How did RPGs go from being based on board games like D&D to being either
A): Extremely linear, heavy story-based cutscene fests with no role-playing elements.
Or
B): Shallow open world messes with less depth than other open world games than came out two decades ago.
I can't pin down when this change started happening exactly, but I feel like it was around the mid-90's.
ADD riddled manchildren.
It's when fags stopped caring about putting hard work into their designs for their own autistic tastes and having to have a simple plot to lure funding by being easy to explain.
Bioware, Bethesda and Square spitroasted the genre into a vegetative state.
People confused the mechanics common to RPGs as being the mechanics central to rpgs, because most of them had never played real rpgs. "rpg" Bevan associated with having levels and attributes and numbers rather than playing a character and freedom of choice.
When they became video games.
I still play with my friends and our DM at a local shop near here, no video game ever made seems to capture the feeling D&D has. They tried to back in 80's and early 90's, but modern RPGs like Skyrim aren't even remotely close to the freedom and depth of D&D.
I personally wouldn't even mind the lack of freedom if they weren't advertised as doing otherwise and didn't play like absolute shit. It's like wanting a steak, settling for a burger at a drive-in and then being served spam.
I think Mass Effect and Oblivion were the defining games that ensured popular RPGs were no longer role-playing games.
It's sad how many people think this.
The problem now is that people don't have the experience of playing, making and running tabletop games, so when it comes to game and level design they are complete shit that takes everything from movies and TV
To be fair
motb and hotu were awesome things
Although even the base campaigns of nwn 1 and 2 look like gems compared to todays usual turds.
That and icewind dale.
The same thing that microwave ovens did to cooking.
People got impatient.
Daggerfall had it right.
Still don't understand why they have continued to cut down the amount of choices and freedom for you, even though the amount of space available for the developer has only increased. Maybe cut down on the marketing-budget a bit and increase the amount of actual content and freedom?
Good games sell anyway. Well unless you listen to gaming-"journalists" of course. Their favourite-games aren't good games. Never was, never will be.
Inflammatory as this sentence may be, it really is the root of the issue. Pen and paper RPGs are limited only by the imagination, but vidya RPGs are limited by only being able to code so much into the game before release. As a result, all video game RPGs are limited, and even if you are given an array of choices for dealing with a certain situation, that array of choices eventually ends. You might be able to talk, stealth, fight or trick your way through a problem, but you're still limited to what the developer put in there for you to do. Except in the rare case of maybe some borderline buggy shit in a procedurally generated sandbox, any choice you make is a choice the developer has explicitly given you ahead of time.
Final Fantasy 1 on the NES, while you had some freedom if you went out of your way, still had a pretty linear path with just some branching sidequests. From the very beginning of console RPGs, this existed. PC has always been a little better, in games such as the Quest for Glory series, Wasteland, Fallout, and other "open world" RPGs, but you're still limited to the choices the dev gives you.
I think the main breakpoints in the casualization of RPGs is as follows:
1) Pen and Paper.
2) Converted to limited-choice video games.
3) JRPGs in general tended to try more for a coherent narrative than WRPGs more open world approach. JRPGs from the beginning usually had one main path with branching sidequests that led to nothing but interesting loot.
4) Final Fantasy VII popularized JRPGs in the west, and was the first role playing game in history to lean very heavily, and successfully, on cinematics and setpieces in order to draw people into the narrative.
5) This style was epitomized by Xenogears (and probably the Xenosaga series) which were often praised for their story and writing, but which leaned so heavily on that pillar of the game that exploration and "traditional rpg elements" fell by the wayside. It was a story with gameplay elements, not a game with story elements, for better or for worse.
