the future of RPGs
Or, hear me out, the future might be 2D pixel-art games made by one or two people in a bedroom – not by critical acclaim or player sentiment, but just by sheer volume, filling up digital storefronts.
Im almost done playing crosscode and i was floored away by how engaging and fun it is. I never thought id invest 60+ hours in it so willingly and eagerly. Honestly the best time ive had in gaming in a long time.
If you’re even remotely interested in Warhammer 40k, the Rogue Trader CRPG is excellent
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2186680/Warhammer_40000_Rogue_Trader/
That game was far better then it had any right to be.
Still waiting on an imperial guard focused game though.
I love Rogue Trader so much.
I wish more of the game was like act 2. That’s where the game really shines
Owlcat in general, despite their buggy releases, make absolutely ambitious and exciting games that are terrifically well written. Wrath of the Righteous is my favorite CRPG out there, and Rogue Trader is close to that as well.
It’s funny and sad knowing that Bethesda once were the company making weird and ambitious RPGs.
Morrowind is one of the weirdest and most ambitious games of that era.
Morrowind was thier hail mary to stay in buisness.
Then they gave the series to Howard and his crew…
It’s like the super bowl champs giving the next decade to the Bears.
Morrowind: An oral history on Polygon is a wonderful read.
All the little stories Kirkbride tells are great. My favourite is him designing progressively weird shit to dupe Howard with. He’d be like “Hey Todd, can we put this in the game?” and after he knowingly got knocked back he’d present him something more palatable.
That’s a classic negotiation technique abusing the psychological anchoring effect.
Yeah, I’ve heard of writers on shows like the Animaniacs doing it, insisting heavily on a more outrageous joke having to go in knowing it’ll get knocked back as a Trojan horse to slip the real jokes they want in.
It’s like the super bowl champs giving the next decade to the Bears.
nowhere is safe 😫
Lol if it makes you feel better I was going to say Buffalo originally
Indeed, as the article writes
Even Skyrim—certainly a weird, ambitious, and janky RPG in its own right—refined and streamlined the formula set by Morrowind and Oblivion, rather than expanding on their eccentricities, and that trend only continued in the studio’s following games.
Skyrim wasn’t “weird” by any definition I’d use. More like bland.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. When you look through the classics, they’re not “typical”. Hell, one of the most iconic games involves a plumber fighting a punk-rock turtle to save a princess, with a variety of mushrooms both helping and hindering.
How dare you!
With its nuanced characters, wonderfully layered world, and incredible depth of interactions, it was natural to feel the game had set a new bar for the whole genre—but it was pointed out that declaring it the new standard was unreasonable and unsustainable given how few other developers could possibly rise to meet it.
You could make a game a third of the size of BG3, and it would still be excellent value for BG3’s asking price. And no, you shouldn’t attempt to make a competitor with BG3 on your first try. Nor should you try to make a competitor to Elden Ring on your first try; FromSoft had been making those games for the better part of 15 years, building and iterating on what came before. I do think more RPG developers should strive to follow the systems-driven approach that Larian has and be cognizant of what it is that we all like about BG3, but it can be sustainable if you don’t try to hit a home run on the first pitch.
FromSoft had been making those games for the better part of 15 years, building and iterating on what came before.
Longer, if we really want to get pedantic. King’s Field, the game and series that is now the spiritual predecessor to the Souls genre, is from 1994, so we could probably say they have been refining their own flavor of action RPG for over 30 years now.
The joke of these games is that they aren’t notably more weird than titles Bethesda and Bioware were famous for turning out. Hard to get more weird than Fallout’s more esoteric vaults or Morrowind’s bizarre cults and exotic cultures.
BG3/KC:D have been, if anything, a direct successors to the old classics. They’re faithfully propagating the fundamental ideas these old titles represented in a way the new studios are unable to reproduce.
Also, honorable mention to the poor bastards who released Disco Elysium and then got their studio stripped out from underneath them by their financiers. Absolute gem of a game and you should feel free to pirate it without a twinge of guilt.
It’s also ironic that BG3 is continuation of Bioware’s own franchise.
removed by mod
There are lots of things to physically fight back over, but video games ain’t one of them.
I’m not talking about video games I’m talking ruining someone’s life and stealing their intellectual property, the fucking performative humiliation he put those guys through. You think a rich CEO who would fuck people over that hard is really redeemable?
Edit: But no, you’re right that he shouldn’t be murdered, he doesn’t necessarily have blood on his hands like a healthcare CEO. He should simply be torn from his home and have all of his property and assets liquidated and distributed as compensation
I am sensing a lot of anger here and given the current state of the world it just seems so misplaced. Like dude, there is really shit going on with real villains and real people siffering, maybe direct that anger there.
