Building a Better RPG #1 @ Destructoid

But will you buy the expansion pack? :)

No.

Hows that saying go? SCrew me once, shame on you. Screw me twice, shame on me. I'm sure NWN is the perfect game for a lot of people who really just want to hack hack hack, but my problems with the gane will not be addressed in the expansion, so I see no reason to buy something I won't play or be interested in.

And I'm not exclusivly talking about nwn 2, its just the only AAA game I've bought in a long time. I skipped Oblivion and gothic 3 and the other big releases, so I'm picking on nwn 2 by default.
 
The problem with NWN2 (and other games in this regard) is simply that NWN2 has to saty within the bounds of the D&D rules. And the writing in the NWN2 has to stay within the bounds of the D&D universe.

Although, I've only had very limted PnP D&D experience, I have to admit that the campaigns I created (and the other DMs created) didn't include much of a story line, except something like this: 'there is a farmer that has lost his daugther. Go find her in that cave' or something like this: 'there is an ancient artifact in that cave there, go find it and you will get a reward'.

The PC RPG computer games are so much better than this with their lore based mythology and reasons behind the tasks (quests) you get in these games. The games, at least Bioware's and Obsidian's CRPG, have a very nice narrative structure to them, which I find very well done.

My best guess is that roqua (and others) have played games like Ultima and Wizardry from about 1985-1995 (or so) - games which gave the player much freedom in terms of what he or she could do (afaik). However, the CRPG games, based on the D&D license, do limit the player's choices a great deal.

And i think it sometimes prevents game developers from making their own kind of games...
 
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The problem with NWN2 (and other games in this regard) is simply that NWN2 has to saty within the bounds of the D&D rules. And the writing in the NWN2 has to stay within the bounds of the D&D universe.

Although, I've only had very limted PnP D&D experience, I have to admit that the campaigns I created (and the other DMs created) didn't include much of a story line, except something like this: 'there is a farmer that has lost his daugther. Go find her in that cave' or something like this: 'there is an ancient artifact in that cave there, go find it and you will get a reward'.

The PC RPG computer games are so much better than this with their lore based mythology and reasons behind the tasks (quests) you get in these games. The games, at least Bioware's and Obsidian's CRPG, have a very nice narrative structure to them, which I find very well done.

My best guess is that roqua (and others) have played games like Ultima and Wizardry from about 1985-1995 (or so) - games which gave the player much freedom in terms of what he or she could do (afaik). However, the CRPG games, based on the D&D license, do limit the player's choices a great deal.

And i think it sometimes prevents game developers from making their own kind of games...

I'm not a fan of Forgotten Relms, either and I agree with you that some used-up settings appears to limit what designers could have done to some extent.

As a side note, I came across an article "Confessions of an RPG Developer", which may appear too optimistic in this thread but very informative about the history of CRPG.
 
I disagree wholeheartedly. If they stayed within the D&D rules you'd have the combat of ToEE and the mechanics of toee, but you don't, because they didn't.

And this goes far beyond combat well into the realm of mechanics and sanity. I'll expand on just one point but there are about 25 million I could articulate. From d&d, to AD&D, to 3 and 3.5, magic users are balanced by having a set limit of spells to use, which of course are regained by resting. In NWN 2 you can rest after every fight (almost, for the overwhelming majority of them), becauses people play mages to kick ass and throw fire balls left and right like in Diablo, so all you have to do is hit a button and 2 seconds later, wha-la, all your spells back. Of course, since this is a D&D game you can't change what the spells do overly much, and you can't really change the numbers on the feats, so you have to give the warrior overpowered gear to make up for the unbalancing resting after every fight, and skew the melee numbers highly in favor of the PC if he is melee, or just a retarded magic user who hasn't figured out that he can rest after every battle. Leading to vastly underpowered enemies, and vastly overpowered PCs/NPCS, even with retarded AI.

One retarded decision that has a resounding trikle effect into every aspect of the game.

So the answer is to stick with D&D (and actual D&D), or don't stick with D&D. Stop making stupid amalgamations that don't work. A great game is a great game regardless of the setting. Look at the Realms of Arkania trilogy. What a boring setting as presented in the games. EMpty towns, only map-travel, boring, boring, boring. ANd all three games have a vaque semblance of a story as presented in game. But still, great games. Look at Darklands (eww, Germany, how unique, and absolutely zero story).

