Havoc
05-05-2011, 05:47 AM
Hello, and again, welcome to this thread.
Right off the bat: there may, or may not be a teal deer version at the end of this column.
If you can't stay focused for a couple of paragraphs without getting distracted by shiny objects/squirrels in your vicinity,
you should seek professional help.
That being said, formatting isn't quite yet my biatch here, so bare with me.
Ok lets go ~ this is a very painful topic, likely to set some things on fire, but I'm going to talk about how RPGs have changed over the time,
and how bleak the outlook is.
Lets take a step backwards, into the past of gaming.
Now I'm not the oldest gamer, I was the kind of child who spent his time playing Monkey Island 1 on a Pentium IBM pc with 33 MHz, 66 in turbo.
Role playing games weren't that big back then, and definitely not on a scale as they are now.
We had the Ultima Series, and the first couple Elder Scrolls, and anyone who played them knows what kind of amazing games those were back in the day.
But we don't have to reach that far back into the past, lets look back a FEW years.
2000 - 2002;
The first two jewels on the list of those years would be Diablo 2 and Fallout 2.
Two games that excelled at everything they were supposed to as role playing games: Gameplay, System and Story.
Whether it was the hack and slash-y combat in Diablo 2 or the Tactical Round based battles in Fallout 2, those were refined, balanced, simply really thought through.
And the system wasn't lacking, a ton of stats, Attribute and Ability points, countless skills, items, weapons, armors, all with their own looks, attributes, statistics etc.
It was complex, it required a lot of thinking and planning, how to build my character, which equipment is best for me and so on...
Coming from this complexity, the possibilities were equally great, and while Diablo was quite linear, you could at all times revisit old locations to grind for exp or items or to admire the landscape or just for shi tz'n'giggles.
Fallout had an "open" world and you could travel everywhere on your world map, regardless of requirements and level, and thus get killed in dangerous areas...
(Other games worth mentioning: Buldurs Gate 2, Icewind Dale)
Later that time we got our first big real 3D RPGs, namely Gothic and Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, later on Gothic 2, and the less known Arx Fatalis.
Following the trend of popular RPGs, those too had huge worlds, a complex game system, and had the added perk of stunning visuals.
Both those games had huge, open worlds, which you were free to explore from the moment you set foot in them, the only boundaries were natural ones:
Endless oceans
unclimbable mountains
monsters that would maul your tiny lvl 1 butt in seconds
And those weren't some simple, auto-generated worlds, with a little tweaking and prodding, set a monster here, remove an item there, nope;
those were hand-crafted huge surroundings with countless corners, holes and secrets, things that kept the simple act of exploring the world,
outside of any quest, atmospheric and tense, you were always bound to encounter a creature, a bandit camp,
a cave with undead and a rare artifact and countless other things that had absolutely nothing to do with the story,
they were just there because the developers cared.
A well told story that went on for hours, yes indeed, I don't remember about Morrowind, but Gothic 2 had multiple endings.
But what those games had in common were the countless possibilities.
You could get whatever skill you desired, you could be what you wanted, who you wanted,
join any faction that was to your liking,
kill anyone, steal anything and face the consequences.
It was your world. It was a living, breathing world.
Sure, those games had their flaws, technical, mostly, bugged like godknowswhat, but that subsided with patches, and made (especially Gothic) the game playable. There were those endlessly long fetch-quests. And no mounts. So you spent hours of your life just WALKING/JOGGING from one location to the other. But hey, the scenery looked awesome, and you could always step from the road to take a whiz just to encounter a cave full of skeletons eager to skull***** a low-lvl fetchquest-noobie you with their... bones.
Staying alive in world like these was already considered an achievement.
If a game like this comes out in the future it sure will be:
"Achievement Unlocked - Stay alive for more than 30 minutes"
Arx Fatalis is a honorable mention here. Hardly anyone knows this incredible game.
