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PC RPGs - Time To Man The Lifeboats?
Thanks to GameBanshee for their editorial, written by former Black Isle designer Damien Foletto, discussing how PC RPGs can survive the console role-playing game's popularity surge. He explains that console-originated RPG successes such as Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic are a boon: "There is no denying that SW:KOTOR's open-endedness, character creation, and story are heavily influenced by PC RPG development." This, he suggests, helps everyone out in the long run: "When these gamers are exposed to the deeper intricacies of RPG game play, and if they enjoy it, then they are more likely to pursue similar gaming experiences. This may eventually lead them to PC RPGs, or it might just make them more demanding for deeper console RPGs." Elsewhere, the rise of the console RPG is backed up by a new 'GameSpotting' editorial naming their favorite RPGs of 2003, all of which originated on consoles.
One of the greatest elements of PC roleplaying that I am yet to see grace a console is a vast, open-ended explorable world.
I know it was mentioned earlier that consoles favour the eastern style linear plotline and story elements, and yes, PC's don't, but this is because the PC is a very powerful instrument.
With vast amounts of memory and storage space, larger and more intricate virtual worlds can be created.
Take Morrowind for example. The world design was so intricate that you could walk into just about any city, pick the third house on the left of the main avenue, break into it, find the living room and count the spoons in the top drawer of the cabinet. Then steal and sell them. Because you're a nasty spoonseller.
Furthermore, it feels like a breathing living world, because as your reputation grows (in any direction, based on your actions and infamy), NPC's react differently to you.
What's more, the world of Morrowind is vast, exploring the continent took me weeks until I felt I'd been just about everywhere.
Then, after finishing all the quests, you are almost elevated to a God status! I can't think of many console gamers who'd even be interested in such a grand endeavour. PC gamers, yes, of course. Console gamers are not interested in investing so much time into a game, perhaps this is why open-endedness is not popular with consoles. Let them eat cake.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
There is of course, no piracy with console games.
.::: Did the writer only play Shadow Madness or something just as dire on consoles?
True, Baldur's Gate - Dark Alliance was just plain dumb in comparison with it's PC-counterparts (though still highly enjoyable and a good game in it's own right). But console players do not need to be exposed to the "deeper intricacies of RPG game play". As if the Final Fantasy's, Xenogears, Suikoden's, Dark Chronicle (Dark Cloud 2 US), and even Mario & Luigi - Superstar Saga didn't provide proper RPG gameplay.
Both PCs and consoles have brilliant RPGs in their own right. Planescape: Torment and Final Fantasy VI both stick out for me. The different approaches both use are wonderful. Why would you ever want to get rid of one side of it? Unfortunately I'm not a Star Wars-fan, but what I've picked up about KOTOR seems to imply it's one of those RPGs which uses a blend of PC- and console-RPG styles.
Isn't that to be celebrated instead of critisized?
not entirely anyhow. Eastern-styled RPGs have been largely console-centric since the days of the Famicom. So this is more directly about the growth in popularity of western-styled RPGs on the consoles.
I think the main cause of the popularity explosion is developers are finally finding the western-styled rpg market in the console arena. They're learning that you can sell console players Morrowind and Knights of the Old Republic.
The only reason that these rpgs weren't on consoles in the past has been storage. Consoles prior to this generation didn't have enough storage to handle the content without having to switch a multitude of discs, something the average player does not want to do. Nor did they have appropriate storage for the massive save-game sizes western RPGs are known to generate.
Now however, that roadblock is gone (at least for the xbox this generation, and probably all systems in the next). It is only natural that RPG developers, the guys who always cared about story over all else, are gravitating toward the platform that lets them concentrate even more on story, and not worry about minimum system requirements, or compatibility.
RPGs on the PC will survive this turn in popularity like all other PC-gaming genres, sports, shooters, et al. They'll shrink in market share, but remain. I don't think PC gaming will ever die, just as mac gaming has never died. But it certainly will lose the edge it has held in the past.
with PCs losing their last vestiges of hardware advantage over consoles (namely harddrives and network adapters), there is less and less justification for publishers to ignore the console market under some illusion of console-gamer predisposition to action.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
The inherent goodness about PC-based RPG's is that the developers continue to lay the ultimate fate of the game's longevity in the hands of its players, with reference to the mod community. After all, consoles aren't going to start handing out SDK's or development tools for modding anytime soon, and probably never will; thus all attempts at extensibility will have to be created by the developer, which -as we've seen with MechAssault- will likely carry with it an extra charge. However, as far as the PC community goes, the ability to mod a particular game is a selling point for both the player and would-be modder. Case in point: Neverwinter Nights had two strategy guides out at the time of its release. One, we'll call it the Player's Handbook, in that it was just basically a walkthrough for the as-packaged game. The other one could be referred to as the Dungeon Master's Guide, essentially spelling out how someone could develop a scenario, if not an entire module. While Morrowind certainly has an active mod community, I don't believe I've seen any other games ship with such an obvious (and well-publicized) push for community involvement as happened with Neverwinter Nights. Of course, then again, I also think they were hoping to create an enormous network of persistent linked servers, run by players, in hopes of creating some variety as a free alternative to the monthly-fee of Massively Mundane -er, Multiplayer- RPG's. Unfortunately, that lofty goal never quite panned out. I, for one, cranked through Knights of the Old Republic on the Xbox within three days of getting the game and I appear to be the only person on earth who was left wanting. In about thirty hours of game-time (yes, I know what that breaks down to), I finished the majority of the side-quests, spent another few hours to see the other ending, and it's a nice and compelling game all around, but after it was done, there was nothing left to do, and -given that Bioware created Neverwinter Nights- how I wanted some extra content.