“Evil is Evil. Lesser, greater, middling… Makes no difference. The degree is arbitary. The definition’s blurred. If I’m to choose between one evil and another… I’d rather not choose at all!”
Greedy CEOs, MAGA supporters, Islamists, Nazis, Tankies, all the same. If all of those people stopped existing tomorrow, then the world would undoubtably be a better place. I’m ready to die on that hill!
But is it even evil? Like there were contracts involved with terms and conditions. Its not like some guy with a handle bar mustash just swiped the IP and walked away. Someone agreed to the contract that resulted in the loss of their company/IP and if they didn’t read it or consult with legal lawyer who’s bad guy?
Yes, yes it is! On what world would stealing someone’s intellectual work and booting them out of their own company for the sole purpose to keep all of the money for yourself not be evil? Funnily enough, making people sign unfair contracts is literally the most devilish thing ever. It’s the one thing demons and devils do in pretty much every interpretation they appear in. This is why we need more people like Luigi!
Why the fuck would you think it’s not? There’s a lot of goddamn villains in the world, an entire ecosystem of cruelty where people abuse those who they think are below them because of unchecked wealth and power, and people get personally fucked by individuals of that ecosystem every day. Just because there are bigger fish doesn’t mean small fish are exempt. Don’t presume that a frustration with a lesser evil means a blind eye to the greater ones
Aside from the unacceptable violence, the story here is far more complicated than that.
They were just impossible to work with.I think PeopleMakeGames did a good YouTube video on it if you’ve not seen it.
What had happened to the people in ZAUM (or what was once that studio), is a tragedy, and a huge shame. I’m not even a cRPG/dnd person, but that game has singlehandedly opened my eyes to a whole new world. It’s easily in my top10 games of all time, and I wish we could get another one eventually
Morrowind is over 20 years old, and there hasn’t been a FO game with compelling plot lines since New Vegas. You are living in the past.
Kinda the point of the comment
Just finished Disco Elysium few days ago, watched the credits roll from start to finish to see all the great people working on it, such a great game…now I am sad for what happened to them, I didnt know that
BG3 isnt even a deep RPG. Im really glad it’s popular, but as an rpg it doesn’t even have half the options final fantasy 7 had.
Kingdom Come is a much richer experience, imo. Even though the options are even fewer on paper.
I’ll just sit over here rocking in place and muttering Owlcat Games over and over
You’re going to have to elaborate on those first two sentences, because that’s a wild thing to say.
Youve never played the original FF 7?
I have. I don’t know which options you’re referring to. Materia selection? I guess, but there are fewer permutations of those than there are spells/feats/stats in D&D 5e, and that’s before we even get to all the stuff that makes BG3 stand out, like its emergent design. FF7 is a great game, but it is not emergent, and emergent design will nearly always be deeper than the finite stuff.
No you’re right. Oil puddles are amazing emergent designs. My bad.
There are challenge runners who’ve beaten the entire game with only salami for weapons. Oil puddles are just a small part of it. There was a part in act 3 where I was denied entry to a place by failing a speech check. I could have possibly brute forced my way in and murdered everyone, but instead I found a back door that was three stories up on a balcony, cast flight on my rogue, and had him stealth in to achieve the objective. That’s emergent design. Solutions to problems that weren’t explicitly programmed in but work because the rules are loose and can be applied intuitively. There’s a part in the game where you have to cross a bridge blocked off by some high level enemies, and there are a ton of ways to get across the bridge that I know of, several of which the developers didn’t intend for, and probably dozens more that I’ve never even seen before, because the game just lets you run loose with its systems.
That’s depth.
That is very cool, i agree.
There are other games out there that give that amount of freedom. If not more. That’s all I’m saying.It’s a very pretty game.
Can you give some examples of games that give more freedom than that? Because as the other person said, ff7 is not one of those. And I too am curious because I love those kinds of games. And while owlcat’s pathfinder games are great, they’re also not a viable answer, since you’ve mentioned them.
I don’t think FF7 is one of those games.
Half the options of the original FF7
I’m pretty sure nobody had the option to save Aeris, side with Sephiroth, finish blowing up Shinra before having to change to disc 2, etc
your comparison to FF7 isn’t really accurate as they’re two different types of RPGs
and CRPGs are known for being far more fleshed out than any jrpg, so I’m curious to hear your reasons for saying so. considering FF7 doesn’t even allow you to make your own character to roleplay.
BG3, while very fun, is a pretty shallow game. Obviously that’s not a popular opinion, but it’s unfortunately true. There are far more fleshed out CRPGs out there.
i think you possibly are confusing BG3 for another game. nobody would make a statement like that unless they either hadn’t played it or were trying to troll.
