Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: Luis Dias on June 11, 2017, 07:04:44 pm
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Trigger Warning, it's BioWare's new IP. Their take on Destiny, apparently.
Have to admit, it looks amazing. Shades of Titanfall, crossed with Destiny... crossed with Attack on Titan? (some people have called it attack on titanfall, ar ar ar). But seriously, something as dark as the titans in this world would be an incredible experience. Big wolves and some weird goblins ain't enough.
Of course this is all heavily scripted and I don't buy it for a second the graphics will look this amazing at launch, but STILL.
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Scripted gameplay trailers are the worst. Why does anyone think that it's a good idea to try and script voice comms between players, when the end result always sounds stilted and bad?
That being said, I really would like a Destiny with a coherent storyline, so I'm definitely interested.
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This is not a game for me ... too much is way off the mark for my interests... The use of technology and power armour as defining kit mechanic is nice, and welcome change from the absue of Clark's third law (despite it yielding positive results once or twice)
I really would like a Destiny with a coherent storyline
That seems to be the first "fighting line" out of the mouth of the EA marketing staff ... However considering Destiny 2 is not only taking up the challange to provide a better narrative, but has a scenario poised to finally adress parts of its mythos, we just have to see how comes out on top...
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I really would like a Destiny with a coherent storyline
That seems to be the first "fighting line" out of the mouth of the EA marketing staff ... However considering Destiny 2 is not only taking up the challange to provide a better narrative, but has a scenario poised to finally adress parts of its mythos, we just have to see how comes out on top...
I am confident that Destiny 2, like the first one, will be fun to play but brain-eatingly stupid in the storytelling department.
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Speculation about Destiny 2 will not serve us here....
Just ... I think neither of these games will be a positive entry into the "crisis" of current futurism, i.e. that positive or optimistic representations of the furture, civilisation and technology are now in minority and the main tool seems to be near-modern decadence imagery (e.g. there are little abstarct tools anymore - granted that was mostly filmmakers/showrunners could save on props but it is cool device nontheless).
* I am not saying we should be blindly optimistic or forget the ways we did and still mess up the planet or the achievments of civilisation (e.g. undermining the concept privacy in the name of efficiency or security) but -you know- it would be nice to see ways this works out for the better more often. Inspiration might be more helpful than constant alarm.
Destiny+ is a post-apocalypse, which can't move away giving us rusted out present day features. It's narrative is laser-focussed on the "space magic powered super-men" which are either going to save an (eeriely) absent human population from an encroaching enemy and restore a (undefined) gold age.
Anthem, juding solely by material avalible, is set on a frontier world the little civilisation there is crammed into a walled-off frontier town. It's protagonist are "freelancers", humans empowered by weaponized envoirment suits going out into the hostile outside for personal gain.
It is to early to say anything more, or to come to concluding judgement, but the absence of evolved civilisation has me a bit worried. But that might be just over exposure to the same stuff again and again with nearly no entry presenting anythig worthwhile (Horizon: Zero Dawn being a notable exception as it yielded at least both a worthwhile mystery and an interesting personal story).
This is the same reason why I lost all interest in post-Capella stories when it comes to Freespace and won't be making any strides into that direction anytime soon. Of Shivans and Men is already pretty post-apocalyptic and while it opens a lot of doors to explore (e.g. what does it actually mean for a Vasudan to be surivoir of the battle against the Lucifer at Vasudan Prime), it is most serious weakness (outside my ability as storyteller of course).
Maybe that is just the 90s Sci-Fi diet of Star Trek and Babylon 5 speaking, my fondness for the "in-between-stories" (i.e. while knowing what world-shaping events are taking place elsewhere to see characters outside the world-shaping circle deal with change in their problems or their powerlessness towards the on-going world-shaping) talking, or even my post-anachristic "voluntary association and commitment is better than both lawlessness and hegemonial rule" making itself known.
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It all depends on the concept. Again, I'm interested in the "Attack on Titan" aspect of it, a trapped within walls humanity that will sometimes venture into the outskirts, where all manners of danger happens.
What is not at all clear however from the trailer is how this meshes with the technology that mankind posseses. So they are sufficiently advanced to have Iron Man suits, but somehow they refrain from reclaiming more territory because... there are some green weird unimpressive goblins and some big bears out there?
