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RPG Devs Should Beware MMOGs
CVG is reporting on comments made by Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart. In an interview with the site, he points out that traditional PC RPG developers are in danger of permanently losing out to the developers of Massively Multiplayer Online Games. "He believes it's key that developers of non-MMO RPGs look closely at what the genre offers over MMORPGs to ensure the RPG genre doesn't lose out to the increasingly popular massively multiplayer online world. 'I think those of us that make non-MMO RPGs need to look at what a single-player/small multiplayer RPG can do that MMOs can't and spend our time and effort on those things', Urquhart said. "
The MMORPG and the RPG genre are completely different, one is for socialising with people in a vast world with only a backstory guiding them while the other is more oriented to dicovering a story by yourself....
I would think that people who are into role playing games are very interested in character development. Traditional crpgs offer limited character development while mmorpgs offer never-ending opportunities for character advancement and development.
The biggest advantage is the lack of 13 year olds whining and asking for help. Just focus on games targeted to mature gamers.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
After playing my first MMO, a non MMO seems rather "lonely" and "empty", and I am not even that social. I think that will be hard to overcome.
For me the biggest reason to play a single player/ small group games vs. an MMOG is that I can play in smaller bouts. It is a bit of a waste to play an MMOG for 20 minutes, yet it works OK to play 20 minutes at a time in a single player game. Two year olds tend to dictate when you can and can't play.
Bobo Mahoney
...I remember when Oblivion came out, many people referred to it as a "single-player mmo". Ignoring the inherint oxymoron in such a statement, perhaps that is something game developers should attempt to do?
Living With a Nerd
Please use also synonyms for MMO and others next time. I had a hard time reading the summary.
One of these days someone is going to come up with a game that both supports MMOG play but also has a single player campaign running on a mini-server. This title will rule the RPG world until someone brings out one that lets you run your own server, and create a portal from the mmog to your server (the portal simply doesn't appear unless your server is up; it could even be flickery if you have a poor history of uptime.)
One thing that we have all learned from the mod communities in this world is that players want open-ended, customizable games.
I can't speak for anyone else, but many people have told me that they won't pay for the client for an MMOG because it could become useless in the future, and they're offended by having to pay for a client AND pay a monthly fee anyway - this is precisely where I stand on the issue.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
'I think those of us that make non-MMO RPGs need to look at what a single-player/small multiplayer RPG can do that MMOs can't and spend our time and effort on those things'
So they should concentrate on what differentiate them from other game types. Thank you, Captain Obvious.
NWN2 and KotOR2?
I think it's key for Obsidian to develop games that don't have 50 bugs around every corner. I started the first act of NWN2 5 times, and they all ended up with corrupted save files after crashing, before I gave up on it. For KotOR2, I lost both my main save and my back up save to some weird bug.
Maybe they should worry about ironing out their bugs before they worry about competing with MMOs.
Single-Player RPG's have always excelled, and will always excel, at what they do: They tell stories.
Like books, before them.
I don't see any danger here to the RPG.
That said, it might be fun to read a book (play an RPG) with others some time, and if they made it possible in the game, that might be neat, if it worked out.
Perhaps you get cues, on what to say and act, but you do it in your own words, with language tips to the side, and briefings before-hand? (Like a computer-mediated LARP?) Could be neat.
I predict a huge success for the game which fuses the concepts of World of Warcraft and Second Life.
A RPG should focus more on a dynamically changing storyline that gives the player a real sense of interaction, power, and accomplishment. Where as the MMO player will get those from interactions with other live players, but the world will remain static and respawn again.
One example I can think of would be Gothic 2 & Gothic 3. Gothic 2 gave players a real choice about how they would... role-play, being good, or bad, or neutral. Where as Gothic 3 felt like a single player MMO, runnig around killing things, only without the respawns.
I suppose it really depends on what you're looking for in a conputer/solo RPG or MMORPG - also, let's not forget table top RPGs. For my own part, and there are a few in my 'gaming circle' that tend to agree with my outlook, I play a solo RPG for the story - it's rather like reading a good book when everything is done well, just without exercising the mind's eye to picture the details. When I'm feeling more social, I'll play either a table top RPG or MMORPG. It's my way of being a gaming nerd/geek, but without sacrificing my social life - although I tend to prefer the table top games just for the added human interaction. I guess it all comes down to what you want to get out of whatever game you're playing. I think both solo RPGs and MMORPGs are here to stay (sentence stolen from the Obvious Department). Neither is really a rival to the other, just one more time sink to fret over.
Probably the first things Obsidian should worry about are: 1) Releasing products that are finished. Hi KOTOR2 2) Releasing products with an adequate amount of performance optimization. You shouldn't have to turn NWN 2 settings down to the point of making the game look 6 years old in order to make it playable.
Unfortunately for this concept, the fundamental principle of MMOs is "don't trust the client" -- as soon as you put game data on the client; it becomes hackable by the end users. For example, in NCSoft's City of Heroes, even though all the character data is stored on the server, world textures and sounds are stored on the client; fairly shortly after the introduction of exploration badges and history plaques to the game, there was a 'map patch' that would show, on your in-game map, the location of all the badges and plaques in each zone, so you could find them easier. Now, this doesn't affect the actual game mechanics, but think of the possibilities for hacking and duping that would exist if an MMO publisher let character data get off of its server onto a server controlled by a player and then accepted it back again. The rapidity with which unscrupulous players would have their characters off to custom hackservers to get outfitted with all the 'phat lewt' would make your head spin.
Oblivion - 3 million, Baldur's Gate 1&2 - 2 million each, and the various Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy Games from Square - Around 3 million each
How are these games different from the most successful Fantasy MMO, WoW? Depth and immersiveness of combat comes immediately to mind. Also Story, all of these games have a much more cohesive story than WoW itself (whose story is mostly conveyed reading background information on the WoW website. To be honest, that really ought to be enough to build games around. Create a game with a solid combat system and a story, and you've got the basis for a solid single player RPG. The trick really, is not to be misled into thinking you can build a WoW-killer. You can't. Blizzard has the budget and the installed base to bury you. So don't even try.
Regardless of the possibilities in MMORPGs, fact is they boil down to grindfests. When have you ever played a "grind" style in single player CRPG? Diablo? Not an actual roleplaying game (a level system and a sword doesn't make it an RPG). MMORPGs have never been created as RPGs, though they took the name to lend credibility to what they are. I don't see single player RPGs being threatened by them at all.
had both online and offline characters...