It had stats leaking out of all its orifices, items in hundreds of varieties, atmosphere as thick as cement and while the world was still open, it wasn't "all open".
But the setting was a huge underground world consisting of mines and dungeons because the sun died and the humans(and all other humanoid fantasy creatures) had to retreat into the old mine systems.
It was first-person btw.
The combat felt as natural as a mountain dew tastes, but it had incredible aspects like hitting from different angles, hitting different body parts of the enemy etc.
The magic system was quite complex too. You found runes all over the world, and based on those runes, you could find spells, which were composed of a series of those runes. To cast a spell, you had to draw the runes with your mouse on the screen. Yes, I know, that's like... as convenient as a raging bull in your living room, but it was new, it was exciting, and you could take solace in the fact that you could prepare up to 3 spells which you could cast at any time.
The game also had those nice little things: you could mix flour with water, and then put it near any source of heat, be it an open fire, oven, stove, and eventually that mix turned into bread.
---
Wait, what was that? A chicken? Lets club it to death!
NICE! Got me two chicken legs... hmm but they're no good raw. Oh!
A campfire. Splendid! Lets hold those chicken legs into the flame, shall we?
Great! Roasted chicken! Yummy!
---
Alternatively you could just kill the chicken with a fireball spell and get a whole roasted chicken in return...
Those were the amazing little details that made this game so amazing, if you just took some time to notice them.
And while I know that all those games can be finished in a couple of hours speedrun,
you could, and most likely would spend ten times more time than you ever needed to. Just because.
This trend was followed up by games like Gothic 3, Elder Scrolls IV(much later), Sacred - nice Diablo-esque game in 3D. Fable... somewhat. Titan Quest.
The follow-up era, already showed signs of what I'm aiming for with all this, which may or may not have already been somewhat revealed.
But before that the two notable releases of 2007: Two Worlds and Wiedzmin(The Witcher).
Two Worlds was criticized to have "a too big world" and The Witcher to be "too complex" and have "too much stuff".
This is a serious turning point, a pathetic sign of failure of a world-wide gaming community. It simply showed that we became stupid.
And while there were still good games like Sacred 2, and Fallout 3, things started going in the wrong direction:
Risen - the hyped up unofficial sequel to Gothic 3, by the same developer, who lost the rights on Gothic to its publisher. It was still a great game, with lots of possibilities, but instead of a multi-branch huge arsenal of magic, you had 3 spells. You know, for convenience. The world was only a fragment the size of its predecessors, the combat was simplified, a lot of intriguing parts of the game system taken out. Because, you guessed it, people got too confused with stuff that did not necessarily drive the story. However, it wasn't all that noticeable in this one.
I'm aiming higher, and more recent... and more popular as a matter of fact:
Mass Effect -> Mass Effect 2
Dragon Age: Origins -> Dragon Age 2
Gothic 1,2,3 -> Gothic 4
Divinity 2 -> Divinity 2,5 stand alone follow up sequel thingie
Two Worlds -> Two Worlds Two (didn't see that one coming, did they?)
If you compare the development of all those games, you'll notice a common characteristic:
They are all shorter, they are all simpler, and they do more things for you than their predecessors.(And in singular cases they look prettier)
And while Mass Effect 2 had too many improvements over Mass Effect 1 to notice where they took away,
it cannot be denied that it has been dumbed down.
(No more looting, no more inventory, simplified attribute system, less weapons, no armors etc.)
More notable would be the Dragon Age example. The DA2 has fewer areas, all over a smaller world, a much shorter story, less classes etc.
It doesn't suck you in as much as DAO did. You just grind down your quests in, and get that: always the same 3 dungeons.
They did with dungeons what MMOs do with mobs: palette swaps. It feels more like a JPRG Final Fantasy 10 style.
Except Final Fantasy 10 had far more content.
Gothic 4, better known as ArcaniA, is a shame to talk about.