That makes little sense, however the story around the portal may have some clues. Technology gone amok and crazy everywhere, or more specifically, open portals that bring monsters from other dimensions or whatever. I don't like that mechanic from storytelling purposes, but at the same time, it's an unavoidable mechanic to get you to other open world maps.
Let's see how it unfolds.
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EA + Bioware + Frostbite = disaster.
Trailer reminds me of Elex - Piranha Bytes upcoming game. Large mechs, exo suits, post apocalyptic, tropical wasteland and monsters. Looks like a good setting, but I won't buy it as it will probably suffer from many issues known from previous BioWare games, such as poor storytelling, repetative and boring sidequests, short main quests chain, and final explanation of all mysteries which will cause disgust [yeah... Leviathans!]. As a result of recent discussion with Col.HorRet, we agreed that BioWare is not actually gaining any lessons from release of each game.
I guess Bioware is still dreaming about beating Witcher 3... But those are only dreams :P.
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I've seen this attack on Frostbite before.
I don't really get it. What's wrong with it? As far as I can tell it's a much better engine than UE3. Surely, it's all about how things are developed and implemented, rather than this particular tool? Help me out here.
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Frostbite is a highly specialized engine, which does the stuff for Battlefield and Battlefront very well and makes it all look very pretty. But from what you can hear from other Studios than DICE, which have been pushed the engine as "company syngery"-thing, it doesn't have any non-shooter functionality (like an own facial animation engine, which is why stuff looked so off in ME:A).
Many of the technical issues with DA:I and ME:A can be traced back to having to create new functions in the engine from scratch at Bioware.
Sadly, Frostbite is here to stay. (Insert 0rph3u5's rant against photorealism here if you like)
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Read interviews with developers. Frostbite is dedicated FPS engine made for Battlefield, and devs had a lots of problems implementing things such as vechicles or large maps. I agree that it's one of the best engines avaliable, but not for RPG games focused on exploration. Here UE would succeed.
I guess Anthem is gonna be open-map RPG. Unless Dice make some implementations to make Frostbite suitable for support sandbox style gameplay, it will fail where Andromeda devs failed.
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I guess Anthem is gonna be open-map RPG. Unless Dice make some implementations to make Frostbite suitable for support sandbox style gameplay, it will fail where Andromeda devs failed.
What are you talking about? Andromeda, for all its faults, managed to nail the gameplay pretty well, and DAI was a very solid effort all around. Having done those two, I'd assume that Bioware have found good workarounds for the issues in Frostbite.
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@Nycteaus:
After the inital teaser I asked my EA contact "so bioware is doing bethesda rpgs now?" (Which if you know me is pretty much an insult), he responed Anthem would not be "a Bethesda RPG" nor a "Bioware RPG" - now from him these labels are quasi meaningless but it might be a good indicator that some assumptions maybe out of the window here
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I know it's not the same but I saw the Division in that trailer with all the scripted bull. Is it possible I'm getting less impressed by these types of games?
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I know it's not the same but I saw the Division in that trailer with all the scripted bull. Is it possible I'm getting less impressed by these types of games?
Possibly. But I'd wager that the trailer format, which immediately reads as super phony and weird, has to carry more of the blame. It just doesn't tell us anything about the game that would really grab interest.
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I guess Anthem is gonna be open-map RPG. Unless Dice make some implementations to make Frostbite suitable for support sandbox style gameplay, it will fail where Andromeda devs failed.
What are you talking about? Andromeda, for all its faults, managed to nail the gameplay pretty well, and DAI was a very solid effort all around. Having done those two, I'd assume that Bioware have found good workarounds for the issues in Frostbite.
But they excluded some features like larger, procedurally generated maps and cut off some other plans. According to dev interviews, Andromeda was supposed be exploration focused like No Man's Sky, but with limited planet count. Frostbite was one of the things that cancelled this plans, and finally we have five explorable planets and one asteroid. Their quality is discussable, but it's not caused by Frostbite. As for gameplay, it's pretty good despite numerous bugs. Majority of them were fixed in 1.07 and probably after recent 1.08. Despite all the issues I enjoyed the game, but just after release, the Andromeda was unfinished and far below expectations.