6)Final Fantasy XII came out, and appeared at first glance to pull things back in the opposite direction. Very open world, lots of side content, huge arrays of builds and complicated stat relationships… but none of it mattered. In the end, it was really the same linear narrative, they just added tons of dead-end side content, and all of the side content was resolved by defeating enemies. JRPGs had calcified into their true and final form, which would go on to be exemplified by FFXIII: a linear story you passively watch, while all conflict and problem-solving is handled strictly through the battle system. There are no ways to deal with the problems presented to you aside from killing the problem, or watching your characters do something else in a cutscene.
Neverwinter Nights back in the early 2000's attempted this. There were some heavy RPG servers that a GM or team of GM's moderated and they were able to tell the story they wanted to tell using the world building tools provided by the game.
It was great!
If a developer took that premise now and implemented it with modern tools it would be incredible.
Something never quite captured effectively in any RPG is an effective Charisma system nor a true open world.
i.e. in Skyrim I can't burn down a house and then try to escape town and avoid bounty hunters. Nor can I come up with a creative solution to the local vampire problem by mediating a peace.
The former is because of limitations of the engine and/or a lack of resources. The latter is because persuasive and other charismatic ploys require scripting and foresight from the developer.
something Witch 3 did (or at least talked about doing; I'm not sure if it ever made it to the final product) was an on going world. So if an Army was going to cross a border in 7 days that army crossed in 7 days. It didn't wait for you to complete the quest that triggers that event.
Where in Skyrim, I'll never forget, the council that meets to discuss what to do about Alduin, they will literally sit there for months and months and years and years of in-game time, waiting for you to show up to start the meeting. Instead of just starting the meeting without you, coming to a decision without you, and you having to deal with whatever decision they come up with.
sorry for the wall of text, this is a topic I have a lot of disjointed thoughts on. Having worked in video games before (doing marketing) I have access to some resources to make a game but, like with everything, lack the capital to begin such a project.
Ongoing world is the biggest meme and will never happen.
It doesn't do this. Over half of the game's marketing was flat out lies that only get a pass because the game isn't straight up propaganda.
ah, ok, I only got past the first King's abortion baby quest and the 3 witches in the swamp area before I had to leave fro basic training and have been waiting for a new monitor to arrive before picking it back up.
I still like the Witcher games and books regardless of marketing lies; though, those lies are why I stopped paying attention to E3
/thread
This post pretty much nails it.
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I never even played pen & paper rpgs but hell, it's obvious, a videogame transposition of a pen & paper rpg will always be shit: you keep abstraction, dice rolls and stats, the worst part of pen & paper games when it isn't needed, since videogames can simulate these aspects way better through mechanics and you remove the freedom and endless possibilities of imagination in favor of premade linear branching narratives.
The major advantages are that video games are more immersive with graphics and sound effects, and also usually a solitary activity if you prefer that.
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Things might change once ai's in vidya advance.
did they make the model bigger? I need comparisons
J"RPG"S ruined everything.
RPG is a bunch of rules, the meat is created by interaction between the players and the GM.
Vidya can never have this freedom so it's either:
- that interaction is replaced through cutscenes in a linear faction
- that interaction is replaced by cutscenes in a non-linear faction
Some RPG just cut off this shit altogether and focus altogether on the combat.
It's not really hard to understand considering the limited structure of video games.
They aren't, FPS Fallout and Skyrim will never be RPGs. It just turned into a buzzword subgenre like "open-world", to make them sound like they have more depth.
There's always roll20.net
(checked)
It was actually mid-00s. When WoW became popular it was over. The birth of the casual faggots that actually enjoy kill 10 things, or fetching 10 things over and over forever and fashion and mounts.
It's easy as fuck to build a huge pretty yet boring world and fill it with "do X thing Y times" to give the illusion of quality.
People who had only played CRPGs and never touched traditional RPGs started making RPGs.
The problem with this is that it keeps the dependency on other people, and tools for playing traditional RPGs online have become so widespread that if you're going to get people together to play an RPG you may as well use Roll20 or Tabletop Simulator or VASSAL and play an actual RPG. NWN multiplayer was neat, but there's really no need for the same kind of thing today.