'I think those of us that make non-MMO RPGs need to look at what a single-player/small multiplayer RPG can do that MMOs can't and spend our time and effort on those things', Urquhart said.
Granted it was a WHILE back that I looked for (S)mallMORPG, but I didn't find anything so I eventually setup a MaNGOS server. Blizzard is missing out BIG TIME. If they were to release a version of WoW that was scaled for personal use, they would make a killing. I would have no problem paying $120.00+ US for something like that (PLUS a yearly fee for content updates). Obviously there are people out there that want / need the "massiveness" of the MMORPG, but there are others (like me) that just want to play the game. Granted I have kinda gotten into the aspect of developing the game (the database not the core), but at times it would be nice to just PLAY and know that things work, not have to hunt down why a particular quest is bugged.
For those that don't know MaNGOS is the Massive Network Game Object Server. It isn't being developed for any one client, it just HAPPENS to work with the World of Warcraft client. In addition to the MaNGOS core, you need a backend database that drives the world. There are several out there that are being actively developed, but I prefer SDB.
-- http://anonet.org -- The internet the way it was meant to be. Check it out, you may be surprised.
Amen to that. And some folks (like me) are fond of the stories that single-player RPGs, Interactive Fiction, and so forth tell, but refuse to get sucked in to the time and money sink that is an MMORPG. (Besides, after all the time I spent on text-based MUSHes in the early 90s, I think I've used up my lifetime quota.)
It's not really that hard to handle, and there are several solutions for handling it.
One possible solution is to simply restrict the player from bringing goodies, stat bonuses, et cetera back to their world. While players would be bummed, they could still adventure on those servers and have a jolly good time.
Another scheme would be that items have cryptographic signatures which are generated and tracked by the main server. The main server would actually send the cryptographically signed items (strings of data, really, but anyway) to the sub-server which would then grant them to the player. In this way, the server can control the distribution of items.
And not trusting the client is a good thing, because it means that the client can be open and modifiable and still not permit cheating.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Fearghus is a good person to be talking about this, since his Obsidian Studios is the developer of NWN2 and its upcoming expansion.
NWN and NWN2 are games designed with multiplayer in mind. The original spawned hundreds, if not thousands, of "persistent worlds", which were mini-MMOs. Some linked servers ended up supporting hundreds of simultaneous players, and individual popular servers handled 50-95 simultaneous users, often stopping only at the limit of the hardware and the engine (as an NWN PW developer, and experienced sysadmin, it seemed very much to me that the engine had some sort of O(n squared) cost associated with users; going from 1 to 35 would barely dent a server, but going 35 to 55 could bring the same server practically to its knees).
Imagine if WoW supported user mods. There could be an "official server" and any number of player servers. The people setting up a player server could allow a player joining there to import their character in from the official server (not the other way around, of course). The people on the player servers would start with a base world, but have tools to add, remove, and modify the content. Add in a scripting language and a way to distribute customized art assets (models, animations, etc), and you have something like Quake 3 w/autodownload, but applied to an RPG instead of an FPS.
Bioware began to hook into another possibility when they started offering their "digital distribution" modules for NWN. For some small amount ($4-$12 depending on the module), you got an add-on game experience for NWN; a sort of new official campaign to play through. Imagine if a game like NWN or NWN2 had an "NWN live" service you could subscribe to. You pay $8 a month or something, and it gives you access to some cooler online features, as well as content updates. New models, new portraits, new adventures, etc. Bioware seemed to indicate they were pleasantly surprised with the reception of DD modules for NWN1.
One of the things about NWN and its expansions was that each expansion featured a bunch of new things (new classes, support for prestige classes, new models, new spells, new voices, new vfx and sfx). These were featured in a new official campaign adventure - one you could play through - but they were also remixable into a lot of new user adventures, and also could be combined with custom content for more possibilities. And a nice toolset to tie it all together.
A game that was gorgeous and easy to use and fun like City of Heroes could have reached its true potential with a scripting language and a toolset and a way to use that end-user content, because hobby content creators would have come up with enough refreshing content to avoid the "gets dull" label CoH earned for its repetitive missions.
Urquhart raises some good points on how to design a top-notch RPG (he's perhaps the kick-assest RPG producer in the western world, after all), but even in the absence of MMORPGs, those points would still be just as important.
:)
The real difference that puts RPGs at such a disadvantage isn't playability or content - it's money. MMOGs are the gift that keeps on taking, and financiers are increasingly interested in funding a multi-bazillion dollar MMOG in hopes that five years down the road, they'll still be raking in $15 every month per subscriber, compared with a single-player RPG that ends up in the bargain bin for $15 in the same length of time. This is why you see the RPG industry trying to adopt the MMOG model, by providing multiple expansions and even mini-expansions (a la Oblivion or NWN) to keep the players paying. Make repeated payments a part of your development and marketing scheme, and suddenly, making a game that people want to play becomes a lot less important for getting said game funded and out the door.
Of course, those of us who are true-blue fans of the genre still appreciate it when developers put time and effort into making a quality product
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I went back to look at what else the DS offered, old classics remade such as Final Fantasy, and the new Pokemon were about it. I half considered both of them, but in the end they were $40 for a game I would play at most a month.
I went back to Everquest 2. It is $15 for a month of play, offers the most lore I've ever seen in any RPG. You can play it solo, you can play it with people. I mostly play it solo, but the thing is, this game is designed in a way that any sort of person can enjoy. Starting over is a new experience every time. Granted I don't keep the subscription going. I basically play until my RPG hunger is satisfied and then cancel again. Only to renew when it returns. I've been doing this for two years now and I gotta say, it sure beats out most of the competition available. They ARE the same market regardless what anyone thinks. You can ignore people and solo your way through the game, or you can work with other people and guilds.
Story. Suspension of Disbeliev. In RGPs you can be THE ONE - the hero who saves the world from the brink of destruction, you can be the one to beat the ULTIMATE EVIL. In MMOGs its either not really feasible or not really good for the suspension of disbeliev.
So, you and your party comes up to the castle of the EVIL OVERLORD, to defeat him. Just like the guys that are following behind you, the guys who are currently inside and the guys who are currently on the way out and maybe give you the hint "watch out for his nastly AOE attack when he dies the second time, almost got us with that one". Will it be a fun run? Yeah. But there is no suspension of disbeliev if you kill the same guy over and over again, like everybody else.
