Druin,
I disagree about DX - for me, it was a fantastic game
That's fine. I'm not a fan of FPS games. I burned out on them with Unreal. Too shallow for me. They had some appeal for me back in the days when RPGs and Wargames were using mostly static graphics or at best crudely animated sprites, but there's nothing a shooter can do that I can't have in a better game genre. My opinion, of course
... and I can't see any relationship between it and the decline of the genre.
Maybe you weren't around the industry back then? Warren Spector was the second coming of Christ for a while there. And it was while a lot of the big PC game makers were getting bought out or failing, or both. The old ways of making RPGs got abandoned, and Deus Ex was hyped as at least one of the new ways. It had an impact.
By the way, the one game company that didn't abandon its recipe is Bethesda. I'm not a Bethesda fan and never have been, but recent RPGs have been so bad that Oblivion and Fallout 3 are actually amongst my favorite games in recent years. Which is pretty sad, since I was huge critic of every game Bethesda made from Arena to Morrowind.
It was a continuation of the work and concepts developed by Looking Glass, which started a long time before.
No, I don't think it was. I loved Ultima Underworld. I loved System Shock. I did not love Deus Ex. In fact, I couldn't even force myself to finish Deus Ex.
And, as I ask in the newsbit: where are all the copy-cats? If DX started the decline of the genre, why are shooter/RPGs relatively rare?
Because Deus Ex failed. It was over-hyped, and didn't meet expectations and surplus copies of the game were in the bargain bins in a matter of weeks. And that happened even though virtually every reviewer gave it a spectacular review... teh whole Second Coming and all that, don't you know
I think Warren Spector was the last of the industry's "Golden Boys" too! A lot of em crashed and burned in quick succession, for a while there. I can't really explain why so many bad games get good reviews, these days. Could be it's just a money thing, eh? But at least once in a while they give a score less than 90 for a major release.
As for separating and comparing specific elements (not the best shooter, not the best RPG) ignores the possibility the combination brings something unique. A good shooter/RPG takes the excitement of a shooter and adds welcome depth.
I agree. That has some appeal, for fans of shooters. It doesn't have much appeal for fans of RPGs, though
And I would still argue that it better be a good shooter at its core, and not a mediocre shooter with stats and dialog.
Finally, I knew the inclusion of some games (Vampire: Bloodlines) would be controversial but - trust me - if I'd left it out, someone would complain. And someone out there thinks Bloodlines isn't a genuine RPG and wastes the PnP ruleset potential with shooter mechanics.
Well, everyone has their own definition of "genuine RPG". What I object to is games that don't even make more than a token effort to include RPG elements being called RPGs.
By the way, I saw on Warren Spector's wiki that he was playing Ogre and GEV back in the late 1970s. I'm younger than him, but I was too! You know what those games were? A little fold out paper hex map with cardboard counters and about a 10 page mimeographed manual. You think that was the kind of game that the typical teenager or young adult was playing, back then? How did Warren Spector go from making games that interested him and that he would want to play, to making games that he thought he could sell a lot of copies of? Every game developer seems to make that mistake, and they never learn from it. It seems bizarre to me that people would try to use their creative talents in the pursuit of something that didn't even hold any interest for them, and think they'd come up with anything good that way.