General News - Why RPGs matter more than ever @ Rock Paper Shotgun

Rock Paper Shotgun explains why RPGs matter more than ever:

There and back again: why RPGs matter more than ever

So many roles, so little time

In a 2019 interview with Retronauts, inXile Entertainment founder Brian Fargo recalled what Interplay hoped to accomplish in Tales Of The Unknown: Part 1, the seminal RPG more commonly referred to by its subtitle: The Bard's Tale.

"We were trying to set a mood and build a sense of being there… that there was a world… in our own primitive way," Fargo said. "You started off in a bar; you got to walk around outside, you had to go down to the dungeons, so you felt like you were living in a world; you weren't just thrust into a wireframe dungeon and that was it."

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It wasn't until the following decade, with the surprise success of fiddly dungeon crawlers like Dark Souls, that RPGs found a way to strike the balance. Crowdfunding certainly did its part, as did the explosion of digital distribution and the proliferation of more powerful tools. Streamers and YouTubers, too, helped to popularise games like Undertale, which took familiar genre trappings and subverted them with unique and interesting choices of their own.

Meanwhile, the PC and console ecosystems came together in the 2010s, but not in the way that publishers might have expected. In recent years success has flowed out of platforms like Steam, where Divinity: Original Sin and other games like it are continually refined before being released to larger audiences on consoles. The flow has run the other way as well. Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest - classic franchises that got their start on console - have thrived on PC. In 2020, Persona 4 Golden, an enhanced version of a 12-year-old PlayStation 2 RPG, found great success on Steam, prompting Sega to announce that it was planning additional ports.

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Nice article but the writer seems to emphasize console RPGs over PC RPGs.

So just ignore me I'm tired of reading games like D:OS and Pillars of Eternity didn't get popular till they released on mainstream consoles. RPS is just another POS console site.

Yeah I'm in a bad mood right now so excuse me or don't.

I don't see that argument at all regarding console vs PC RPGs. Are you sure you read the article without a pre-conceived bias against it?

It's admittedly a very generalised overview and probably lumps too many games together for its purposes (I would make greater distinctions) but overall it seems like an honest piece wanting to generate enthusiasm for the genre. I didn't learn anything new but that's ok; it's food for thought.

One criticism I would probably make though is the general lack of coverage on the Kickstarter movement and its associated games (particularly Wasteland 2) which greatly assisted in moving the "renaissance of RPGs" (as termed in the article), forward.

Nah I'm couchpotato I'm biased against everything. It's my thing.

You sound like Marlon Brando from the "Wild One".

Hey Spud, what are you rebelling against?

Angry Potatoe: Whaddaya got?

The title is right, but inXile crappy games are a bad example of the genre.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
RPS is just another POS console site.

Huh?! This is a joke, right? … RPS is one of the most PC-centric gaming websites out there… has been since its inception.

Originally Posted by SSIGuy
Huh?! This is a joke, right? … RPS is one of the most PC-centric gaming websites out there… has been since its inception.

Yeah well I happen to disagree. Another post for Reddit's unpopular opinion again. If you want my reasons why I'm afraid we must take the discussion to the political forum.

Like so many others, I discovered these games when they made their way to console and found a mass audience.

Nuff said proves my point I win.