Sure -- and you're absolutely right, I should correct what I said. If fewer sales were lost due to piracy, publishers might be more interested in PC releases. :-) There's also some degree correlation. There's a potential market of some size. Some portion of the people pirating a given game would have purchased that game had they not pirated the game, and some portion of those people would have not purchased that game had they not pirated the game.
The problem for publishers is that the first group is non-zero in magnitude, and based on things like Ambrosia Software's study of piracy, one notices that sales are much, much better when software can't be easily bypassed. (And Ambrosia had an *extremely* positive situation, where they had few competitors, a good deal of loyalty, a generally affluent market...)
Take Counterstrike. Counterstrike *was* popular. Very popular. However, a major reason it sold well is that it used a proxied auth method. Yes, you could crack it and play only on cracked servers, or play single-player-only, but it was enough of an impediment that an awful lot of folks just handed over the money to Valve -- it wasn't worth their time or effort.
Note that this is also a factor in the surprising success of MMORPGs. Sure, folks play MMORPGs, but not *that* huge a chunk of the gaming world. More than currently play MUDs, perhaps, but I'd be very surprised (based on the folks I know) if the number of folks playing, say, Everquest even begins to approach the number of folks that played Quake. However, since it's difficult and unpleasant to bypass Everquest protection (one might manage it, I suppose, through credit card fraud and having one character "help out" other new characters), Everquest enjoyes a much larger purchasing rate.
This is not a post coming from someone who's trying to argue against piracy on some kind of ethical grounds or adopt a holier-than-thou attitude. I've probably cracked more software than most people use on their computers (though I don't distribute my cracks), and have certainly pirated software myself. However, I do want to point out that piracy certainly does have a decidedly negative impact -- many folks don't realize quite how much -- on software publishers, which ends up in fewer games getting funded.
There are a few times that piracy can be beneficial. In the case of Quake, multiplayer had a network effect, increasing value of the game. It's likely that id actually gained sales due to widespread piracy, though obviously nobody can say for sure. There were lots of good players out there playing it and producing more material for it, increasing the game's value. However, the same does not apply very well to PC RPGs. Due to the nature of the games, these are generally played by single players, and generally aren't particularly player-moddable. They receive little sales benefit from being spread around. Furthermore, I would like to point out that attention span for games tends to shorten when one gets into adult years. Many hours of gameplay is less of a big deal if you aren't trying to maximize bang for your buck. If you're a kid, dropping $40 and getting a game that you beat in two days is disappointing. An adult with a job has less worries about costs, and more interest in maximizing the enjoyment they get in their free time. I would venture to guess that RPGs, as a genre, are probably more likely played by a group of folks who have a lower median income than the group that plays, say, Max Payne 2, and hence has a greater financial incentive to pirate a given game.
When one adds this to the fact that RPGs do not sell particularly well in the comparatively PC-centric United States, and *do* sell well in the comparatively console-centric Japan, and the fact that most modern RPGs require a *lot* of expensive content creation to produce, you have some compelling answers to the question of why there aren't a lot of PC-based RPGs released.
May we never see th
I would think the PC RPG is in trouble more from the highly successful PC-MMORPG than from consoles. Further, I would imagine the console RPG's will decline when MMORPG's get more penetration into the console market - and this won't really happen until they get keyboards (thus further bluring the line between console and PC).
I speak from personal experience. Both my wife and I played PC RPG's (yes, even before we met) and once we tried MMORPG's there is really no going back. We have tried: we both own NWN and the first expansion. We played some of the content together and we have downloaded custom modules and played some of them and even made some efforts to create our own module. The pace of progress and the plot are awesome - but the long term attraction of the game is really negligable. The odds I will buy another RPG are slim. Will I buy the next expansion pack for my MMORPG? Almost certainly.
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land for the PlayStation 2 was an absolutely excellent old-school (I can create my ENTIRE 6-character party however I like) dungeon-crawl. I absolutely loved it.
Even PC RPGs lately have been getting away from the multi-character stats-based games that I loved as a kid. The old TSR gold box games, Bard's Tales, and especially Wasteland. Anyone who thinks that it began with Fallout is just sadly missing out on where it was really at: trying to get through Fenster's devilish mind maze, and second-guessing yourself about whether those paragraphs that you read "by accident" weren't really true... We're going to MARS!?!? heh.