Ragabul the Ontarah wrote...
I"m gonna go with "Bioware RPG" as their games apart from maybe BG2 have never really fit the standard definition of an old-school RPG. They've always tweaked something or more like somethings. And what do I mean by "Bioware RPG?" Well it'll be something that places strong emphasis on building and maintaining relationships with companions including romances. It'll be something that tries to give you deeper, more thought provoking morality choices that differ from standard good and evil.
Bioware uses the term "Story-Based Gaming" to describe what they do, and I think it's a pretty accurate term.
"RPG" (Roleplaying Game) has always had two or three meanings in the game community, and the problem is that they're not infrequently at odds with each other. What some people here are calling "old school RPG gaming" in the Baldur's Gate tradition gets a lot of its inspiration from P&P gaming, where you have a group of people sitting around with a game master that can adapt and improvise on the adventure in progress. This provides a very free-form gaming experience that allows players to feel that they're in a simulated world and can choose to do "whatever they want." Related but along similar lines is the "game mechanics" view of RPGs, where having a pile of stat-based character creation and build options to play with is considered an important if not defining aspect of an RPG.
The problem with overattachment to both of those approaches, it seems to me, is that they don't necessarily translate well to Computer-Based Gaming in general or to
Story-Based Computer Gaming in particular. Arguably P&P gaming was never about telling a
story in the true sense of the word. It was more about a group of people getting together in a structured and cooperative fantasy about having an adventure. For an effective story, by contrast, you need a tight and coherent plot to give the narrative a sense of drama and purpose, and you need to make the player experience conform to the needs of that plot. This kind of experience isn't really compatible with the old-school "sandbox" style desire to be able to "go anywhere and do anything I want," and it's not enhanced very much by having an overabundance of build, race, and origin options.
That's why I see these "old-school" RPG elements getting less of a focus as time goes on, especially for
story-based computer gaming. For that, I see a third aspect of RP play coming to be of greater importance: what I'd loosely call
Agency-Based RPG story design. Roleplay requires the player to have and be able to make effective choices; but in an interactive story that RP has to be integrated with and subservient to the plot and the needs of the drama. So you have to design a kind of "meta-plot," with
purpose-driven variations and choices within it that all move events along parallel threads within that overall plot.
Whether Bioware is thinking about the evolution of story-based gaming in similar terms, I have no idea. But I do think it's important to note that such an approach does leave it open for elements and interests of story and drama to drive RP and player choice, rather than the other way around. Speaking personally, I like and prefer the "story-focused" approach to gaming, and it's one of the reasons why I like Bioware games as much as I do.
Modifié par AndarianTD, 28 juillet 2010 - 07:28 .
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