S
Sacred_Path
Guest
After reading a lot of Codex threads and realizing the Codex is mostly about combat-centric discussions nowadays, it occured to me that for me, the most important part of RPG design is world building.
Without carefully placed items, atmospheric dialogue and a coherent setting, I won't even care about the combat system. Or puzzles. And the reason why I have a growing backlog of unplayed RPG's from indie/ middle class developers is, frankly, that their world building sucks. It's all faux-European, faux-medieval crap with generic as fuck orcs and dragons. Or else post-apocalyptic games ripping off the original Wasteland.
Nobody seems to ask themselves "why are we doing this?", or rather, the only possible answer is "to have a framework for showing off this neat feature we have". Like roguelike mechanics. Or card game battles. Or rock-paper-scissors elemental combat. The framework, the actual body of the game, is a mere vehicle to showcase a few features that are meant to set the product apart, rather than creating the product from the ground up with the goal of being unique.
Lately I've tried to approach the question "what is a RPG?" by choosing the player's perspective, as in, what motivates the player. And it seems that basically, there are two ways to pull his strings. There's the "world building RPG", where you give the player a world to immerse himself in, via exploration, dialogue or story. Bethesda games fall into this category, but also the original Fallouts, Arcanum or the Ultimas. And the other way lies the "adrenaline driven RPG", where motivation comes from the player's own heightened awareness due to monsters and traps he has to navigate around. Games that rely excessively on this kind of motivation are often sorted into subcategories of RPG's, like ARPG's or dungeon crawlers. And rightly so. Because while any proper RPG will necessarily include some squeezing of the old adrenal glands to create gameplay and drive player agency, too many other genres focus on this kind of motivation as well. It's in the little things, literally, that the RPG genre is at its most attractive, and most distinguishable. And IMO developers need to go back to giving attention to these many little things, much like Richard Garriot did during the evolution of Ultima.
Without carefully placed items, atmospheric dialogue and a coherent setting, I won't even care about the combat system. Or puzzles. And the reason why I have a growing backlog of unplayed RPG's from indie/ middle class developers is, frankly, that their world building sucks. It's all faux-European, faux-medieval crap with generic as fuck orcs and dragons. Or else post-apocalyptic games ripping off the original Wasteland.
Nobody seems to ask themselves "why are we doing this?", or rather, the only possible answer is "to have a framework for showing off this neat feature we have". Like roguelike mechanics. Or card game battles. Or rock-paper-scissors elemental combat. The framework, the actual body of the game, is a mere vehicle to showcase a few features that are meant to set the product apart, rather than creating the product from the ground up with the goal of being unique.
Lately I've tried to approach the question "what is a RPG?" by choosing the player's perspective, as in, what motivates the player. And it seems that basically, there are two ways to pull his strings. There's the "world building RPG", where you give the player a world to immerse himself in, via exploration, dialogue or story. Bethesda games fall into this category, but also the original Fallouts, Arcanum or the Ultimas. And the other way lies the "adrenaline driven RPG", where motivation comes from the player's own heightened awareness due to monsters and traps he has to navigate around. Games that rely excessively on this kind of motivation are often sorted into subcategories of RPG's, like ARPG's or dungeon crawlers. And rightly so. Because while any proper RPG will necessarily include some squeezing of the old adrenal glands to create gameplay and drive player agency, too many other genres focus on this kind of motivation as well. It's in the little things, literally, that the RPG genre is at its most attractive, and most distinguishable. And IMO developers need to go back to giving attention to these many little things, much like Richard Garriot did during the evolution of Ultima.
