what about something in the RPG sense where there's gameplay, choices, and story flowing together much like older WRPGs?
The rare steampunk story focused game has gone more the visual novel sort of route very light on gameplay, the action games focused more on graphics, cutscenes, and linear bits of action. When was the last time we got a steampunk sort of game that wasn't too far in one direction or the other?
Immensely. Now, know any singleplayer finished steampunk games not infested by tumblrite hipsters? ib4 silverfall
Ian Johnson
So I opened the third pic first and was trying to think of a way to describe why it doesn't look good enough, but then I've opened the second. The third looks too empty, too clinical. The border between grass and road is too straight, no flowers or bushes or grass of uneven height, terrain is too flat and so on. The cars look too pristine as well. The airship looks good tho.
David Gomez
Too bad Steampunk got ruined by fags with goggles and gears on their top hats.
Colton Morales
Mite b cool, but only if the writing is decent. Arcanum didn't become a classic purely on the merit of being a steampunk RPG, it combined quite a few ideas and concepts in its universe, such as the balance between and cycles of technology and magic, Half-Ogre breeding conspiracies, and much much more.
Connor Ross
There's a visual novel called Icebound which is, sort of decent. Had a paragon/renegade system like Mass Effect, your choices seem to have some clear effects on some things going on, has some puzzle mechanics, decent art for the setting and a pretty nice soundtrack.
It's rough around the edges and has some forced dialogue with an anthro character that implies a romantic route even if you don't choose any dialogue to pursue that, but I'd say it's worth a playthrough if you can buy the game for around $5-$6. The soundtrack would be worth looking into buying too since that's probably the best single aspect of the game.
There's some other games you're probably more familiar with that are time period specific or retrofuturistic type stuff, such as Bioshock, Dishonored, and maybe some Final Fantasy games. I haven't gotten around to playing Skies of Arcadia but that might have something close enough to steampunk from what little I've seen of it and it tends to be highly praised.
Zachary Myers
Why do people hate steampunk so much these days? I understand that the cosplayers mostly dress like shit, but to write the whole concept off just because of overabundance of cogs and gears seems retarded.
David Moore
Years of disappointment and letdowns.
Gavin Barnes
Name five good steampunk games. I had thief, arcanum, impossible creatures and sims 3 with kinkyworldand even that's stretching it
Hudson Brown
I could be misremembering, but I think there were one or two JRPGs on the PS2 that looked like they fit with the steampunk theme. I don't remember what they're called though.
Isaiah Lopez
Steambot Chronicles
Dominic Wood
i love steampunk, but im tired of the magic vs technology trope that tends to come along with it. theres no reason they cant work in tandem
Colton Green
A setting where they do can be really interesting. This and the main theme can be combination of the two driving society to some obscure next step of evolution, with confrontation being between those welcoming the change and those desiring to keep things the way they are.
Andrew Reed
dark cloud 2 to a degree.
Aiden Baker
I really like those screenshots
Andrew Turner
How often does the magic vs technology conflict even come into play? I am not a big connoisseur of steampunk games, but are there really that many games other than Arcanum that do this?
Tyler Bell
off the top of my head at least, a theme with the human emperor i remember one of the races was troll and there was some karma system
Adam Perez
Well a number of games I know of for gameplay reasons feature sorts of magical abilities (or an equivalent like Bioshock has with its retrofuturism type stuff). It's not always magic vs. tech and trying to fight over which is superior but the nature of the games and their gameplay generally incorporates certain kinds of abilities to mimic what magic generally does in RPGs.
Ryan Watson
Here's another screenshot I forgot I had saved from what the devs have shown.
Ian Nelson
I like the look of it for all the reasons you dislike it.
Easton Ortiz
There might be some things with the engine to consider for some of the complaints, since it's a fairly obscure and not so complete engine called FIFE (Flexible Isometric Free Engine).
Meant to say the engine getting a new update or two could improve the viability of more game devs using it for WRPGs, and the lack of updates for it could be factor effecting the polish of the game in the OP.
John Rivera
Mostly because of the sweeping trend of steampunk hipster bullshit I kept seeing.
Jeremiah Barnes
It sucks that the hipster bandwagon and armchair nerd social justice folks have infested themselves into doing their best to ruin interest in potentially interesting genres and fandoms.
Gavin Diaz
I don't have anything against locations not filled to the brim with various miscellanea. The problem for me is that one looked like something from a tech demo, or maybe from an alpha. The train can work as is if it was recently built.
Landon Turner
Well without context of the story there's no way of knowing how old the train actually is, to be fair. Or how well taken care of it is.