@Nycteaus:
After the inital teaser I asked my EA contact "so bioware is doing bethesda rpgs now?" (Which if you know me is pretty much an insult), he responed Anthem would not be "a Bethesda RPG" nor a "Bioware RPG" - now from him these labels are quasi meaningless but it might be a good indicator that some assumptions maybe out of the window here
Thats a good news, but it's to better wait until they reveal something more. Neverending promises of innovations by Bethesda, Ubisoft, Bioware etc and further lack of any effectively killed any hype.
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I know it's not the same but I saw the Division in that trailer with all the scripted bull. Is it possible I'm getting less impressed by these types of games?
Possibly. But I'd wager that the trailer format, which immediately reads as super phony and weird, has to carry more of the blame. It just doesn't tell us anything about the game that would really grab interest.
I mean I guess. It's also that Bethesda and bioware RPGs are all over the place now and more copies coming they all start to look the same to me.
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The big budget Western RPG has become a flailing mess of tentacles as far as I'm concerned. Everyone needs to be open world and have collectathons everywhere. Playing Tyranny and now Pillars of Eternity is comforting. I don't have to walk 100 miles across the map to discover a place to fast travel for the first time. There aren't piles of garbage to collect for quests.
With that comment that Anthem "won't be a Bethesda or Bioware RPG" does that mean it'll be like DA:I and Andromeda? I wouldn't call either of those games Bethesda or Bioware RPGs.
I don't know much about Frostbite's tools but somehow I'm not surprised that EA is forcing developers to use an engine with a great renderer and narrow original focus to build massive RPGs. There's a reason CDProjekt Red built their own engine for the Witcher 2 and 3. There's a reason Bethesda is still using the junk that is Gamebryo and not IdTech 6 for their games. (Side not, according to one of Id's main engine devs the new Wolfenstein is on a modified Doom engine).
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As for the implementation of the Frostbite engine, I bet that problems were mostly related to the fact, that Andromeda team was told to switch for this engine when they had their game in development already. It is far easier to plan your work when you know which tools you will precisely need but when you are told to change them on-the-fly, serious trouble may arise. For Anthem franchise, I'm almost certain that the whole "Frostbite" thing was planned from the beginning (and we have no idea if this is not a completely new variant of the engine. And what it will be in a final product).
I actually enjoyed Andromeda pretty much, it's brilliant gameplay mechanics, decent characters (let's not compare them to the OT, they had 3 games, Ryder's squad was just introduced). Even though the soundtrack (crown jewel of previous ME games) was awful, generic and simply boring (which I won't forgive them. Dumping the styles of Hulick and Wall was a crime against youmanatee xD), which made big worlds of Andromeda even emptier. Random bits of cinematic horns, strings and some drums, vastly lacking synth tunes which created some most recognizable pieces of ME music.
All of that (yes, I know that Anthem and Andromeda are developed by different teams. It's still Bioware) made me watch the teaser without emotions. I'm not jumping the hype train absolutely. It's even easier for me that I have a strong aversion for post-apocalyptic worlds and especially all sort of mechs, walkers. Simply not my cup of tea. I'll just wait and see what they came up with.
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I really would like a Destiny with a coherent storyline
That seems to be the first "fighting line" out of the mouth of the EA marketing staff ... However considering Destiny 2 is not only taking up the challange to provide a better narrative, but has a scenario poised to finally adress parts of its mythos, we just have to see how comes out on top...
I am confident that Destiny 2, like the first one, will be fun to play but brain-eatingly stupid in the storytelling department.
May I speak in Destiny's defense?
My perception of the storyline was always that it was deliberately obscure, and that was a good thing. It just required the fans to work out a lot of the plot for themselves by digging deeper than the surface and making (yes, sometimes arcane) connections. That's a quality that I like in games, and it was what I hoped to do with Lost (and, with luck, it's successor). Hyper Light Drifter was another game that did that well. Dark Souls did that also (so I hear). And Sync & Transcend.
But that's just my 2cents worth, and I've only played a little Destiny. Mostly just watched hours of youtube playthroughs and commentary like the wierdo I am. :p :rolleyes:
EDIT: Okay, granted, the Grimoire cards totally should have been readable in-game. That was kind of stupid. :rolleyes:
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I'm all for allowing interpretation but Destiny's story problems were rooted far more in some questionable decisions made during development that forced things to be reworked from my understanding. That isn't to say certain pieces weren't deliberate. A lot of the lore and history about the Traveler and Golden Age seemed very deliberate and I'm perfectly happy with that stuff, it's a lot more Bungie needed to rush to get something presentable and had to make everything vague a la Dark Souls without being built from the ground up to be that way.