Look at the civ games, how boring of a setting and story can you get. You can't get more dry. But again, great games. Great games are great games, a great story or setting doesn't make a great game. Without the game play or a reason for game play options (like character creation and devlopment that does nothing and is not a driver to gain a level because it does nothing) don't provide the options.

So in conclusion, people need to focus on the actual gameplay if they are going to make a game because it just makes all sorts of sense to do that. You don't play a story, you play a game. The story is to improve the game, just like setting, or graphics, but without having a good game, you are left with a good story, setting, and graphics, all three of which are not interactive and not fun to play and would be better off being a movie.
 
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...all you have to do is hit a button and 2 seconds later, wha-la, all your spells back.
That's a good point. It's hard to balance magic.

Baldur's Gate 2 and Icewind Dale are good examples. Magic users were more powerful in BG2 while magic weapons were more powerful in Icewind Dale. Neither system was balanced well enough, though. The rules seemed fine until you squared off against a powerful mage. Then they had to be tweaked, granting him a significant edge. Otherwise, he didn't stand a chance against a typical party.

There's no shortage of opinions about the way magic should work, either. In the late '70s some guys over at Caltech's computer club came up with their own system for D&D, and some of us used to play over there. Despite the fact that they were quite obviously brilliant, it soon became clear that their rules, and their rules for magic in particular, were no better than the original ones.

Apparently, it's not easy to balance these games and especially magic.
 
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That's a good point. It's hard to balance magic.

Baldur's Gate 2 and Icewind Dale are good examples. Magic users were more powerful in BG2 while magic weapons were more powerful in Icewind Dale. Neither system was balanced well enough, though. The rules seemed fine until you squared off against a powerful mage. Then they had to be tweaked, granting him a significant edge. Otherwise, he didn't stand a chance against a typical party.

There's no shortage of opinions about the way magic should work, either. In the late '70s some guys over at Caltech's computer club came up with their own system for D&D, and some of us used to play over there. Despite the fact that they were quite obviously brilliant, it soon became clear that their rules, and their rules for magic in particular, were no better than the original ones.

Apparently, it's not easy to balance these games and especially magic.

Well, you can balance by numbers or by other ways, such as making a class weak against this and strong against that, etc. Or balance through imbalance.

And there are millions of magic systems in rpgs, from Ars Magica, to shek-pvar in Harn, to a magic system I think is brilliant in the new LotR RPG (not Merp), that is low magic and makes magical spells a rare(er) use, pull out in an emergency, type ability.

The problem isn't lack of ideas, I believe its two-fold. Most game devs would rather be movie devs, and the second problem being us, the consumer. We don't buy good games, and we buy crappy games. NWN 2 is so easy because the people that buy it want an easy game. Find one review that critiques the game for being way too easy or having horrible, retardly easy combat, and a meaningless chardev system (due to the overall ease of the game itself). You won't, because people eaither like it that way or they are so used to not having any sort of challenge provided by a game that they don't notice.

It doesn't matter, its still our fault for being retarded monkeys that buy crap which causes more crap to be made and bought because we'll buy it and love it. This genre is basically dead because we suck. We are stupid and we suck very badly, and because we are stupid and suck, our games are stupid and suck. Theres your answer right there if you want to get down to the nitty-grit. Sure, we don't want to take responsibility for actually being fans of the wrong genre, or liking games geared to the learning curve of retarded three year olds with parkingsons disease and a bad twitch, and base the games value on superficial presentation that would capture the attention of the same three year old, but thats where we are as a community and =thats who our games are designed for.

I'm not saying I'm better, thats why i used "we." I tried Dwarf Fortress a bunch of times, and never got through the map creation screen. This game is supposed to be great, but the fact that it takes 30 minutes to generate a map in ascii graphics really pisses me off. Its an insult of the highest order and it makes me turn angry and smash things, like the same retarded three year old we all resemble. So, I'm losing out on whats supposed to be a great game over something that chalks up to nonsense. But thats how it is, and this is where we are. Thank God for the Indie developers.
 
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