General News - On the History and Future of RPGs

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PC Gamer has interviewed Brian Fargo, Josh Sawyer, and Gordon Walton on the history and future of RPGs:

Brian Fargo, Josh Sawyer, and Gordon Walton on the history and future of RPGs

Brian Fargo (Wasteland, Fallout), Josh Sawyer (New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity), and Gordon Walton (Ultima Online, Star Wars: TOR) are veterans of the videogame business and have, between them, worked on some of the most beloved RPGs ever to grace the PC. Fargo and Walton got their starts all the way back in the 1980s, and all three have more recently been at the forefront of the crowdfunded RPG renaissance: Fargo at the head of inXile Entertainment, which is currently working on Torment: Tides of Numenera and The Bard's Tale IV; Sawyer as the game director and lead designer on Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity; and Walton as the executive producer of ArtCraft's upcoming MMO Crowfall.

Instead of talking to each of them individually about their careers making RPGs, I decided to rope them together at this year's GDC and get them to talk to each other. They shared stories about how they make games and their years of experience in the industry. The resulting interview was a long talk about the past, present and future of PC RPGs. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

[... big 6 page interview ...]
More information.
 
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Get that popcorn going, this is a big article!

RPG fans have very strong opinions, so things got pretty heated in our forums and in the offsites, because, we try to read a lot of the offsites just to kind of see what people are talking about.
What? HEATED? Must be talking about that Codex place. ;)

Here's an interesting bit from Josh:
I think it’s important over time you learn how to parse through what people are saying, because their feelings are never wrong, their feelings are always valid. But they’ll say, ‘Do this,’ and it’s like, ‘Hold on, yes, I understand that you’re upset about this, but what you’re saying is not necessarily the solution,’ and so it takes some time and experience, and a lot of times it just takes a little bit of time and space for you to think about the problem, hear more people’s input on it, and then you can come to a conclusion. And it’s not the thing that the person told you to do, maybe it doesn’t make that individual person happy, but you can still make it better for everyone. Like he said, when you get more people and more feedback, you learn to parse through, ‘What’s the actual problem here? People aren’t happy, but what’s the solution?’
Sounds like he's a lot more interested in the specifics of why you aren't happy than semi-educated guesses on how to fix whatever isn't making you happy.

And another good one from Brian:
On Bard’s Tale, my crowd wanted to know exactly how saving was gonna work. ‘Am I gonna have save points? Can I save anywhere? Before battle? After battle?’ How exactly we were gonna do it. I refused to give them an answer, because I wanted to experiment with stuff. I’m not gonna be pushed into a corner early on. It’s like a political promise. I’m not making one. My social media guy is like, ‘You’ve got to do a YouTube video telling them how you’re gonna-’ I said, ‘No, I refuse, because I want to leave myself latitude to experiment. Maybe I’m gonna have you come back in ghost form. I don’t know what I’m gonna do, but I’m not gonna be forced to think about it now.’ But they think we should know all that now, and I think that’s a learning cycle that our audience is having of the imperfect science of it all.
 
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I laughed at the bit where Josh was surprised about the reaction to his naming conventions. I think he thinks he understands what players really want but his solutions indicate otherwise to me.

[rant on]
His solutions solve problems that weren't problems. I want there to be weak and strong builds. I like the extra challenge a less ideal build provides because I like distinct classes. I want to replay a combat until I find the best way to do a thing. Or try to do it an obscure way to see if I can. I want my choice of companions to matter to how I play the game - to make up for weaknesses or complement strength of my main character. I don't want it to be impossible to lose or boring to try different strategies because there's no hard failure.
[rant off]
 
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I want there to be weak and strong builds. I like the extra challenge a less ideal build provides because I like distinct classes. I want to replay a combat until I find the best way to do a thing. Or try to do it an obscure way to see if I can. I want my choice of companions to matter to how I play the game - to make up for weaknesses or complement strength of my main character. I don't want it to be impossible to lose or boring to try different strategies because there's no hard failure.

Dig it.
 
@Fluent
Thanks! Pillars got under my skin. But lesson learned and I'll make sure to pay closer
attention to warning signs. Us old school gamers were promised an infinity style game so
'huh' I guess was my reaction.

Frankly I find a lot of modern designers focused on accessibility produce bad games.
Luckily these games are easy to spot because of there focus on including elements not
usually found in better crpgs of the past. This includes things like removing bad builds or
evening out aka balancing classes to the point of blandness. Its all unnecessary because
newer games like these forget difficulty levels have existed since the beginning of gaming.
Truthfully it was very disappointing because the kickstarter promised an old school game.
 
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Josh is one lost hipster

PS Great interview
 
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What I took away from that is that they're still patching PoE :D


I wish Fargo would talk more often and in more detail about Bard's Tale IV. It feels like he has it on the back burner.
 