I'm far more worried about Anthem simply because Bioware is as much if not more of a shell than Bungie when it comes to senior staff. To my knowledge Jason Jones at least is still at Bungie and maybe a few others from the early days but Bioware bled what seems like all its leadership as Mass Effect came to a close and nothing Bioware has released since ME3 has even gotten to ME3's bar.
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(Side not, according to one of Id's main engine devs the new Wolfenstein is on a modified Doom engine).
I thought the whole point of having idtech versions was precisely that. Isn't RAGE running on a "modified Doom engine"?
I actually enjoyed Andromeda pretty much, it's brilliant gameplay mechanics, decent characters (let's not compare them to the OT, they had 3 games, Ryder's squad was just introduced).
What decent characters? I'm in the first arc of the game and I've cringed ten times more in a few hours than I have in all of the OT. The only decent characters I've found so far are father Ryder and Vetra. The first, well, we can't really appreciate for long, the second because she's contained.
The rest is like watching Teen Titans in SPACE. ****ing hell.
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IdTech 5 from what I've heard (and not that Id's very forthcoming about engines anymore) was a pretty major departure from Doom 3's engine (IdTech 4) as far as design philosophy. I don't know how much of IdTech 5's code base is in Doom 2016's engine (IdTech 6) but I don't get the feeling a ton of it made it through given how limited IdTech 5 is. I'm sure there's some vestigial code from Doom 3 or even Doom 1 in IdTech 6's bowels but the two latest have been massive overhauls plus IdTech 6 wasn't spearheaded by Carmack.
I could have worded it better. Wolfenstein 2 is built around Doom 2016's engine and not the weirdness of IdTech 6.
I already ranted today about Bioware's fixation and horrid execution of romances so I won't do it again here but what little of that I've seen in Andromeda is immature as hell.
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The big budget Western RPG has become a flailing mess of tentacles as far as I'm concerned. Everyone needs to be open world and have collectathons everywhere. Playing Tyranny and now Pillars of Eternity is comforting. I don't have to walk 100 miles across the map to discover a place to fast travel for the first time. There aren't piles of garbage to collect for quests.
A problem here is that the growing pains of the genre happen in envoirment flodded with money and overly concerned with graphics (because they make easy selling points both in the companies and publicly). Much of what used to be wRGP or cRPG standards were in fact technical limitations (not just graphically but e.g. the limited voice acting of landmark titles were because of disk space), and as those went away people started move ahead.
Don't get me wrong, the evolving roster of tools and techniques has brought us some good results (e.g. the shift to more visiual storytelling - cue screenshots of Morrowind's textbox vs. Jade Empire's dialogue) but also a pressure to perform. Can't blame people under pressure to play it safe.
But on the other hand it also brought trend chasing (e.g. 3rd person perspecitive as default for "action oriented" gameplay), and since the trend were dictated by wildly different games from RPGs (e.g. Uncharted), some of it was bound to lead to bad mash-ups.
As long as titles like Divinity: Original Sin, Tyranny and Wasteland 2 get made however I think we will have grounded discussion about the features of the genre. (And when Bethesda finally drops their "all player all content"-policy, they got to learn from what Arkane is doing under their stewardship eventually)
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Divinity: Original Sin, Tyranny, and Wasteland 2 are all guilty of a different crime. They're using the same tabletop inspired mechanics that cRPGs were using 20 years ago. There are many people, including myself, who still enjoy those mechanics and don't really mind it but I really wouldn't put those games on a pedestal as in terms of gameplay they do almost nothing to differentiate themselves. Tyranny has some really good writing and general theming but the combat might as well be Neverwinter Nights or Baldur's Gate.
I really don't think graphical evolution is to blame for trend-chasing either.Trend-chasing hapens beacause game industry execs are almost completely disconnected from reality. Just look at some of the general trends that lost companies millions of dollars and got a lot of people fired.
The MMO craze after WoW hit it big around 2008. Did those people not stop to consider that most players aren't going to be playing 2 MMOs at the same time because they've invested a lot of time into their character and gear? Yet like every 2nd game back then was an MMO, they are now mostly dead and forgotten.
