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The Oblivion of Western RPGs
1up has a piece looking at how Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion may just be what the western RPG genre needs to spring back from the brink of nonexistence. From the article: "Western RPGs focus on the characters, and the world around them is a tool to let the player-as-character do and see more. Eastern RPGs focus on the events unfolding around the characters, and how the characters affect the world around them. Western RPGs are based on the experience of tabletop role-playing games, limited only by the imaginations of the players and the game master, where Eastern RPGs are more re-creations of traditional storytelling. Oblivion has taken huge strides toward meeting fans of MMOs halfway by building A.I. that really lives alongside the player and ensuring that the actual missions are easily pursued."
i was kinda confused when i started out reading the second page of the article.
try this.
My previous comments on this game... Oblivion is the first time I have played a TES game. Being someone who loves FPS (hardcore UT and Battlefield player), it takes some thing special for me to play something that doesn't have quad damage and a rocket launcher. I can count the number for non FPSers I own in two hands. A need for speed game that I bought when I got my first car (which I played breifly and haven't touched since) and Oblivion. Having put 30 hours into one character, mostly in 6 hour spurts after work, I am hooked. Who would have though bows and arrows were as cool as rocket launchers?
What's this crap about Western RPGs being on the brink of nonexistance? I guess all those games by Bethesda, Bioware, etc. don't exist?
Because, when you come down to it, using your gun to make big holes in people in buildings is what I play Western RPGs for.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Eastern RPGs are just a book written as a video game.... a story is told, with no major twists to what the end is...
Western RPGs is where YOU make the story, and how you want to do it.
I find it interesting that they talk about how character development is the big thing for Western RPGs. I never realized that RPGs were ever really that commonly created in the Western Hemisphere. I would have to say that the change to having the primary focus on character development is more a general revolution in RPGs. All of the table top RPGs and such were extremely story oriented as well. No one wanted to play a game of D&D where the master was a bad story teller.
Also, the fact that technology has increased so much is the only reason that the character development can take place. Eastern RPGs seem to be a continuation of the classics, which took place when they could only have so much and the best thing they could do was tell a story.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Chicks with big breasts? And all the girls wear next to nothing?
I can identify with the player mentioned in teh article who dislikes playing with other people. I have been quite bored with the glut of MMO & RTS games that have come to dominate the swords and spells genre of gaming. I have been playing Oblivion for about a week and it is so wonderfully full of single player greatness I can barely stand to go to work and wait 10 hours before my next hour of exploration. Every character I meet in the game is absolutely in-character and free of the slightest hint of l337speak of griefing behaviour that permiates the online worlds. I can come and go from the game at will and know the world has waited for me to return to it as if I hadn't gone to my job all day. Best yet, the NPCs aren't just manequins anymore- they are completely entertaining to watch as they attempt to live their lives and deal with each other. The first time I saw a pickpocket get attacked and killed by city gaurds- I was delighted. He was someone I had met and talked to and now, due to his unscripted actions, he is dead and gone from the game. The actions of the NPCs impact the world permenantly. I imagine that, just like in GTA, after my initial wonder of exploring the world starts to wane- there is an abundance of non-save-game fun to be had by simply messing with the locals to see how the game's AI reacts.
I would honestly change 'Eastern' to 'Console' and 'Western' to 'Computer'. After all, the great 'eastern' RPG series' are all primarily developed for consoles, and sometimes the best of the best ported to PC. the 'western' RPG of character development and creating your role originated with and continues to be the domain of the personal computer, from the early Ultimas, Questrons, Phantasies and Alternate Reality: the City and The Dungeon on the Apple and Atari 8-bits and Commodore 64 to the more modern Elder Scrolls, NWN, Fallouts etc all on modern PCs with some portage to consoles. Its only with the simultanious launches of TES III and IV to the Xbox as well as the PC that the 'western' RPG has been developed at all with consoles in mind. SO I say it's Console RPG vs Computer RPG, and many an arguement about which is best will be waged, but in the end, it all comes down to taste. When I want to be fed a good story i'll play the latest Final Fantasy. When I want to MAKE the story, i'll play Oblivion.
Devil bunnies! I snort the nose! Lucifer! Banana! Banana!
Is this a good time to be doing Western RPGs, what with Brokeback Mountain coming out on DVD? Think of all the horrible jokes!
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
I think I agree. I'd say Final Fantasy was one of the earlier "Eastern RPG" titles to make it big in the U.S., and that "game" just continued to suck more ass as it got older.
Should count as the one that brought back the western RPG...
And I thought this was about nobody making a good RPG settled in a Western environment. You know, like with six-shooters, silly hats and indians.
:)
Yee-haw, that would be fun
Okay list them.
In case you haven't noticed, the "single slayer, PC RPG" genre has been all but dead for years. They morphed into something that is found mostly in its current MMOG form (think World of Warcraft) or something more "hybrid" (for instance RTS games with RPG elements).
