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Hehe, yeah, maybe that was going overboard. Didn't even notice. Guide for the uninitiated:

IWD = Icewind Dale
IWD2 = Icewind Dale 2
IE = Infinity Engine -- powers BG/BG:TotSC/PS:T/IWD/IWD:HoW/BG2/BG2:ToB and IWD2
NPC = Non-Player Character
NWN = Neverwinter Nights
DS = Dungeon Siege
TA = Total Annihilation
OP = Original Poster
TotSC = Tales of the Sword Coast. BG1 add-in adventures
PS:T = Planescape: Torment
ToB = Throne of Bhaal. BG2 expansion.
HoW = Heart of Winter. IWD add-in.

Is it me or have PC RPG's really gone downhill?

Planescape: Torment is what you're after.
Fallout, Fallout 2, & All of the Baldurs gate series are good too.

Not new, but still the very best of the best: Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate 2.

I'm going to snap if I hear another "Bring back the old games, they were so much better". Sheesh--it's just a matter of time before somebody mentions _Elite_ as the end-all/be-all space trading game.

The fact is that progress is good. Nobody mentions how hard it was to orient yourself while docking with non-texture mapped polys in _Elite_, along with nobody ever mentioning how the end of _Wasteland_ could have been more fufilling with a short movie.

Sigh, it's easy for people's psyche to wash away thousands of crappy C-64/2600 games, but then unforgivable for a new game to be too complicated.

I have to admit that I always thought the old school RPGs were the best, these unassailable, unimpeachable titans of the field: _Bard's Tale 3_, _Wasteland_, _System Shock_, but then I played _Planescape: Torment_. Not "along them same lines", not "just as good", but "better". That in itself has revived my belief that things really do get better.

The eds and writers at Gamecenter.com aren't exactly the greatest source for true gaming information. The purist and hardcore gamers get their information from sites dedicated to their favorite type of gaming, even to the point of shunning the psuedo-targetted gaming sites like the GameSpy network (www.planetquake.com, www.planetunreal.com, etc).

The future of the gaming industry is my forte. Hell, it'll be my thesis when I hit the point where I want a doctorate. And believe me when I say that the biggest cause of any genre of game "dying off", as they put it, is due to corporate and VC pressure to stick to things that they know work. Gaming companies are less likely to go out on a limb and innovate in their games. The few that do don't end up with the funding for the mainstream marketting thats needed to compete with the big publishes. Its alot like the music industry right now - except no Napster.

Gaming is becomming more and more about making profits than it is about making games. Companies are producing things that are very much clones of things that sold well. Instead of trying to recreate a good engine, and possibly comming up with new interesting innovations, the companies opt to simply license the engine and make minor upgrades to it. Look at all the various commercial games (not player-made mods) that came out on the Quake2 engine. It was pathetic in my opinion. The only game using the Q2 engine which caught my attention was KingPin: Life of Crime, and still that was only a so-so game. It was only different in that it offered much more of a story than the others.

Its the large publishers like Interplay and Sierra who are just drowning the game market with these 2-bit titles based on other games. And its these clones that are tiring players out, and confusing them. Titles that are truly different from the pack get hidden behind the clones. FPS games like Rainbow Six and its sequel Rogue Spear that were very much different from the fragfests of Quake didn't get noticed. But games like Soldier of Fortune take the spotlight because they're using the hottest latest (licensed) engine, when all they're really doing is adding some new graphics and more blood and making the genre a little more stale.

What game design teams really need to do is stop producing clones of other peoples' work, and start working on their own innovations and interesting games. Licensing of engines is fine, when done to a degree and when signifigant changes to the original game are made. Quality games are becomming more and more difficult to find due to the flood of clones. Not all licensed engines turn into junk games, but the amount of them coming out is making it very difficult for gamers to choose which ones to own and which to ignore. If an avid RPG gamer who enjoyed Baldur's Gate decides she wants to play more of those games, does she purchase IceWind Dale or Planescape: Torment, or the Tales of Sword Coast? In my opinion, Planescape: Torment blows the others away, even the original Baldurs Gate. But reviewers can't tell you if you'll like a game or not, or if you'll like it better than another game (and this is only made worse by reviewers who sell out to game companies or to generate clicks).


More and more games are going online. As an AI designer I can understand this. Its very difficult to write an AI which gets close to simulating a real opponent without using too much cpu power. Also, online games provide the sense of community and friendly rivalry that is lacking in singleplayer games. But the online world still suffers from the same problems that the singleplayer world suffers from. Funding is not provided to game companies with a radically different idea.

