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Real PC RPGs Are For Nerds

M

Mr_Appleby

Member
pa22word said:
That's really interesting. Reminds me of Halo going from an RTS to what we all know today. I bet it's a really crazy story how the game went from a turn based RPG into what amounts to Gauntlet with heavy systems interaction and how that influenced design going forward.
Click to expand...

Not really that crazy. Blizzard had, I think at that point, already bought the company making Diablo (if not they were they were still the publishers) and after a demo they said "it's great but make it real-time."

Most of what "is Diablo" was already in place at that point and making it real-time instead of turn-based was an afternoon's work according to David Brevik.

His GDC post-mortem is a great watch.
 
D

DeadTrees

Member
pa22word said:
Are you a console gamer by chance? Not being an asshole, but it's an important distinction that the term "action game" and it's lineage varies vastly in the long term lineage between the PC and consoles. While in today's terms Diablo wouldn't be considered an action game in the days where you have console type action platformers and beat em up type games releasing all the time between the two platforms, in the olden days this wasn't really the case at all and the term "action" meant something very different. Again, it's more of an anachronism these days but (and I may be wrong, as noted above I've never gotten into them) Diablo was considered an action game because its systems were geared entirely around combat delivery and game design that fed back into solely the combat, and not "role playing" in the traditional sense at all. Going back to my previous posts, think of something like RE4 in the same context: RE4 is very systems heavy on the back end where you build and balance Leon around either a power approach or a DPS type build. Sure the implementation is drastically simpler than Diablo, but the end result is largely the same: the systems serve to reinforce the combat. This is really at the end of the day no different from the mechanical delivery from Diablo on the backend, just the frontend of the game's design differs in how it engages with the player. I guess a better example is probably borderlands, which is basically Diablo wrapped in a shooters clothing. The moment to moment gameplay is more uh, directly stimulating but the actual systems governing it are entirely wrapped around the loot and statistics governing what you are seeing more than your actions on the screen. Sure it's flashier, but the end result is still largely the same.
Click to expand...
You forgot to mention honor and shame--I've been told they're huge parts of it.
 
autoduelist

autoduelist

Member
TheRedSnifit said:
To be fair, I find it hard to get upset at elitists when the genre has been continuously dumbed down in the name of "accessibility."
Click to expand...

I don't think most people realize how different the genre is, because the vast majority never played the originals. And in their defense, many originals are now locked behind some antiquated design decisions, graphics, difficulty, etc. I recently replayed Bard's Tale, for example, and you literally had to -remember- your spells [4 letter codes]. So when you leveled up and learned 3 more spells, you had to remember DRBR [Dragon's Breath], etc. There was no menu to select from... you just typed it. As a kid, that felt -amazing-. But who is going to bother with that now? And who is going to even survive the first 5 minutes when that game is so frickin' hard right out the guild door?

A simple, easy, go-to example is map making. Many old CRPGs required intense mapmaking on graph paper. There were a plethora of traps meant to make this difficult - teleportation, spinner, darkness, secret doors, pits, etc.

Now, with a few excpetions [a special mode in Grimrock, for example], dungeons have automapping. Many see this as a great feature, because many have no interest in sitting down with graph paper.

But this leaves the original fans behind... their favorite genre simply disappears. And instead, we get something like Dragon Age Origins... not only does it have simplistic dungeons, but they're essentially just linear paths with a couple side areas... there is no point in making the dungeon complex, because between automapping and quest arrows there is no complexity. The time spent mapmaking is replaced with traversal time. You're just following the arrow for 3 minutes.

There's a lot of areas where this sort of thing has happened, and RPGs are probably the worst hit genre. Sure, now almost -everything- has skill trees and/or lewt, so gets classified as a rpg-hybrid, but until the recent kickstarter renaissance actual rpgs that the original fans of the genre liked were few and far between.

Coming from the era of Wizardry and Ultima and Wasteland, it's -is- hard. People call it elitism, but it's not that at all. It's not that I care that games have spread out and pulled in RPG-lite systems -- I -love- that this happened, I love that games like Horizon pull in skill trees and lewt. But I miss that many aspects that I loved in the RPG genre are effectively dead and buried. Even most drpgs automap, which is a wild thought to my younger self.

No other genre really has this issue. Maybe platformers have lost the idea of 'pixel perfect' jumping? [and as someone who couldn't understand the appeal, I'm thankful for that].. but if there are any fans of those, they simply lost their favorite thing. But in general? Most things lost happen due to 'accessibility', and I think RPGs lost the most in that transition to popularity.

ZZGO.
 
S

SatelliteOfLove

Member
Sou Da said:
The Crpg community is awful. Like, Christ this entire paragraph.
Click to expand...