So here is an excirse: go to the store to pick up a brand new copy of Oblivion but also look around to see what other single player RPGs are current on the self. Chances are there is Morrowind. There will also probably be Knights of the Old Republic 2 which is a pale shadow of its predicessor and not to mention a very shollow RPG. If you want to count things like Grand Theft Auto I suppose these could be RPGs and even closer to "a sandbox" that is found in Oblivion but again it is a very shallow if not an outright adventure game (Zelda is an action/adventure game even thought it has many themes common to RPGs).
So where are all of these Bethesda and Bioware games? Compared to the stuff online, compared to the sports games, compared to the movie franchise games, the fact that producers buckled down for Oblivion is a miracle. Just like Myst style "hot spot adventure games" went out of style so is the "single player RPG". On the console, there may still be refuge there for the "single player RPG" but who knows how long that will last as consoles gravitate to look more like PCs....
For the near future, I see Neverwinter Nights 2 and Gothic 3 and I suspect one of them wants to desperately have some sort of online play feature....
So what you mean is, "Western RPGs focus on the characters' relating to the word by 'doing and seing more,' and Eastern RPGs focus on the world around the characters and how it is seen and is interacted with by the character."
Wouldn't it be easier to say "Western RPGs are more easily described by active-sense sentences, and Eastern RPGs by passive-sense sentences. Otherwise, they're exactly the same."
Sheesh, I thought we got away from all the groove-speak after 1980.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
While adventure games have been considered a "dead genre" for years, there are actually MORE of them being released to the mainstream currently than there are single-player RPGs!
:)
It's a shift in the market. As the adventure fans come to recognise that they are no longer considered a hot property, they also become more willing to accept ANY adventure game that comes along, and thus it becomes easier for extremely small studios on a low-budget to make an adventure game and get it published for retail. These adventure games don't get the huge marketing push of the 'hot' genres, but they are out there. Check Gamespot - you'll find several reviews of recent adventure games. Every single review will include the phrase "Adventures are a dead genre". Despite the fact that, y'know, the game is right there and they are playing it.
So yes. There is a lack of single-player RPG goodness on the shelves. If it persists, expect the independents to eventually pick it up, just as they have with adventure games. *Especially* as better rpg toolkits become available. RPG Maker XP has already produced at least one English PC game on sale...
I've gotcher 'Women In Gaming' RIGHT HERE!
"nice link"
Link is from the Legend of Zelda series, not the Elder Scrolls series. But, yeah, he is a nice guy.
We all know that there are shills, but very few of us know to what extent. The sad truth is that there are no real fanboys. Sony, Nintendo, Xbox, Final Fantasy, whathaveyou. In fact there is no hardcore gamer demographic, only casual players that follow whatever the shills say is cool. The Slashdot boards are 99.9% shills. I hope that I am not the only one left. If I am, then I will certainly get modded down into obscurity.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/01/25 http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/02/10
Oh you mean... Western company's making rpg games... I thought we were talking about Cowboys and Indians type of role playing game.
Seriously, when I read the headline I was wondering what Oblivion had to do with Western 1800's era RPGs which I know were non-existant. Unless maybe there is a Oregon Trail mod out for oblivion? Hrm... Now that would be cool.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Chrono Trigger
Explain to me how that game is on rails?
Also please explain to me how, with all the choices you could make in say Baulders Gate, you got to not fight the boss at the end? These are the two quickest examples I can think of. Another would be FFX-2, where if you screw up in like the first 5 minutes (or anywhere, really) you get a different ending?
"I can identify with the player mentioned in teh article who dislikes playing with other people"
I agree. I like playing with myself. Oh, wait. That didn't come out right.
In Polar RPGs, from countries like Russia, Canada, Norway, and the like, oh and Australia and South Africa, you get richer art content, more humor, and insane pop songs that richochet in your head.
Oh, and igloos and caribou.
Plus penguins. You can never have enough penguins.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The problem with both is that they each only have one or the other essential components of a real RPG- character development and self-determination.
Console (eastern is a stupid, overinclusive category) RPGs generally have a lot of the former- characters are vivid, plots are involved and very party-driven. Problems evolve with this because there's little self determination ("Whee! I get to chase sephiroth to YET ANOTHER RANDOM LOCATION!"), character development is often superficial due to the maturity of the audience ("I'm, like, totally not caring about this village I'm risking myself to save") and general lack of choices. There are some advantages! SO3 makes fantastic use of facial expressions and voice acting, for instance, because the game knows generally people's relationships, etc. SO2 lets you simply NOT TAKE annoying people along (Precis!!!).
PC RPGs (again, Western is a stupid descriptor) we get "sandboxes." The advantages are that the player has more control over his characters, more options in interaction, and more opportunity to change outcomes. The downfall is that these sorts of abstractions lead to anemic central plotlines and shallow characters.
However, these two styles are not incompatable! There is a fantastic middle ground that no one has discovered. In order to fuse the two, the game must have a large cast of characters, a strong central plot (but not be on rails), and a crapload of so-called "mini-quests," mostly character-based. When the player cannot control every aspect of his main character, at least give him the option of adding that "aspect" of that character by adding party members that conform. To facilitate this, a huge cast of optional party members allows the right level of customization. This large cast can still be used in general "main plot" development, however, by separating characters into groups (mage, scientist, cleric, etc), and write flexible (or modular) dialogue so that for purposes of the main plot, characters are interchangeable.
