Decline What killed off oldschool RPGs?

[ilitarist]

Ah yes, that painting. It's like a joke on her name and her own head looking severed.

I am not comparing EA to Monet. More like Skyrim to Elvis Presley. I don't like Elvis. I also know that if aliens come and ask for our best artist I'll give them Elvis and not Arjen Lucassen I'd rather listen to. Humanity is the only measuring tool we can call objective. If people want Skyrim and Elvis then this is what works for human nature. If you claim any objectivity you can only use global popularity as a measurement, otherwise it looks like blaming human nature and reality itself for not conforming to your wants.

Still you make an interesting point. This talk about Bethesda and Bioware selling out sounds like a conspiracy to me. Akin to saying candy companies sell out by selling unhealthy sweets full of sugar. They always had a goal of creating something interesting to them compromising with what people want. They still do stuff that they want even when public doesn't appreciate it, they still have some artistic integrity. If you want some example of engineered hyped projects then you have plenty of movies and games people buy and instantly forget. Like half of current Marvel movies coming packaged with movies that people actually care about. Ant-man, Thief 2014 and King's Bounty Dark Sides are what you want to compare to Klimt's commercial works. Those things clearly had a lot of talented people involved but still came out like mediocre forgettable distractions, and even then it's not a crime to enjoy them a little. Still no one remembers them now and that's a good measure for me even if they made a lot of money (though only Ant-man did probably). Even if BioWare and Bethesda had sold out at some point people are still discussing and replaying their games from 10 years ago and producing mods for them. Those masses didn't just sheepishly consumed what they were given, they enjoyed and embraced it the same way you were touched by, I don't know, Planescape or Arcanum or whatever is a good artful RPG for you. Here we aren't talking about you liking sincere works of Klimt against his commercial work that plebs consume, we're talking about you liking Klimt while people like, say, Aivazovsky who is able to produce the same cool sea painting each week. Both are recorded in history, but Aivazovsky was able to do great art that sells.

The point is all those modern games do not appeal to you personally. Let us even assume that is because of your personal sophisticated tastes, no nostalgia involved. Even then I'd say it's not that much about quality but about focus. Whatever older classic RPG you bring to the table I'm pretty sure its writing is not stellar, amount of content is not that great, UI is terrible and gameplay is unbalanced and simplistic. And there I don't even talk about things that are made easier by progress like graphics and sound - but it's not like you have to ignore those things when ignoring, you don't drive cars from 1950's saying that their characteristics where good for their times. There's some unique merit in older games but a lot of it is replicated in newer titles and a lot of it was due to, so to say, special requirements, similar to how people can be nostalgic about old arcade machines specifically designed to extort your money with unfair difficulty. And a lot of it is misunderstood: Wasteland/Fallout world wasn't great because it was postapocalyptic, it was great because it was special and original. But as you well know we get lots of Fallout clones who just try to make the same game, just like every fantasy novel tries to duplicate Tolkien's success forgetting that his success was due to creating something absolutely novel instead of copying something. Thus it's very tempting to deduce that love for classic games is more of an attempt to replicate a feeling of childish wonder you feel when you don't yet know that those games you're playing aren't perfect simulation of alien worlds.

 

[Grauken]

To shorten your wall of text somewhat

bla bla objectivity by popularity bla bla

bla bla there are people that enjoyed Bioware and Bethesda games and still remember them, hence they are great art bla bla

bla bla unfounded and plain retarded assumptions about old games regarding writing, amount of content, gameplay and UIs bla bla

Conclusion >> ilitarist is a dumbfuck of the highest order

 

[Morkar Left]

The success of TES exists because of the deep lore, artstyle and freedom of Morrowind. This came together with an extensive and well thought out modding tool and a console port. The reason TES and Fallout are still successfull today is because of these fundamental pillars. There isn't anything else going for it.

Morrowind was released in 2002. That means there was no real advancement of gameplay in 16 years. The only things mentionable would be the conversion from statsbased hitting chances to full realtime combat, horse riding, the engine port to the fallout universe and some construction minigame in F4. The thing not really mentionable would be the upgrading of the engine to meet some basic AAA standards at the time of release. Basically everything else got dumped down for it.

TES definitely has its merits as a game series to belong to the top. But these merits are way behind of its time and they are resting on them for over a decade now without the will to go back to these. I think that's mostly because there is no competition. Had Witcher 3 similar modding tools and freedom of char gen / story they would have been finished by now.