Can anyone imagine a oldschool RPG like Planescape: Torment as MMO? It would just not work - MMORPGs and RPG have similarities, but are essentially different game types.
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
You, the player and your character/party, are the only important part of a single-player RPG. The game revolves around you and you goals and whatever characters, locales, etc. that your goals entail. This provides the opportunity for creating a truly unique character that actually stands out in the game world. An MMO, where you're just another level x [insert class here], can never touch that.
Also, in a single-player RPG, there are no griefing assholes out there to camp your corpse or talk smack about how you're a n00b or spam the chat. Some people are willing to put up with the grief or find ways to avoid it cuz they like a world filled with people, and that's why MMOs are so popular these days. But there are people who don't and need to get their RPG fix in a non-MMO form.
Personally, until there's a massive paradigm shift in the general attitude of MMO communities and people start playing nice with each other, I'll just stick to Star Wars: KotOR, The Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, and the like for my RPG needs.
The one thing the RPG can do that a MMO can never do is have an ending. Therefore, they can tell a story. After a while, even a well done MMO feels like a Lethal Weapon marathon.
Also, in an RPG you can really be the hero and effect your world. In an MMO you're just one of a gazillion heros/villians and can never truely effect your world.
that lets you run your own server, and create a portal from the mmog to your server... Hmmm.... D&D Planescape Immortal. Rule your your Plane, define its physics, create your minions, assume a mortal avatar to adventure... Defend your Plane from invasion. Project an avatar into another Immortal's plane to invade and win over their minions. A MMOG one part Populous, one part NWN, one part WOW... It'll never happen
Solo RPG video games give you sense of being unique.
You are Neo or Luke Skywalker and noone else can have that power.
Only you can save the world.
No MMO gives that today.
Even super heroes games like http://www.cityofheroes.com/ have so many heroes that you dont have the sensation of being so marvelous.
You spend your time harvesting missions, badges and now crafting.
Not very heroic !
MMO RPG (or so called) emphaze on the community experience.
You share stories with others,
you show your achievements to others,
you develop your character with others.
You oppose and win against others.
These "others" are people,
and this is important.
Even though oponents were bots with behaviour no different that humans,
knowning they are bots would render them not as interesting as humans.
After all I prefer to chat a girl than a bot and
I prefer to constantly win and humiliate another player rather than a mob.
OK, some would prefer chatting a bot...
Last comment, MMO RPG are no RPG.
I spent a tremendous amount of days playing table top RPG when I were young.
And the experiment is no comparison with computer RPG.
Compared, computer RPG are really flat and
MMO RPG are event flatter than solo RPG.
There is only basic heroism, limited sense of achievement and
no way to come with innovative solution that game author did not imagine.
The killer game will provide real freedom and content ,
the sense of being unique and
still experiencing with tons of other players.
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
If it did, though, it would be righteous to do it as an Amber game. Frankly there's no point whatsoever in trying to do anything THAT ambitious until we have much more righteous physics engines and the horsepower to run them. Now THAT is an application for a massively parallel home computer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
>> CEO Feargus Urquhart
Damn! I was going to use that name! Can I be Paladin Feargus Urquhart instead?
This is actually exactly what the E Programming Language was designed for:
g e
9 93ab06e56af731346f78.1710507
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_programming_langua
Back in the mid-nineties, Electric Communities wrote E, and a product in E ("Microcosm"), which was designed for exactly this: secure online distributed worlds. Microcosm was, in some respects, a distributed Second Life, written in the days before the Pentium 2 was released. Everyone ran their own little server on their desktop, and you could create and trade objects securely.
The company, and Microcosm failed due to a combination of just being too demanding for the hardware available at the time (the PC of the day was a Pentium 166 mhz with 64 meg of ram, using a 28k modem to connect to the net, 3d cards were just hitting the market), too early as a net phenomenon (most people weren't online at the time, and everquest hadn't even come out yet), bad business decisions, and the dot-com collapse.
The founders of the company have all found their way to Yahoo in the last couple of years. Doug Crockford is probably the one most of the Slashdot crowd will recognize, likely from his javascript evangelism:
http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=cccd4aa02a3
Non-linearity is the point of role playing games. If the storyline is too constrictive, as it is in most Asian RPGs, the presence of the player is superfluous, and it may as well be made into a movie.
Elder Scrolls games are not RPGs, they're action games in a fantasy environment.
NeverWinter Nights allowed you to have persistent multiplayer servers as well as single player campaigns and let you run your own servers.
1) Scale. An MMO is limited in how many units can be operating in a single battle. Network limitations are the reason World of Warcraft couldn't deliver on its promise of world pvp. Dunno if anyone knows what happened in the old "world pvp" days of Tarren Mill... but the general problem was once enough people showed up it became so laggy that it was unplayable. That really sucked. Talk about destroying immersion.
/golfclap, and walk away.
2) Continuity of Storyline. Look at Matrix Online. Everyone wants to be Neo, but nobody can. Look at SWG. Everyone wanted to be a Jedi. But nobody could be Luke Skywalker. Not true in an offline RPG. You can literally live the storyline of your favorite character.
3) User created content. Look at Morrowind for example. The game came with a construction set. You could build your own world. You were the god of that world you created. Now shift to WoW. You're a peon, and if you're lucky you can get 24 other people together to take down raid mobs. But you'll never be able to do it solo. You'll never BE that raid mob.
When the day comes that they give a player the chance to control a raid mob (with their current abilities and hitpoints) that's the day a raid wipes every time on that mob, forever. The AI on those mobs is particularly stupid. Tactically, if I were said mob, I would immediately kill all the healers, then the DPS. Which would leave the tank beating on me with his sword 'n board. To which I would let loose a huge laugh, do a
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
A MMOG one part Populous, one part NWN, one part WOW... It'll never happen
Its not as if the comment "It'll never happen" has ever been proven false in the field of computers before.
--
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
That said, it might be fun to read a book (play an RPG) with others some time
Isn't that (shared experience of enjoying a story) called a Movie today?
The gaming equivalent closest to this is actually online co-op play I think since the storytelling aspect is more direct...
MMORPG's are more like virtual workplaces, where you log in and go about your daily chores in the context of a larger and slower moving story that unfolds around you even as you perform your menial tasks. A companies day to day workings are like the story in an MMORPG, though successful MMORPG creators have found a way to make this shared story compelling enough to have people pay THEM to take part in it, unlike a company where it's the other way around.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Please, Someone prove me wrong!
