BobSmith101 wrote...
I could never really understand the fuss about FFVII. Maybe if I played it when it was released I probably would but I sort of went backwards from FFX my first one.
It's quite recently that Bioware have started doing the pre-gen character thing. KOTOR , well kind of but only ME and now DA2 have had true pre-gen characters and a lot of Japanese story pacing influences.
FF7 was a runaway hit, followed by Parasite Eve, both of which featured fine JRPG influences and well balanced cutscene vs gameplay systems.
The problem arose in that FF7 caused alot of people to think that it was representative of what an RPG is. Rather than recognizing it as essentially RPGLite. It seems a significant number of people decided that they wanted to be RPG players because they liked FF7.
This phenomenae became exacerbated by Bethseda. Oblivion was a fairly standard Action-Adventure game, but they marketed it as an RPG. They then followed it up with a massive campaign to convince people Fallout 3 was also an RPG. Bethseda actually hates RPGs, as can be easily observed from watching them remove anything that even remotely resembles an RPG mechanic in favor of Action-Adventure or flat out Shooter. Combine this with the FF7 crowd who thought they might be RPG players, but hate RPGs, and you get a muddled mess.
The mess is coming to fruition. You've now got a polarized population, RPG players here, people who like FF7/Oblivion/Fallout/ME2 there but actually hate RPG mechanics. Devs think the latter group is bigger and make their games to suit them.
The end result is Fable 3, Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age 2, and Fallout 3. All of them are hated by a very significant number of RPG players for being superficial at best, Two of them were roasted by the people who hate RPGs but think they like them because they were crappy games. Fallout 3 shipped 4.2 million units, but by the NPD numbers sold only around half of them before dropping off the top 10.
This isn't unexpected. The same thing happened with the RTS craze around 00. Studios decided that RTS was the future because they thought there were more sales in it, switched properties to it left and right, and studios died left and right. They could not figure out that to take advantage of a newish type of gameplay they needed to design games around that type of gameplay, not force-feed it into existing games just to have an acronym on the box.
Today, ironically, the best selling game series in history is...TB RPG (Pokemon).
So FF7 touched off a potentially newish type of game that could've sold well, studios misread it, Bethseda exacerbated it, and we're in a muddled mess with two distinctly different groups of fans facing off fighting to play the games they like. One group wants Action-Adventure, the other RPGs, the problem is the first group doesn't want the conotation of Adventure Gamer, they want RPG Player, and they want all RPGs to become Action-Adventure for some strange reason.
The whole thing could be avoided if a couple studios would quit using RPG to refer to games that aren't. If Oblivion, ME2, and Fallout 3 didn't have "RPG!!!!" on the box and Developers insisting Action-Adventure/Shooter is the new RPG, none of this would be happening.
It's when they try to make it out like only Action-Adventure/Shooters are RPGs and that everyone must conform or there's something wrong with them that it becomes a problem.
(Mind you, Bethseda goes way out of their way to antagonize RPG players. Poo-pooing them on the forums, in game characters to mock them. Bioware's no longer any better with Laidlaw claiming "This is the evolution!". It's a sure fire way to start a digital riot.)
Modifié par Gatt9, 31 mars 2011 - 07:39 .
Retour en haut