Next, character development/sandbox. By putting in very character-specific, optional subplots/subquests, you allow these characters to grow without hindering the main plot with too much generalization. This also streamlines the game by omitting character development for characters not used by the player, or if they just don't feel like developing that character in that direction.
All this allows you to separate characters from the central plot. Stories are generally about internal development of the cast (the modern novel concept), but often (Ulysses, for instance) the plot of the story is secondary to character development completely unrelated, on the surface, to the main action. In this way, you can have a strong but not entirely character-driven plot.
All these allow the player to go through with as much or little freedom and character development as they choose, while maintaining the "epic" story required to make the story itself fulfilling. It's a good system, and I wish people in the industry were trying to explore this area rather than simply throwing their lots in with either the entirely linear or entirely nonlinear camp.
That word brought to mind images of a massive MMORPG filled with horses, pistols, and saloons. Imagine moving up the ranks by being a better outlaw or lawman. Having your skills at drawing your gun improve accuracy and speed as you gain experience. And after a hard day of fighting bandits, you kick it in the local tavern and hook up with some bar maids... ah yeah.. good times...
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
I bought Oblivion over the weekend on a urge. I was suprised the game is totally addictive. I have to say that the only thing that Deus Ex has over it is the real world links (half of the consperiacies are real) which made it all the more immersive. But for a fantasy RPG. It rocks.
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
"No kidding. There IS no such thing as an "Eastern RPG" - they're NOT RPGs! The best description of them I heard was "rail-playing game". They're cliched stories which are viewed by repeatedly hitting the "Action" button."
Let me remind you what table-top role-playing used to mean, at least with a good group and GM. It used to mean just that: playing a role, as in a theatre play. The whole point was taking part in an interactive fiction exercise, sorta like being co-autor in a theatre play. The stats were _not_ the whole point of the game, and in fact they were just props in that interactive fiction. What made one a fun guy to play with was _not_ accumulating the most loot or levels ("woot! my char is level 60 and PvP rank 14 before yours!"), but coming up with interesting lines for your character and/or interesting ways to solve a situation. Even if that character was level 1.
So making a game that's all about the props (stats, levels, whatever) is _not_ an RPG. And that pretty much sums up most of the Western games that some marketroid called "RPG" in the last years: some action game (be it arcade-like, action/adventure, or FPS) with some stats strapped on. You'd be surprised what got called an RPG. Let's just say even Daikatana claimed to have "RPG elements.
And turning it all into a fast-paced action game where all you ever have time for is mashing the attack button, and occasionally blocking, is _not_ what makes an RPG. _The_ thing that made table-top RP fun was having the time to come up with some smart and innovative solution. Having just enough time to reload and aim for a headshot before the enemy finishes charging you in real time is not exactly making that possible, even if the game actually gave you the possibilities. Most don't.
So basically there never was much RP in either Eastern or Western games. All they could offer was a good story, with some (different) ways of pretending that you're a part of it. Actually, in the Western most games didn't even offer that, as they focused mainly on having an action game with some stats thrown in. (You can feel free to point at Bethesda and Bioware games, but they're not the majority by any kind of counting.) So basically if you want to define RPG as "If you don't play a role in the story, it's not a role-playing game", then most western games didn't even _have_ much of a story to play a role in.
And even those exercises in storytelling, on both the eastern and the western sides of the map, are on a path to extinction, as more and more companies turn their games into MMOs (even Bioware announced one) and the afore-mentioned action-games-with stats. Presumably to catter to the large mass of CS kids who don't actually have the attention span for a story ("Auugh! It says 'press START to continue'! If I wanted to read that much text, I'd get a book!") or the interest for anything that doesn't involve willy-waving ("I managed to head-shot you, so you suck and are gay too! Oh, and your mom is a fat whore!") Though the western ones seem to have a head-start there.
"If anything, Eastern "RPGs" are going out of favor. Japan may love FFXII, but other than that recent fan-boy "defence of FFXII" article on Slashdot, I've yet to hear ANYONE in the US who's at all interested in that game. Oblivion, on the other hand, had/has people saving up money to purchase. Can't wait until I can afford a new computer..."
It might also be worth noting, that the western RPG that you so seem to cherish also is a pretty recent invention. Having much of a story in a RPG didn't even exist in the West until the mid or late 90's. Before Bethesda's "TES: Arena" and Interplay's acquiring the rights to D&D, there was no such thing as a western RPG with enough of a story to play a part in, or any freedom in playing that part. E.g., SSI's D&D exercises swung between being some kind of squad-based tactics game with D&D rules in the beginning, and some kind of dumb square-based proto-FPS in later games like the "Eye Of The Behold
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What do you classify Planescape:Torment ?
Northern RPG ?
Planescape: Torment anyone? There was an end to the story, but ultimately, it was the journey that counted. I still play it occasionally over a week or two, simply to enjoy the effort and thought that went into the design and creation of the game.
"The bass, the rock, the mic, the treble. I like my coffee black, just like my metal" - Mindless Self Indulgence
Hands up if you ever seen a game claimed to have "rpg" elements when the only thing the game has is that units can gain "level up"?
