Why do modern RPGs have 0% soul?

[Harthwain]

Cyberpunk 2077 (2020/2023) has tons of soul.

Does it? I thought CDPR lost its soul after they got rid of almost everyone who worked on The Witcher 3 and thought they could do the same mad dash with Cyberpunk 2077? Firing the entire team just to not pay them feels like something a corpo would do and it bit them in the ass in the end, because they game was a bug-ridden mess that underdelivered on the promises and hype? I admit I wasn't really following the game after that point (and because it was a disappointment for me personally).

If anyone is looking for a soul, then small- and medium-sized independent developers are the best bet.

 

[Lord_Potato]

Cyberpunk 2077 (2020/2023) has tons of soul.

Does it? I thought CDPR lost its soul after they got rid of almost everyone who worked on The Witcher 3 and thought they could do the same mad dash with Cyberpunk 2077? Firing the entire team just to not pay them

What? CDPR teams have a lot of rotation, but the company pays its employees.

feels like something a corpo would do and it bit them in the ass in the end, because they game was a bug-ridden mess that underdelivered on the promises and hype?

Are you mistaking CDPR with sone other company? Yes, some of the team who made CP2077 left, burned out and overworked, but most of the core team continued on, working on patches, expansion and now moves to Witcher 4.

I admit I wasn't really following the game after that point (and because it was a disappointment for me personally).

Well, it made a pretty great comeback with update 2.0 and Phantom Liberty. And the base game after patches and changes brought by 2.0 is pretty great.

If anyone is looking for a soul, then small- and medium-sized independent developers are the best bet.

And yet CP2077 is an exception from this rule.

 

[Lady Error]

I was listening to the intro music to Wizardry 7 the other day and thought the same thing. I don't know maybe I just got old, but I never feel that sense of wonder in newer games.

Try Grimoire (and in about a year Mystic Land).

 

[Harthwain]

What? CDPR teams have a lot of rotation, but the company pays its employees.

I heard they offer employees bonuses depending on how well the game sells (or something like that). So they fired them right before that. I could have misunderstood something when it comes to this particular point though.

Are you mistaking CDPR with sone other company? Yes, some of the team who made CP2077 left, burned out and overworked, but most of the core team continued on, working on patches, expansion and now moves to Witcher 4.

I meant about how they fired almost everyone who worked on The Witcher 3. They also had a few ways of big layoffs. So much so that their employees started a union to better protect their interests (there is also crunch and unpaid overtime, and working for minimum wage, which DOES sound like blood-sucking, greedy, soulless corpo for me when you put it all together).

 

[Lord_Potato]

What? CDPR teams have a lot of rotation, but the company pays its employees.

I heard they offer employees bonuses depending on how well the game sells (or something like that). So they fired them right before that. I could have misunderstood something when it comes to this particular point though.

Yes, they do offer bonuses based on company profit. No, they did not mass sack people from Cyberpunk 2077 team.

Are you mistaking CDPR with sone other company? Yes, some of the team who made CP2077 left, burned out and overworked, but most of the core team continued on, working on patches, expansion and now moves to Witcher 4.

I meant about how they fired almost everyone who worked on The Witcher 3. They also had a few ways of big layoffs. So much so that their employees started a union to better protect their interests (there is also crunch and unpaid overtime, and working for minimum wage, which DOES sound like blood-sucking, greedy, soulless corpo for me when you put it all together).

They had one wave of layoffs, this year (like every other tech company btw). And it touched a lot of departments, not only production ones.

CDPR has high rotation because of relatively low wages (in regard to competition from the States or Western Europe) and the inclination towards crunch (I heard recently situation is getting better and there was no need for long crunch during Phantom Liberty production). So in the 8 years that passed since Witcher 3 was released indeed many people left. But this did not seem deliberate move not to pay people profits. Besides, much of the team that made W3 stayed long enough to create two expansions.

During the years there was news of many difficulties concerning working in CDPR, but I don't recall any news about company not paying people what they were due.