*woosh*

The Wart said:
Good lord. The popularity of your preferred genre is not a moral issue, and if you think it is you should seriously reexamine your worldview.
Click to expand...

And *woosh*

autoduelist said:
I don't think most people realize how different the genre is, because the vast majority never played the originals. And in their defense, many originals are now locked behind some antiquated design decisions, graphics, difficulty, etc. I recently replayed Bard's Tale, for example, and you literally had to -remember- your spells [4 letter codes]. So when you leveled up and learned 3 more spells, you had to remember DRBR [Dragon's Breath], etc. There was no menu to select from... you just typed it. As a kid, that felt -amazing-. But who is going to bother with that now? And who is going to even survive the first 5 minutes when that game is so frickin' hard right out the guild door?

A simple, easy, go-to example is map making. Many old CRPGs required intense mapmaking on graph paper. There were a plethora of traps meant to make this difficult - teleportation, spinner, darkness, secret doors, pits, etc.

Now, with a few excpetions [a special mode in Grimrock, for example], dungeons have automapping. Many see this as a great feature, because many have no interest in sitting down with graph paper.

But this leaves the original fans behind... their favorite genre simply disappears. And instead, we get something like Dragon Age Origins... not only does it have simplistic dungeons, but they're essentially just linear paths with a couple side areas... there is no point in making the dungeon complex, because between automapping and quest arrows there is no complexity. The time spent mapmaking is replaced with traversal time. You're just following the arrow for 3 minutes.

There's a lot of areas where this sort of thing has happened, and RPGs are probably the worst hit genre. Sure, now almost -everything- has skill trees and/or lewt, so gets classified as a rpg-hybrid, but until the recent kickstarter renaissance actual rpgs that the original fans of the genre liked were few and far between.

Coming from the era of Wizardry and Ultima and Wasteland, it's -is- hard. People call it elitism, but it's not that at all. It's not that I care that games have spread out and pulled in RPG-lite systems -- I -love- that this happened, I love that games like Horizon pull in skill trees and lewt. But I miss that many aspects that I loved in the RPG genre are effectively dead and buried. Even most drpgs automap, which is a wild thought to my younger self.

No other genre really has this issue. Maybe platformers have lost the idea of 'pixel perfect' jumping? [and as someone who couldn't understand the appeal, I'm thankful for that].. but if there are any fans of those, they simply lost their favorite thing. But in general? Most things lost happen due to 'accessibility', and I think RPGs lost the most in that transition to popularity.

ZZGO.
Click to expand...

Alot of it's still there, though, or, rather, back again.

It's wierd, as alot of that restriction wasn't for shits and giggles, that hardware couldn't DO that stuff, so you'd get what you described or stuff like spinner tiles that were outlandishly more difficult due to the nearly-to-no frames of animation or bare wireframe walls or whathaveyou. I mean, now it IS a choice, and that has consequences. One would CHOOSE to restrict oneself, right? That's how it shakes out to someone fresh to such stuff.

But there are things that abstraction can do that a game cannot do without that, ya know? Atmosphere mostly, but also making stuff like mana or gold or whatever worth more. But it can be a stiff climb when familiar QoL is missing to get that new different experience (now, UI stuff is what bothers me, most 80s CRPGs are inscrutable in places to me). I do know it's HEALTHY for players to do that stuff from time to time though so the QoL is appreciated like it's supposed to be.
 
T

The Wart

Member
autoduelist said:
I don't think most people realize how different the genre is, because the vast majority never played the originals. And in their defense, many originals are now locked behind some antiquated design decisions, graphics, difficulty, etc. I recently replayed Bard's Tale, for example, and you literally had to -remember- your spells [4 letter codes]. So when you leveled up and learned 3 more spells, you had to remember DRBR [Dragon's Breath], etc. There was no menu to select from... you just typed it. As a kid, that felt -amazing-. But who is going to bother with that now? And who is going to even survive the first 5 minutes when that game is so frickin' hard right out the guild door?

A simple, easy, go-to example is map making. Many old CRPGs required intense mapmaking on graph paper. There were a plethora of traps meant to make this difficult - teleportation, spinner, darkness, secret doors, pits, etc.

Now, with a few excpetions [a special mode in Grimrock, for example], dungeons have automapping. Many see this as a great feature, because many have no interest in sitting down with graph paper.

But this leaves the original fans behind... their favorite genre simply disappears. And instead, we get something like Dragon Age Origins... not only does it have simplistic dungeons, but they're essentially just linear paths with a couple side areas... there is no point in making the dungeon complex, because between automapping and quest arrows there is no complexity. The time spent mapmaking is replaced with traversal time. You're just following the arrow for 3 minutes.

There's a lot of areas where this sort of thing has happened, and RPGs are probably the worst hit genre. Sure, now almost -everything- has skill trees and/or lewt, so gets classified as a rpg-hybrid, but until the recent kickstarter renaissance actual rpgs that the original fans of the genre liked were few and far between.

