Prime Junta
RPGCodex' Little BRO
- Joined
- October 19, 2006
- Messages
- 8,540
I've just gotten back into NWN2, and it's... decent.
I recently played Jade Empire, and it was... OK.
I played a bunch of NWN1 premium modules (WCoC, DoD, that pirate thingy), and they were... well, nice.
I replayed Fallout, and it was three parts brilliant, one part annoying, tedious, and frustrating. And it engaged my imagination just like I remembered it.
Not too long ago, I played Planescape: Torment. To misquote someone else, it was like swimming laps in a cesspool with a shot of heroin at each end. By now, I've mostly forgotten about the cesspool, but am still jonesing for the heroin.
Thing is, over the past couple of years, a few games have grabbed my imagination by the short-and-curlies the same way that Fallout and PS:T did. Only one was a cRPG's, and that one used a first/third person perspective and combat mechanics -- and would have been a much better game had these things been done better.
There's Rome: Total Realism.
There's S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
There's The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay.
And there's Vampire: The Masquerade -- Bloodlines.
Now I'm seriously looking forward to Bioshock, considering Overlord, probably going to buy Crysis once that's out.
What's more, after these games, the classic RPG mechanic of top-down view and abstract combat feels tedious and stale. At the gameplay level, I want either solid, adrenaline-pumping first-person action, or solid, intelligent tactical gaming, I don't care if it's real-time or turn-based.
However, that's not enough. The thing that grabs my imagination is the illusion of choice: the feeling that I, the player, can make choices that genuinely affect the storyline and the world around me, and that I care about the world and the storyline enough that the consequences matter to me.
Half-Life 2, DOOM 3, and Far Cry didn't really do that much for me because they were basically corridor shooters -- a glorified obstacle course. Butcher Bay did, because it had genuinely memorable characters that adjusted their attitudes to you depending on what you did -- even if the actual storyline was just about as linear.
The other games on the list were more and more open, down to Rome: Total Realism that had no characters at all but an intricate, unbelievably detailed world that my choices molded into one form or another.
This feeling is what I look for in cRPG's -- because it was the genre willing to concentrate on content over fancy explosions.
However, lately there have been non-RPG's that have the same kick, without RPG mechanics, but with more intense gameplay. And a wider appeal to boot.
So, are RPG's dead? If so, will the things that made RPG's great seep through into other genres? If NWN2 was the last, great top-down RTwP spreadsheet-tweakin' monty-haulin' cRPG, will the gaming world be worse for it?
A while back I would have lamented their passing. Now I'm not so sure.
I recently played Jade Empire, and it was... OK.
I played a bunch of NWN1 premium modules (WCoC, DoD, that pirate thingy), and they were... well, nice.
I replayed Fallout, and it was three parts brilliant, one part annoying, tedious, and frustrating. And it engaged my imagination just like I remembered it.
Not too long ago, I played Planescape: Torment. To misquote someone else, it was like swimming laps in a cesspool with a shot of heroin at each end. By now, I've mostly forgotten about the cesspool, but am still jonesing for the heroin.
Thing is, over the past couple of years, a few games have grabbed my imagination by the short-and-curlies the same way that Fallout and PS:T did. Only one was a cRPG's, and that one used a first/third person perspective and combat mechanics -- and would have been a much better game had these things been done better.
There's Rome: Total Realism.
There's S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
There's The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay.
And there's Vampire: The Masquerade -- Bloodlines.
Now I'm seriously looking forward to Bioshock, considering Overlord, probably going to buy Crysis once that's out.
What's more, after these games, the classic RPG mechanic of top-down view and abstract combat feels tedious and stale. At the gameplay level, I want either solid, adrenaline-pumping first-person action, or solid, intelligent tactical gaming, I don't care if it's real-time or turn-based.
However, that's not enough. The thing that grabs my imagination is the illusion of choice: the feeling that I, the player, can make choices that genuinely affect the storyline and the world around me, and that I care about the world and the storyline enough that the consequences matter to me.
Half-Life 2, DOOM 3, and Far Cry didn't really do that much for me because they were basically corridor shooters -- a glorified obstacle course. Butcher Bay did, because it had genuinely memorable characters that adjusted their attitudes to you depending on what you did -- even if the actual storyline was just about as linear.
The other games on the list were more and more open, down to Rome: Total Realism that had no characters at all but an intricate, unbelievably detailed world that my choices molded into one form or another.
This feeling is what I look for in cRPG's -- because it was the genre willing to concentrate on content over fancy explosions.
However, lately there have been non-RPG's that have the same kick, without RPG mechanics, but with more intense gameplay. And a wider appeal to boot.
So, are RPG's dead? If so, will the things that made RPG's great seep through into other genres? If NWN2 was the last, great top-down RTwP spreadsheet-tweakin' monty-haulin' cRPG, will the gaming world be worse for it?
A while back I would have lamented their passing. Now I'm not so sure.
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2006
- Messages
- 8,540