Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
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.
Your so right! They should list real rpgs like World Of Warcraft.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
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".)