 

[The Wall]

CDPR is WOKE! as fuck. It's company that hates Poland and loves black dick. They fund every single Pride Parade in Warsaw and bunch of LGBTQQQ+++ NGOs. 95%+ of guys who worked on Witcher 1, 2 and 3 have been fired or have quit. It's company that has been turbo westernized, in worst sense possible. Do not expect from them anything but more THE MESSAGE™

Fuck Marcin Iwinski, wannabe Polish Todd Howard

 

[Ryzer]

The Wall, That's what the Poles want, why do you want to deprive them of the fun?

It's exactly what they wanted 100%.

 

[Lord_Potato]

CDPR is WOKE! as fuck. It's company that hates Poland and loves black dick. They fund every single Pride Parade in Warsaw and bunch of LGBTQQQ+++ NGOs. 95%+ of guys who worked on Witcher 1, 2 and 3 have been fired or have quit. It's company that has been turbo westernized, in worst sense possible. Do not expect from them anything but more THE MESSAGE™

Fuck Marcin Iwinski, wannabe Polish Todd Howard

You make a pretty bad copycat of the Critical Drinker, The Wall . He's usually amusing, you're just repetivive and unoriginal.

 

[NecroLord]

CDPR is WOKE! as fuck. It's company that hates Poland and loves black dick. They fund every single Pride Parade in Warsaw and bunch of LGBTQQQ+++ NGOs. 95%+ of guys who worked on Witcher 1, 2 and 3 have been fired or have quit. It's company that has been turbo westernized, in worst sense possible. Do not expect from them anything but more THE MESSAGE™

Fuck Marcin Iwinski, wannabe Polish Todd Howard

Isn't Marcin Iwinski a billionaire?
Also, aren't there non w0ke devs left in Poland anymore? The guys who recently released Robocop: Rogue City?

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Over-saturation of D&D-inspired fantasy to the exclusion of other genres? TSR alone made a lot of rpgs! Where are the adaptations of Metamorphosis Alpha, Gamma World, Star Frontiers, Kromosome, For Faerie, Queen and Country, Dark•Matter, Star*Drive, or Urban Arcana? There’s no shortage of existing IPs and genres you could take inspiration from to stand out from the glut.

 

[Cryomancer]

Yawn.

Cry some more while I play good AA and indies that appear almost every year.

Even AA and indies are being infected with such evil. Rogue Trader will gonna have gender ambiguity. Lunacid added pronouns after the game launched.

CDPR has high rotation because of relatively low wages

Not only that. Now that they have ESG crap, at least before someone could accept a lower wage and not have to deal with diversity hires. Now, CDPR workers have all cons of working for a western company without the wages of a western company.

CDPR is WOKE! as fuck. It's company that hates Poland and loves black dick. They fund every single Pride Parade in Warsaw and bunch of LGBTQQQ+++ NGOs. 95%+ of guys who worked on Witcher 1, 2 and 3 have been fired or have quit. It's company that has been turbo westernized, in worst sense possible. Do not expect from them anything but more THE MESSAGE™

Well said. When they adopted ESG, their company died for me.

aren't there non w0ke devs left in Poland anymore?

There are non woke devs everywhere. Even in Commiefornia. The problem is that ow that CDPR has ESG, every non woke dev would be crushed by the ESG crap. CDPR will never make anything like TW1/2/3. They will hire a lot of diversity hires, talented Polish man will gonna suffer discrimination and have a much harder time to get hired in a company created by talented Polish man. While diversity hires gonna produce bugfest bloatware woke preaching games.

Before, a talented highly skilled Polish worker in a in demanding area with freedom of movement in EU could before accept a worse wage and not to have to deal with this woke nonsense while he lives in Warsaw. With Poland importing everything that sucks from the west, why he would even stay in Poland? If he needs to deal with incompetent diversity hires, woke cancel culture, rampant violence and hatred toward him and everything else in Poland too, why not get German wages?