It's 100% linear, it has a 100% dumbed down skill system, it's easy, even on the hardest difficulty,
and it won't last you more than 6 hours estimate(main story because you don't get any sense of exploring at all).
Every enemy can be defeated with the exact same simple tactic: run in circle and hit with whatever spell slows them down most.
Divinity 2 was an excellent successor of Divine Divinity from... 2000? I think.
A Diablo-esque game. Divinity 2 had a huge, more or less open world, a buttload of skills and attributes,
and you could always feel that the system rolled the dice with every attack. (also you could shapeshift into a dragon if that wasn't enough of a selling point already...)
Its "sequel" was 100% linear grindfest because you started out with all the skills already available anyway.
And while you had items from the previous part in your inventory (a stone that teleported you to the base,
and a stone that let you shift your shape) you could never use them in the game, because those parts didn't exist anymore.
Two Worlds 2 - while still fun any a very good game, it had but a splinter of its predecessors world size, and the world felt... extremely linear.
It had some tweaks like a much more awesome magic system, it had great flow and combat, but it didn't suck you in as much as the first part.
Also why would you remove the consequence for stealing from the game system?
Sneaking is a great thing and jacking all of some poor fellas retirement fond isn't much fun if you can do it right under his nose and he doesn't even pretend to care.
Let's get some closure here.
The point is: RPGs became dumber with time. This can have two reasons:
Either the developers became more lazy, or more stupid.
Or the gamers have. If you managed to read down to here, you're probably NOT part of the problem.
But unfortunately for us, the world is stupid.
More and more gamers are increasingly stupid.
And to accommodate that, developers make the games simpler, more linear, shorter, its easier to handle for some shutin who gets distracted by the view of his closest fat relative. JRPGs may have shown us that linearity works well, but even this went down the drain with FinalFantasy13.
Sad but true: not only RPGs are affected, this works for most other genres just as well.
At this point I have to congratulate Bethesda Softworks, Fallout New Vegas has not suffered from this disease that destroys quality games,
and hopefully for us, neither will Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim!!!
Thank you for reading!
Right off the bat: there may, or may not be a teal deer version at the end of this column.
If you can't stay focused for a couple of paragraphs without getting distracted by shiny objects/squirrels in your vicinity,
you should seek professional help.
That being said, formatting isn't quite yet my biatch here, so bare with me.
Ok lets go ~ this is a very painful topic, likely to set some things on fire, but I'm going to talk about how RPGs have changed over the time,
and how bleak the outlook is.
Lets take a step backwards, into the past of gaming.
Now I'm not the oldest gamer, I was the kind of child who spent his time playing Monkey Island 1 on a Pentium IBM pc with 33 MHz, 66 in turbo.
Role playing games weren't that big back then, and definitely not on a scale as they are now.
We had the Ultima Series, and the first couple Elder Scrolls, and anyone who played them knows what kind of amazing games those were back in the day.
But we don't have to reach that far back into the past, lets look back a FEW years.
2000 - 2002;
The first two jewels on the list of those years would be Diablo 2 and Fallout 2.
Two games that excelled at everything they were supposed to as role playing games: Gameplay, System and Story.
Whether it was the hack and slash-y combat in Diablo 2 or the Tactical Round based battles in Fallout 2, those were refined, balanced, simply really thought through.
And the system wasn't lacking, a ton of stats, Attribute and Ability points, countless skills, items, weapons, armors, all with their own looks, attributes, statistics etc.
It was complex, it required a lot of thinking and planning, how to build my character, which equipment is best for me and so on...
Coming from this complexity, the possibilities were equally great, and while Diablo was quite linear, you could at all times revisit old locations to grind for exp or items or to admire the landscape or just for shi tz'n'giggles.
Fallout had an "open" world and you could travel everywhere on your world map, regardless of requirements and level, and thus get killed in dangerous areas...
(Other games worth mentioning: Buldurs Gate 2, Icewind Dale)
Later that time we got our first big real 3D RPGs, namely Gothic and Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, later on Gothic 2, and the less known Arx Fatalis.
