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[Opinions lol] Whatever happened to the RPG?
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handhelds have no shortage of good jRPGs, including ones that follow classic models
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Also, 3d graphics
the worst is when some things are voice acted and some things aren't, that drives me up the wall
It's hard for me to role play with a silent cast. I might as well just re-read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell then. Or go back to writing my own book.
The only silent protagonist I ever liked was the Dragon Knight in Ego Draconis. That cad is so delightfully smug.
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Western RPGs have seen a massive upswing because of traditional PC developers deciding enough was enough and developing on consoles first. Skyrim was the successor of an early ship jumper to consoles and did millions more then series norms. A cross between an unlicensed BG 2 clone and FF XII did a few million and its sucky successor didn't even do too bad.
This also happened a lot in the NES era with games like Baseball Stars and River City Ransom where some crazy developer would put traditional RPG mechanics in a non traditional RPG type game.
JRPGs took a dive...if you're only paying attention to home consoles. RPG is a great fucking game format to have on the go as long as the game is designed for it. Hell I've been playing Pokémon in a pick up and play for ten minutes, do something else, come back to it for over a decade now and it was amazing to see in the late GBA era and beyond how many other JRPGs joined them in portable heaven. Even ports of traditional save on the world map or save points games are refreshed with the lovely invention known as the suspend save.
I had a DS as well, but I was looking only at apples to apples. Not apples with oranges. Another of my favourite genres, turn based strategy games, is really absent on consoles but are prevalent on handhelds. I don't really have an interest in owning a 3DS or Vita as I am happy with my iPad 2 for mobile games when I require it so I'm only thinking about the main console JRPGs. Which have both declined in number and general quality compared to last generation (IMO).
I actually think that RPGs should scale back on the production values, and add more substance. That's what makes handheld RPGs much more compelling to me, they're actually more substantial than their console counterparts, which seem to put an overemphasis on grafix and awesome voiceacting. The reason why older games like BG2 were able to have so much that you could do was because they were less restricted by technology, in a sense. Instead of putting the manhours and budget into cutscenes and celebrity voice actors, all of that effort was put into making the actual game bigger and better.
This is strictly my opinion, but really, if you can't do cutscenes and VA properly, the effort that's put into implementing them should be used on better things.
Granted, this is a complaint I have on gaming in general, but it seems to have impacted the RPG genre the worst.
I hate it when to pause or speed up a conversation I have to stop the talking completely ala older MGS games or a few RPGs. I also hate it when its an hour long cutscene that you can't skip AT ALL.
The drive for everything being AAA budget in scope and trying to rake in 10 million sales or else it's just not worth it is a daft one, and a major reason that we've got so many awesome games coming out of the more independent developers at the moment. They're free to make those smaller scale games without publishers looking to score mega big.
see: Zelda
Minding, a game in Planescape's setting with actually decent combat I would be all over so badly, even without the depth in dialog...
Also, sometimes I just wish that cRPGs were just full on VNs rather than fiddling around with filler combat
PS:T had about as much text as a freaking novel. If it was voice acted (and a lot of that would actually have to be narration), I'd probably end up reading it and speed-skipping the voice acting.
It would have also come on about 3000 CD's.
On another note, it blows my mind that there never have been any attempts to marry the pros of WRPG design with JRPG design. The freedom, complexity and writing of cRPGs with JRPG combat ala the SMT series just makes me hot and bothered.
Now that would be a good attempt in 'westernizing' games that seems to be all the rage these days. But then again, cRPGs have been dying off in the west so..
Makes me interested to see just how Bioshock Infinite turns out with its story, since they seem to be putting a lot of emphasis on both the VA and the story, where development is being a much more fluid experience with the former and the latter feeding into each other more.
Are CRPG's dying off in the west? I mean compared to previous generations?
Well, the correct answer is that they're already virtually dead I guess lol. People keep saying that the Adventure genre is dead, but the cRPG genre is much deader than the Adventure genre.
But with Shadowrun and Wasteland 2 we might see a cRPG renaissance in the near future.
edit: i'm a dumbass. You can ignore the part where I say cRPGs are dead.
I personally don't think they are dead, they have just evolved.
Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Kingdoms of Amalur, Fable series (for good or ill), Fallout, and The Elder Scrolls.
Though if you are referring to the classic party based, isometric view of the Good ol' Days, then yeah I suppose those are pretty dead.