One of these days someone is going to come up with a game that both supports MMOG play but also has a single player campaign running on a mini-server. This title will rule the RPG world until someone brings out one that lets you run your own server, and create a portal from the mmog to your server (the portal simply doesn't appear unless your server is up; it could even be flickery if you have a poor history of uptime.)
This reminds me a lot of Blizzard's Diablo. It was fairly ground-breaking when it came out, and it had a good run. It may even still be running.
What about people who play RPGs primarily for the story? MMORPGS have a distinct problem with story - the story can't advance at the pace of an individual player. That's the same advantage of a CRPG over a paper RPG - if I want to take a week off work & play Oblivion for 16 hours a day, I can get all the story I can stay awake for. Not so much with WOW or D&D. (Although with the latter, I could get a whole group of people to take a week off of work, but you know what I mean.)
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Without those things it hardly felt like any kind of immersive story-telling experience at all.
You're thinking of adventure games (ie, Monkey Island, Day of the Tenticle, Sam & Max, The Dig, et cetera). Those exist to tell a story with a little bit of freedom to explore and interact with the characters.
RPGs on the other hand present a universe for the players to interact with, not a story. Traditionally the universe is controlled by one specific player, who can construct a story around what the players do, rather than the other way around. This isn't as possible in CRPGs, and so the story to them should be as loose as possible, and provide many different avenues.
Lose the "as an artist" bullshit. Either you are on your own merits, in which case there's no need to state it, or you're just a poser.
I just picked up S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl recently, and it's pretty good.
k ershadowofchernobyl?q=stalker
It's an RPG/FPS hybrid that takes place in the 30km exclusion zone around the site of the Chernobyl disaster. You can wander around pretty much wherever you please, though if you're careless you'll run out of ammo and then stumble into a radioactive pile of metal as you try to escape whatever mutated horrors have found you.
It's actually quite fun.
Reviews here: http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/stal
MMOG: Focus on building environments and tasks that encourage and in some cases require cooperation between individuals or groups. Characters should be powerful enough to have an effect on the world, but not so powerful as to usurp the storyline characters. There should be lots of replayable content, and a great deal of customization.
RPG: Focus on building environments and tasks that make the player the superhero of the story. Instead of goals that are so difficult that only a group of people could complete them, make them so difficult that only one who stands head and shoulders above the world can complete them. The character starts out following the storyline, and eventually becomes the story line. In this case, the world does literally revolve around them. There should be a fair amount of replayable content, and a fair amount of customization. Mostly this is so that you can approach the goal from different paths.
Two extremely important things to remember:
1. To make a good RPG, you must have a great story that the player is intricately involved in. For an MMOG, the story is important, but secondary to the social interactions.
2. To make a good MMOG, you need lots of content. Lots and lots and lots of content. And while you can script an ending to an RPG, you have to design MMOGs to be open-ended.
Great MMOGs: Warcraft and LotRO.
Great RPGs: Oblivion and KotOR.
They've been around for 15-20 years, which is ancient history in perspective.
I maintain that the player is superfluous because the decisions made are superfluous. You can't have player run character development without a player run storyline; the one is meaningless without the other. Further, the combat mini-games in those sort of "RPGs" are *boring*. The games would be better off without them.
It's not helped by the fact that the storylines are just plain awful.
Not paying $10/month to keep playing.
Daggerfall can only be considered a classic by those who never actually played it. It was a buggy mess. The only people who enjoyed it were obsessive-compulsive types.
Is that really his name?
"Your parents not like you or something?"
Its so simple. MMO's are limited in what they can do with graphics, sound, physics, ai, etc etc by the fact that they are on servers that have to support tens of thousands of people. If the game engine is too complex existing connection speeds and networks couldn't handle something like Oblivion or better in a massive setting.
RPG's on the other hand are not constrained in such a manner. An RPG is no more limited on what its developers can do than a game like the upcoming FPS Crysis. Single player or non MMO RPG's should be focusing more on rich, eye candy filled graphics, amazing physics, surround sound, and other bells and whistles that MMO's won't have for 5-10 years. The RPG should also be easy to pick up and play similar to World of Warcraft for new comers but also offer very in depth options for the hardcore RPG players amongst us. The only other thing to focus on would be the story line in general. The plot needs to be deep and have back story that people are at least somewhat familiar/interested in.
Or at least that's how I see it. I admit I haven't been able to MMO for a couple of years since moving out to the back of beyond in and not having broadband - I'm not sure I miss it.
;-)
...... ( on Linux would be nice ;-p )
See, I enjoy the role-play. I used to do the old "sitting in a darkened room" roleplay games - the entire attraction is playing the ROLE ( I know, repeating the concept, but it seems to me that lately the 'RP' has vanished from 'RPG' ).
The problem that I see online, is that most of the players I've come across in various games don't want to role-play. Casting all your actions, speech, aparent persona into a specific character, starts to get a little boring with conversations like.
ME: "Wither goest thou' ? Mayhap we may share our experiences on the road ahead, that better aware, we mayest travel in safety?"
SomeIdiot: "Dude - LOL - I'm l33t - gonna pown you!!!!!! SUX0RZ"
To be honest, I had fun with Oblivion ( tho found it's replay value to be very limited, even with the expansions ). True, there were times when I couldn't do what I ( my avatar ) would of wanted - but it beat the hell out of MMO. ( And I *liked* both KOTORs - okay not perfect, KOTOR2 was a little unpolished in areas but still more fun, even on replay, than MMO ever gave me ).
This, I think, is possibly the market for RPG - I suspect there are still plenty of us 'RP' gamers left ( now over 25 or 40 with our own money ) who will always pay for good stories, plenty of personal character scope, and no kids playing other characters
-- still waiting for KOTOR3
*PC* RPG, not console RPGs. That's the point. A lot of American made, PC RPGs are basically MMORPGs without the MMO part... they have very little story, and are so obsessed with non-linearity and the "make your own character" bullshit that they absolutely refuse to do so.
o n RPG's? Not my cup of tea. (neither is Final Fantasy, but that's just 'cause I'm a Tales/Star Ocean kinda guy) And the Deus Ex/Fallout franchises (DE1 was AWESOME, never got around to DE2 or Fallout tho) kinda passed away, so I'm not sure they're terribly indicative of PC titles in the last 3-4 years or so. On the flipside, I don't think any title TOUCHES the cinematic presentation of Half Life 2. It did in its time what Final Fantasy VII accomplished that was so awesome : *seamless* cinematic integration. FF7 did it by not pausing to show FMV (it came instantly, and sometimes, while the gameplay was still going on) and HL2 did it by not stopping the gameplay. (I think HL1 did it too tho) Before I digress any further, yeah, I don't enjoy the Elder Scrolls style (I used to, like 10 years ago, in 2D land) of RPG'ing, but that doesn't mean it's a bad fuckin' game. I didn't like X-Men 3. It made like 100 million in its opening weekend. That's called opinion.