I generally agree with his statement, bg3 is very simple in terms of character building and has shallow exploration/questing (particularly after act 1). But then again, that’s the case for most AAA games out there - they are made in a way that anyone can play them to the end.
You all keep throwing these big accusations around without actually giving any alternatives for those of us that actually want to play these deeper more complex games that we’ve somehow never heard of. Why is that? Give us some games to play, please!
The op did give an alternative, I can’t speak much for it however.
Baldur’s gate 3 barely has any character building after picking a class at the start. It really doesn’t feel you’re building a character so much as following a template. And worse, the classes are all very vanilla. Pathfinder wotr for example has much better character building, the mythic classes add a ton of depth and interesting interlacing.
The big problem about exploration in bg3 is that there’s just not much to do. Most dungeons are like a handful of rooms and that’s that. You go in, you talk to a few people, you do 1 combat and rarely 2 and go out. There’s no sprawling or sense of discovery. I’ll recommend Underrail for exploration.
I see. We just have different opinions on what RPGs should be and that’s okay. I prefer a deep lake to a shallow ocean, so to say. I’ll take bg3, disco Elysium or mass effect over Skyrim any day of the week.
I’ve still got 100+ hours in games like that as well… they’re just not as fun or memorable to me and I often end up bored before the end. Had to force myself to ignore a bunch of the map in order to finish Witcher 3 and kingdom come, for example.
Gothic 2 is like the sweet spot, imo. Large enough that you don’t feel confined, but not that large that you get bored doing the same stuff over and over again. And while I did say that KC:D had me bored with exploration by the end, I didn’t feel bad about skipping parts of it like I did in other games because there the size of the map is just for realism and it’s not actually filled with meaningless stuff.
As for character building, I just play path of exile for that. I play RPGs for the stories. If it can have both, great, but I’m not gonna complain about build diversity in a game that I’m not gonna play more than once or twice anyway.
Pretty+cinematic does not mean better. You need to play more crpgs, my friend.
oh, I’d say ive played quite a few, bud. but the advice is appreciated.
enjoy your generic protagonist with a mysterious dark past. seems like a truly unique concept in RPGs! 🙏
Then i recommend playing more games with unique concepts. DnD is like the most generic concept on the planet.
BG3 is the same as any of the other games previously. A D&D game with an amazing DM. Immersive story and characters, great system at the foundation, and excellent gameplay to channel the story and system through.
I think BG3 spent most of their time saying no to dull or shallow ideas, rather than reinventing the wheel. And of course it worked incredibly.
Could somebody please explain fo me how either of these two aggressively cliche and generic games are in any way “ambitious, weird, and unexpected”?
Are you serious? Do you need help understanding the definitions of ambitious, weird, and unexpected?
Do you need a run down of all generic clones of games bioware and bethesda have released in recent times?
They are literally sequels. 2 and 3. That removes any chance of them being unexpected now doesn’t it you dunce.
Ambitious, sure; if your definition of ambitious is delivering a complete game at release.
Weird? If you think these games are weird I’ll absolutely punish your eyeballs with just some stuff on steam that will leave these two games looking absolutely mainstream.
This would be a great reply if you didn’t call him a dunce which will likely get your comment deleted.
People understandably love to hate Oblivion and Fallout 3, but I feel the side quest writing had heart, like groups of devs got to go wild within their own little dungeons. Their exploitable mechanics were kinda endearing.
…And I didn’t get that from Starfield? I really tried to overlook the nostalgia factor, but all the writing felt… corporate. Gameplay, animation, Bethesda jank without any of the fun. I abandoned it early and tried to see what I was missing on YouTube, but still don’t “get” what people see in that game.
If you want a big walking sandbox in that vein, I feel like No Man’s Sky would scratch the itch far better, no?
Meanwhile, BG3 and KC2 completely floored me. So did Cyberpunk 2077, though I only experienced it patched up and modded. Heck, even ME Andromeda felt more compelling to me.
I got Cyberpunk in December and KCD2 in February. At this point I’m convinced I’ve spoiled the entire RPG genre for myself for the next decade. I can’t imagine playing 2 great games back to back like that again.
Oblivion is my favorite Elder Scrolls. I actually played it again recently and thought it held up pretty well. I’m a sucker for wandering lush bucolic landscapes though.
The article totally misses the big intervening step between Skyrim/old Bioware and the failure of Starfield/Dragon Age: CDProjectRED.
While those studios largely just made “more of the same”, CDPR made Witcher 3 and then Cyberpunk 2077. Both games are way better narrative experiences and pushed RPG forward. Starfield looks very dated in comparison to both, and Dragon Age failed to capture to magic. Baldur’s Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 are successes because they also bring strong narratives and emotional connections to the stories.