The MOBA craze after League hit it big around 2012. Every second multiplayer game was a MOBA, yet the genre doesn't support multiple big games. MOBA players, like MMO players, stick to their chosen game because they've invested tons of time into getting good at it. Most of those games are now dead and forgotten, with Smite as the only lasting success.
So yeah, people in the game industry chase trends because they're ****ing stupid and it loses them money.
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Divinity: Original Sin, Tyranny, and Wasteland 2 are all guilty of a different crime. They're using the same tabletop inspired mechanics that cRPGs were using 20 years ago. There are many people, including myself, who still enjoy those mechanics and don't really mind it but I really wouldn't put those games on a pedestal as in terms of gameplay they do almost nothing to differentiate themselves. Tyranny has some really good writing and general theming but the combat might as well be Neverwinter Nights or Baldur's Gate.
Well, then we have somwhat different ideas what makes up an RPG.
Combat from me is not essential to an RPG (I am looking foward to my time with Torment: Tides of Numenera which according some reviews I read can be played without engaging in combat :) ), playing and defining a character is the essenital. Combat can have an important role in this, esspecially as an expression of character traits. But beyond what purpose does it really serve and are they no better way to do that?
As for TT-inspired mechanics: They work, they are proven to work. That is primary concern of any system.
On the flip side you could ask why Mass Effect needed cover-based shooting, why Dragon Age 2+ needed their speedy animations, or why Fallout 3+ needed a first person mode...
And I am not putting them on pedastal because of that:
- Divinity: Original Sin came with a system to role-play two not one player created character. Allowing them to define them off each in addition to the game world. Granted this was made mainly for Co-op and had its flaws (e.g. Rock-Paper-Scissors resolutions) but a welcome single player feature regardless. And personally this is something I wanted ever since my first dungeon crawler in which I played a party of self-made characters.
- Tyranny brought us a system to shape a character's backstory with its Conquest of the Tiers "pre-game" section. The same could be said about Dragon Age: Origins but there it was much more restrictive, as Conquest of the Tiers has a) more possible outcomes and b) real consequences in game (e.g. when you deliver the Edict of Storms during the Conquest, there is no option to reason with the locals of one region and they will attack you on sight; other example: one choice locks out of all instances of parley with Tiersmen in the opening act).
(... okay Wasteland 2 was just on my mind because it is staring at me from the bottom of bucket list)
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re: your comments regarding MMOs and MOBAs
I don't know where you get information from but you are grossly misrepresenting reality here. No one of the publisher side was expecting player to play multiple entires in the same genre, each time however companies that went to market were sure to have the superior product and could either steal the audience away from the competitors or gain a new audience that "had just been waiting" for just their offering.
What they underestimated were (in different combinations) their competitor's product, their competitor's community work, brand loyality, the sunk investiment-bias (?), audience size(s) and their own investment-to-return-ratio. Considering some of these are hard to quantify (not that it stops some M.BA. from trying every year), the flaws of some of the consumer research that is being done (e.g. desirability bias-problem) and that there isn't quite a similar product like games in the market (e.g. movies don't foster the kind of engagement and indentification as product), wrong decisions happen.
EDIT2: In that vein, we can be thankful that Star Citizen as it is quite a revealing exercise in some of these effects...
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The other thing to remember about the Infinity Engine redux games is that they've all been made with pretty small budgets (particular Tyranny from where it cut a few corners) and the table top mechanics are much easier on the budget since you don't need many animations or high quality models to make them work well. I'm with 0rph3u5 on the RPG side of things and I relish standing around and talking in those games. Tyranny actually brought me back to the real time/pause combat that I'd been avoiding like the plague recently.
Side note: Tyranny has one of my favorite pre-games of any large scale game I've played.
If I remember, Extra Credits talked about how the jRPG found itself in its current situation as action games moved towards having more integrated stories. In some ways one could argue that Bethesda saved the wRPG by making them so focused on exploration (at the expense of character interaction among other things) and Bioware for injecting some action and higher production value into them.
Maybe I'm just weird but I didn't grow up playing the Infinity Engine games (though I did play a lot of Dragon Age: Origins) and while the gameplay is clunkier than something like Mass Effect, it has its own charm.
