[Luis Dias]

(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.

[Firesteel]

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.

[0rph3u5]

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)

[FrikgFeek]

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.

[0rph3u5]

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)

EDIT:

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...

[Firesteel]

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.

[FrikgFeek]

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).

[Firesteel]

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).

[0rph3u5]

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.

[FrikgFeek]

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.

[0rph3u5]

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.

[Luis Dias]

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.
 

[Phantom Hoover]

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.

[0rph3u5]

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.

[0rph3u5]

(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.