For some reason some people have come to believe that levelling up == RPG. It of course does not. Many games level up. Being allowed to fly bigger aircraft in an aircraft sim is a form of levelling up. Getting a bigger gun in Doom is.
Take away the levelling up from games like FF and you will see that they play very much like the adventure games of old. In fact the old "Indiana Jones: Fate of Atlantis" also had fights in it.
Adventures however are not RPG's most notably because you do not choose a role to play but rather follow the lead character through a pre-determined story. Adventures are as much about roleplaying as a FPS. Sure, you can roleplay in Doom. Just as long as you roleplay a guntoting silent marine who shoots everything on sight.
FF does not give you a role to play.
So where does this leave oblivion? Well in limbo. The thing that is missing from the elder scrolls is choices. You can join any guild you want even if they seem mutually exclusive. Only a hand full of quests even have a choice in them as to how you complete them. Usually either giving an item to the cops or the criminals. You can very easily however complete both quests for the dark brotherhood (evil assasins) as for some noble band of knights.
The old taking a side in a quest is not part of the Elder Scrolls and I miss it.
Oblivion ain't a bad game, just that it is RPG light compared to the real stuff like baldur gate, KOTOR, planescape torment etc.
Oblivion is free as those games but the individual quests are pretty much on rails. I would have loved to have been able to choose a side in the whole dark brotherhood deal. Not in this game.
To some this makes Obilion a union of the worst elements of eastern and western RPG's. The "feeling lost" of western RPG's and the "on rails" of eastern adventure+levellingup games.
It almost reminds me of Doom3. Nice engine. Now can a real game company make a proper game with it? For me Oblivion is only acceptable because there the lovers of western RPG are not exactly swamped with choice. When is the next company going to revive the genre like Baldur's gate did?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I remember a western RPG that had actually nude paperdolls of your avatar on your inventory screen. Purely for gameplay reasons of course. Not to oggle your female elves boobies.
Just can't remember the game names. I always thought it was one of the Elder Scrolls series but that don't seem to be it.
Anyone know the answer?
Oh, and to be on topic. The western RPG has died and reborn so many times they put a revolving door on its tomb.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The east/west dichotomy is simply wrong.
Certainly, Bethesda's earlier games fit the bill. You were a character in a completely static world, the only thing that changed was you. But that's Bethesda. (And, frankly, that's their *technology*. I think they would cheerfully make their world's dynamic if they didn't need to write the code and build the content.)
In general, game design is a struggle between richness of content and quantity of content. Ideally you want both, but practically you tend to settle for one or the other. Some "eastern" games, such as Final Fantasy VII say, try to give you the feeling of a very rich and varied setting, but in fact are "tunnels of fun" where you have very few real options at any given time. Some "western" games, such as Daggerfall, try to provide the illusion of an entire world in which you can do anything, at the cost of the entire world being essentially static and boring. It's a tradeoff.
I've played Western RPGs (e.g. many of Bioware's games) and *designed* games where the character(s) are simply part of larger events. I can't speak sweepingly of "eastern" RPGs, since I haven't played that many of them, but I suspect such sweeping generalizations are probably just as wrong there. The fact is that if something you do has some large effect (e.g. destroying a town) either you need to create the entire town before it's destroyed AND the entire town afterwards, or contrive a far more linear story where, say, you only see some parts of the town before it's destroyed and some parts after. You'll see "western" (and I suspect "eastern") games which take different approaches to this omnipresent problem.
The Final Fantasy games that I've played (VII, VIII, IX, X) are all kind of samish in their plots, but is that an "eastern" thing or just Square sticking to a successful formula?
Anyway, I'm rambling... Mod me incoherent!
I've played RPGs all my life. Pen & paper, computer RPGs back since the old SSI/Ultima and the early Final Fantasies games. I like 'both genres'. And I see so many closed minds when people discuss them.
Face it, there's not such a huge difference between Oblivion, Baldur's Gate and Final Fantasy. There's a big focus on character development and their stories in the Final Fantasy games. So was there in Ultima 7. But the core of the gameplay is the same. You have a quest that takes you from A to B. Along the way you can take time of to do sidequests X, Y and Z.
There's more sidequests in Oblivion, that is true. They're also tightly scripted and though you have some leeway in what you do it's far from the free choice people pretend is there.
You can assault people, empty their pockets and rob their stores. That is freedom. But what do you gain from it? Either you pay the guards/thieves' guild to erase the record and it's as if it never happened, or you keep running from the law who somehow know your face on sight - unable to continue with the main story that is there.
It's not really an opportuniy to change the story, it's just a pastime. It's far from anything revolutionary either, and it has about as much ultimate effect as if you set your characters in FF to attack eachother.
They're just games. And the AI in Oblivion sucks immensely. It's still a good game. Overhyped, which was fuelled a lot by Bethesda's bullshit (they're good at propaganda, I'll grant them that) but still a good game. Mind you, I enjoyed BG2 more and I will definitely remember BG2 longer.