 

[jungl]

pillars 1 was fun to play with developer commentary on.

 

[Hobo Elf]

What? CDPR teams have a lot of rotation, but the company pays its employees.

I heard they offer employees bonuses depending on how well the game sells (or something like that). So they fired them right before that. I could have misunderstood something when it comes to this particular point though.

Can't find any info on layoffs after Witcher 3, but I wouldn't be too surprised that it was contractors who were let go after the project was finished and the games media conflating them with company employees.

 

[Gregz]

CDPR is WOKE! as fuck. It's company that hates Poland and loves black dick. They fund every single Pride Parade in Warsaw and bunch of LGBTQQQ+++ NGOs. 95%+ of guys who worked on Witcher 1, 2 and 3 have been fired or have quit. It's company that has been turbo westernized, in worst sense possible. Do not expect from them anything but more THE MESSAGE™

Fuck Marcin Iwinski, wannabe Polish Todd Howard

^ This applies to the entire hobby. A very few indie devs and small shops are not doing this, and they are being routinely punished for it. The hobby has never been more dead than it is right now.

 

[Phinx]

To me it's simple. Game developers use to make games based on what they wanted to created so the player base could experience it.

Now, they make games based on what they think the player base will like. There is also the elephant in the room. To make big bucks, you have to cater to the masses. To appease as many people as possible, you need to "streamline" it, and add a carrot on a stick with a sprinkle of dopamine..

 

[quaesta]

"Why?" is the first question

In the 80s/90s if you made games you were an engineer/super nerd.
In today's time if you made games you're a normalfag nerd who grew up playing games. As you said, there's fewer games about emulating economies because that's stuff nerds like. In addition, the conventions of games have been established and as such, people just make clones of what they like. Back then it was people from diverse experiences making games and had their own answer to what a game is. As you mentioned, Daggerfall and Ultima Underworld are two fundamentally different games that answered the same question of first person dungeon crawling.

"What we can do?" is the next one

Get a wide array of experiences both in real life and games and make your own vision. I forgot who said it, but the quote was that good authors are often people who experienced a lot and are able to convey that perspective. I know if I was tasked to make an RPG I would make it about traversing/getting lost, and draw from all the times I biked/drove/hiked around different places, how I got lost and the navigational tools I had to use to get myself out of it, like using the sun as a compass, determining position from a map and even using litter in the forest to indicate how close I am to civilization. I imagine if I asked my ROTC friend to make a game from his experiences his answer would be extremely different.

 

[quaesta]

The shit ones then were better than the good ones today.

A more appropriate answer is that the shit ones were more INTERESTING than the good ones today. I once played a DOS wild fire game, that had me planning out where to place firewood and where to erect barriers, to stop the wildfire from burning the forest. It was very simple and I certainty wouldn't pay money for it, but it's much more mechanically interesting than a lot of modern games, that just seek to answer the same question of

• How much should I pump into strength?
• Should I romance A or B?
• Should I join faction A or B?
• Should I use this consumable or not?

etc etc, of the same questions being asked in an RPG context. Meanwhile if this was Darklands, even making the characters themselves took a lot of thought, balancing between their age and skill.
Saying the shit ones were good back then obfuscates the central point of the thread, that games lost their soul/innovation.

 

[Devastator]

I have a pretty simplified view. I'm curious about the ratio between these two extremes:

1. A straightforward economic perspective on risk-reward: Investing X amount to create one high-quality game, potentially yielding a great return or encountering a flop, versus investing the same X to produce three uninspired clones that are nearly guaranteed to perform reasonably well.
2. Most consoomers don't seem to voice complaints when provided with soulless content. Alternatively, they might voice some complaints but continue purchasing games (as there isn't really an alternative unless everyone stops buying RPGs in protest, given the dominance of mass-produced clones).

P. S. While this doesn't directly relate to RPGs, it remains relevant. I came across this online, so please correct me if I'm mistaken. There were complaints about Starcraft 3 not being mentioned at the last Blizzcon. I recall either a developer or an ex-dev mentioning that releasing a $15 mount in WoW generates more profit than actually creating a Starcraft game. This paints a really disheartening reality.

