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This Fall is going to be the greatest fall in the history of RPGs

Which one looks the shittest so far


  • Total voters
    232

Harthwain

Magister
Joined
Dec 13, 2019
Messages
5,413
larp, roleplay, whatever, I can have a game of chess without making up a bunch of stories about the pieces or a creating a setting for the conflict.
It is not whatever. You're confusing LARP with roleplay and emergent storytelling. When events are literally happening as a result of you playing the game, then you aren't "making up a bunch of stories". Which is - ironically enough - also what happens when you're playing a PnP RolePlaying Game at the table.
 

Urthor

Prophet
Patron
Joined
Mar 22, 2015
Messages
1,879
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
More like 2025 is going to be a very enjoyable year, after I ignore all these video games for 1 year and wait for patches to drop.
 

frajaq

Erudite
Joined
Oct 5, 2017
Messages
2,569
Location
Brazil
Surprised by the voting so far, even with how mobile-gaming Dragon Age Failguard looks, at least it looks playable, which I cant say about VTMB 2
 

Vic

Savant
Undisputed Queen of Faggotry Bethestard
Joined
Oct 24, 2018
Messages
5,760
Location
[REDACTED]
larp, roleplay, whatever, I can have a game of chess without making up a bunch of stories about the pieces or a creating a setting for the conflict.
It is not whatever. You're confusing LARP with roleplay and emergent storytelling. When events are literally happening as a result of you playing the game, then you aren't "making up a bunch of stories". Which is - ironically enough - also what happens when you're playing a PnP RolePlaying Game at the table.
I just can't take these stories seriously because I know they were just created by entropy, and the degree of player agency is really irrelevant to me, it's just how I personally feel about it. I purposefully haven't used the term "emergent storytelling" because that's not an actual thing. There's emergent gameplay but I don't think emergent storytelling has been defined yet, maybe because it's all in your head mhh
 
Joined
Jan 21, 2023
Messages
3,769
A second, interesting question, would be which one of those games will receive the 75% discount kiss of death first...
 

KeighnMcDeath

RPG Codex Boomer
Joined
Nov 23, 2016
Messages
15,420
*cough cough* LARP :lol:

no but it's cool, great that you like them
LARP is when you're pretending that something happens when it doesn't.
larp, roleplay, whatever, I can have a game of chess without making up a bunch of stories about the pieces or a creating a setting for the conflict.
well, those bishops are pretty perverse bastards, why do you think the pawns rush to die? The queen is getting fucked by the knights unbeknown to the King who is reading porn scrolls and ancient egyptian works. Only the rooks seem unaffected except they are constantly drunk and just roll over other fucks like crazy broken russian tanks. And that's just the whites! The nigga opponents are completely different. There is more drama in chess than you think.

Now Checkers! Rednecks vs niggas! The real game of the hicks. Kill the nigga before King Nig rapes them inbred hill honkeys.
 

KeighnMcDeath

RPG Codex Boomer
Joined
Nov 23, 2016
Messages
15,420
Fable was great because your char's appearance changed according to how good/evil you were based on the choices you made during the game. I think KOTOR did something similar? But it was much cooler in Fable.

Fable-vita.webp
psh, you can become evil then good then evil then good at will by doing various actions. I was really sidetracked doing that and then just killing everything.


.....one day I will 3d print a set of the checkers game. I bet it'd sell.
 

Saint_Proverbius

Administrator
Staff Member
Joined
Jun 16, 2002
Messages
14,048
Location
Behind you.
yeah I respect that, I've heard that argument many times, personally they're off putting to me knowing they've been generated by random numbers in my CPU, but that's subjective.
Not so with Kenshi. The factions will react to certain things that you do. The main example I use is that if you build too close to Holy Nation territory, they'll send envoys to hold prayer sessions in your town. If you reject this, it pisses off the Holy Nation and it lowers your reputation with that faction. Now, if you accept, and there's non-humans in your settlement, the Holy Nation will get really pissy about that. There's more to it than that, because it's possible you built in United Cities territory, so that's good, right? Well, it is for a while, but they're at war with Holy Nation, so it's entirely possible that the city closest to you gets attacked by the Holy Nation and taken over. And now you're in Holy Nation territory.

While you're doing your thing, everything else in the world is doing it's thing. You can try to ignore it and do your own thing, but things are always happening around you even if you don't notice them at first.
 