Xavier Evans
steam punk, the cool setting and theme that was ruined by shit games and fat/ugly cosplayers with googles and brass colored spray paint
if only we had lived in the bearenstein universe
Cooper Bailey
Yeah, and that's why I mentioned the train. Everything else, though? Nah. There's a well done "empty space" that's not really empty if you start paying attention and then there's a hastily thrown-together thing that's good enough for a demo for an early-mid development stage that can show promise, but not much else.
Kevin Thompson
Looks neat, does remind me of Arcanum but no details about the story,setting, etc just leaves it as a fairly nice looking showcase of stuff they made.
Cameron Stewart
I liked Rise of Legends.
Jacob Barnes
Well the trailer at the very least showed polish in some of the interface sections of the game and visual assets. Taking care of that I'm sure gets pretty time consuming.
Hoping sometime soon the devs give out an update to let us know how development is coming along, I'd be interested in seeing a short synopsis of what the game is about.
Nolan Parker
Personally I don't think bad cosplay is the defining factor of a genre being ruined as far as games go. There's just not enough in terms of Steampunk genre or themed games out there while other styles of games are far more rampant and ripe with more crap games as a result.
Unless I guess the point you're getting at is that bad cosplay, fanfiction, etc. type of stuff has influenced potential developers in that realm to think things that aren't really Steampunk is actually Steampunk.
Josiah Mitchell
Checked.
I see how you played the game.
Landon Morris
The problem with Steampunk is that it's very limited in scope and setting. You have your victorian era setting, your steam engines with maybe magical creatures(elves, orcs) and magic. It can never really evolve into something new, or be a reflection of our current culture, it's always going to be the same few stories of magic vs technology, colonization and my favorite, a story that could have easily been set in the real world during the Victorian era, but it has gizmos and more steam engines, and thus it's steampunk. Compare this to Cyberpunk, which has more technology and can also have magical creatures and magic(Shadowrun). While at first glance it seems similar, only with laser weapons instead of gunpowder weapons, it can actually be a critique or exaggeration of our current culture or fears. If there is a fear that in the future, megacorporations will rule the world, you can make a cyberpunk story about that. If the fear is that robots will take away our jobs, or start ruling us, you can make a cyberpunk story about that. If the fear is overpopulation, you can make a cyberpunk story about that. If racism is a hot issue today, you can make a story in Shadowrun where orcs mistrust elves and chant Orc Lives Matter. If the internet is a hot issue today, you can make some story about the internet and how everything is connected to it, and present the positives and negatives. The possibilities are much greater than those in Steampunk.
Kevin Sanchez
...
Levi Long
OK, imagine for a moment the premise of a Rasputin game and tell me how that's limited in scope.
Liam Lee
No one has done anything profound with it.
Jace Harris
I think steampunk is a bit of a misnomer. It was originally given the suffix -punk because its spiritual similarity the aesthetic of cyberpunk. Except cyberpunk is an entire genre in it's own right. It has it's own unique aesthetic and it has a multitude of themes and conflicts and speculations that make it a distinct subgenre of science fiction. Whereas steampunk almost entirely revolves around it's aesthetic.
To me it seems like cyberpunk's aesthetic is just one of many parts to the entire genre and the conflicts and stories arise from dark or unoptimistic speculations of the future. While steampunk's aesthetic acts as the central pillar of the "genre" and conflicts and stories arise from the aesthetic itself instead of from any real commentary. Its always "wow what if they had tvs in the 1800s that ran on clockwork? Wouldn't that be crazy?"
Chase Nguyen
To add cyberpunk got it's name because it was a departure from the pie in the sky, optimistic views of the future of the science fiction in the 1960s and 70s. It was a rebellion against mainstream sci fi. It was the "punk" of science fiction, steam"punk" has none of that
Grayson Reyes
>>>/reddit/
Ian Bell
He mentioned "a story that could have easily been set in the real world during the Victorian era".
So here's the question, WHY would your "Rasputin game" be steampunk and not regular historical fiction or historical fantasy? A setting shouldn't just exist for its own sake, it needs to interact with the story in some meaningful way.
When he talks about cyberpunk, the "cyber" aspects exist to inform us of the setting's distance into the future and the "punk" parts generally deal with our real world fears taken to their future extremes. Fantasy elements on top of that may exist as proxies for more sensitive topics (ie racisim), or even drive entire speculative "what if" narratives on their own. The point is that the story and setting are interwoven and dependent on each other.
For reference, Arcanum's story (among other things) dealt with the rise of technology, especially industrialization, upsetting the magical world, which is itself a more extreme version of how those things impact the real world.