 

[ilitarist]

TES was initially successful because of the freedom, the road to Fallout 4 started with Morrowind that severely limited options compared to Daggerfall but made the game less of an insane kitchensink of barely working ideas.

There were also experiments with AI but in the end they became less ambitious about it after Oblivion. Also Oblivion/Fallout 3 added minigames to the formula which could be expanded but it never became a worthwhile part of any game. Modern Deus Ex games managed to add an ok puzzle as a hacking minigame and they have a progression system very similar to Skyrim so it's not like they couldn't do it. Fallout 4 looks much more like an adequate shooter at least compared to Fallout 3 where gameplay was extremely shallow. Skyrim had more diverse combat magic then previous games but less non-combat spells.

Yes, not a lot of progress on that front, most of the work went into aesthetics, especially in Skyrim. Kingdom Come is described as Skyrim without magic so maybe this will add some diversity but that remains to be seen.

 

[Roguey]

Morrowind was released in 2002. That means there was no real advancement of gameplay in 16 years. The only things mentionable would be the conversion from statsbased hitting chances to full realtime combat, horse riding, the engine port to the fallout universe and some construction minigame in F4.

Bethesda have been refining the gameplay for the mass market with each release. I like Skyrim more than Oblivion more than Morrowind.

 

[Morkar Left]

Morrowind was released in 2002. That means there was no real advancement of gameplay in 16 years. The only things mentionable would be the conversion from statsbased hitting chances to full realtime combat, horse riding, the engine port to the fallout universe and some construction minigame in F4.

Bethesda have been refining the gameplay for the mass market with each release. I like Skyrim more than Oblivion more than Morrowind.

So what? That just makes you part of the problem...

 

[Roguey]

So waht? That just makes you part of the problem...

My individual preferences are minuscule compared to the tens of millions of people who bought Skyrim but don't particularly care for other RPGs.

 

[Morkar Left]

who bought Skyrim but don't particularly care for other RPGs.

yes, they don't care for oldschool rpgs. They probably never did. Which suits my points already made in this thread before. But this has nothing to do with Bethesda dumping down rpgs in general. Their sales come from marketing and lack of alternatives. Their market share is huge open world in 3d realtime with freely customizable char gen and huge modding potential. There are no other rpgs which tap that. And that was already established in Morrowind, if you take out modding - which you shouldn't, it's a big part of selling the game - it was already established in TES2.

 

[CryptRat]

yes, they don't care for oldschool rpgs. They probably never did.

Unfortunately some of them used to and don't anymore. Some of my old friends used to like the RPGs available when we were children but from then they have almost only played Bethesda stuff or social networks like Diablo 2, Neverwinter Nights and MMOs, think that every Bethesda game is 10/10 GOTY and don't expect anything else. It's the reason why my answer to topic's question is "Diablo", it's when my own taste started to differ regarding games labelled as RPGs from the taste of the majority of players playing the games. New players are the main reason, by a margin, but some players shifted, embraced the decline, too, you can't totally ignore those traitors .

 

[frajaq]

Oldschool RPGs were killed off because they always feel absolutely horrible to play

 

[Egosphere]

Ah yes, that painting. It's like a joke on her name and her own head looking severed.

I am not comparing EA to Monet. More like Skyrim to Elvis Presley. I don't like Elvis. I also know that if aliens come and ask for our best artist I'll give them Elvis and not Arjen Lucassen I'd rather listen to. Humanity is the only measuring tool we can call objective. If people want Skyrim and Elvis then this is what works for human nature. If you claim any objectivity you can only use global popularity as a measurement, otherwise it looks like blaming human nature and reality itself for not conforming to your wants.

Average iq on our planet is estimated to be 86. Stellar works of art like The Da Vinci Code, Hunger Games, Fifty Shades of Grey are among the highest selling books / book-series of all time. Call of Duty and Ass Creed both have over 100 million in sales and are in the top 15 or thereabouts.

Still you make an interesting point. This talk about Bethesda and Bioware selling out sounds like a conspiracy to me. Akin to saying candy companies sell out by selling unhealthy sweets full of sugar.

cRPG is a niche market, as are ( were ) many sub-genres across gaming. As a dev, you either make a game for a specific audience, or you appeal to the average player. The average player has zero interest in how many ways you can solve a quest, or how well the dialogue is written, or how many sliders there are on the character creation screen. We know what the average player wants - Call of Duty, Assassins Creed, GTA, Battlefield, Halo. They're the (western) game series that have sold the best. So the companies jettison the unique elements and style of their work in favour of mass appeal. To take your food analogy - the dev goes from being a small restaurant specializing in the cuisine of some exotic country to being a mcdonald's.