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I like the extra challenge a less ideal build provides because I like distinct classes. I want to replay a combat until I find the best way to do a thing. Or try to do it an obscure way to see if I can.

I also want those things, and I enjoyed PoE's combat system a lot. I don't think you can call it dumbed-down for the sake of accessibility at all -- certainly not in comparison to the D&D rulesets of the Infinity games. In fact I think a fairer criticism is that the UI was too abstruse at release to make sense to a lot of players, especially those expecting Baldur's Gate III.

The game's ending let me down with its weak reactivity and tiresome sophomore-level philosophizing, but the game system itself I find really strong, along with the world design.

I understand the desire for varying difficulty levels -- I went through the first time on "Hard", and I'm upping the difficulty to "Path of the Damned" for my expansion playthrough with a monk PC.

But why tie difficulty level to class build? I may want to play as a monk with challenging combat, while you may want to play as a monk with easy combat. There's no reason the game should cater to just one of us in that case when it's easy to make difficulty level customizable separate from class and build choice.

(Also, the game does have an OP character build, or at least it had one at release -- Cipher rolled right over everything else at that time. Again, a flaw from my point of view rather than a bonus, but the exploit was there to be discovered for those who like that sort of thing.)
 
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But why tie difficulty level to class build? I may want to play as a monk with challenging combat, while you may want to play as a monk with easy combat. There's no reason the game should cater to just one of us in that case when it's easy to make difficulty level customizable separate from class and build choice.

You've lost me here. I wasn't arguing for that at all.

I think the way easy difficulty for infinity engine games was done is good enough. For the player, the game will spawn less creatures and less challenging creatures in general. The player will also gain more hp on level up etc. That is sufficient. Now with modern story mode you can just auto-win past creatures if you want too.

I was saying why make your classes boring regardless of difficulty level for your core audience to attract new people when that new audience should really just play at an easier level until they understand combat.
 
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It depends what angle you're taking when you design your game. I get the impression that sawyer began his framework with the idea of creating balance and the abilities, skills and even characteristics of the characters then gets debated and implemented as a result of a desire to adhere to this aim.

An alternative to this is to decide what characters you want in the game, what their abilities and skills are going to be and then try and make the encounters a challenge to these abilities. Nerfing/buffing the content instead of the characters.

When people make games based off of D&D the characters are all established, the development team will know that XYZ character will have access to XYZ pre-defined skills and abilities. The prospective players know this as well. In this scenario the dev team is forced to balance the game via encounters rather than by changing characters (see Sword Coast Legends for what happens if they try changing characters).

When you produce your own IP you don't have to worry about this. Swordsman too OP at killing Goblins? Just reduce his level-up percentages. Heal spell too powerful? Increase it's cooldown time. When what you could have done was provide one encounter where physical damage was less effective, such as a shadow-like creature, then, for the next encounter have a creature that hits multiple party members at once so you can't just heal the tank every time he takes a hit, such as a group of sharpshooters.

With this method each character has their encounters where they're OP and their encounters where they're underpowered, but, playing as a party you don't notice so much but you still have to think about what's best in a challenging puzzle-like format and, for the hardcores, if someone wants to 'go solo' or other form of classic extremity, then it's going to be genuinely hard until they discover the best possible all-rounder, and they can have fun finding out.

If you go into a game knowing that the characters have been balanced, not the encounters, then it reduces both the fun of discovering what's the optimal way to play and, even on a basic level, reduces the amount of encounter to encounter varied thinking in a puzzle-solving context you have to do, and you likely end-up with a lot of people complaining about repetitive combat - not that combat is numerous, but that the numerous combat is repetitive.

Now, I do believe that a common complaint about PoEternity is that the combat is both numerous and repetitive. With IWD and BG the complaint, if there was one, was that combat was too numerous, not that it was repetitive, and it was the varied aspect of their combat which makes fans from the numerous combat, not the fact that combat is numerous. The complaint in PoE of repetitive combat is therefore the telling result of the design philosophy of Sawyer. Though this might not be entirely his fault as it's an easy mistake to make when establishing an entirely new IP and don't have set rules you have to abide by.
 
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It makes sense doesn't it. What I will say though is that there were a couple of things in the IE games that really spoiled some of the characters, such as Haste, Improved Invisibility and the like on the wizard side of things which I would have had a look at, not because they are wrong but just because they tend to make a mockery of everything else. Haste comes far too early in the wizard tree, as does mass haste when this is quite obviously a level 8 or 9 spell, for example. having this kind of spell so early on makes encounter creation exceptionally more complicated. I'd much rather see spells like these severely limited. So I think he might have had the right idea, but took a sledgehammer to the problem instead of just tweaking bits and pieces.
 
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