You're generalizing an entire fuckin' genre based on a couple of licenses.
Half of the people who love Final Fantasy "for its great story" don't really understand the story, they are just utter Japanophiles who will refuse to acknowledge great American games.
You're generalizing millions of gamers with a stigma I'm kinda fuckin' tired of.
Seriously, nothing's more adorable than when the occasional person that doesn't like a fucking genre speaks out against it like he/she'd try it when they have no intention to, ever. Or someone who likes making generalization attacks at people who like a particular genre. Remember that guy at EGM who gave ever FPS he came across a 6.0 or below who kept mentioning that he didn't like FPS's? WHY the fuck did they keep sending them to him? The point of a review is to inform. If someone doesn't like FPS's, a glance at the back of a box will do all the informing needed. That shit about FF7 being overrated? No, it wasn't, that particular gent never fucking liked it, and 10 years later, it's easy to attack by calling it overrated.
I'm not a big fan of racing games. Like, at all. Especially sims. The closer to realism, the less I can fucking stand the game. It's just my preference. If Forza sells bad I'm not gonna go into a tirade about how racing game designers "spend too much time on boring-ass simulations when all I want in a video game is an 'escape'."
As for D'nD-hyper-customizable-zero-cinematic-presentati
But at least bring about something to the conversation that's doesn't fucking REEK of bias, or at least admit to it. This is slashdot, people, not fucking IGN.
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A shrinkwrap title eventually goes out the door and the team moves on to other titles. Short of a few patches, development work is done.
A MMORPG requires constant updates to update game content and keep it fresh, to adjust game balance, to stop cheating, etc.
Probably doesn't matter a lot to the player, but from a developers perspective a MMORPG is never done.
How do you pause in WoW ?
... but I can't my friends Conan269 and CromOnEarth are being attacked, I need to help them.).
Somehow pressing P does not put the AI on hold and all the NPCs keep moving.
I have to go to the bathroom with my laptop and make sure I tape mic to avoid disturbing noises. I can always pretend I'm an Ogre so I'm in character.
But seriously I would like to play when I'm bored and don't have anything better to do, and not plan my life around a clan. I guess you can't play MMO that much once you are married (Honey you're in the mood
Oblivion barely qualifies as an RPG. The skills and armor sets were drastically reduced from Morrowind, and the combat was morphed into a Quake-like first-person twitchfest rather than a stat-based combat system. Classes don't matter, because you can do anything anyway. You can be the Arena Champion as a level 1 warrior, and then join the Mage's Guild and work your way to the top without ever actually using magic. The world and most of its quests (especially the main quest) are totally bland and meaningless.
It's endemic of the "next-gen" hype that leads to budgets spent on crap like SpeedTree and FaceGen rather than making the fucking game.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Um, no. Good RPGs allowed you to have an effect in the world.
Yeah, welcome to 20 fucking years ago!
"Sufferin' succotash."
MMO: pay monthly to grind and chat
RPG: well, RPG. I still remember Planescape torment, i have never been moved by a game so much. The inmersion that game had was out of this world, people comparing it with Oblivion (which just was an offline MMO) makes my teeth grind.
The problem (for us gamers who like quality instead of quantity) is MMOs are easily made, proof of that are the 200 similar games around the world (half come from korea) and they are HUGE cash cows. SO its almost pure profit, against a well thought, intelligent RPG which takes a lot more than 10 scenerios with respawning monsters to make.
Games like Final Fantasy *and* Oblivion bore the living shit out of me. I even tried The Fall: Last Days of Gaia and stopped about a half hour into it. When I play a PC game, I'm not interested in infinite character choices and trying to recreate my tabletop gaming experience - with games like Tribe 8, Blue Planet, and Spirit of the Century that just isn't going to happen. I want the PC game to be immersive in the way that they do best - audio visually. Great gameplay, good graphics, good story, strong central character that I don't necessarily care if I created. Because of that I skew more towards FPS' with some trappings of RPGS. My favorites to date have been the Half Life games, System Shock, the Thief Series, Aliens vs. Predator, Far Cry, F.E.A.R., even Tron 2.0 and No One Lives Forever. Now, maybe I'm unique and CRPGs deliver something to tabletop gamers that is of value - but as a tabletop gamer, I see CRPGs as something appealing more to those who don't already enjoy tabletop rpgs. I'd rather see another good installment in the Thief series (Thief: Deadly Shadows was mildly disappointing) or Deus Ex than another CRPG.
Agreed. What I noticed is that the MMORPGs offer a whole lot of different experiences and fun things to do, but with roleplay, a character concept does not include all of them. I found myself playing two games: one in which I kept to a character concept and background, and another where I went off and killed stuff and did things that would make absolutely no sense if they were part of a story. So in effect, one could easily get that from a single-player game, if that's the draw for them.
:)
Maybe it's an issue of lack of flexibility in the right places. I come from text MU*s for roleplay. I didn't need to find a mob that dropped a certain armor with the look that fit my mental idea; I wrote it in prose. That's kind of the flexibility I mean.
Of course, I usually play both games, each for their strengths.
MMO's are basically glorified chat rooms in the end. I never understood the MMORPG thing since it lacks all of the the "G" and most ppl don't stick to the "RP". I am a big RPG fan, but have never liked MMO's because when I get into an RPG I like to sit down and immerse myself in a story and a world that is authentic to the story. I don't want to immerse myself in a big chat room of ppl that look like character type X or Y and act like a 13 year old kid- I want to see the characters act like characters and work towards a story arc.
http://www.thief2x.com/ -- simply amazing, try it
http://sourceforge.net/projects/opde -- not yet there, but something to watch out for
They should also ensure that they won't release a game which is still well into beta testing.
I never played 3d mmorpgs, and don't really like nwn2 either due to its weak combat system and the bad story.