Coming from the era of Wizardry and Ultima and Wasteland, it's -is- hard. People call it elitism, but it's not that at all. It's not that I care that games have spread out and pulled in RPG-lite systems -- I -love- that this happened, I love that games like Horizon pull in skill trees and lewt. But I miss that many aspects that I loved in the RPG genre are effectively dead and buried. Even most drpgs automap, which is a wild thought to my younger self.

No other genre really has this issue. Maybe platformers have lost the idea of 'pixel perfect' jumping? [and as someone who couldn't understand the appeal, I'm thankful for that].. but if there are any fans of those, they simply lost their favorite thing. But in general? Most things lost happen due to 'accessibility', and I think RPGs lost the most in that transition to popularity.

ZZGO.
Click to expand...

What? Many popular genres have had this happen to a greater or lesser degree. Real Time Strategy. P&C adventure. Collectathon 3D platformers. JRPGs -- how many threads have we had about the decline of these compared to the PSX/PS2 era? How FFXV is a generic open world game instead of a "proper JRPG" or whatever? FPS -- this in particular has gotten better lately but just like old school cRPG fans endlessly bitch up Fallout threads there was a time when threads for just about every major FPS was full of grognards (or the FPS equivalent) complaining about how slow and dumbed down and low skill-ceiling modern FPS are. Hell, how about 2D platformers? Before the indie boom there was a period when they practically vanished off the face of the earth. Hard to imagine now that we're practically swimming in them. This is the natural life cycle of videogame genres. They're mainstream for a while, and then they're not, and they live on in the form of lower budget and indie titles.

I swear, there's nothing more intolerable than grognard exceptionalism.

SatelliteOfLove said:
And *woosh*
Click to expand...

Am I missing some deeper meaning here? The post you took offense at was suggesting that you should enjoy the games that are for you instead of complaining about the existence, and popularity, of games for other people. You also seemed to interpret it as some kind of moral castigation.
 
C

cartman414

Member
pa22word said:
Are you a console gamer by chance? Not being an asshole, but it's an important distinction that the term "action game" and it's lineage varies vastly in the long term lineage between the PC and consoles. While in today's terms Diablo wouldn't be considered an action game in the days where you have console type action platformers and beat em up type games releasing all the time between the two platforms, in the olden days this wasn't really the case at all and the term "action" meant something very different. Again, it's more of an anachronism these days but (and I may be wrong, as noted above I've never gotten into them) Diablo was considered an action game because its systems were geared entirely around combat delivery and game design that fed back into solely the combat, and not "role playing" in the traditional sense at all. Going back to my previous posts, think of something like RE4 in the same context: RE4 is very systems heavy on the back end where you build and balance Leon around either a power approach or a DPS type build. Sure the implementation is drastically simpler than Diablo, but the end result is largely the same: the systems serve to reinforce the combat. This is really at the end of the day no different from the mechanical delivery from Diablo on the backend, just the frontend of the game's design differs in how it engages with the player. I guess a better example is probably borderlands, which is basically Diablo wrapped in a shooters clothing. The moment to moment gameplay is more uh, directly stimulating but the actual systems governing it are entirely wrapped around the loot and statistics governing what you are seeing more than your actions on the screen. Sure it's flashier, but the end result is still largely the same.
Click to expand...

Likening those two is like saying Mario and Contra are the same game.

Diablo and Ys could both be considered RPGs, but the action related mechanics (to say nothing of lack of loot in the latter) set them far apart.
 
C

ChrisD

Member
Some of them he tried a bit too hard in reading, but the first few and a number of them scattered within were freaking hilarious. The perfect voice, movements, and exaggeration on specific words.
 
P

pa22word

Member
cartman414 said:
Likening those two is like saying Mario and Contra are the same game.

Diablo and Ys could both be considered RPGs, but the action related mechanics (to say nothing of lack of loot in the latter) set them far apart.
Click to expand...
I think you misunderstood that part of my post. My point wasn't that they were similar mechanically, but that they both use their backend systems specifically for reinforcement of their combat. Thus why Diablo is/was considered an action game despite the mechanical presentation. It's just genre definition by way of looking at the reason the player engages with the game and it's systems vs rigidly looking at structural similairities between it and other games and defining it simply by way of comparison. I'm not judging one way or the other as best and the right way to do it, but look at the post I was responding to instead of looking at the post in a vacuum: the poster was wondering why people originally defined it as an action game despite the lack of direct player engagement and system heavy gameplay, and my post was an attempt to explain why that is. I even admit in the post that it's largely anachronistic. The terminology has just stuck around due to Diablo's staying power more than anything else.
 