BrainMuncher

Liturgist
Joined
Jan 26, 2015
Messages
149
*cough cough* LARP :lol:

no but it's cool, great that you like them
LARP is when you're pretending that something happens when it doesn't.
larp, roleplay, whatever, I can have a game of chess without making up a bunch of stories about the pieces or a creating a setting for the conflict. It's nice to have that in RPGs to add some variety between combats, but I prefer RPGs with shorter scripts, or if they don't have story at all I can do something else in between encounters, it doesn't have to be all crammed into one game. The """critically acclaimed""" BG3 is being shat on for being too easy, while also having very strong cinematic elements to it, also all that romance and sex shit... this is a trend I don't appreciate.

It might've been BG2 that started the decline.
Narrative and player agency in games exist on a continuum. The more of one you have, the less of the other. At one extreme you have table top games, where the only real limit on player agency is imagination, even the rules of the game can be broken. Games like minecraft and civilization are near this end of the spectrum, with only minimal narrative constraints. The story is just an account of what the player chose to do, it's not LARPing it's just facts about what happened.

At the other extreme are movies and books. Where every micro detail is set in advance and the audience has no agency whatsoever. Again the story is just facts about whatever happened, the only difference is that the player has no impact on the events.

This actually applies independently to the story aspect of games and the gameplay aspect. For instance the overall plot in Diablo II is set in stone and you have no agency at all. But there is a reasonable amount of agency in how the details of the combat play out.

Similarly you could have a game with heavily scripted combat with lots of "press x to cutscene" and pre-determined characters so it always plays out pretty much the same, but with a lot of overall plot agency. I'm not really aware of any games like this but it would be possible to do. Some sort of popamole choose your own adventure.

It's probably more correct to talk about agency/constraint rather than agency/narrative, since you can have constraints on agency that aren't related to narrative. But a pre-determined narrative is by it's nature a constraint.

A game by definition has rules so you need some sort of narrative or you don't have a game. But past a certain point, the stronger the narrative, the worse the gameplay gets, until you don't have a game at all it's just a movie. That's a law of nature not an opinion.
 

Jaesun

Fabulous Ex-Moderator
Patron
Joined
May 14, 2004
Messages
37,432
Location
Seattle, WA USA
MCA Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech
Having been gone from here for several year and still getting caught up on THE NEW SHIT™ (from AAA Studios) this latest offering of RPG's is some of the most terrible shit I have ever seen. It's like what in the fuck?

Thankfully in 2024 we have indy devs making actual cRPGs. I'll just stick to that. I will however anticipate all the juicy drama that will ensue from these shit games as they release.
 

Fedora Master

STOP POSTING
Patron
Edgy
Joined
Jun 28, 2017
Messages
31,766
More like 2025 is going to be a very enjoyable year, after I ignore all these video games for 1 year and wait for patches to drop.
All these games are inherently bad because the people making them are incompetent morons. There is no fixing this.
 

Readher

Savant
Joined
Nov 11, 2018
Messages
704
Location
Poland
Surprised by the voting so far, even with how mobile-gaming Dragon Age Failguard looks, at least it looks playable, which I cant say about VTMB 2
Most of DA4 votes are probably based on the cartoony reveal trailer.
 

BrainMuncher

Liturgist
Joined
Jan 26, 2015
Messages
149
DA looks like a completely generic 3rd person cutscene heavy console hack'n'slash, completely unplayable in my eyes.

VTM seems to have micro-cutscene combat a la doom 2016. With a few canned special moves. Not ideal but at least it's first person. Looks infinitely more playable than DA. As long as there's not so much of it that it becomes a chore the combat will probably be mostly fine.

I don't know anything about fable

It actually looks like Avowed will have the best combat of the bunch. You seem to have control over your character at all times, looks like it not designed exclusively for console controllers and you aren't stuck with a shitty camera angle or constant mini cutscenes. There's a good chance it has the most variety as well.
 

Vic

Savant
Undisputed Queen of Faggotry Bethestard
Joined
Oct 24, 2018
Messages
5,760
Location
[REDACTED]
It's probably more correct to talk about agency/constraint rather than agency/narrative, since you can have constraints on agency that aren't related to narrative. But a pre-determined narrative is by it's nature a constraint.
I/we were talking about games like Dwarf Fortress, Kenshi and Crusader Kings. People call these games "story generators" because, despite not having a pre-defined narrative they generate stories through their simulation engine. All I'm saying is that for me personally these "machine generated stories" despite how much you as a player affected their creation, can't come close to even badly written drivel by a human. But that's just me (and many others :lol:)

A game by definition has rules so you need some sort of narrative or you don't have a game.
That's quite the leap in logic, are you saying there are no games without a story? Because that's not the case.