Did you know Torment, one of the most critically acclaimed western made RPGs ever and using BioWare's famous engine, included a thank you note to Squaresoft for Final Fantasy in the credits?
Oblivion is not all that special and definitely not very innovative - and in places horribly designed. It's a good fun RPG though. And so are Final Fantasy, Fallout, Pools of Radiance, World of Warcraft and countless others.
This is a sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
I've played this a total of about 25 hours now, and I must say the answer is NO, it has not. The AI is horrible makes amateurish mistakes and isn't a stride towards anything good. I've seen countless enemies stand there and do nothing while I spend 2 minutes shooting fireballs at them. I've seen them ignore comrades being attacked from range, and get caught on crazy terrain features like stairs.
Xbox360 AI developer comments
read up on this and you can see how the xbox360 gimped the AI, and since this game is a port with no real improvements being made on the PC its quite telling about how the game was put together. The AI isn't even the worse part of the game. The level-scaling is attrocious and completely removes the feeling of immersion since every enemy you face is either leveled or replaced with a more powerful version. You only get ahead of meta-gaming and power-leveling.
Is the game enjoyable? Yes it is.
Is the game everything it was reported to be and should be? No, not by a long shot.
Thief had better AI awareness 8 or so years ago. Enemies reacted appropriately to things happening around them. They only react now if you're in range. You can stand there outside their response range, which is not outside your sight range and rain holy fire down around them. Unless you hit them, they don't care. You can do the same thing in a town.
I recently played a game of "Deadlands", You can download the .pdf documents of the rules for a fee, and they use Advanced Dungeons And Dragons for the base rules, and apply new "Western" classes and skills. Story line is a mix of Call of Cathulu and Wild Wild West. Very cool. Much better sitting round once a week with my friends and a roaring fire in the hearth than sitting at a desk clicking away on my mouse IMHO.
Morrowind, of course, had entirely static quests and dungeons, and once you cleared them out, they stayed empty. While this made for more of a believable world, I found it detracted from the uniqueness of the encounters. We were all basically stuck in the same cookie cutter world, and while we might use different spells and equipment to accomplish it, we all basically ended up in the same place. Not to mention I found the main story line in Morrowind to be teh complete suck, and the 'ending' was even worse.
How does Oblivion stack up in terms of random quests?
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
Being able to do what you're "not supposed to do". Ever since the first TES game, Arena, I've loved this aspect and looked for it in other games.. If I wanted to, I could kill a guard and the game actually planned for that sort of thing.. I didn't instantly lose, the guard didn't kill me by looking at him, I was able to loot his body and the towns affection for me dropped... If I talked to a quest giver and realized that the quest was a sham (he was a guilty thief and was trying to frame someone else get me to kill them or something like that) I could kill him on the spot and achieve the goal without having to go through the story.. likewise I could kill a legitimate quest giver and never be able to recieve the award. I've often looked for that kind of aspect in all the games I play. I'll go to do something "I'm not supposed to" just because it seems like it would be fun, only to find that the developers had taken the extra step and planned for that sort of reaction and gave you a result you wern't expecting. Eastern RPGS don't have any room for that sort of open gameplay... you follow the story and if you don't then you're staring at a brick wall.
(zoom out)
IV
LIVI
BLIVIO!
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
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An FPS with oldschool-style RPG plot, levelling, and equipment would be quite interesting.
Not to sound snide, but what rock have you been hiding under since about 2000? That's when the rather brilliant original "Deus Ex" came out for PC (it has since been released for the Mac and for the PS2). It's generally considered an RPG, and has a tremendous emphasis on both character development and story (the story of which is branching in many ways; for example, if you know later that you're going to have to kill what is now a friendly character, you can often kill that character beforehand. Not that your allies won't freak out about this...)
Okay, so it isn't "oldskool RPG plot" in that I suppose traditionally RPG plot is set in a world of sword and sorcery, but hey, many of the best games are exceptions (Fallout, anyone?). I have met many people who have played Deus Ex, and introduced many more to it personally, and none of them failed to be tremendously enthusiastic about the game afterwards. And eventually the devs even released an SDK, and as UnrealEd is one of the easiest-but-powerful game editors out the IMHO, there's a lot of rather good third-party content out there (they even held an official contest, and you can be sure that the winners are worth checking out). Hell, last LAN party I was at we even took advantage of the later-released (about the time of the SDK) multiplayer part and just hacked up some of the single player levels to deathmatch in; it was a lot of fun, due in no small part to the fact that even to this day the level of detail and interactivity of the levels and the game in general have precious few competitors in the realm of FPS games.
The Wikipedia article has more info if you're curious. Really, if you're looking for a FPS with RPG style plot (and the ability to interact and converse with NPCs in Deus Ex beats out even most other RPGs), levelling and equipment, then honestly, try out Deus Ex! You won't be disappointed!
(A word of caution, though . . . please don't mistake this game for the sequel, "Deus Ex: Invisible War". Opinion on the quality of that one is a bit more . . . shall we say . . . divided?)
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
one of the defining characteristics of sheep is that they think that everyone else is a sheep except them...
Me? I'm a total sheep, I realize that there's really no way of escaping it, and get on with my life
Your self-awareness of your sheepishness, by your definition, seems to exlude you from the sheep herd.
