Hathur wrote...
Does it even matter? Are you saying that a genre needs to remain / stay the same forever, that it can never change or shift... or that a game company is forbidden from making a different type of game?
How is this idiotic argument that DA2, Mass Effect are not real RPGs even relevant? I'm a 32 year old gamer.. been playing PC games since I was 4 years old, RPGs since I was about 6 years old... I was and still am a hardcore pencil & paper Dungeons & Dragons gamer.... but I don't bemoan that video game RPGs aren't the same as they were 10 years ago or 20 years ago.... Why? Because pencil & paper rpgs have changed a lot in the 20+ years I've played them too.
At it's core, a RPG is about the characters, the story and some form of character development and / or advancement through a process of trials and challenges. How that is executed is moot... be it in a turn based method, or frenetic action flick speed..... at the end, what matters is:
1) Are the characters interesting
2) Is the story interesting
3) Are you having fun
If the answer is yes to those 3, then what else actually matters?
Rulesets DO NOT define whether or not something is a RPG or not. This whole argument is about as stupid as the D&D players who argued that 3rd edition D&D or 4th edition D&D were not true / pure D&D like AD&D was because the rulesets were "faster paced" .... the rules have NOTHING to do with whether or not something is a good RPG. Rulesets only define it something has good gameplay... but a RPG it does not make.
People argue Mass Effect isn't a RPG because it functions very much, if not entirely, like a 3rd person shooter.... once again, these people are arguing rulesets and are ignorant beyond belief. Mass Effect is every much a RPG as D&D red boxset, blue boxset, AD&D or whatever.... why? Because they are character + story driven games that focus on character development and advancement.... you are assuming the identity (or ROLEPLAYING... aka acting, aka pretending, aka make-believe) a character in a game. In this game you have some freedom to make choices on your actions, your dialogue, what equipment you carry, what type of skills you know, etc.... it is in every shape & form as much a roleplaying game as my beloved pencil & paper D&D.
Get your pretentious, arrogant, stuck up heads out of your asses and try to understand that there's infinitely more to what constitutes a roleplaying game than how the goddamn bloody stupid combat works....
"oooooh! The combat is too fast, this is no rpg!"
"oooooh! The combat is so slow and boring, this is no rpg!"
Based on everything I've seen in the demo of DA2, it fits every definition of a roleplaying game. We have:
1) A character we take control of.
2) Ability to choose what our character says (to a degree, this is afterall a video game... you want true dialogue freedom, go play a pencil & paper RPG)
3) Some degree of choice in what actions our character does
4) Ability to select what type of skills or abilities our character knows
5) Ability to advance both statistically (raising abilities & skills) and as a character through plot, & dialogue
6) Ability to choose what kind of equipment we use.
This is clearly a RPG in every sense of any other video game RPG I've ever played. If your issues are with how the combat plays out, then your issue is that of the gameplay mechanic or ruleset... NOT it as a RPG.
If you're bothered by the degree of character / story freedom you have, then you're likely not going to find appeasement until you get a few friends together around a table and learn to play a pencil & paper RPG such as Dungeons & Dragons where you have complete and total freedom to let your character do or say what he / she wishes.
ok we're about the same age, got my 8088 at about the age of 6, so we must have about the same computer gaming experiences. I don't play tabletop RPGs, so I'll leave these out of the discussion.
for me an RPG is made up (in order of necessity)
1) my character progressing according to his/her skills and my mental ability to use them, not on my skills (I roleplay the character).
2) some stat based system with regard to gear, talents etc.
3) a sufficiently interactive/deep world (I don't necessarily mean totally open ended a la Morrowind).
Ofc a *good* rpg needs more than just this, e.g. a good story, interesting characters and much more, but the these two points are what make a game an RPG to me.
with your definition, bar point 2, a basketball game would qualify as a cRPG. Nothing wrong with basketball games, but they're not RPGs. One distinction from -a gameplay perspective- being that they rely allot on player skill.
My definition is probably flawed and silvius could argue about a more tight definition but imo the distinction between using character skills and player skills is a central one.
Killing the Ogre+3 darkspawn by kitting all of them with 1 mage is skill, albeit not a demonstration of high-skill, half of those gave the demo a go did this. It's just that a hack&slash oriented combat is not promoting RP'ing. Without a proper top-down camera, while pause&issue mode is theoretically supported, in practice the game is meant to be played as a h&s.
Again, nothing wrong with h&s games, I'm gona love it when I play Diablo III but an action game with stats is not necessarily a cRPG.
Limiting choices on which parties gear-up is also a move backwards, regarding the "RPGivity" of the game.
So TLDR, I think the "problem" is purely with DA2 going the h&s route, while this franchise was supposedly about reviving the feel of old-school rpgs, something which DAO did brilliantly.
Some other people quote VO'd protagonist as a stepback, I can't agree to that, I like seeing more tech in games. However, the wheel seemed to oversimplify things. Nothing wrong with using a wheel per se, but seeing mostly 3-word sentences ("I want to be a dragon") as available options made me smile, seemed like an oversimplification.
Ofc Bioware is entitled to do whatever they want with DAII, DAIII, DAIV etc, they could make them purely action games in the fashion of PoP should they choose to but on the other hand, it's quite natural to see posts saying this is not really about going "back to the roots". After all, the DA franchise was the most promising one for reviving old-school cRPGs.
The above do not meant that DAII will be a bad game (though tbh I didn't find the demo exciting, for different reasons) but it clearly demostrates a drift towards de-RPGification. Dreamfall was an amazing game, yet it was not an adventure game, still an awesome game but an awesome action game.
A couple of things I was hoping to see in DA2,
- more interactive world (not necessarily cook my own bread, but something in that direction)
- more special mobs, each requiring its niche spell/tactic to beat (like many bgII mobs)
Again, these are not necessarily what other people wanted but these are elements I miss from older games.
Modifié par Lyssistr, 03 mars 2011 - 01:57 .
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