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Quantum Leaps in RPGs
Gamasutra has up an article, giving out 'awards' to titles that made a genre what it is. Today, they have memorable and impactful role-playing games; a top five with five honorable mentions. They're all very worthy titles, but I'm not sure about their placement on the list. None of the Ultima games make the top 5? Really? From the article: "Ultima V - The Ultima series allowed the player a level of freedom found only in a few games today. Through the origins of the series, the game had fits and starts where some ideas worked and others did not. By V, however, the central core of the game was completely worked out and many games today are 3D versions of this ground breaking title: Elder Scrolls comes to mind. Though other games at the time were similar, Bard's Tale for example, they did not have the scope of story and adventure, nor did they encompass so many technologies of the time. -James Edwards, Microsoft"
Ziggy says there's a 93% chance you have to slay thusands of random orcs then rescue the beautiful dragon from the evil princess before you can leap out of here.
Would love to play as Sam Beckett or Al Calavicci. Classes are traveller, resident, or hologram representation from the future.
I was expecting information about a quantum leap in Rocket Propelled Grenade technology.
# Erik
Why is it that every time we talk about the influence of groundbreaking games (and films too, I suppose), more often than not they're shoehorned into some sort of subjective pecking order?
You'll never see "Top 10 Paintings of the Rennaisance", but that hasn't kept art critics and historians from debating their merits and influence through the years.
Every game on that list, and quite a few others, deserves to be there. But why waste time quibbling about rank? When you make lists like this, people are bound to concentrate more on a game's place rather than the content of the criticism or praise. These games stand on their own as great works, or they wouldn't be there at all.
It all reminds me of those silly GameFAQ's character battles.
And, for my money, Daggerfall and Morrowind deserve to be on there every bit as much as Oblivion. Not to mention NetHack and Diablo.
Starting with place #5 Chrono Trigger:
It was definitly one of the most entertaining while also groundbreaking games of its time - the time-battle system, the combination of techniques for the battles, dozends of possible endings, countless sidequests and the ability to avoid battles (having to take on the 415th Generic Enemy you wipe away easily is a major turn-off). Shame with Chrono Cross though (it still was a great game, if only the story-makers had not decided to "hey let's kill off everything CT players hold dear and piss on their graves")
For #4
System Shock 2 and Deus Ex. Both game stand synonymous for a new Genre - true first person action role playing games - not FPSs that got added an "roleplaying" system as if as an afterthought, but both sides - action and roleplaying - made as one, from one yarn. The multiple solution & multiple ending ability in Deus Ex gives it a slight advantage over SS2, but I would have been happy to see either on this spot.
For #3
Oblivion - is it the new quantum leap or just a propagation from the old. Perhaps a bit of both. I had some qualms regarding the difficulty of the game (scaling the power of enemies according to your level is nice, but please make sure their power niveau fits the setting - a level 1 character that gets beaten up by City Guards, but that can become champion of the arena - and thus best fighter in the world - just because the arena opponents are also pitiful weak hurts both the sense of accomplishment and suspension of disbelieve), but still the direction is the right one - RPGs become even more open-ended and lifelike, and Oblivion is pointing that direction.
#2 Planescape Torment
What can I say. A perfect story, told in a perfect way. Be who and what you want - literally; waking up without memories gives you that freedom. Truely one of the best RPG ever made. #1 Fallout
Words fail me. Fallout has it all (though PS:T still wins in the story department).
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
I agree to the extent that I'd put Morrowind on the "quantum leap" list before Oblivion. Oblivion feels like "pretty Morrowind" more than any kind of new thing.
But to Oblivion's credit, I made it through the game without a single hitch or crash (that I remember). I'm not running an amazing machine, but it looked great and played smooth throughout (except a little choppy during one of the last battles). I remember having a storyline order problem or two in Morrowind - but none with Oblivion.
I don't know whether you were unlucky or I was lucky but I thought Oblivion was a great, well-executed game - with very few glitches for such a complicated setup.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
WoW is an excellent MMORPG. But it has done absolutely nothing innovative or interesting for the the RPG genre. MMOs are popular mainly because of their social aspects. The one thing WoW did right was made it so that casual players can level more quickly. This shows future games how to set up their MMO, but does nothing for the RPG genre. Remove the social aspect of WoW and you have a miserable excuse of a game. All you have left is a level grind and extremely boring quests. Their is story in WoW, but you have to dig hard for it...most of it you have to get from external websites. RPGs have evolved in to interactive fiction. Story is the key element and in that WoW fails. It has story, but it lacks a storyteller. It also has not brought anything new mechanicwise. So yeah, WoW has made a lot of money and is an addictive MMORPG but it does not belong anywhere near this list.