Doh! Logical conundrum...
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Pay up. I cried and was emotionally attached to the characters in Planescape: Torment.
SRSLY.
It's a little too open ended. I can't stand playing games where I know what's going to happen, or having to go down a static route to achieve my goal. However, Oblivion kind of just throws you in the role, without any training or walkthroughs, or DIRECTION. The weapon & armor system is confusing, the leveling is equally as confusing, and the training system leaves a bit to be desired.
Yes, I'm one of 4 people who don't strongly love this game, but it does have some glaring problems.
One of the worst bugs i've encountered has to do with a horse you acquire during the game. The NPC's in the game do not understand that your horse isn't stolen, so they chase after you (even important quest NPC's, Martin did this) until they kill either you or the horse. This obviously is a game breaking problem, you could wind up dead or in jail because of something you have no control over.
Otherwise, it's a good game - just add some tutorials and make the interface a little more user friendly. I've been playing it for 3 days and I still can't figure out what dictates weapon power, or how I fit in to the 'thief' category while i'm running around with a long sword & shield.
TES is a great example for that- what the hell is the story in [...] Morrowind?
Long ago on the island of Vvardenfell: The Dwemer (TES' equivalent to dwarves) gained access to tools of incredible might, which their lead scientist Kagrenac used to do evil, as lead scientists are wont to do. This resulted in a war between the Dwemer and the Chimer, at the end of which the Dwemer vanished without a trace. Yes, the tools were involved into that, as well. Dagoth Ur was sent to destroy the tools, but his friend and ally Nerevar Indoril stopped him (the fact that Nerevar was the Chimers' war chief might have been a factor, too). However, Dagoth Ur soon was corrupted by the tools and turned into some sort of mad god. Nerevar recognized the danger that the tools posed and defeated Dagoth Ur and his minions, but unbeknownst to him they survived, merely "sleeping". After the battle Nerevar was killed by his three advisors Vivex, Almalexia and Sotha Sil, who then proceeded to use the tools to turn themselves into gods and forcefully establish a cult centered around themselves ("the Tribunal") as the dominant religion on Vvardenfell. Azura (a real goddess and somewhat on Nerevar's side) was quite pissed and cursed the Chimer (turning them into the black-skinned Dunmer). She also announced that Nerevar would return and reestablish the old ways.
Fast forward to Morrowind (the game, not the region): The emperor Uriel Septim VII (having limited prophetic abilities) has sent a prisoner matching the Nerevarine's description to Vvardenfell where he should establish that he was in fact the reborn Nerevar (the "Nerevarine") while really being a member of the Blades, the Empire's elite spies, as an act of religious manipulation in order to further his influence in Vvardenfell. As it turns out this man is the Nerevarine and with a tiny bit of support from Azura he swiftly proceeds to defeat Dagoth Ur and the Tribunal.
(I do know that some details are missing.)
Yes, it's not easy to find out everything about the story, but it's certainly there and it's not quite bad. In fact, Morrowind has a pretty immersive world - just take the time and read the books you encounter. You learn a lot about the game's world, the people and their culture. I think it's quite impressive to which lengths the developers have gone creating their world.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Let's not also forget that Eastern games are all done in the "Anime" style of animation. I'm NOT dumping on Anime. It's cool.
But the all Anime all the time in all videogames gets old after a while. The amount of games that do their graphics in non-anime are for the most part non-existant on console platforms. PC games are better but Anime style still dominates.
The only one I can think of is Boot Hill I think it is out of print. Can't think of any that are on the computer...
Am I the only person who thought "So why are games about gunslingers inherently focused on the character in a way all other RPGs aren't?" before clicking through to the article?
But then again I'm currently playing <i>Curse of Monkey Island</i> for the first time. I don't keep up with the cutting edge of gaming any more.
Yknow, an RPG set in the Old West could be kinda fun. (Or the Future West. Wait, wasn't that the much-loved <i>Wasteland?</i>)
egypt urnash minimal art.
I thought RPG stood for Rocket Propelled Grenade.
The original Elder Scrolls game is free to download from their website.
MMORPGs COULD be called RPGs, IF they simply got over the idea that the players MUST end up being better than 90% of the enemies in the game. (WoW's end game gear is so overpowering that stories of people equiped in epic tier 2 gear doing 1-on-3 no epic equiped players and winning are not uncommon. Theres are even complaints about high level enchants being usable by low level players, essentially turning matches into level 20ish people versus level 30ish-par equiped players.) This is why I think quick reward MMOs such as WoW are doomed to fail in the long run. Constantly creating 'uber-gear' ultimately leads to players belittling the rest of the game content and boredom FAST.
... and yet you have experienced kill-stealing by the guards. Shame. I would personally raze their city in retaliation.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Maybe you're just a crybaby anyway?
Cry in descent 2 when wingnut exploded?
Ok I dunno if wingnut ever explodes because I never finished Descent2... But if it does happen... umm.. *spoiler*...
sweeping generalizations are characteristic of internet discussions, and are always wrong.
whereas arbitrary categorizations are a sign of a sophomoric discussion, and are always dumb.
