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 Posted: Fri, 17th Feb 2017 21:15 Post subject: What does the future hold for RPGs |
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What does the future hold for RPGs?
Developers discuss how roleplaying games need to evolve.
| Quote: | Imagine a roleplaying game in which you aren’t Champion of the Realm, but a homely bystander such as an innkeeper or a carpenter’s apprentice. Imagine an RPG in which you aren’t able to hand-craft your own posse of adventurers, fussing over everything from eye colour to movement modifiers, but must do your best with the character or characters you’re given. Imagine an RPG in which you aren’t there to save the world but simply find your way through it, as cleverly as you can. If there’s a common theme to my discussions with developers about the future of roleplaying games, it’s that the old “pick your stats, level up by killing stuff, decide the fate of the universe” premise is in sore need of an overhaul, or at least some decent alternatives.
“There have been dozens of attempts to reinvent the RPG story, but the heart of the gameplay is always bodding from one combat to the next, gathering rewards that make you better at combat,” says Alexis Kennedy, creative director for Failbetter’s acclaimed Sunless Sea, who now divides his time between the forthcoming boardgame Cultist Simulator and freelance design work for major studios like BioWare. “So characters tend to be warrior-adventurers and stories tend to have a big showdown fight conclusion and generally you’re combing the countryside for things to fight. That’s a really compelling core, and it’s been perfected, but I like seeing other activities emphasised in RPGs. There are other loops than these.”
“I feel like in spite of what some people have been saying, there’s been a lack of really amazing RPGs for a few years now,” says Katherine Holden, a Cumbria based manga artist and designer whose projects include the RPG series Vacant Sky. “I’m sure that’ll be an unpopular opinion, but I feel like all these ‘create your own character, run around doing busywork in a sandbox and meet NPCs who all fall over themselves to give you power and authority’ games get a little tiresome after a while.” Holden points to 2015’s incredibly accomplished but slightly uninspiring Dragon Age: Inquisition as evidence of this stagnation. “Inquisition wasn’t bad, but it was such a shallow, toothless game compared to Dragon Age II, which featured deeply flawed, yet likeable characters and also a very timely story about refugees, prejudice and religious tension.”
Subverting well-worn approaches to RPG design is both artistically desirable and profitable, says Tyler Sigman, the co-president of British Columbia developer Red Hook and designer of the masterfully unpleasant Darkest Dungeon, a game that uses psychological modifiers such as paranoia and claustrophobia to unsettle the otherwise familiar turn-based party combat. “People are quite open to new experiences that make them think about the whole party-building and dungeon crawling thing they’ve been doing for 30 years, but in a new way. Remember Ultima IV? It totally did that at the time: suddenly putting the burden of morality on the player, whereas other games had sort of assumed that since you are The Chosen One, you can do whatever you want.”
[...]
If RPGs are bundles of beloved traditions, there’s plenty left to achieve within the ambit of those traditions. There will always be a place for RPGs in which you don the armour of a legend, mix-and-match abilities to create devastating class builds, and make decisions that shape the story without interference as you tour a vast, opulent landscape. But my conversations with developers reveal a hunger for more provocative, directed and personal experiences, that aren’t as beholden to the old stereotypes or notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘fantasy’—games in which ‘choice’ doesn’t just mean reshuffling your party composition, or trying to work out which dialogue responses will lead to the greatest reward.
“I’ve always found the definition of a ‘roleplaying game’ a bit frustrating myself, because the actual mechanic that defines the ‘genre’ doesn’t reflect what makes a great RPG to me,” Katherine Holden says. “The actual definition of an RPG seems to be: you have numbers that represent your abilities, you gain a resource called experience for doing things—usually, for making stuff die—and that makes your numbers go up. I’ve always felt this is a million miles away from the actual experience of playing a role, stepping into the shoes of another person.” |
All walls of text @ http://www.pcgamer.com/what-does-the-future-hold-for-rpgs/
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Nodrim
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Location: Romania
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