I too am quite excited to see what else might come our way through Kickstarter, cRPG renaissance indeed.
So they are hardly dead, just different and spreading to a wider audience. That's not a bad thing.
Oh fuck, I found out just now that cRPG was an acronym for computer RPGs, not classic RPGs. In that case, you're right, they haven't died at all, they just evolved. My misguided definition of cRPGs are virtually dead though.
I mean I don't understand why Skyrim or the Witcher wouldn't count for example.
These games exist on consoles as well actually and especially on handhelds you can find turn based, isometric games. But just being isometric and turn based doesn't mean that you're an old school computer game, because old CRPGs included more than just Baldurs Gate (which was real time, it should be noted) and Fallout. For example you have the old Wizardry games, which were first person party based games with turn based combat (something like this is what I want most actually) and Stonekeep. Plus you had your original Elder Scrolls games, like Daggerfall which was just as ambitious for its time.
Lots of purists will tell you those older games were superior, but that's not always true. Baldurs Gate 2 is a fantastic, deep game with plenty of great tactical combat - but in terms of choices with consequences it's actually not that amazing. While Witcher 2 isn't as long in scope or content, in terms of storytelling and giving you important choices that affect the narrative it's superior to many of those old games. Plus it's also on consoles now, so that shows you that consoles do not make games less deep or similar: Publishers do.
Remember Super Mario RPG? It was entirely text-based in terms of dialogue, and also featured a silent protagonist. The fact that Mario never said a word was great, because it gave them the opportunity to turn it into part of the game's charm: whenever he needed to convey a message to someone, Mario would literally act out the scenes of the story. It was awesome!
To me, the appeal of JRPGs ended with 3d rendered graphics. When we went from short, squat characters in tile based landscapes to weird looking, superthin, emo looking characters in prerendered, linear worlds the games became much less appealing. A side note to that folks probably won't agree with either but to me that's also when I lost interest in the console Zelda games - until Wind Waker came along.
Currently playing: DI:Riptide, Eador:MotBW, FE:A, MH3U
Uh yeah, Pokemon has always been an RPG. Just because you can recruit new party members and cast off old ones doesn't mean it's not a pretty traditional JRPG. Plot, dungeons, treasure chests, side quests, leveling, abilities...all of that.
If it's the scale of the party that's throwing you off, think of the Suikoden series with its 108 party members per game.
Nintendo Network ID: unclesporky
To be fair, the concept art for a lot of the squat characters was superthin and emo looking. It was just hard for them to convey that at much lower resolutions and with sprites and all.
That said, 3d did kind of take a bit of the appeal of jRPGs away from me too, since it took away a lot of the imagination (imo). Since you're being told everything, a lot of games just aren't as engaging.
But you're not playing the pokemon, you're playing the character that uses the pokemon like tools. It's more like a tactics game (where you employee dozens of evolving, generic resources to engage in battle) than a regular jrpg (where your party members are each unique and of limited supply). Besides, by your description of the elements that make up an rpg we can start classifying things like MW as an rpg
Currently playing: DI:Riptide, Eador:MotBW, FE:A, MH3U
MW has dungeons, items to cure status effects and warp out of dungeons, that "go anywhere" exploration feel, side quests?
I already mentioned Suikoden as a traditional JRPG with a ton of potential party members too, it's the same concept. They're both JRPGs, plain and simple.
It'd be like trying to put Final Fantasy Tactics (party members can be recruited endlessly, small scale fights) and Fire Emblem (limited number of unique members, large scale fights) in separate categories. They're both SRPGs.
Nintendo Network ID: unclesporky
http://callofduty.wikia.com/wiki/Equipment
You mean like frag refills and stuff? It also has leveling, instanced battles, classes...and instead of recruiting npcs, you recruit people!
No really. If defining an rpg was easy someone would have nailed it by now.
Currently playing: DI:Riptide, Eador:MotBW, FE:A, MH3U
And we have nailed it. Final Fantasy, Pokemon, and Suikoden are JRPGs. Call of Duty is not a JRPG. Primarily because it was not produced in J, but also because it lacks every standard feature of a JRPG created in the past few decades.
It's one of those things that's often extremely easy to define with a cursory examination and people pretend its' difficult because they want to be argumentative.
Nintendo Network ID: unclesporky
nope.avi