Elijah Edwards
I wouldn't blame Social Justice, it's just trendeater hipster shit, Social Justice, Nerd Culture are trendy shit that these people consume, So is Steampunk I guess but it's kind of niche, I haven't seen much of it in a while but the shit I saw just killed it for me.
I guess that explains why it's so easily digested and shat up by fags.
Sebastian Foster
Not entirely correct. Steampunk was a mockery of cyberpunk, essentially the same thing but set in the past. You still have class struggle, (relatively) advanced technology taking jobs from people, advanced weapons used for brutal combat and most commodities are assembled or used through some advanced commodity. Pretty much every story you can make for Cyberpunk, you could do it in Steampunk as well, with the exception of the Net, unless your particular world\setting includes something similar like the ethereal world.
The problem is that something that starts just as mockery hardly goes farther than that, which is why it never took off very well. But even then, that's not even the biggest problem. To write cyberpunk stuff, it's relatively easy on the technology side. Just exagerate computers, software and robots, all pretty familiar concepts. But to write Steampunk, what you need instead is engineering to explain the tech and come up with actual uses for it.
From that problem comes the shitty gameplay you have, where despite having a steampunk world, you wouldn't know it except for the aesthetics. You're not gonna assemble a machine or a gadjet to use, you're not gonna juggle different power sources with their distinctive characteristics, you're not gonna rewire a house for different effects or "hack" some mechanical lock. You don't even have crazy inpractical but fun weapons, just boring mundane weapons reskinned with cogs and brass. You never get any of the gameplay mechanics you usually have in other games and surprisingly, most people don't even understand the idea of class struggles to actually write a decent story with that theme either.
You have plenty of other styles too that could do quite well and even have better and more original aesthetics but again, they suffer from the same problem: nobody understands the science behind the pseudo-science. You're not gonna see Diesel-punk because mechanical engineers don't write for it and you're not gonna see Biopunk because biologists don't work on it, despite Steampunk, Dieselpunk and Biopunk essentially being the same thing but with a different science and theme behind them.
Alexander Lewis
Well, that's an oxymoron if I ever heard one. And speaking of nitpicking genre=/=setting=/=vibe. "He" talks about shadowrun as cyberpunk proper. Completely ignoring how dumb it is to compare an established setting with years of backstory padding including but not limiting a few gorillion novels and shit in relation to a general style of a industrial evolution that turned out just a bit different in dimension xyz. There's also some pretentious shit I'll ignore for the sake of brevity.
You want to talk specific games? How about American McGee's Alice, Thief, Blood Omen or Dishonored? ib4 m-muh Dishonored: say what you want about gameplay but the world was interesting.
I'll straight up say that only a proper moron can claim how steampunk originated from cyberpunk and not from shit like Verne, Lovecraft or Haggard. Also, itt proxyfaging much?
Christian Ross
It's a "genre" that has degenerated into a pure aesthetic. Nounpunk is garbage. I'm glad the trend is dying.
Jayden Johnson
All stories of class struggles can be placed in a Steampunk\Cyberpunk\Dieselpunk\Biopunk world as those are aesthetic styles firstly and world settings secondly. It just so happens that Rasputin was a poor man that, though his faith and personal influence, willed his presence into the court, garnering so much influence over the Tsars that other nobles began to resent him to the point they had him killed.
In the specific case of Steampunk, you could have a story about a country where technology improves the life of men and the richer you are, the more you can buy and the more confortable you live. Nobles still influence the Tsar and laws are passed so they get exclusive acess to some technology, the kind that gives them longer healthier lives but it's not perfect and still there are problems they can't yet solve.
In come Rasputin, holy man from the lowest castes of society, capable of giving medical attention and healing to the select few with his faith. He wiggles his way into the court when not even technology can solve medical problem the son of the Tsar has but Rasputin is known to fix and immidatly the interest in the man rises. Some want to explore how he does it so they can replicate it and cast him out. Others are too impatient and want him gone as he has priviledges he wasn't supposed to have. The man himself seduces the Tsarina and her daughters, giving the royal family a bad name and further making him despised, as well as constantly trying to convince the Tsar to lax the laws regarding the limitations on technology so the average folk can have acess to them as well.
Generally the difference between "historical fantasy" and straight generic fantasy is that historical deals with real world people/places or at least legends of them. It also tends to keep the fantastic elements light enough that it doesn't drastically change how the real world would have worked.
Jason Cox
Not proxyfagging, I'm serious here. The genre proper came shortly after cyberpunk became a thing, a mockery and satire of that but not offensive at all. You have pretty much the same thing but with steam instead of electricity.