Following the trend of popular RPGs, those too had huge worlds, a complex game system, and had the added perk of stunning visuals.
Both those games had huge, open worlds, which you were free to explore from the moment you set foot in them, the only boundaries were natural ones:
Endless oceans
unclimbable mountains
monsters that would maul your tiny lvl 1 butt in seconds
And those weren't some simple, auto-generated worlds, with a little tweaking and prodding, set a monster here, remove an item there, nope;
those were hand-crafted huge surroundings with countless corners, holes and secrets, things that kept the simple act of exploring the world,
outside of any quest, atmospheric and tense, you were always bound to encounter a creature, a bandit camp,
a cave with undead and a rare artifact and countless other things that had absolutely nothing to do with the story,
they were just there because the developers cared.
A well told story that went on for hours, yes indeed, I don't remember about Morrowind, but Gothic 2 had multiple endings.
But what those games had in common were the countless possibilities.
You could get whatever skill you desired, you could be what you wanted, who you wanted,
join any faction that was to your liking,
kill anyone, steal anything and face the consequences.
It was your world. It was a living, breathing world.
Sure, those games had their flaws, technical, mostly, bugged like godknowswhat, but that subsided with patches, and made (especially Gothic) the game playable. There were those endlessly long fetch-quests. And no mounts. So you spent hours of your life just WALKING/JOGGING from one location to the other. But hey, the scenery looked awesome, and you could always step from the road to take a whiz just to encounter a cave full of skeletons eager to skull***** a low-lvl fetchquest-noobie you with their... bones.
Staying alive in world like these was already considered an achievement.
If a game like this comes out in the future it sure will be:
"Achievement Unlocked - Stay alive for more than 30 minutes"
Arx Fatalis is a honorable mention here. Hardly anyone knows this incredible game.
It had stats leaking out of all its orifices, items in hundreds of varieties, atmosphere as thick as cement and while the world was still open, it wasn't "all open".
But the setting was a huge underground world consisting of mines and dungeons because the sun died and the humans(and all other humanoid fantasy creatures) had to retreat into the old mine systems.
It was first-person btw.
The combat felt as natural as a mountain dew tastes, but it had incredible aspects like hitting from different angles, hitting different body parts of the enemy etc.
The magic system was quite complex too. You found runes all over the world, and based on those runes, you could find spells, which were composed of a series of those runes. To cast a spell, you had to draw the runes with your mouse on the screen. Yes, I know, that's like... as convenient as a raging bull in your living room, but it was new, it was exciting, and you could take solace in the fact that you could prepare up to 3 spells which you could cast at any time.
The game also had those nice little things: you could mix flour with water, and then put it near any source of heat, be it an open fire, oven, stove, and eventually that mix turned into bread.
---
Wait, what was that? A chicken? Lets club it to death!
NICE! Got me two chicken legs... hmm but they're no good raw. Oh!
A campfire. Splendid! Lets hold those chicken legs into the flame, shall we?
Great! Roasted chicken! Yummy!
---
Alternatively you could just kill the chicken with a fireball spell and get a whole roasted chicken in return...
Those were the amazing little details that made this game so amazing, if you just took some time to notice them.
And while I know that all those games can be finished in a couple of hours speedrun,
you could, and most likely would spend ten times more time than you ever needed to. Just because.
This trend was followed up by games like Gothic 3, Elder Scrolls IV(much later), Sacred - nice Diablo-esque game in 3D. Fable... somewhat. Titan Quest.
The follow-up era, already showed signs of what I'm aiming for with all this, which may or may not have already been somewhat revealed.
But before that the two notable releases of 2007: Two Worlds and Wiedzmin(The Witcher).
Two Worlds was criticized to have "a too big world" and The Witcher to be "too complex" and have "too much stuff".
This is a serious turning point, a pathetic sign of failure of a world-wide gaming community. It simply showed that we became stupid.