I stopped playing nwn2 not because of a new shiny mmog but because of nwn2's own 'qualities'.
Its simply boring.
Where is the great storytelling we got from BlackIsle (now Obsidian) in Planescape:Torment?
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
this doesn't get more attention. For all the writings about the incredible (and consistent) success of Blizzard, no one ever points out what I think is one of the obvious causes. Blizzard does not release buggy games. They know that people play games to have fun, and buggy games are never fun. Blizzard continues to reap rewards for that belief, but for some reason other companies are slow to catch on.
Bugs, glitches, crashes, and general poor performance are deal breakers. Look at what they did to the Gothic series: a couple of great RPGs (particularly the second one) that didn't sell that well because they weren't playable until many months after the release date when they had been patched several times.
Think beyond the next 8 weeks of your company's future, and finish games before you release them!
Relax I just want some peanuts.
Blizzard doesn't allow people to changes servers. So if I play on one of these "scaled back" servers, am I trapped there? If not, at the very least they would become gold farmer havens, which is something Blizzard would hate. You're right about the appeal of being able to experience the world with a little more solitude, but since I don't think many want to play that way all the time (or it basically becomes a bad co-op rpg, because the appeal of MMORPGs is not really in the quality of the story, characters, etc), and Blizzard doesn't want to dilute their "world" model by letting people shift around where they play, the idea is DOA. And also, in all seriousness, Blizzard is already making far more than a "killing" the way things are now, i.e. >billion a year from subscriptions. So unfortunately, they'll probably get by.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
Beside that, your argument is moronic. I want to be able to solve a quest in different ways. If you don't, stick to Final Fantasy and other railroaded interactive movies with some combat scenes.
Very, very true. Add to that the fact that the interface was dumbed down to console standards (really, the PC version feels like a lame second-tier port). Morrowind's UI was very usable and did its job very well, especially the inventory screen. Oblivion's interface has been reduced to a bunch of lists - that kind of GUI is not really suitable to a role-playing game, at least in my opinion.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Who says an RPG needs stats anyway? The Gothics were relatively sandbox RPGs with an even more curtailed skillset than Oblivion has but try to argue they're not great RPGs with any of the fans (0f 1 and 2 - jury's out on 3 and the verdict isn't looking good.)
Arguably STALKER was a statless RPG with "upgrades" by way of improved equipment.
Yes, that's right. Farming & crap gear. That is what contemporary MMORPGs are all about. I did not like any MMORPG for more than a day or two. I find it crap.
Though I enjoyed a number of traditional RPGs (mostly JRPGs like Chrono Trigger). And treasure good memories about their gameplay.
I really hope that non-MMO, single player games will still be produced for a long time. I hate playing with hundreds of other people hunting for the same monsters all around me and doing exactly the same quests to get the same gear. I hate that everything boils down to "spend more time hunting". It feels like a flash mob or cosplay, or worse, a sport event.
On opposite, traditional RPGs feel like real adventures, like a world to explore.
Well, I played Baldurs Gate 2, and Oblivion, and I have to say BG2 quests are much more varied, deeper, more interesting, and better constructed.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
It seems like that YOU are unable to acknowledge that Final Fantasy games actually have a great story.
And that's only taking one of the most known (Pokémon are even more known), but Xenogears or some Tales games shatter your weak argument. Sadly, story-intensive RPGs have merit and marketability but I think you're wrong about them having a "strong future." They are a niche in America and are likely to remain a niche in America Well, that's true though. But it's not just in America, it's everywhere.
If you meant JRPG, sorry, but current JRPG prove you wrong. The people you really need to focus on are not the American developers, who can actually make some amazing stuff, but the American market that largely rejects a good story in favor of thumb-twitching action and/or graphical feasts Can't disagree, but this means Blue Dragon will fail in the USA?
Try a *real* roleplaying game, such as Advanced Dungeons and Dragons or GURPS. If, on the other hand, you are just looking for mindless dungeon crawling, then computer games are the thing for you.
Hellgate: London is doing this, but is not exactly an MMO. I heard the Conan MMO is too, but not sure about that, and I think the solo part was just for the lower levels.
The thing is solo games and MMOs have completely different design goals, they're hard to mix. MMOs are designed to keep you playing forever with grinding etc. Single player games are designed to keep the excitement levels high and move you through areas quickly - if a single player game tries to make me grind I just quit it and play something else.
I like many others I personally know want an end goal. That is why I can't do MMORPG. I play and play and play (tried it), and then I play some more for what..... Well, that's were traditional games work best for me. I can load them up on multiple PC's for home and or travel and port my saves around with me if I need to (sometimes with a little effort) and play while travelling when I have no net, and best of all, I can accomplish a game winning goal and feel a sense of accomplishment. I also get the ability to play many games that I bought without a monthly subscription and experience a new game world (with exception being close sequels) each time. To each his own, but this gamer likes his games to be like a good book.
"Hi server, me again! How amazing that in the ten minutes I was disconnected/playing solo, I acquired both the Sword and Armor of Ultimate Awesomeness - on a level 5 character! Pretty cool, huh? So, you'll let me bring them into the town square, right?"
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Small nitpick, but Baldur's Gate is Canadian, not American. I'm not normally one to show excessive pride in my country, but come on, you can't take our games, eh b'y?
Then you'd better stop playing Oblivion since it offers no multiple ways to solve its ultra-linear quests. It's hilarious to me that you leverage Final Fantasy as an insult when Oblivion is just as railroaded and braindead. It is not an RPG. Classes don't matter, and level scaling makes progression pointless. It's a safe, crippled sandbox for XBox 360 players to feel "next-gen" without feeling the challenge of having to locate NPCs or locations by themselves without the Magic McCompass telling them where to point and run.
"Sufferin' succotash."
The problem as I see it with the jRPGs is that their stories are very specific to a certain adolescent coming-of-age arc. The mindset in them does not vary much, as the mindset in most anime does not. Worse, I think that even there you see less and less investment in Writers.
What was great about Fallout? About Planescape:Torment? About Deus Ex? Eternal Darkness? KOTOR? All of these games had a huge focus on the writing. Rarely did you find yourself 'leveling up' or in meaningless fights. But meaningless fights is practically the staple of RPGs these days. I go to the store and pick up a "Lord of the Rings: The Third Age", supposedly a "nice little role-playing jaunt into the world of Tolkien." Yet the game is a long (and I mean LONG) series of fights using the exact same mechanism over and over, with a little filler glue. Many games are like this, and many, many jRPGs are like this. That filler glue can be elaborate or simple but the focus of the game is largely on the number-based or twitch-based fights.