Since 0rph3u5 mentioned Arkane (and I'm working on a video talking about Prey's, and the rest of the genre's, massive narrative shortcomings) I'll simply say that Arkane's designers and writers need to put as much faith in players from a narrative perspective as they do from a gameplay perspective and not worry about having perfect closure.
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Bethesda makes games that pretty much nobody else does though. Their style of design hasn't really spread out into other wRPGs so I wouldn't really say they 'saved' the genre.
And I'd really disagree with the notion that combat mechanics are 'unimportant'. You'll spend like 30%-40% of your gameplay time engaged in combat. For some RPGs it's even more than that. I can't see something that occupies that much gameplay time as not important just because it's not that great. So with a lot of these old-school RPGs you push through the mediocre to get to the great bits(mainly plots and characters).
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I disagree that Bethesda's style hasn't spread. No one else is doing the absurd level of interactive clutter or necessarily the same ridiculous map size but they have very much pushed mainstream wRPGs into the open world design space. I know they aren't the only reason but look back at the big RPGs before Skyrim and after Skyrim. Everyone wants a piece of the Skyrim open world pie when it comes to RPGs now. I distinctly remember Bioware talking about how Skyrim inspired Dragon Age Inquisition's changes (for better or worse).
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It didn't start with Skyrim though, there have been plenty overambitions challanges to Oblivion before Skyrim was a thing, like Gothic 3 and Two Worlds.
And I'd really disagree with the notion that combat mechanics are 'unimportant'. You'll spend like 30%-40% of your gameplay time engaged in combat. For some RPGs it's even more than that. I can't see something that occupies that much gameplay time as not important just because it's not that great. So with a lot of these old-school RPGs you push through the mediocre to get to the great bits(mainly plots and characters).
I will not argue that it occupies time but that -regardless mechanics under the hood- it does little to add to the character definition and character expression.
Here is a good example of a how and why combat is part of an RPG: The Witcher 3 (1 through 3 really)
You play as Geralt. His entire idenity is defined by being a "Witcher". A Witcher in simple terms is professional "folk tale hero" with physiological alterations that make it possible (enhanced strengh, stamina, senses and resillience). His entire occupation, therefor the reason to travel the world and to engage with it is hunting monsters that threaten the local populance, lift curses or similar actions that integral to your 0-8-15 folk tale. Because the line between Men and Monster doesn't run exactly along species definitions however (People are shades of grey; not every Monsters deserves to be killed) and not every situation is a trope, he keeps getting caught up in the problems around them.
For Geralt to not fight monsters and eventually people would a) deny the motivation underpinning his character, b) undermine the central themes of series (e.g. line between men and monster) and rob him of the essential conflicts defining his personality (e.g. who is worth protecting).
These themes are also codified in an essential mechanic of the combat: the destinction between Geralt's swords exemplifies the central dillema by basing your main combat tool in an untenable definition of "monster or person".
Here is a bad example why combat is part of an RPG: Mass Effect (any entry)
Shepard (or Ryder) are Soldiers. They are always soldiers regardless of your choices, your kit or your relationships. Being a soldier is only a framing device why people order you to do their shooting for them. It doesn't even define any kind of ethos you would have towards soldiering.
However shooting things, exploding things or blue space magic change next to nothing in the way you interact with the rest of the world, e.g. an Engineer-Shepard will never tinker together with Tali despite both the same abilites in combat. There isn't even a thematic difference between the combat kits outside some coversation about headaches (at least there is in Dragon Age when you play a Mage).
Now part of that is of course that Shepard are a more loosely defined character than Geralt, aimed to be a self-insert figure rather than a role you play (here meaning act out, as on a stage or in a movie). This doesn't make them apples and oranges however, as it highlist the problem of the last one even further. If combat were an essential part and not just filler material it would be expressing something about the character you are defining and/or expressing in the game.
As for the time spend argument: I agree that combat occupies much time and that it spaces out pieces I see as essential (not good, essential - important distinction). But declaring it important under that explaination would ammount to sunk investment-falacy (i.e. "I spend so much time on it so it has be important, right? RIGHT?!"). The same could then apply to the time my character would spend trekking across an explored section of an open world without encounters or new discoveries.
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What you're describing isn't even sunk cost fallacy. A sunk cost fallacy is predicated on not giving up doing something you have spent a lot of time/effort/resources doing even if stopping is the most reasonable choice. Like developing a Duke Nukem game for 12 years and not stopping on the 13th even though the project is going nowhere because damnit you've spent 12 years doing it and it would be wrong to abandon it now!