Why do we need to have these fights in here about eastern rpgs vs western rpgs.
:(
You know, you can enjoy both.
Jade Empire, while western, is eastern styled - it tells a specific story, infact it's almost just an action adventure rpg game - none the less it's a GREAT game.
I also happen to enjoy Oblivion, it's a beautiful, fun, very open ended game - I can what I want and craft my own path through it, surprisingly the open endedness hasn't scared me off like it did in Morrowind.
Stop fighting fella's - start playing, we all seem to spend more time discussing games than playing the darn things
Personally, I'd absolutely count GTA, particularly now San Andreas has stats levelling to worry about.
But I'm speaking as someone who thinks he doesn't normally like RPGs at all, because all the ones I'd tried were Japanese-style "repetitive turn-based strategy games interspersed by some wandering around and a whole lot of cutscenes". But with all the Elder Scrolls hype around at the moment and my machine not being up to running Oblivion, I bought Morrowind really cheaply the other day.
I'm really rather liking it. As I say, I'm not an RPG person, but I've played a fair bit of GTA, and this is feeling an awful lot like GTA with a fantasy setting instead of that urban gangster stuff that never really appealed while I got on with enjoying the whole sandbox idea.
I've got a whole bunch of missions I can go on, I can choose which one to try next, or I can ignore all of them for a while and go earn cash and weapons by performing assorted crimes while ensuring that I don't get spotted by the cops doing them. Sounds pretty GTA to me.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Because the level system in oblivion is based on you skiling up your 7 primary skills (10 skillups = 1 level xp) you can very easily unbalance your character. A mob's equivalent level is basically = your level * difficulty factor + offset. Ie, a scenario might say "this mob is 1 level higher than you" or whatever. The difficulty slider is normally going to be set in the middle, no bias.
The gotcha is, when you level up, you get to increase your attributes. However, this ALSO is scaled, you can only level up three attributes, and the amount (1-5) is dependent on which skills you have increased during your levelling period. Each skill has an underlying base attribute. If you want to get a +5 intelligence bonus, you need 10 skillups (ie, mostly in your secondary skills) BEFORE you go up in level.
So, you can nearly completely control when you go up in level.
But, because skills have perqs, choosing a character with "useless" primary skills lets you level "useful" secondary skills way up without causing the mobs to get more difficult.
Because a lot of the combat is baselined against some arbitrary scaling factor, it tends to be the case that mobs get MUCH more difficult the higher in level you go. You are frequently forced to find either innovative tactics (strafing, blocking etc) to avoid getting hit or adjust the difficulty slider downward to try to rebalance the missions relative to your character.
Automatic mob scaling in Oblivion is a nice idea, but the primary vs secondary skillups driving mob levelling is a bit broken, in my opinion. Even if the mob attributes scale with the average of 2.5 points per level not the full 5, in many cases just trying to casually play the game means +2 bonuses only, and so you are regressing against the scaled baseline.
I have been enjoying Oblivion, but its a lot of fun to own mobs at level 1, and not much fun at all to get pwned in your teens. I've re-rolled due to advice on the forums to pick primary skills I dont use much to allow my secondary skills (which are heavily used!) to advance enough to try to keep me alive without using the difficulty slider.
Hmm, I suppose there's no "no text" meme in slashdot, I'm just supposed to repeat the title. Oh well:
Same devs, for the most part. Alas, I'm unsure of whether Warren Spector, to name the man at the helm there, is actually working on anything genuinely new at the moment. Naturally his previous studio (the one that created Deus Ex, that is, which was comprised hugely of ex-System Shock and Thief devs) was closed by Ion Storm. Grr.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
I meant to say that the Spector branch of Ion Storm was closed by Eidos.
Bah, damn "Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment"!
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
... who's hackles rear up everytime they try to call these things rpgs? It is not a roleplaying game when you are handed some character to play that isn't yours, it's not a roleplaying game when you don't get to chose what comes out of your mouth, or it's part of a canned set of lines. How do you define who your character is, when you're restricted in what you can do?
Of course, one could also argue that there's as much point in roleplaying by yourself with a computer as performing a play in an empty room.
CRPGs are storyline based adventure (and sometimes puzzle) games.
Okay, not the same meaning of "western" as in the article, but I surely would love to see a Western MMORPG. Better yet, a Dark Tower MMORPG.
:)
From having read volumes 1 to 5, let me see what such a game would have:
a) Battles with guns, swords, knifes, light-sabers, throwing disks, machine guns, bows and bahs;
b) Vehicles, ranging from horses and cows to (mad) trains, tubes, cars, trucks and even nazi aircrafts.
c) Dimensional travel with at least 12 different versions os the United States, plus some non-Earth-related settings, and even distorted versions of classical fairy tales settings.
d) Time travel embracing at least 3 "ages": the '60s, '70s and '80s.
e) Last-day cowboy-knights descending from King Arthur or some alternate-reality version of him.
f) Giant bio-mechanical robots, human-sized robots, animal-shaped robots, and small robots.
g) Brain-eating mutants with psychic powers.
h) Vampires (3 types), "men in yellow", witches and dark mages.
i) Mad cults.
j) Policemen and gangsters.