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Warcraft isn't a role-playing game. It's an adventure game combined with an AOL chatroom. There's as much roleplaying there as there is in tetris.
Warcraft hasn't invented or innovated anything, they've just taken an existing format and dumbed it down for the masses.
And if making the most money is what defines a good game, then we may as well cancel the game industry.
Who cares about Ultima? As long as Planescape: Torment is in a well-deserved second place, I don't care about anything else. Torment was the first and still only computer game that actually feels like a RPG. Excellent storytelling and excellent writing on top of that, but the most important thing is that you actually roleplay an interesting character, instead of just an empty set of stats and weapons who's mainly exploring other people's lives. If that's not a leap forward in CRPGs, I don't know what is.
Still, pen & paper RPGs are better.
Your so right! They should list real rpgs like World Of Warcraft.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
How can there be a list of RPGs, and not one page mentions Wizardry?
If there's one thing I would like to see more of, it's Wizardry 8-style party RPGs. I don't think they even make those anymore... *sniff*
J-RPGs are RPGs in the sense that your characters gain levels to improve their stats and can also wear/wield equipment to make them fight more effectively. The fighting systems are also based on the old paper&pencil RPGs, suitably automated of course, but it still comes down to the good old fashioned D&D style fight - "I hit the orc", "The orc swings at me - misses" type of combat.
I agree that J-RPGs tend to be more like "stories on rails" with fixed characters, pre-set dialog, a pre-set story, heavily scripted events, and long non-interactive cutscenes. This does take the "R" out of the traditional RPG. A more accurate description would probably be something like "Adventure Combat Stories".
The overall experience of a J-RPG is somewhat like a movie or novel mixed with various mini-games (the fighting system being key among these.)
Anyways, if you're looking at computer RPGs that follow the paper&pencil style of RPG in that there is actual "role playing" on your part, with a fairly flexible and open-ended storyline then there's been very very few games that can be called RPGs at all. In fact, given that criteria, I might even consider The Sims to be a sort of RPG, since you can create your own characters, "level them up", and make up little stories for them to perform.
Honestly I am a huge Final Fantasy fan and Final Fantasy 7 is actually my favorite out of the series, but I agree that 7 should not have been put on the list.
This list was talking about quantum leaps in the genera, recognizing games from breaking the mold and jumping into the unknown. Final fantasy 7 did not do that. It was a very polished game, the story was detailed and with enough plot twists to keep it entertaining, it had excellent mechanics and is one of my and many other's favorite games of all time.
But the vast majority of the game was pretty derivative of the genera. The character progressions were pretty close to pervious jRPGs, the game mechanics were classic final fantasy and nothing revolutionary. FF7 didn't change the RPG genera, it made it popular get recognition and is high on the list of quality RPGs but the general it self wasn't changed by it.
Deus Ex and Oblivion are close: it should be System Shock 2 and Morrowind instead, but I can see why they chose the ones they did
The only significant omission IMHO is Wizardry. There are so many firsts in that game it's scary- I think most people forget how lame 99% of all Apple games were.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Phantasy Star was a good series, but I'm wondering where Arcanum is. It took the RPG genre and turned it on its pointy ear.
No classes - you had stats, gained skill points to invest in whatever field you wanted (both tech and magical), and your skills determined how tech or magic you were (the more tech you are, the less magic works around you and the more magic you are, the less tech works around you to the point of having a good chance of technical weapons missing you completely)
Your tech/magic rating, race, background, and alignment rating also affected how people responded to you.
The ability to not only purchase, but create tools, weapons, and even steam driven robots.
Having to actually find locations on your own by exploring on the map if you can't find someone to point them out on your map.
The ability to basically forget your main quest for pretty much as long as you want and wander around foing side quests if you so desire. It really is a fun game to just roam around in.
And, last, but most certainly not least, you have to love any game in which you can play a pickpocketing, fireball slinging half-elf who packs an elephant gun. =]
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
If the point is about quantum leaps, the article was a bit careless.
Planescape: Torment is awesome, but it's probably, technically, redundant to Fallout. Fallout was the first (IIRC) Black Isle-style RPG, which are notable for being RPGs in the old sense, and it's Fallout that made the quantum leap; P:T and Baldur's Gates et al "merely" polished that leap. That opens up a slot.
