The Future of RPGS - - According to Urquhart and Muzyka

Dhruin

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Eurogamer has a summary of a DICE 2013 talk from Feargus Urquhart and Ray Muzyka on "the next step for RPGs". Apparently social aspects will be even more important in the future:
"You could imagine online gameplay modes in the future that could work with a single-player game, like ghosting or seeing other players' characters - being able to play with other players' characters in an asynchronous multiplayer mode - or seeing achievements," he said.
"We've had ideas at Obsidian from the standpoint of why can't you share your world map with your friends?" Urquhart remarked. "If there's different ways to play the game, good and evil, why can't you look at how your friend is doing the quests, how the world is doing the quest - how are people in America or Europe... What's the ebb and flow of that?
"We always thought it would be really interesting to - instead of having to go to a website or having to go somewhere else, it's actually in the game," he added. "I can go into the game and look at my friend's characters and then see the trinkets, see the weapons and get information about where they got that.
"It's almost like putting the water cooler into the game."
More information.
 
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Wow that article had everything that I could care less about in a CRPG.
 
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Putting the water cooler into the game?

That's the future? Ehm, ok.

Maybe these guys should consider not talking about game design in public.
 
The crisis hits: player provided/created content. You Tube style. Will ease up the production costs.
 
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I wouldn't mind that: playing a MMO-based single-player game that had optional multi-player side quests. The single player game experience would pay for the service.
 
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All of that would spoil the game greatly. Even some of the achievements shown to you by a friend would be spoilers if you didn't already know about them.

It would make sense to compare after the game, but wouldn't you or your friend uninstall it by that time? People rarely play in completely parallel fashion. So I can see no point.

Even if you need a clue, I can't see why it has to be integrated into the game, you can just Alt+Tab and google.
 
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What thee Hell is the deal with the 'beehive mentality' to everything in the last decade or so? I'm so sick of all the social media and social aspect to everything. If I want to be part of a herd, I'll go to the nearest mall and roam around with the rest of the insecure types. Is everyone that afraid do to things on their own? Do they really have to be plugged into everything 24/7/365?
Is there something wrong or odd about doing things by yourself or being alone with your thoughts and enjoying the peace and quiet? Seems like like people are terrified if they aren't joined at the hip with their posse.
 
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Looking at this from the personal point of view, is playing and interacting online with the 'community' for very long periods of time healthy? Should we all sit in chairs and socialise through a computer screen if we can instead go outside and actually see and talk to people?

I guess they are addressing those people that walk and talk with their mobile devices than individuals with real personalities.
 
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I"m not sure most teens can carry a conversation without some type of computing device. If you take away their toy, they look as if you ripped out their voicebox.
 
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I like the battle.net chat in various Blizzard games (D3, SC2 and WoW). That's about it. If the multiplayer aspect goes beyond that, it's going to cost a pile of resources that could've been spent enhancing the single player experience.

In short: I see no reason to merge the MMORPG and CRPG genres. You'd just end up with a "jack of all trades, master of none" type of game where you couldn't polish either aspect.
 
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Hate the idea. Fine for an MMO but why taint the SRPG's anymore than they already are? Sometimes I want company and sometimes I don't. Bad enough we have to be online "all the time" for some games. I had to reinstall steam and forgot to turn off the in-game notifications ... completely breaks immersion.

I mean I enjoy NPC companions in an SRPG a lot, among my favorite things as it is part of the game world. But other people? When I want that (if I want that) there are more than enough MMO style games to get it from.
 
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Damn. And this from Feargus!

I want my games to be hermetic worlds. Sanctuaries for my (and mine alone) escapism. No connections to the real world please except the one I'm using to access it.
Hell, I don't even like to talk about games I liked to my friends - I only do that to complain!
 
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They sound like two people who don't understand their player base. How depressing. Perhaps they ought to check those Skyrim sales.
 
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The quoted part of that article is pretty bad. None of that sounds remotely interesting.
 
No wonder I stopped caring about Bioware's games. Clearly their vision of RPGs diverged from mine a long time ago.
 
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this reduces a game to mechanics and kills immersion.

From another point of view why would I as a player want to reveal my inventory to a competitor whom I could make a trade with? I'd want to block this if I were a player.
 
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woah woah woahhh! You guys are all incredibly against something that's not necessarily such a horrible concept. Something that's already implemented more or less in a whole lot of games.

When I see an interesting player in a game, I'll examine them to see their armor type/stats/whatever. We do that in our everyday lives: look people up and down, make an assessment about who we think someone is. Good MMOs ( know thats a contradiction of terms for some!) have the option to look at, examine other people. I remember when I was playing Diablo III and was at the character screen, I would always pop in to see how my friends were doing by checking out their characters, where they were, and how far they'd gotten in whatever mode they were playing.

I'm not talking about having an omnipresent social media invasion in some SP game, the last thing anyone wants is some crappy Twitter/myspace/facebook nonsense popping up, or a windows saying "your friend just leveled up!" or something. But it wouldnt necessarily be a bad thing to be able to have a way to check up on friends if you'd like, and see how things are going and what theyve been up to in the context of the game world itself. We do that in the real world, I think it's not too far out to imagine that our alternate selves in the fantasy realm may have similar curiosities and relationships.

I dont necessarily think that could be deemed "the future of RPGs" any more than any new innovation or feature would, but it's something that could develop into fun and interesting feature
 
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I'm fully agaisnt it because I despise my friends.:biggrin:

Seriously I don't need that crap in my sp games. I mean it I hate playing mmo's and having other gamers in my game.:)
 
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To repost my reaction from PC-Gamer....

There's actually something fun they could do along these lines: recordings. Not flat out video recordings but recordings of player input. Just get the game's starting state then track all player input plus all the random numbers generated (if any) and record those. You could then take that file, send in the same inputs at the same time, and the game will play exactly the same way.

Make one of those recordings automatically for some of the big battles or perhaps on demand. When you finish one of those battles then you can go back and replay how it was done. Pull down one of your friends' recordings and you can watch how your friend did it. Maybe even put them both on a split screen, or have one real and one appear as a ghost.

I think that would be pretty neat for the more action oriented games. The file size shouldn't be all that big, either. Game patches could make recordings play wrong but oh well.
 
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I'm definitely not a big MMO player, last one I played more than creating a character was Asheron's Call. I've tried to start The Secret World a couple of times but can't quite muster the motivation to continue.

One of the things they were pointing to was Minecraft and NWN and I actually agree that if someone can put together a scalable persistent world that gives users actual creation capability that those two gave then it could still be interesting. In a sense it would be going back to Ultima Online I guess but the key is having meaningful DM-type tools in the hands of the community to create their own story. This isn't a new idea as MUDs and MOOs are nearly as old as video games themselves.

Alas, I suspect this requires a critical mass of creators and lack of griefers and that is unlikely to happen in most anonymous forums. So for the meantime I'm happy to buy prepackaged systems that give a good story and maybe some modding tools.
 
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