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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.
Really, the game is essentially Neverwinter Nights in Star Wars. A good thing, and I think it goes a long way towards popularizing PC RPG's -- man the lifeboats, indeed.
It's missing two key features from Neverwinter Nights, though: the emphasis on content creation, and the hair that acts like a hair-painted bowl attached to the scalp by a spring.
Then again the very western game Planescape Torment had a small number of party members wich you interacted with strongly and strong story with relativly few subquests. It is widely thought by pc users to be the best rpg ever. Perhaps a happy hybrid could emerge.
So I think for this at least pc and console can exist happily together as long as developers take care to tune the game to the different platforms. So USE the keyboard. USE the HD for easy saving. USE the bloody mouse, yes I am talking to you Final Fantasy. Kotor did it pretty well although the interface graphics were a bit large for a pc monitor. No need for inch tall text thank you very much.
I have no idea what is needed to make a game work on a console as I am a pc snob.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
NWN is pretty innovative though. There has been nothing like it before. (At least not on the level of NWN anyway.)
This whole talk about a genre being at deaths door is nothing new. Every few months, some website or magazine says "(Insert genre here) is dead, consoles have killed it." Then every year we get "PC gaming is dead. Consoles killed it."
It's all bollocks. The fact is, to most people I know, the console RPG's are NOT really RPG's at all. They're no more RPG's than say Tomb Raider or Crash Bandicoot. At best you get to rename yourself. All of sudden there's one title on the XBox that's barely above average (KOTOR, and yes, I've played it. It's tedious) and suddenly the PC RPG genre is dying...
What a crock...
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.
I said "as heavily pirated", not "not pirated".
The ratio of pirated to legitimate console games is a lot lower than the ratio of pirated to legitimate PC games.
May we never see th
.::: 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?
And you know the next thing that'll be dead is FreeBSD...umm wait.
(shakes head)
Nevermind
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.
Okay, there were supposed to be line breaks in that, but I hit Submit instead of Preview, then realized that it was HTML formatted instead of plaintext, so please excuse the utter lack of readability in what would've been an otherwise coherent post.
So, they should have released Half-Life 2 on the X Box because the code wouldn't have leaked?
I have a saying for articles like this: "Know where you are on the bell curve." The corollary is, of course, "Know where everyone else is, too."
If PCRPG fanatics comprised just one percent of the US population, that would still be more than 2 million people. I suspect it's probably less than that, but not by much.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
Actually the number of games pirated is totally irrelevant. What game publishers actually look at is number of units sold. If you sell 1,000,000 units but have 10,000,000 units pirated you are sitting a hell of a lot prettier than if you sell 100,000 and only have 1,000 units pirated.
(Arr, avast and ahoy ther, matey!)
And I hope to be seeing in metamod the dumbass who modded the above post Flamebait.
With regard to Knights of the Old Republic breaking new ground (I don't count Morrowind as it doesn't have anywhere as much buzz KotOR seems to have from what I can tell), I think it is a bit early to decide that Western RPGs are seeing a rise in interest. Is it the quality of KotOR that is drawing the console crowd or is it the "Star Wars" branding? We'll find out when Bioware releases their X-Box exclusive game, Jade Empire.
I don't think RPG developers are moving to consoles because there's a burgeoning RPG market. They are testing the waters because a console game sales failure is equivalent to a PC game awesome sales success. It's just another market and has nothing to do with hardware or storage or whatever because it is all about the story and related content.
Forgot the anti-MS slant... :P
It's also because Microsoft are throwing big cash at developers to help their X-Box cause.
PC games are heavily pirated. Consoles aren't as much. This is a valid point. This isn't a flame.
Think.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
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
That's why half the playstations I know of are modded, right?
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In a nutshell, PC RPGs are not even PC RPGs anymore. They've strayed so far from the roots that it's not even funny. All games are either Diablo like hack-and-slashers, or try some sort of hybrid real-time battle system which ends up being a mess. (It's a real shame that Bioware can't put together a half-decent battle system).
:)
If you want a classic style RPG, you're actually better off playing on a console. Like the old Gold-box games? Play Final Fantasy Tactics Advance or Disgaea. Like Wizardry? (Actually, that one is pretty much dead. You don't see any dungeon crawlers anymore). Ultima? The best Ultima style game is the conversion of Ultima 4 for the NES so just stick with that
PC RPGs have gone from one disappointment to the next, at least for me. On the otherhand, Console RPGs tend to always surprise me pleasently. Branching out, giving new feelings of a play experience. Changing the flow of a story, or how a game operates can make it feel extremly fresh.
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?
If piracy was such a big concern, more games would be made for the piracy resistant (note that's resistent, not proof) Gamecube. While companies are concerned with piracy, sales are more important to them. Many companies make more console games than PC games because they can sell to a broader audience. Joe Average is more willing to play a game on a console than on a PC, and the companies notice this.
The Escape Velocity series contains some of the best shareware games I've played, and they've made other good games outside of that. Unfortunately for the Mac, both Ambrosia and Spiderweb are porting games to the PC now (Spiderweb's been doing it for a long time, Ambrosia only recently).
Rob
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.
What kind of console players have you been hanging around? Moreover, what kind of console games have you played? Do you realize that most console RPGs allow you to "become a god" if you work at it, and that many console RPG players do work at it?
I agree with the fact that Morrowind is much deeper than the average console RPG, but what you're saying here is way off-base.
Rob
Sorry, just want to confirm one thing: doesn't CS require Half-Life to play? I remember wanting to try CS once (hearing it was free) only to find out I'd have to buy Half-Life to play it. Was that incorrect?
No, it's obvious from how the controls work in the PC version that it's an console RPG that was ported to the PC.
More games are made for the system that has the larger user base. And not that I think it's a huge swing factor, but I do know people that went for X-Box over Gamecube because it's so much easier to get pirated games for.
ah wait. I bought it in 2002. Sorry about the confusion; I was playing it just yesterday... ;)
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
And do more than 50% of the PC game players you know use pirated software?
May we never see th
Lest we forget: Try the PC version of Ultima VII. Then try the SNES version of the same. Even if it were a state of the art port, the experience was never quite the same. =)
I don't think consoles will take over the PC RPGs. They're trying, but PCs still handle stuff more elegantly - especially the modding. Did the X-Box version of Morrowind ship with TES Construction Set? Guess not... and one of the reasons I have enjoyed Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights so much is the moddability.
And besides: Where's my bloody Nethack??? PS2Linux doesn't count...
I'd never thought about it before, but thinking about it now: I don't know a single PC gamer who hasn't used pirated software. Not one. I had just assumed that it was most of the people I knew, but on reflection, everyone I know who plays games on PC has had at least one pirated game...