And while there were still good games like Sacred 2, and Fallout 3, things started going in the wrong direction:
Risen - the hyped up unofficial sequel to Gothic 3, by the same developer, who lost the rights on Gothic to its publisher. It was still a great game, with lots of possibilities, but instead of a multi-branch huge arsenal of magic, you had 3 spells. You know, for convenience. The world was only a fragment the size of its predecessors, the combat was simplified, a lot of intriguing parts of the game system taken out. Because, you guessed it, people got too confused with stuff that did not necessarily drive the story. However, it wasn't all that noticeable in this one.
I'm aiming higher, and more recent... and more popular as a matter of fact:
Mass Effect -> Mass Effect 2
Dragon Age: Origins -> Dragon Age 2
Gothic 1,2,3 -> Gothic 4
Divinity 2 -> Divinity 2,5 stand alone follow up sequel thingie
Two Worlds -> Two Worlds Two (didn't see that one coming, did they?)
If you compare the development of all those games, you'll notice a common characteristic:
They are all shorter, they are all simpler, and they do more things for you than their predecessors.(And in singular cases they look prettier)
And while Mass Effect 2 had too many improvements over Mass Effect 1 to notice where they took away,
it cannot be denied that it has been dumbed down.
(No more looting, no more inventory, simplified attribute system, less weapons, no armors etc.)
More notable would be the Dragon Age example. The DA2 has fewer areas, all over a smaller world, a much shorter story, less classes etc.
It doesn't suck you in as much as DAO did. You just grind down your quests in, and get that: always the same 3 dungeons.
They did with dungeons what MMOs do with mobs: palette swaps. It feels more like a JPRG Final Fantasy 10 style.
Except Final Fantasy 10 had far more content.
Gothic 4, better known as ArcaniA, is a shame to talk about.
It's 100% linear, it has a 100% dumbed down skill system, it's easy, even on the hardest difficulty,
and it won't last you more than 6 hours estimate(main story because you don't get any sense of exploring at all).
Every enemy can be defeated with the exact same simple tactic: run in circle and hit with whatever spell slows them down most.
Divinity 2 was an excellent successor of Divine Divinity from... 2000? I think.
A Diablo-esque game. Divinity 2 had a huge, more or less open world, a buttload of skills and attributes,
and you could always feel that the system rolled the dice with every attack. (also you could shapeshift into a dragon if that wasn't enough of a selling point already...)
Its "sequel" was 100% linear grindfest because you started out with all the skills already available anyway.
And while you had items from the previous part in your inventory (a stone that teleported you to the base,
and a stone that let you shift your shape) you could never use them in the game, because those parts didn't exist anymore.
Two Worlds 2 - while still fun any a very good game, it had but a splinter of its predecessors world size, and the world felt... extremely linear.
It had some tweaks like a much more awesome magic system, it had great flow and combat, but it didn't suck you in as much as the first part.
Also why would you remove the consequence for stealing from the game system?
Sneaking is a great thing and jacking all of some poor fellas retirement fond isn't much fun if you can do it right under his nose and he doesn't even pretend to care.
Let's get some closure here.
The point is: RPGs became dumber with time. This can have two reasons:
Either the developers became more lazy, or more stupid.
Or the gamers have. If you managed to read down to here, you're probably NOT part of the problem.
But unfortunately for us, the world is stupid.
More and more gamers are increasingly stupid.
And to accommodate that, developers make the games simpler, more linear, shorter, its easier to handle for some shutin who gets distracted by the view of his closest fat relative. JRPGs may have shown us that linearity works well, but even this went down the drain with FinalFantasy13.
Sad but true: not only RPGs are affected, this works for most other genres just as well.
At this point I have to congratulate Bethesda Softworks, Fallout New Vegas has not suffered from this disease that destroys quality games,
and hopefully for us, neither will Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim!!!
Thank you for reading!