Whatever older classic RPG you bring to the table I'm pretty sure its writing is not stellar,

This guy, despite being an obnoxious leftist, meticulously dismantles your argument. Start at 3:39 because the video is utter shit before that. Or 27:40 if you want to jump straight to Fallout 1 comparison:

 

[undecaf]

What killed off oldschool RPGs?

Greed and ignorance.

 

[ilitarist]

Egosphere, you need to censor the review you link to? Funny.

Fallout 1 writing isn't good. It has a powerful intro and that's about it. Even New Vegas is better and it has a lot of problems too.

By the way it's funny about how the guy talks about the casino thing. Which was changed from an interesting idea of making Gizmo good for town and Killian bad for town to a dumb straightforward black & white story. Aren't you disgusted by those developers sacrificing their artistic integrity for the idiotic masses? And oh well, rest of the video is mostly talking about how Fallout 3 is not the same as Fallout 1, you could make a vice versa video shitting over Fallout 1. It would be very easy to get screens of bad Fallout 1 dialogues and compare them to okay-ish Fallout 3 ones.

Average iq on our planet is estimated to be 86. Stellar works of art like The Da Vinci Code, Hunger Games, Fifty Shades of Grey are among the highest selling books / book-series of all time. Call of Duty and Ass Creed both have over 100 million in sales and are in the top 15 or thereabouts.

Here's a quote from review of Star Wars from a Soviet Newspaper back from 1977:
"Massculture-77
This summer met a new wave of movie-insanity in American cinemas. Press sources say, a new film by American director George Lucas “War of Stars” (the original title was translated into Russian like that) is smashing box office records: $60 million in its first month of screening. "
(...)
"In a few weeks a new part of the “War of Stars” will be released (they are talking about Holiday Special). Probably, the movie will be as mediocre as profitable. And this is hardly a surprise. Mass audience will take the bait on such example of "art”. After the screening they will get up and will understand - they feel a lot safer in the real world…"

You could argue Star Wars is just a thing for dumb people made for profit back in 1997. Ten years later when everybody saw it's still a part of culture and doesn't go anywhere you couldn't do that. All the DaVinci Codes and stuff you're talking about are already forgotten. The premise about mainstream being dumb by definition is false, you can only catch people's attention for a very short time if the product isn't worth it. People forget all the things you mentioned and still remember and quote Citizen Kane or Dark Knight or whatever film had a similar commercial success. People do remember Iliad and Don Quixote. Back when Dumas wrote people thought he won't remain in history and instead some less popular elite authors will be remembered, but they weren't because they had little appeal besides being not mainstream. We remember few anti-mainstream movements in history not because they were anti-mainstream but because they've created something new.

By default something being not mainstream doesn't mean it's good anymore than punk teen is more original than his boring peers.

We know what the average player wants - Call of Duty, Assassins Creed, GTA, Battlefield, Halo.

It's as strawman as it gets. You know what sells. People buy these games not because they're dumb and those games are simple. They do it because those games are much closer to what those games are trying to achieve than almost any RPG. The simplicity means less opportunities for screwing it up. RPG and other complex genres require you to willingly accept you're going to get an inherently inferior product. The best RPG is farther from platonic ideal of RPG than any mediocre shooter is from perfect shooter.

 

[CryptRat]

Fallout 1 writing isn't good.

 

[Morkar Left]

yes, they don't care for oldschool rpgs. They probably never did.

Unfortunately some of them used to and don't anymore. Some of my old friends used to like the RPGs available when we were children but from then they have almost only played Bethesda stuff or social networks like Diablo 2, Neverwinter Nights and MMOs, think that every Bethesda game is 10/10 GOTY and don't expect anything else. It's the reason why my answer to topic's question is "Diablo", it's when my own taste started to differ regarding games labelled as RPGs from the taste of the majority of players playing the games. New players are the main reason, by a margin, but some players shifted, embraced the decline, too, you can't totally ignore those traitors .

Yeah, but that's why I have the opinion they weren't too much in oldschool rpgs in general or at least they valued some aspects which aren't that much core rpg mechanics or only a part of it. Nothing wrong with it but that's why oldschool rpgs died.

 

[Lilura]

Fallout 1 writing isn't good.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Fallout 1 writing isn't good.

the correct answer to that question is 'Arcanum', better luck next time.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

the correct answer to that question is 'Realms of Arkania HD', better luck next time.

I'll be there to remind you lot, don't worry.

 

[Egosphere]

Egosphere, you need to censor the review you link to? Funny.