The original NeverWinter Nights was a superb game. It had a large base of absolutely fanatical players. AOL made one of their biggest mistakes by shutting it down. With modern network technology the original NWN could become 10x's what it was limited to on AOL. But no game company now would be willing to do that, because it isn't "safe" for them to do so. The companies see that there aren't enough clones of the original NWN around to make it a surefire sale. Its ironic that NWN, something alot of people who've played it consider pivitol, was only created due to alot of GoldBox clones.. In other words, it takes a saturation of clones in order for a game to become worth of support by a publisher. But its the saturation of clones that confuses gamers and makes them bored of the genre.

More power to the Garage Developers. More power to Forgotten World, Shattered Galaxy, and all design teams that can create thier ideas from scratch.

The eds and writers at Gamecenter.com aren't exactly the greatest source for true gaming information. The purist and hardcore gamers get their information from sites dedicated to their favorite type of gaming, even to the point of shunning the psuedo-targetted gaming sites like the GameSpy network (www.planetquake.com, www.planetunreal.com, etc).

The future of the gaming industry is my forte. Hell, it'll be my thesis when I hit the point where I want a doctorate. And believe me when I say that the biggest cause of any genre of game "dying off", as they put it, is due to corporate and VC pressure to stick to things that they know work. Gaming companies are less likely to go out on a limb and innovate in their games. The few that do don't end up with the funding for the mainstream marketting thats needed to compete with the big publishes. Its alot like the music industry right now - except no Napster.

Gaming is becomming more and more about making profits than it is about making games. Companies are producing things that are very much clones of things that sold well. Instead of trying to recreate a good engine, and possibly comming up with new interesting innovations, the companies opt to simply license the engine and make minor upgrades to it. Look at all the various commercial games (not player-made mods) that came out on the Quake2 engine. It was pathetic in my opinion. The only game using the Q2 engine which caught my attention was KingPin: Life of Crime, and still that was only a so-so game. It was only different in that it offered much more of a story than the others.

Its the large publishers like Interplay and Sierra who are just drowning the game market with these 2-bit titles based on other games. And its these clones that are tiring players out, and confusing them. Titles that are truly different from the pack get hidden behind the clones. FPS games like Rainbow Six and its sequel Rogue Spear that were very much different from the fragfests of Quake didn't get noticed. But games like Soldier of Fortune take the spotlight because they're using the hottest latest (licensed) engine, when all they're really doing is adding some new graphics and more blood and making the genre a little more stale.

What game design teams really need to do is stop producing clones of other peoples' work, and start working on their own innovations and interesting games. Licensing of engines is fine, when done to a degree and when signifigant changes to the original game are made. Quality games are becomming more and more difficult to find due to the flood of clones. Not all licensed engines turn into junk games, but the amount of them coming out is making it very difficult for gamers to choose which ones to own and which to ignore. If an avid RPG gamer who enjoyed Baldur's Gate decides she wants to play more of those games, does she purchase IceWind Dale or Planescape: Torment, or the Tales of Sword Coast? In my opinion, Planescape: Torment blows the others away, even the original Baldurs Gate. But reviewers can't tell you if you'll like a game or not, or if you'll like it better than another game (and this is only made worse by reviewers who sell out to game companies or to generate clicks).


More and more games are going online. As an AI designer I can understand this. Its very difficult to write an AI which gets close to simulating a real opponent without using too much cpu power. Also, online games provide the sense of community and friendly rivalry that is lacking in singleplayer games. But the online world still suffers from the same problems that the singleplayer world suffers from. Funding is not provided to game companies with a radically different idea.

The original NeverWinter Nights was a superb game. It had a large base of absolutely fanatical players. AOL made one of their biggest mistakes by shutting it down. With modern network technology the original NWN could become 10x's what it was limited to on AOL. But no game company now would be willing to do that, because it isn't "safe" for them to do so. The companies see that there aren't enough clones of the original NWN around to make it a surefire sale. Its ironic that NWN, something alot of people who've played it consider pivitol, was only created due to alot of GoldBox clones.. In other words, it takes a saturation of clones in order for a game to become worth of support by a publisher. But its the saturation of clones that confuses gamers and makes them bored of the genre.

More power to the Garage Developers. More power to Forgotten World, Shattered Galaxy, and all design teams that can create thier ideas from scratch.

This is great news, because BioWare doesn't just make games, they make the game engine as well. Planetscape: Torment (from Black Isle), another great RPG, used BioWare's Infinity Engine, and Black Isle is currently developing another game using it. With luck, Linux support for these games will "trickle down" just like many Quake licenses have made Linux versions of their games.