I don't know that it's an 'American' quality, but I like the sort of RPG that has a narrative - but by 'narrative' I do not mean a story that is happening in FMV while I watch. HL1 and 2 did a good job, but were very linear. Deus Ex did a far better job; the choices you made mattered. How you went about things dictated your experience; your experience was not pre-dictated, to only be altered in the specifics of the fights you fought. Fallout had whole different endings depending on all sorts of actions you took. This sort of thing is not achieved by hiring the latest code monkeys, it's achieved by hiring people with some writing skills, who have a sense of the real world and what a narrative is.
But such games generally require an attention span. The longer an attention span you need, the less you can utilize tricks to keep the user engaged and the more you require quality writing. This is just expense for the business - nevermind the complexity it adds to coding. The jRPGs do well because there is a formula, and it's sufficiently easy to follow. Most of the attraction seems to fall on the cool graphical advancements. 'The Story' may be good, but it's just that, a monolithic story. The only 'role' you play is the monkey pushing the button to make it go forward.
[Ego]out
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
By casting spells, you mean where spell scrolls are not handily provided for non-magic users - I don't remember any instances where that's the case. As for solving quests in different ways, there really aren't that many options - and usually those options take the form of how you go about killing something.
The key issue with MMOs vs. single player RPGs is that the players in an MMO can not divorce themselves entirely from reality. This is when out of character chat detracts from the experience.
On the other hand, single player RPGs are pretty much a 'one shot' afair, since the puzzles don't change between instances, and the characters don't learn anything new. Talking to an AI MOB can be pretty boring after the first few times.
The ideal situation would be a spontaneous world where everyone is in character all the time. In most MMORPGs there are 'roleplaying' servers that cater to this desire, with admins that address these issues when OOC situations occur.
What would be even better would be a less structured AI MOB functionality that would allow random events to happen within the boundaries of the story line for even more emersion. Anything to elimenate having to camp MOBs incessantly to level (I am sick of the level treadmill - and the major reason I stopped playing MMORPGs). BETTER YET - give the AI intention (as opposed to direction), the ability to interact with other AI, and the opportunity to drive the story in new unforseen directions. I would buy that game - MMO or RPG.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Grinding Furry Combat?
... I just puked a little ...
Quite possibly the best story ever in a CRPG (I don't call them RPG because they're not), was Planescpae:Torment (and it told it without lame cutscenes too). I have no idea how well or badly it sold, but since people always mention Fallout and Baldur's Gate, I suspect Torment sold a lot worse.
So yes, I think you're right. Strong, engaging stories have an enthousiastic but really tiny niche market in the west.
The few Japanese CRPGs I've played (which don't include Final Fantasy, I'm afraid), actually had a rather lame story. They did have a story (town was attacked, talk to the right person, trigger next event, go to some place, trigger some cutscene), but it didn't grab me. It lay there waiting for me to trigger the next event. And it wasn't very well written. I don't doubt Final Fantasy was a lot better, but so were Fallout and Torment.
Ideally, I want both freedom and a good story. Fallout and Torment offered that. No other CRPG I've seen does.
Any game that has some sort of "quest compass" that points exactly where you need to go next to advance in your "quest" is not a RPG PERIOD.
> In an interview with the site, he points out that traditional PC RPG
> developers are in danger of permanently losing out to the developers
> of Massively Multiplayer Online Games
KoToR II was the last decent one I played. Oblivion sucked -- precisely because it seemed so like an MMORPG to me.
In RPGs, developers can take advantage of the fact that you're the only one in the world -- and can thus bump up your powers to levels far greater than you could ever get in an MMORPG.
In an MMORPG, people dr00l over some stupid piece of armor that boosts strength by 5 -- which, thanks to the massive number of points in strength, amounts to very little. Throw on top of it that they use a curve rather than linear association, and adding 5 means little when adding infinite strength would only add 20% to your damage.
BUT PURPZ R()()()LZLOLZOMGOHNOESITSONLYBLUE
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The best games out there are not necessarily new ones.
Find a copy of Grim Fandango and play it, based on your post I think you will like it a lot.
Yes, it was buggy (not surprising for such an ambitious work, really) but, unlike most software companies (especially game companies!), Bethesda fixed bug after bug after bug. As I recall, there were over 200 patches released by the time I beat the game.
It is a classic for two reasons. 1) It was the first game (that I played, anyway) that allowed you to explore the game world freely without locking you into a linear quest storyline. 2) It was the first game (again, in my recollection) that allowed you to define your own character by developing the skill set that YOU wanted, rather than having skills rigidly limited by character class.
Single-player RPGs may not be threatened by MMOs creatively, but they are threatened by them economically. In fact, I would venture that all non-massive titles are threatened by MMOs in that sense. I personally eschew MMos, but a friend of mine -- who used to buy a new PC title every couple of months -- now plays WoW pretty much exclusively. I suspect he is not unique in this.
There are NWN servers out there with dozens to hundreds of concurrent players. Humans aren't capable of internalizing groups larger than that, so more doesn't really provide anything.
tip of the iceberg there... the problem is, hardcore games don't sell well and casual games do (to both men and women, despite the association with girls). D&D is a semi-exception because many people will buy it because they've had some contact with the rules over the years (and licenses always draw some fans). Why do single player Sim games (Sim City->the Sims) sell well? Because you can sit down and play at any time and quit at any time and you don't need to remember a phone book of information. Starting up again after a long layoff from the game like that is quite easy. Now think about someone that hasn't seen the D&D rules for, say, 10 years trying to play NWN2 like me. My first thought was being completely overwhelmed by character creation and leveling, which has changed quite drastically. My second thought was God does this game run slow and the characters move like they have sticks up their asses (compared to any MMORPG I've seen/played). I then learned about a week into playing that the character class I chose generally sucks (at least for NWN2, I think it was Warlock) and I quit playing the game entirely.