D

djtiesto

is beloved, despite what anyone might say
Herla said:
A decade of barely anything to play can turn you into a bitter person.
Click to expand...

Huh? There's a shit ton of western RPGs out there, and barring that, a backlog in the hundreds (maybe even thousands) to play. I don't really follow the western RPG "scene" but was there ever a period where releases slowed to a trickle? Because I don't remember many period of slowdown aside from a brief period in the mid 90's after Origin got acquired and before Baldur's Gate.

TakeItSlowDude said:
Would the reception of modern Bioware and Bethesda games among the hardcore been better if they had called their games Action-Adventure instead of RPGs?
Click to expand...

I think the reception would be better if the games were of better quality. You can have an amazingly polished, aesthetically pleasing, and enjoyable game with fairly simple mechanics, that goes for RPGs as much as any other genre.
 
C

cartman414

Member
It would kind of annoy me a little if, say, a voice actor who considers themselves a gamer that happens to have had a role in any of Obsidian's games (Pillars, Tyranny, etc.), yet ends up paying no mind to them yet has instead played the Dragon Age games. 1) I'd be super-envious of them, and 2) at the same time I'd be a little like, what is wrong with you?
 
D

Durante

Member
djtiesto said:
I don't really follow the western RPG "scene" but was there ever a period where releases slowed to a trickle?
Click to expand...
As already pointed out in this thread, yes, there absolutely was such a period. In the decade from 2003 to 2012 there was just a handful of good CRPG releases.
 
W

Wulfram

Member
djtiesto said:
I think the reception would be better if the games were of better quality. You can have an amazingly polished, aesthetically pleasing, and enjoyable game with fairly simple mechanics, that goes for RPGs as much as any other genre.
Click to expand...

Come on, lets not pretend like Fallout 4, Dragon Age Inquisition, Skyrim etc are poor quality games
 
M

Mifec

Member
Wulfram said:
Come on, lets not pretend like Fallout 4, Dragon Age Inquisition, Skyrim etc are poor quality games
Click to expand...

They're pretty medicore RPG games compared to New Vegas and TW3, yes. No need to pretend. In fact FO4 from a writing aspect and quest design is not even mediocre, it's flat out bad.
 
W

Wulfram

Member
Mifec said:
They're pretty medicore RPG games compared to New Vegas and TW3, yes. No need to pretend. In fact FO4 from a writing aspect and quest design is not even mediocre, it's flat out bad.
Click to expand...

You can argue mediocre RPG if you want, but they're not poor quality games. Even if all you want to see FO4 as is a Borderlands style looter shooter, its evidently a good enough one of those to get the majority of people who buy it to literally play it for days.

Bethesda and Bioware aren't derided by the hardcore for their lack of quality, but for their failure to follow the approved formula
 
autoduelist

autoduelist

Member
The Wart said:
What? Many popular genres have had this happen to a greater or lesser degree. Real Time Strategy. P&C adventure. Collectathon 3D platformers. JRPGs -- how many threads have we had about the decline of these compared to the PSX/PS2 era? How FFXV is a generic open world game instead of a "proper JRPG" or whatever? FPS -- this in particular has gotten better lately but just like old school cRPG fans endlessly bitch up Fallout threads there was a time when threads for just about every major FPS was full of grognards (or the FPS equivalent) complaining about how slow and dumbed down and low skill-ceiling modern FPS are. Hell, how about 2D platformers? Before the indie boom there was a period when they practically vanished off the face of the earth. Hard to imagine now that we're practically swimming in them. This is the natural life cycle of videogame genres. They're mainstream for a while, and then they're not, and they live on in the form of lower budget and indie titles.

I swear, there's nothing more intolerable than grognard exceptionalism.
Click to expand...

There is a difference between the boom bust cycle of genres and the death of systems due to genre evolution.
 
A

Arulan

Member
Wulfram said:
Bethesda and Bioware aren't derided by the hardcore for their lack of quality, but for their failure to follow the approved formula
Click to expand...

No, I'm pretty sure quality is it. That is the quality of the game design, the quest design, its mechanics, and the writing to name a few. Production values does not equate to quality.
 
C

CrazyArcadia

Member
He could easily do a followup video with some of the comments in this thread. It's a neat self-fullfilling irony.

I mean, I am glad that CRPGs with more complexity/choice are coming back again big time the last few years (Divinity OS did make me happy so so much) but yeah, no need for elitism based on the perceived depth of personal chosen methods of escapism... And no need to confuse said complexity with a lack of accessibility.
 
A

Arulan

Member
There have been several great posts in the Divinity: Original Sin 2 thread by newcomers to the genre who are absolutely enthralled by the game. I think a lot of people would be pleasantly surprised to expand their reach beyond the mainstream AAA RPG developers.
 
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