Narrative and player agency in games exist on a continuum. The more of one you have, the less of the other. At one extreme you have table top games, where the only real limit on player agency is imagination, even the rules of the game can be broken. Games like minecraft and civilization are near this end of the spectrum, with only minimal narrative constraints. The story is just an account of what the player chose to do, it's not LARPing it's just facts about what happened.
No, tabletop and Minecraft aren't the same thing at all. If you play minecraft for a few hours and then that's your story, the shit that you did in the game, by all means go ahead and call that "story" but that's not what I was talking about.
 

Nifft Batuff

Prophet
Joined
Nov 14, 2018
Messages
3,577
A game is a game only if you need to use the controller and you push push push push push push...
 

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
Sawyerite
Joined
May 29, 2010
Messages
36,707
VtmB2 looks the shittiest by virtue of it actually having a chance to be something before the original devs were booted off.
It always looked terrible and never had a chance.
https://chrisavellone.medium.com/what-the-fuck-happened-to-bloodlines-2-1ad557bf2284
I went because I wanted to help Hardsuit with the pitch, I had been working with Hardsuit for some time prior on the title, and to encourage the Paradox folks the pitch was a good idea because I knew the Paradox folks from years before. This “encouragement” was very selfish of me and in retrospect of all that was going to happen, probably kind of shitty.

Yes, selfish. Yes, shitty. Still, it wasn’t hard to rationalize. It had been so many years since the original, I wanted someone to do it, and I thought Bloodlines fans (including me) had waited long enough. I was mostly thinking of myself, though, because (surprise) I wanted to work on it in any capacity.

Translation: He knew just from looking at them they were in over their heads, but he was high on hopium.
 
Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Oct 2, 2018
Messages
19,465
Translation: He knew just from looking at them they were in over their heads, but he was high on hopium.
Still, I would've taken an even jankier game with Mitsoda, MCA and Schaffer behind it rather than whatever crap the current iteration will turn out to be. These guys are simply incapable of capturing the essence of the prior title and will just replicate the soulless state of current year WoD in video game format. And that's just settingwise, since mechanically they've already shown themselves to have no interest in trying to do an earnest mechanical adaptation of the tabletop game.
 

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
Sawyerite
Joined
May 29, 2010
Messages
36,707
These guys are simply incapable of capturing the essence of the prior title and will just replicate the soulless state of current year WoD in video game format.
A leaked video showed that one of the quests was just The Ocean House Hotel part 2. A different kind of soulless, the nostalgia photocopy sequel.
 
Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Oct 2, 2018
Messages
19,465
These guys are simply incapable of capturing the essence of the prior title and will just replicate the soulless state of current year WoD in video game format.
A leaked video showed that one of the quests was just The Ocean House Hotel part 2. A different kind of soulless, the nostalgia photocopy sequel.
Sure, but that's just a throwback gimmick. I'm more interested in the atmosphere and writing. Not only are MCA and Mitsoda miles ahead of anything these pygmies from TCR could come up with, but for the former it would've been much more of a labor of love in staying true to the spirit of the original game.
 

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
Sawyerite
Joined
May 29, 2010
Messages
36,707
Sure, but that's just a throwback gimmick. I'm more interested in the atmosphere and writing. Not only are MCA and Mitsoda miles ahead of anything these pygmies from TCR could come up with, but for the former it would've been much more of a labor of love in staying true to the spirit of the original game.
Nothing they showed looked impressive writing-wise and Avellone said Mitsoda rejected everything he submitted until Paradox decided they were just going to stop paying him for work that wasn't ever being used.
 

RaggleFraggle

Ask me about VTM
Joined
Mar 23, 2022
Messages
1,438
Vampires and urban fantasy are public domain concepts. There's nothing stopping you from making your own spiritual successors to Bloodlines. Obsessing over a decades old rotting brand name because it had one memorable game decades ago is not doing anyone favors. Vampyr sold 2 million copies over 4 years and it wasn't exactly an amazing game. There's a market for original urban fantasy games, even mediocre ones.

Make a demo with a few quests to showcase the premise, develop some interest, use kickstarter to attract investors. We need as many devs as possible doing the same thing independently to guard against failure.
 

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