Here's the dataset https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZWUx5bzBWZ1BuMUk/view
James Thompson started the discussion on his twitter. You can check his column at unz if you want.

Fallout 1 writing isn't good. It has a powerful intro and that's about it. Even New Vegas is better and it has a lot of problems

That's a very cogent argument.

By the way it's funny about how the guy talks about the casino thing. Which was changed from an interesting idea of making Gizmo good for town and Killian bad for town to a dumb straightforward black & white story. Aren't you disgusted by those developers sacrificing their artistic integrity for the idiotic masses? And oh well, rest of the video is mostly talking about how Fallout 3 is not the same as Fallout 1, you could make a vice versa video shitting over Fallout 1. It would be very easy to get screens of bad Fallout 1 dialogues and compare them to okay-ish Fallout 3 ones.

It talks about the writing in Fallout 3 being dumb as fuck for the majority of the video. The shallow main plot, the character's threadbare motivations etc. But yeah, let's discard all that because why not?

Here's a quote from review of Star Wars from a Soviet Newspaper back from 1977:

It's as strawman as it gets. You know what sells. People buy these games not because they're dumb and those games are simple. They do it because those games are much closer to what those games are trying to achieve than almost any RPG.

Hold L2, tap R2. The platonic ideal they strive for is inducing a vegetative state.

 

[undecaf]

Fallout 1 writing isn't good.

There is a point in what he says even if it might not be the point he intends. The writing in Fallout, when looked at in isolation, isn't really all that spectacular (and it doesn't need to be anything but serviceable). Writing's not what made the early Fallouts so revered, that's some new age faggot bullshit largely from people who got their experience from the Wiki after tasting Bethesda's offal and only know the word "lore". Fallout was always a sum of its parts, storytelling+playeragency+gameplay, to take any individual aspect out by itself and praise it as "the reason" is a fools errand.

 

[CryptRat]

Of course writing alone is not what makes Fallout good, how could it be? Still writing in Fallout is particularly good, its setting, plot, tone and dialogues works well, the short atmospheric descriptive texts too, the story is an investigation one which is what you want in this kind of game so that you can explore in different directions, doing side stuff while still investigating, it does not rely on checkpoints, the locations and overall world are cool and quests are well interconnected, it has a good dose of "the story is what you do", there are a couple of possible deaths outside combat, the combat texts are cool, the "diplomatic" approach to quests often feels right, in the writing as in other departments it feels much more P&P-ish than many games, it's about the pinnacle of writing as far as I'm concerned, one million times better than any so-called "emotionally engaging" writing.

 

[ilitarist]

Yeah, it may very well be. As in the most important, the most genre-defining. Doesn't make the fact that you get primitive dialogue or moments the only choice is some dumb joke or most characters being non-characters.

Also what undecaf said. You can find plenty of games that do some part of Fallout 1 better than it. Obviously any modern RPG can easily have better graphics and better UI and better balance, not so easily you can get better writing, music, even worldbuilding. Some games do *everything* better than Fallout but then they add a lot of shit to the formula - most modern RPGs want to be 40 hours of gameplay with up to 100 hours for completionist while Fallout 1 is 20 for completionist. Even Fallout 2 is like that - it's everything that Fallout 1 has plus some good stuff plus some shit.

Still it doesn't mean I would recommend it to play today to a person who is not versed well in RPGs.

 

[ilitarist]

It talks about the writing in Fallout 3 being dumb as fuck for the majority of the video. The shallow main plot, the character's threadbare motivations etc. But yeah, let's discard all that because why not?

You brought this video in response to me talking about older games having problems with writing. If you wanted to tell me instead that some modern game has a problem with writing then me quoting Soviet newspaper was even more appropriate than I thought.

 

[vivec]

Morrowind was released in 2002. That means there was no real advancement of gameplay in 16 years. The only things mentionable would be the conversion from statsbased hitting chances to full realtime combat, horse riding, the engine port to the fallout universe and some construction minigame in F4.

Bethesda have been refining the gameplay for the mass market with each release. I like Skyrim more than Oblivion more than Morrowind.

And by that you mean *only* and *only* combat. Not the RP system, not the exploration and certainly not the quest design.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

I am not comparing EA to Monet. More like Skyrim to Elvis Presley. I don't like Elvis. I also know that if aliens come and ask for our best artist I'll give them Elvis and not Arjen Lucassen I'd rather listen to. Humanity is the only measuring tool we can call objective. If people want Skyrim and Elvis then this is what works for human nature. If you claim any objectivity you can only use global popularity as a measurement, otherwise it looks like blaming human nature and reality itself for not conforming to your wants.