Verne was not about steampunk, many of the books he wrote had nothing to do with that. "Journey around the world in 80 days", "20.000 leagues under the sea" and even that russian guy book whose name I forgot, the biggest 3 novels wrote by him are perfectly contemporary. "Journey to the center of the earth" and his time machine books might be the closest he ever got to that but they hardly count as machinery in them is barely talked about and not even the real theme of the books.
You wut now? Maybe he touched on some Imperalism themes, sure. Not even on all his histories. Lovecraft, on the most fantastical stories he had was closer to that retro-futurist shit we got in the 80's (only nearly 100 years before them) than steampunk. Some devices and contraptions here and there, maybe. Like that crazy fella with the cage of iron around your head. Closests story I can think of is "From Beyond". And even that is stretching. I think what you mean is what OTHER people did with the Mythos later. As far as I know, you had two basic themes. Either the 1927 noir investigator shit. Or something like the Dreamlands where everything was magical and fantastic.
Haggard I do not know. But you got the other two wrong so I expect that to be a bad example as well.
Lincoln Morgan
Mockery and satire are meant to be offensive by definition. You probably mean "parody".
Ayden Gutierrez
Right, that's what I meant. Dunno how I forgot about that word. Apologies to any steampunk fan for my retardation.
I knew I heard that name before, Haggard wrote the Solomon Mines and that was mostly his theme. Stories about African mythology or that happened in African territory. That would be Niggerpunk.
Noah Jones
ultimately a steampunk story must be about hubris. The fear of the age was that science would advance too far, too fast
similarly, have you ever noticed cyberpunk stories are about corruption and oppression? Fear of the age
Cameron Edwards
The difference is that Steampunk is mostly in just one age(the Victorian one), whereas Cyberpunk is any future age, and reflects our current age. Maybe in 20 years there will be another fear of the age, and cyberpunk will be able to reflect that, since it's in the far future(well not far enough to have FTL travel, but you get the idea).
I didn't want to say that Shadowrun is the only cybepunk setting, or that it's how every cyberpunk setting should be, I just wanted to give an example of cyberpunk that also deals with magic and elves. There are countless of cyberpunk settings that don't have magic and elves, just like there are countless steampunk settings that don't deal with magic and elves.
Eli Jackson
Steampunk is pretty terrible. You look at Shadowrun/Cyberpunk in general and see themes and developments that closely mirror real politics and societal changes. You look at Steampunk and see a bunch of fags who have no idea about the Victorian mindset or culture.
Ian Williams
Thief is not set in the Victorian era and is Cyberpunk. Neither is Blood Omen (although it's close enough). You can have pseudo-medieval worlds with technology for steampunk.
Mason Rivera
The first Blood Omen is set in a Medieval setting with the not-crusaders and there is no steampunk. Soul Reaver is set in a more post-apocalyptic setting with vampires ruling a decaying world. Blood Omen 2 is set in a steampunk/disepunk setting, but I heard that it has a lot of inconsistencies with the rest of the series, and the only way to explain it is if it happened in an alternative universe/timeline.
Thief is steampunk, I do admit.
Gabriel Gonzalez
I'll have whatever he's smoking
Brody Reed
Discussing so much about Steam/Cyber/Diesel/Bio/Nigger-punk makes you missmatch the words. He was probably thinking of what they originally wanted to do with Thief 4
Jeremiah Butler
Would Cyberpunk Thief even work? I think it would be too hard to balance while keeping the tech level appropriate. You would probably either end up with invisibility or your marks would be inexplicably lacking proper security systems.
Chase Perry
Imagine Dishonored, but with the level design of SystemShock.
Joseph Lewis
Eh… wrong word. My bad. But you can have my steampipe.
To be fair, all those are just aesthetic themes you slap on your story, you can easily implement whatever story from one theme you want into another, just switching the names and science behind the gadjets.
It would be interesting, actually. Cyberpunk offers a very large variety of security measures and ways to break them. Invisibility sounds like easy mode but thermal optics for people and cameras easily counters that, tripwires don't need to see you nor do pressure plates. Lockpicks can also have even more variety (mechanical, electronic, bruteforcing). Even cyberspace could be another area you have to break into with it's own "thief mechanics" for that specific part of the game.
Ultimately, I think most thieves games, and Thief is no exception, are about natural curiosity and greed leading you to find things you weren't supposed to know or obtain. And between the knowledge of an ancient conspiracy or corporate secrets to dominate the world; between ancient artifact of great power and powerfull mutagen, you can have essentially the same thing.
Plus, it would be fun to see how Keepers manage to stay hidden in a modern time.