Many people are mentioning System Shock 2, which I'd point out isn't that different from System Shock 1, which itself is clearly descended from Ultima Underworld, which is what should get the nod on that line. Also, interestingly, all from the same company (more or less; SS2 was developed by Looking Glass offshoot Irrational Games and Looking Glass and published by Electronic Arts.
Oblivion simple doesn't belong. Morrowind may. I'm striking it because I've seen many games like that before and I'm taking the "quantum leap" idea at its word. I'll replace it with Ultima 4, for introducing the idea that RPGs can be more than brutal slaughtering, something still underrated today. All main-stream Ultimas are from Origin.
Dues Ex I can't speak to, never played it, so I'll defer to the article and leave it up there.
And finally, while I don't know whether I'd pick Chrono Trigger per se, but surely "the first significant JRPG" deserves a mention. However, the problem here is that there really were no quantum leaps, it has been a very smooth evolution. (Final Fantasy I is half Ultima-pre-IV and half Bard's Tale, for instance, not a quantum leap.) I've never played FF7, but one may make the argument that if you're going to try to tell a cinematic, linear story (which has it's place, although I wish they had something we could all agree to call them other than RPG), it is a quantum leap to be able to have cinematics and full motion video.
I note with interest that in all four cases where I changed something, all the relevant choices came from the same company. There's Black Isle RPGs, Origin RPGs, Looking Glass (first-person action) RPGs, and (weakest of all/most competition) Square RPGs.
Maybe consolidation isn't the best thing for the industry after all.
(OK, no "maybe".)
I read the beginning of the article, and didn't notice anyone saying COMPUTER RPGs.
"Which role playing game over the entire history of the genre do you think has made the biggest 'quantum leap', and why?"
I'm going to go with Dungeons and Dragons for $100, Chuck.
-Styopa
Role playing in Pen&Paper evolved from wargaming, as people developed an interest in playing specific heros (inspired directly by the works of J. R R. Tolkien) rather than armies. What are called "RPGs" on computers are an outgrowth of Adventure games, they attempted to model the experience of Pen&Paper roleplaying by adding stats and combat to interactive stories told through computers. This, especially in the pre-Compuserve/BBS days missed the social aspect that was seen as critical to Pen&Papers RPGs by purists, and there is a continuing resistance amongst die-hard P&P RPG players to the association of the genres. JRPGs are an even more strange beast, as they evolved being designed by people who had never played D&D in the first place (which is almost unheard of for american cRPG designers), Japanese developers having only played japanese copies of D&D (which is what Anime like Lodoss War is loosely based on, it seems like an odd parody of D&D stereotypes because it is, reflected by another culture through language barriers both ways) at most. The focus on Consoles, rather than PCs had other significant impacts on their development, which can be seen by comparing, say the Original Final Fantasy on NES, with Ultima V on the Apple II.
The difficulty for purists is that all of these different branches (P&P RPG, Adventure Games, cRPGs, jRPGs) evolved over time with varying degrees of intermingling. And now the last ten years have brought MMO type cRPGs into the mainstream, further complicating things (they have social interaction, but relatively little roleplaying where do they fit in?) The question of what a "true" role-playing game is quite difficult to answer now. P&P is the oldest, by 6-8 years, followed by cRPGs , jRPGs, and finally MMORPGs. In reality I think these are all pretty distinct genres, and are probably played (even if by the same person) for different reasons. Each provides a substantially different experience. I think that lumping them all together under the same label is a mistake, in much the same way as an inexperienced bookseller might lump Sci-fi/fantasy/horror/other together dispite definate, if not immediately obvious, differences. One of our problems in this subculture is its evolution with an astonishing lack of criticism (by which I mean criticism in the literary sense) which I think it both desperatly needs, and deserves.
Fallout and PS:T are well-placed, but I'd have probably put at least one of the Ultimas or possibly the series as a whole on #1. While I've never been that much of an Ultima player (I played mostly 7, 8 and 9 and more recently started to play the excellent Ultima V mod for Dungeon Siege) I admire and appreciate it for being everything I want in an RPG. It's a wide, open world where you can do what you want. What you do has an actual impact on the game world - choice and consequence. You have your great dialog, too. Maybe not as excellent as PS:T, but as good as you can get with branched keyword dialog systems. Also love the fact that you have to keep track of your quests and things like that yourself in the earlier parts of the series.
And what does Oblivion have? A shallow plot, a tiny amount of new lore, idiotic dialog, hand-holding at all times, no politics at all; not between individuals and not between factions. Nothing. Morrowind was 10x the RPG Oblivion is, and that's not even mentioning Daggerfall. Oblivion is the coffin in which TES will be buried. It may be a good action game, but it stinks as an RPG.
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