If you can only use popularity as a measurement then you have surrendered your own judgment. I don't think anyone sincerely believes that the best-selling thing is necessarily the best thing. If by like Elvis you mean that they achieve more commercial success than the superior musicians whose songs they stole and then toned down, all because of superior packaging--handsome white boy sells better in the '50s than old black bluesman dude--I'd say you have a point, although Pat Boone is a better analogy. But I suspect that's not the point you were trying to make.

And yes, I am precisely arguing that developers have a choice between designing a product for the greatest possible mass appeal and designing a product for a more rarefied audience. I'm not saying the masses are uneducated sheep who've been brainwashed by large publishers. Casuals know what they want--it's just that what they want is bad. This is inherent in the concept of taste. Most people do not have good taste. I don't think that's a fixable problem and I do indeed bemoan the fact that I'm hostage to these savages, as educated men have done since time immemorial.

You are being unfair to Aivazovsky. Bethesda games are more like Thomas Kinkade paintings: very popular in middle America, but if you go to art school you will be laughed out of the room for saying you like this stuff, with good reason.

The point is all those modern games do not appeal to you personally. Let us even assume that is because of your personal sophisticated tastes, no nostalgia involved. Even then I'd say it's not that much about quality but about focus. Whatever older classic RPG you bring to the table I'm pretty sure its writing is not stellar, amount of content is not that great, UI is terrible and gameplay is unbalanced and simplistic. And there I don't even talk about things that are made easier by progress like graphics and sound - but it's not like you have to ignore those things when ignoring, you don't drive cars from 1950's saying that their characteristics where good for their times. There's some unique merit in older games but a lot of it is replicated in newer titles and a lot of it was due to, so to say, special requirements, similar to how people can be nostalgic about old arcade machines specifically designed to extort your money with unfair difficulty. And a lot of it is misunderstood: Wasteland/Fallout world wasn't great because it was postapocalyptic, it was great because it was special and original. But as you well know we get lots of Fallout clones who just try to make the same game, just like every fantasy novel tries to duplicate Tolkien's success forgetting that his success was due to creating something absolutely novel instead of copying something. Thus it's very tempting to deduce that love for classic games is more of an attempt to replicate a feeling of childish wonder you feel when you don't yet know that those games you're playing aren't perfect simulation of alien worlds.

Fallout's setting may have seemed a little original for a videogame in 1997 and the retro-future kitsch was novel, but no, originality really was NOT what it had going for it. The amount of post-apocalyptic fiction in the 80s and 90s was stunning. What Fallout 1/2 clones are you referring to? I would love to play one but I have yet to encounter anything that deserves the title (no, not Underrail). Same very much goes for Lord of the Rings: it was great because Tolkien cribbed from great sources. There's nothing new under the sun.

But I'll tell you what separates the old-school greats from modern Bethesda trash: fucking role playing. In Fallout 1 and 2 (and New Vegas by the Obsidian guys), you feel like you're a real denizen of a post-apocalyptic wasteland. In Fallout 3 and 4, you feel like a goddamn tourist and that is by design. Bethesda actively encourages the player to NOT take the world seriously. This is the problem with all Bethesda games, going back to Morrowind. Lots to see, but everything you do feels about as meaningful as a fireworks display, which is to say, not. I can't see why you have trouble understanding this. I played Morrowind when I was younger and hated it for much the same reasons as I hate the new ones. In fact, I played lots of popular video games in the '90s, which I loved at the time, yet they do not hold up and thus they do not stick with me. Nostalgia goggles is a thing, but it's not THAT much of a thing.

Fallout was not good for its time, it's was an amazing game that many new players--kids who never encountered it before because they hadn't been born yet--still love upon first trying it today. Same for Torment, same for Baldur's Gate 2, same for Jagged Alliance 2, which as others have mentioned, has better turn-based action point combat than anyone else has devised in the nearly two decades since. The Troika games are a little more debatable because you had to look past the bugginess/unfinishedness, but what's there is amazing content.

But PC gaming is much more of a mass thing today than it was 20 years ago. The money is in making simple games with simple systems that provide lots of low quality instant gratification. If I want a meaningless dopamine high, I'd rather just find myself some heroin--more fun than Skyrim's explore->loot->sell->explore loop. It's not Todd Howard's fault--everybody needs to make money--but to deny that the decline exists says more about your pedestrian video game palate than it does about the actual state of the industry.