Yeah, that would be cool!
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Is the part where the game doesn't test to see if the card has appropriate shader capabilities before firing shader code to the video card also a feature of western RPGs?
Unfortunately, the design of the game is completely overshadowed by the bugs. Oblivion is the next in a long and proud lineage of utterly immersive, amazingly massive games that are also almost too broken to play; a lineage which includes Daggerfall and Battle Cruiser 3000AD.
It's been a long time.
MMORPGs and MUDs before them, are _very_ different beasts. They don't usually catter to the same kind of a group as a tabletop GM does, and don't have the same goals.
For a start they don't aim to have a small group that has fun together, but really aim for numbers.
E.g., as early as Bartle's extremely insightful paper about MUD-player types (and it should be required reading for any wannabe MMO designer), he described "killers" as basically what we call "griefers" nowadays. And he explicitly didn't mean "PvP players", but really the kind that thrives on making everyone else's life miserable and whose greatest achievement is driving someone off the game completely. Basically "killing" them off the game permanently. Hence the name. Yet he then went on about how a MUD needs them too, and ways to keep them interested in your MUD.
Now I'm not arguing with Bartle this time, and he certainly has more experience and insight than I do, but just illustrating a major difference between a MMO/MUD and a tabletop role-playing session. If you had a player whose only interest is humiliating and harrassing the others in your tabletop RP session, chances are you'd ask him to leave, or at least never invite him again. Yet in a MMO/MUD there's interest in how to _keep_ them there.
And on a MMO there is a financial interest to keep people in your game for as long as possible, because that translates directly and linearly into money they're paying you. So the _primary_ interest becomes how to keep them in the game longer, including how to play on their hoarding instincts and fears to keep them there long after they're not even having any fun any more.
On a MMO you _want_ them to feel attached to their level 60 character and to their small hoard of epic items. Each extra day they're in a "but I'll lose all that if I quit!" phase, is one extra day you get their money. (I know the fees are paid monthly, but over large numbers of players it averages out that way. If you have 300,000 players, an extra day squeezed out of each means 10,000 extra monthly fees cashed in.)
And before that, each day they're playing just for the slim chance of getting another piece of epic gear, is another paid day too. It doesn't matter if they're even playing any role at that point. (It's night impossible to play any interesting role in a 40-man raid. Some classes, e.g., priests, can go through the whole raid without even using more than one spell. Two if they also had to res someone.) It doesn't even matter if they're having any fun. All that matters is that they log in.
If you force them to restart at level 8, and they didn't even have much rare stuff at that point anyway, you've just made that decision very easy for them. Sure, they were getting bored anyway, had seen all the content that was available for a level 8 anyway, so it's a good time to cancel the account. So no corporate beancounter will let you design a game that way.
MMos are games run like a business, by the numbers, not like a table-top session. You have the statistics saying how much an average player stays in the game, how many percent do it because they're attached to their hoard, etc, and your job is to turn that into a machine that milks the last cent out of that.
Interesting content and quests are certainly expected, but only as a means to that goal. If a choice becomes exclusively between (A) making the game more fun, and (B) milking more money out of the players, you're supposed to choose B every time.
As an extreme example, again, almost every modern MMO is fitted with "endgame content" explicitly designed to keep players there long after they've ceased to have any fun. At that point you're actually supposed to play with the players' hoarding instincts and anxieties to keep them there, fully knowing that they won't have fun in the process.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
My son is playing this, and he wanted to get into the Dark Brotherhood, or whatever it is. To do so, you have to murder someone for no reason, and then when you next sleep they come to you and tell you you're in. So he murders this guy in his bed, then lays down in that same bed to sleep. The dark brother comes to him and says "Ok, you're in the brotherhood. If you're wondering how I know that you've done the deed, the Dark Brotherhood knows many things..." while the body was still laying right there. Funny.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
I thought this was about cowboys :(
"I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability."-Oscar Wilde
Yes it is a choice and more then you get in adventure games but a long way from roleplaying. I would have loved to have been able to infiltrate the black brotherhood and destroy them from within. Not a choice. Neither can you join the brotherhood and then destroy all the other guilds.
Perhaps Oblivion is just to big for its own good. The first part of the brotherhood is a lot of fun on its own (the "fake" missions are boring to the extreme) and it almost seems a shame they did not make it the full game. Sure sure it is nice I can join half a dozen guilds but what do you prefer. 2 highly detailed opposing guilds with you either joining one or the other or playing them off against each other, OR the current, generic unrelated shallow groups?
It is a nice, game but it sets no new RPG standards for those who were pleseantly suprised by BB and its offspring years ago.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yeah some of the scripted events can get a bit funny since they completely ignore whats going on. My worst AI experience thus far was when I was liberating kvatch. I fired a snowball spell, and at that exact moment a guard dispatched the monster he was fighting, tore directly across the room to the monster I was targetting and stepped in front of the snowball spell. I was labelled a murderer, and the other guard there called me a murderer, then proceeded to tell me I Was awesome and should lead the way.
nt