One of the great things about Fallout was that it was really hard to screw up a character and you would get a unique experience by trying out different things, even if accidental (stealthy, stupid, lucky). Fallout 2 broke that in a way with the initiation quest where if you had no combat skills it was nearly impossible to survive (hit and run, but you need to the pattern to do that, meaning most people had to run through the game the first time as a tank). Most people I know that hated Fallout 2 never made it past the initiation quest (try beating the guy at the end without spear/knife/unhanded/speech tagged and pretty much maxed or without gaining the level from killing most of the monsters - e.g. try as a thief). OTOH, once the game was going, it was pretty casual friendly - your quests were conveniently listed and straightforward and the system was easy to pick up (one of the reasons people like the system it was based on, GURPS). Re-learning how to fight in combat is a snap. Try doing that with Oblivion or worse yet, Gothic I/II/III - you pretty much need to learn how to fight using the game's system again. Ever wonder why Diablo or WoW are so popular? They're simple to play and easy to pick up (but not simple to master) and have the base elements that promote repeat playing (reward for playing like levels, skill points, and loot).
Most Japanese games (and for that matter, many European RPGs) do away with/have minimal character creation and dump you right in to plot and then you develop the character you want that hero to be, which helps make them more accessible, as does only having a single character to worry about (most American games do this now).
A personal peeve, and this on more applies to games in general and in particular action games with RPG elements - if the game has a fairly complex control system or learning curve, don't just dump the player into combat (e.g. Beyond Good And Evil) - give them a gentle ramp up and some sort of refresher/training area (the Tomb Raider series did a good job of that, though I personally preferred the Prince of Persia type gameplay of the original to the shooter gameplay of the latter games Core put out).
gah, how can you play this? loved the first one and I'm playing it again at the moment. think this is maybe the 4th time. DE II had so much potential but it sucks. not a shadow of the original. stupid, dumbed down and ugly. it really payed a high price for xbox co-development.
Actually that was about the grandparent. I gotta get that quote system down better. I figured it was implied in the original set of quotes that I was talking about both parent and grandparent.
Also, as a note, I've dealt a lot more with "man I hate when white people act like xxx race" than I have with said white people attacking American comics/cartoons/films/video games because "Japan does it better". However, I have friends who've dealt with more of the latter, so this might be a regional thing. I loves me some anime, but I'm well aware of its 50's Disney/TerryToons origins.
Origins tend to denote how a regional industry functions. Most games in the US started on the PC, where it was easier to develop and startup (well, before, during, and after the Atari 2600, and especially during the draconian NES days and on) companies. In Japan, most of the monolithic game companies started in the arcades, where the profit from a trendy and tightly clustered population could lead to mad monies. And you can see this today. What're the biggest companies in Japan? Namco, Capcom, Nintendo... In the US we've got Epic, Valve, Bethesda. Midway started in the arcades, and look where THEY are now. Meanwhile, our biggest (only?) console manufacturer makes the biggest operating system on PC.
Heck, a simple glance at what denotes an "adventure" game on either side of the ocean clears that one up right quick. And Grand Turismo is more an example of the brute force capabilities for bigger developers in Japan, and one of the reasons I'd never even think of working in games outside the US.
When it comes down to it, I'm just bothered by the whole oreo/twinkie racial slur mentality that seems to be fine nowadays. I think telling someone that they're not acting like their race should is pretty goddamn racist. That's just me. I'm **hispanic, if that information is at all necessary, which it probably isn't.
Also, the last comment I made is really the crux of the matter. I kinda have higher standards for the stuff said on Slashdot, as opposed to Youtube, where I stop reading 2-4 comments in because my brain starts to physically hurt. Or even Reddit, where the pretentous psuedo-intellectualism reigns over even the slightest traces of commen sense at many times. (I'm an evangelical christian liberal, btw
Anyhoo, if I had a point to make in replying, I probably lost sight of it while typing this on and off for the last half hour.
* I made this point back in the FF7/Diablo days. I think it still holds true to this day: "American RPG's tell a better story. Japanese RPG's tell their story better." So it's a trade-off, really.
** Best conflic ever is wondering which word to use. Hispanic sounds sell-outy, but latino in English sounds hoaky and latin just sounds wierd. But that's a whole 'nother story.
At least NPCs never message you with "gold pls" or blindly invite random people twice their level to groups. It's *much* easier to police bad behaviour in a 3 digit population than a 5 digit one. In fact, the latter is pretty much impossible.
I'm surprised nobody's picked up on what has got to be the main reason why the single-player RPG genre is on a comparatively downward trend.
Single-player games = can be pirated
Multiplayer games = cannot be pirated
This is the main reason why resources are being shifted to MMO's these days, not because of any inherent gameplay difference between the two.
It's a good case for copyright if you think about a game like Deus Ex. Who is going to put all the mammoth effort into creating an awesome story, plotline, engine, graphics, AI, speech from voice actors, etc if the rest of us can just download it from eMule?
Anyway, yes, Oblivion and, let's say, Arcanum, or Legend of Valour, Swords of Twilight, Dungeon Master, Ultima Underworld, FF, they're all different games. I loved all of them, but for different reasons. Note that in most of them classes don't really matter and provide no damage to your life.
Game companies may soon bring there platforms inside a MMORPG http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?relea se_id=259436
And that's only taking one of the most known (Pokémon are even more known), but Xenogears or some Tales games shatter your weak argument.
Not to dig here, by are you seriously claiming that ANY Pokemon game has a good story? There are JRPGS with good stories. They are in the distinct minority. MOST JRPGs have lame cookie-cutter plots filled with anime chicles (amnesiac hero, female spellcaster love interest/sidekick, effeminate villan trying to destroy world, blah, blah, blah). Note the key word: MOST. There have been a shitload of JRPGs released for the PS1 and PS2 in recent years, far more than comparable PC releases. That's why it seems like the writing in console RPGS is better, there is simply a bigger field.
If I think about the RPGs that do best in America, it's because they speak more to the "American" experience. Fallout has it's kitschy 1950's style and "Pip-Boy". KOTOR is based on Star Wars, which while basically a religion in the USA, might not have as much impact overseas. And iconic D&D games like Baldur's Gate might not have as much impact for those not familiar with the tabletop game. The gamestyle tends to be slightly different. Part of this is because of console conventions (save points vs. save anywhere), but others are stylistic, like the heavy use of random encounters.
I guess what I'm getting at here is that poor JRPG sales in the USA might not have anything to do with the quality of said games, but of the nature of Japanese and American culture. "Dating sims" are also big in Japan, but the whole idea seems ridiculous to Americans. Most Japanese people think American Football is boring, by Madden is the bestselling game in the USA.