Starfield would have been huge if it had been released soon after Skyrim. But now it just looks old fashioned, and I think the “wide as an ocean, as deep as a puddle” analogy is good for Starfield. Meanwhile Witcher 3 - which is 10 years old! - has quests and storylines with choices and emotional impact. BG3 and KC:D2 are heirs to Witcher 3.
I have no comprehension what this is attempting to imply as I’m not sure who makes what games…
However, I do have some valid input. Kingdom Come Deliverance is the only single player game I’ve played since literally Metal Gear Solid 2…
Zero interest in single player games, yet I got Kingdom Come Deliverance for free so screw it I was bored hopped on got stoned.
By like hour 14 I realized I was playing a movie. With endless paths true freedom. I almost actually played it… I think I made it 40 some hours in and 20 of those hours were unlocking combos and learning them. Killing randoms on the roads etc.
I enjoyed it thoroughly yet, in the end it was still a single player game. All I could consider the entire time playing it was … Imagine if this map had 100 players on it. How epic of an mmoprg this game could make.
No, stop, let us have single player games, with 100-10000 players in an MMORPG you are suddenly diluted and weak, your ability to influence the world and be heroic and become powerful is suddenly dependent on competing for time investment and skill with 100s to 1000s of other people. THATS WHAT I ALREADY DO IN REAL LIFE. If I want to feel mid and not very powerful without putting in a ton of extra work, I’ll go outside. Especially when doing that extra work would actually allow me to spend EVEN LESS TIME on myself in the real world.
TLDR: there are enough MMOs, there are DEFINITELY enough competitive multiplayer games (also PVM/P survival building games) I do not understand people’s obsessions with saying the very small number of great single player games we have ought to be MMOs. Go play ESO or whatever it is you guys like playing.
Less flash, more passionate people allowed to create. Shocker.
Kingdom Come Deliverance wasn’t even on my radar and now I’m obsessed. The NPCs are so fucking funny
If I were in your shoes…
This might be a unpopular view but I think games like Elden Ring or Lies of P are a better RPGs. More action packed, less busy/boring missions. I beat BG3 and had fun for the first half of the game, the last half was a bit of a drag. I tried KCD 1 and couldn’t get into it, going from one end of the map to another doing mindless tasks. It was more of a middle-age simulator. I put ~250 hours into Elden Ring + DLC and I wanted more by the end of it.
Either way, I have some hope for the future of games.
i don’t know that anyone calls them rpgs.
The article mentions them as action RPGs
wtf
Which is dumb. Souls games are pretty obviously a branch of metroidvanias.
So non RPGs are better RPGs? You don’t have to like RPGs.
Elden Ring is an RPG, not sure what you’re saying.
An RPG without a story and full focus on gameplay, if you like fighting monsters over and over again it sure is great, but otherwise it lacks alot
Its an action game with RPG like stst systems.
Elden Ring better classified as an action RPG, to use an analog its more akin to PnP dungeon crawlers in how it approaches its RPG elements. While say Baldurs Gate 3 is closer to an extended campaign PnP game. They are both RPGs but that’s such a broad grouping so as to be meaningful, an atlatl and a welding torch are both tools but there’s no meaningful overlap.
To quote an old RockPaperShotgun comment about Dark Souls, the best decisions are the ones that you don’t know you’re making. DS definitely has storyline changes depending on where you go first, what you do and who you speak to, which is far more natural than a two-way dialogue option for “blatant RPG decision making”.
The tragedy of Elden Ring is that it’s far too long for that. I’ve played through DS several times and would expect to get it finished in about five hours, so can play through the various plot line resolutions in a long evening of gaming. ER has a variety of ways that the DLC can play out, you say? Best book a fortnight off work so that I can get a hundred hours of gaming in.
You can complete 90% of everything in one playthrough. Then complete the other parts in NG+ so you’re not completely starting over. I believe you only need 2 great runes to face the end boss.
Well, yes. But I would argue that if you have the skills to defeat eg. the Draconic Sentinel with just two runes, then it’s probably not your first rodeo. Stumbling over all the steps to eg. Varre or Hyettas quests on an unguided playthrough, which require specific things in a certain order in a huge world, are not particularly likely either. Its size works against it in that regard.
Doing it in NG+ isn’t that difficult at all since you already have your stats set and multiple weapons maxed out.
I’ve played through DS several times and would expect to get it finished in about five hours
Do you think your experience here is at all the norm?
For people that really love Dark Souls and have finished it repeatedly, including challenge runs? Five hours is probably taking your time, using rubbish weapons for a laugh. For your first time playing through, hell no - probably more like thirty. The first DS has some unreasonable traps for the unwary - one of the stats is a dead end, many of the weapons scale really badly. Maybe better to start with Scholar or 3, that are better balanced.