Just because something is filler doesn't mean its quality isn't important. If a TV show has 5 filler episodes per 12 episode season you wouldn't just shrug say their quality is non-important. They would drag down the overall quality of the show for most people.
But with RPGs you can't even really skip the combat like you could a filler episode, it's not important to the core themes of the narrative but its quality is important for evaluating the overall quality of those games. And I'm talking specifically about RPGs with worn out or mediocre filler combat, not all RPGs.
This is true for pretty much all games. If Half Life 2 had 5 more hours of crappy crane control sequences it would definitely bring the overall quality of the game down. Even though crane-moving is completely unimportant to HL2's narrative or themes.
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Just because something is filler doesn't mean its quality isn't important. If a TV show has 5 filler episodes per 12 episode season you wouldn't just shrug say their quality is non-important. They would drag down the overall quality of the show for most people.
But with RPGs you can't even really skip the combat like you could a filler episode, it's not important to the core themes of the narrative but its quality is important for evaluating the overall quality of those games. And I'm talking specifically about RPGs with worn out or mediocre filler combat, not all RPGs.
I think we are approaching the core of our disagreement here:
- You seem to try to generate the genre definition by inlcuding all entires into the genre with all their components. You highlight specifically that quality of all components deserve (equal?) consideration in an assement of the overall quality.
- I try to generate a genre definition by boiling down genre entries to essential elements, discarding components which that do not contribute the identity of an entry as RPG. For me that makes these essential components integral to the assement of quality and gives their evaluation a priority when generating an overall assesment.
Both methods of assesment have merit, as they IMO serve different purposes.
Why I stick to mine can be summed up like following:
1. It accounts for economics of game development, as components of the game unimportant to the core of project do not get the same time, money and workforce dedicated to them during production.
2. By reducing the number of features essential to a genre it also reduces the ammount of requirements for an entry in the genre to be counted as such. This idealy allows for a more diverse genre overall.
3. It allows to evaluate a game which might be a terrible game on its merits as a genre entry. This is highlighting the contribution to the genre it can make despite lapses in quality.
Non of these is esspecially consumer-centric... it is more an like an artists' definition for an discussion among arstists.
EDIT: To make an example:
Xenoblade Chronicles X is a so-and-so game but a bad RPG IMO. Its world is gorgeous and inviting, scales well between on-foot and in-flight traversal, the progressing system is complicated but manageable yet very slow, the combat is very problematic with a "turn-based in real time" in which turns are bascially cooldowns and rather loose rules what constitutes a hit (e.g. attacks do damage regardless of the animation connecting).
Its plot however is undercut by one of central elements essentially being rendered meaningless by its own gameness: you are susposed to be in a race against time but "time" only progresses at the beginning at story missions; even worse due to progression requirements you have ample downtime between story missions. Its cast of party members is almost exclusively made up military-archetypes (notable exceptions are the two recruitable aliens) to which your character also belongs, the population of quest givers is more diverse and but your interactions are bare bones (sometimes you given binary choices as to how to conclude a section of a quest but there is no greater impact to it).
The first one is what makes it a so-and-so game. The last two make it a bad RPG because a) what is central conflict of the plot and therefor the main point to develop a motivation for your character around is mechanically broken, b) the characters you interact with a very narrow group (who while plenty personal conflict) hardly offer any conflict to develop in or around (even the worst jerk of the bunch is tied to you because of your common mission) and c) interactions with the world are very limited and offer very limited results outside character progression (level and kit xps).
re: "sunk cost"-fallacy:
I know the term is not the correct one, three post ago I introduced it and qualitfied it with "(?)" because a quick look into wikipedia didn't produce the right term. I should have done so my last post, I failed to do so. That is my mistake.
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My two cents is, 0rph3u5 is completely wrong and FrikgFeek is completely right.
At the end of the day, things like "categories" are utterly irrelevant. What matters is your experience. If your experience is good, then the game is good. If the experience is bad because some mechanic is bad, then the game is not as good. Period. End of discussion. Any attempt to circumvent this logic from some convoluted rationalization is a pointless exercise in pedantry.