 

[DeepOcean]

Simple, games are made for kids, for Alzheimer ladies, for your girlfriend that hates video games, for Down Syndrome people, for intelectually disabled journalists, and social media weirdos that waste their lives away cosplaying as activists for bullshit causes all day on twitter otherwise they off themselves if they discover they are irrelevant, all audiences except young men that are 99% of the audience that actually consumes videogames.

So, you make shit for people who dont like videogames, it turns out the end result will be shit. You also foster a culture on those coporations, of fear, if you dare take even 10% risk and fail, some danger hair somewhere will attempt to make your life as miserable as its life currently is. So, you filter the courageous people out as they know the game is rigged, and get the fearful drones in, those people only know how to say yes to the biggest stick.

And who has the biggest stick? The money men. How the money men think? "What? That menu has an animation that will require 0,1% of the work time of an animator? Cut that shit out, it wont provide us with 0,115% more money. What? Adding some trans weirdo on the game will increase exposure on social media by 2,5% and get BlackRock to buy our shares? Great!"

So, we have a culture on the west of people looking for the biggest stick to say how they should think and other people that are constantly calculating if they are getting a 10% reduction on their expenses if they euthanize their mothers.

 

[lycanwarrior]

What? CDPR teams have a lot of rotation, but the company pays its employees.

I heard they offer employees bonuses depending on how well the game sells (or something like that). So they fired them right before that. I could have misunderstood something when it comes to this particular point though.

Can't find any info on layoffs after Witcher 3, but I wouldn't be too surprised that it was contractors who were let go after the project was finished and the games media conflating them with company employees.

https://www.ign.com/articles/stressed-out-by-mass-layoffs-cd-projekt-staff-unionize

They just had layoffs during the summer.

Albeit a LOT of game companies have been laying off this year.

 

[Hagashager]

I don't know man. Look at most RPGs of the '90s and you'll see a lot of similarities too. Yeah, you have Ultima, Might & Magic, The Gold Box and Infinity Engine but they're all fundamentally party-based RPGs set in ye olde Medieval Times. That's not even counting the many *many* copy-cats of that era. For every Dark Sun or Daggerfall or Planescape there were a dozen that just rip M&M or Wizardry whole cloth. These games had no soul either, they were very much Late 80s Hair-Metal aesthetic with basic fantasy trappings.

I love old RPGs, the big blobbers, Infinity Engine, M&M, Morrowind, these are awesome, but they're exceptions.

In modernity you've got quite a bit of variety between the very small AAA options. You can get a cRPG, several if you're not picky, they do TRY to be unique to each other. You can get The Witcher if you're into a Western take on a JRPG. Likewise, you can do Dragon's Dogma if you wanna see how the Japanese do a WRPG. You've got Skyrim, Fallout or Starfield for Bethesda and you got the Fromsoft catelogue if you want a particular brand of hardcore ARPG.

Among that though it's slim pickings, yes, but those pickings certainly are different from each other.

Alternatively, you can Indie and your options open up, but fuck me if they aren't all mostly pixel-art Ultima Wannabes.

 

[DY050503]

Simply not enough competition. You'll have to buy if you want a new AAA game and there are few other choices. Also, many games use the same game engine (Unreal/Unity) which many lead to similar textures. I guess there are also some reasons on marketing too. Bad games exist in the old days, but they didn't sell. Now every time a new game comes out, I would wait a few months before consider reading reviews.

 

[Law]

Soul is the artistic expression of one or a group of individuals working in close harmony. You can't have a corporate product and expect it to have soul.

The creative vision of individual talent within the company gets lost because ultimately it's money that dictates the finished product.

 

[Dadd]

The above is completely true. Example of money dictating the finished product: Starfield

 

[Law]

That is true, I don't think a single person working on Starfield actually cared. It's RPG fast food.