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I don't hugely mind the Standard RPG Formula where you smack mediocre gameplay in partly to space and pace story content but mostly as filler; but I do get really frustrated at how rare it is for the genre as a whole to really make good effort to break out of that. Obsidian's recent output is basically worthless to me for the reasons Frik noted earlier: it's packed full of clunky, worthless gameplay from 1993 because they're pandering to nostalgic fans who've got used to it. Either give the gameplay ludonarrative weight or cut it back to something more lean and less indulgent; there's really no excuse.
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At the end of the day, things like "categories" are utterly irrelevant. What matters is your experience. If your experience is good, then the game is good. If the experience is bad because some mechanic is bad, then the game is not as good. Period. End of discussion. Any attempt to circumvent this logic from some convoluted rationalization is a pointless exercise in pedantry.
The problem with that is you're then building on a completely subjective category. Experience may vary depending on a variety of factors, many subjective and/or prone to bias. (e.g. the interactions with Dorian in Dragon Age: Inquisition carry much more weight to LGBT+-person than someone who is cis-hetero, even more so with had a ****ty adolesence)
This may very well work for a consumer-centric approach, but for a developer-centric appraoch it is of little use because it does not provide you with a baseline to work from.
Sure, you can engineer a baseline by accumulation of responses, but then you are lopsiding your analysis with even more biases.
Now there is, of course, the other side of the argument of "genre features becoming too restrictive" and acctually damaging to the genre - which is best demontrated by the fact that "having combat and combat mechanics" seems to be a genre requirement for RPGs.
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(Sorry for the doublepost, but I think what I am about to write deserves a post of its own)
To follow up on my -rather throwaway- line about " having combat and combat mechanics" being a restricting genre requirement, I would like to add the following:
The focus on combat narrows the concept of violence a game can address. By putting enemies that can be defeated swiftly, decisively and quite possibly permanently with a sword, axe, lance, gun, or any manner of deadly gadgets or magics, reproduces a concept of violence which stresses it immediate and direct forms. It marginalizes the kind of violence that sustained, indirect, systemic, psychological and/or economic (and several other categories I did not think of right now).
I submit that this kind of violence is not an universal experience and therefor hard to transport in a medium. The effect of portraying it on wide sections of the audience maybe none to minimal, whereas a minority/minorities in the audience might find their protrail worthwhile (if just as an object lesson on how not do the protrail).
(I am also not an expert to speak about these things; I have a History degree and while that means I dabble in psychology, sociology and the discussion of the arts as part of the Critical Method, I remain a layman in these matters)
With the focus on immediate violent confrontation also comes a narrowing of focus regarding the stories that can be told well under that umbrella. I am a firm opponent that prevalence of tropes like "save the princess", "kill the enemy general" or "find the Mcguffin" are systemic to the medium of video games. But as long as immediate personal violence remains the go-to opposing force, especially with the inclusion of an antagonist with personhood*, these tropes, which offer an immediate resolution to the stories they are employed in, are deprives the medium of a form of depth.
Another point is that this way there is an emphasis on personal growth and development in very short amounts of time. I know the rule is to ask yourself before penning any story "is this the most intersting time in life of the protagonist?" but there is no rule that the "most interesting time" has to be span of days, weeks or months. This especially worse when the traversal across space becomes more important than the advance of time, as it is in many RPGs. Now usually that is because a player's freedom is held in high regard and as an escapist element (having to rush from appointment to appointment after all is an element of day-to-day-life you want to get away from) - both of these are worthwhile. But the advance of age is also an complex and very interesting transformative process which regularly excluded from games in general and RPGs as well.
This is not to speak out against escapism, the concept of the power fantasy, cathartic drama as we know it, or a even a plea for pacifistic games. And I very well know that several games, many more in the indie scene, are addressing this problem and find good, sometimes wonderful solutions to it.
But I wonder if there is not a transformative shift around a corner, that has not be rounded by a majority.**
Now all these things do not have to mean a thing to you. If all you want is to occupy time and give you a feeling of time well spend, that is also fine by me.
But I think about this from a different vantage, which serves a different purpose.
This is where I rest my case now. I got to get back to writing, so I make good on the ideas I put forth. And maybe fail at it, we will see.
* Sorry for the odd turn of phrase but I thought "personal antagonist" could be misleading, as it could also mean "an antagonist specific to the protagonist/player" instead what I want to express: the personification of an antagonistic force in a character.
** This sounded way better in my head.