Grimoire Forever

[Alrik Fassbauer]

Clearly character development is 99% meaningless without the tactical combat engine, and it is that engine and its richness which makes character development fun.

On the other hand, tactical combat is still fun without character development. In fact every combat plays out without character development - each combat is from the context of a snapshot of where one's characters are right then.

What character development allows is new perspectives on that combat engine - and the reason those new perspectives are fun is because that engine was so well designed with so many meaningful and well balanced options. That allows for meanginful and fun character development.

Sounds as if role-playing = combat for you.

I don't want to play a game with you.

 

[horace]

What you like is adventure games, and it would do the CRPG industry a lot of good to look at itself in the mirror and realize that it's an adventure game industry these days with little to nothing to do with the tactical combat/character development roots of the gold box series and early ultimas and roguelikes.

If I want to read escapist fantasy fiction I can get a Forgotten Realms novel and it'll be a higher level of writing and creativity than I'll ever find in any CRPG game not named Planescape.

What CRPGs have historically done well, what their unique quality is, is tactical combat and character development. No other gaming genre prioritizes that.

This unique facet of CRPGs is precisely what people like you stopped caring about, without realizing that that means you don't really care for CRPGs, rather you like adventure games. The spiritual ancestor of games like Baldur's Gate or Planescape is not the Gold Box games. It's adventure games like King's Quest.

That is why I appreciate Wizardry 8. Because its designers didn't set out to write an adventure game with carelessly tacked on combat/development elements, as BG and P:T are. They wrote a tactical combat/ character development CRPG with a tacked on back story.

That suits me just fine because I am hard pressed to find any story in any CRPG that's worth much anyway. It's all pulp fiction level escapist drivel, fun for what it is but hardly compelling or inspiring. Even the best such stories give little reason for replayability, which is another of those things that people like you gave up caring about, to the detriment of real fans of what used to be the CRPG genre.

 

[Corwin]

And how then would you categorise The Witcher, or the Gothics?

 

[dteowner]

Now we're actually agreeing on some levels, horace. The only thing I would caution you on is trying to define CRPG. That's an extremely fuzzy zone, and people will lose track of your point as they argue the definition of CRPG. I think you'd have better luck contrasting modern adventure/RPG (and I'm pretty sure you're putting all the action RPG games under the adventure/RPG umbrella as you're defining it) games with "old skool" CRPG. That allows you to avoid the debate of just when the CRPG genre shifted from its roots.

 

[Dhruin]

What you like is adventure games, and it would do the CRPG industry a lot of good to look at itself in the mirror and realize that it's an adventure game industry these days with little to nothing to do with the tactical combat/character development roots of the gold box series and early ultimas and roguelikes.

If I want to read escapist fantasy fiction I can get a Forgotten Realms novel and it'll be a higher level of writing and creativity than I'll ever find in any CRPG game not named Planescape.

What CRPGs have historically done well, what their unique quality is, is tactical combat and character development. No other gaming genre prioritizes that.This unique facet of CRPGs is precisely what people like you stopped caring about, without realizing that that means you don't really care for CRPGs, rather you like adventure games. The spiritual ancestor of games like Baldur's Gate or Planescape is not the Gold Box games. It's adventure games like King's Quest.

Hmmm...I think you're revisioning history there. Would you remind me of the tactical combat and character development in the Ultimas that would exceed Baldur's Gate? In, say, Ultima IV, I recall being able to (A)ttack, (C)ast and there was obviously party placement. The positioning and mix of spells certainly provides some tactical depth but nothing like the complexity of D&D. Likewise, the character development system isn't even close to D&D. What am I forgetting?

If the inclusion of Ultima is an error, then I would agree most modern RPGs branch away from the focus of games like Wizardry and the Gold Box series -- but then you've deliberately ignored one of the seminal series that often predates some of the other standards. I would argue that at least since U4, there has been a CRPG "branch" that is more focused on story and adventuring than combat and stats and many modern games trace an ancestry back to that, which means they are very much in the CRPG family.

I also suspect if I asked a Kings Quest point-and-click adventure fan if they thought BG was of the same lineage, they'd completely disagree.

 

[Ubereil]

Not to mention that cRPG's supposedly a long time ago springed from tabletop RPG's, who's not about combat and rulesets at all, the rules are just there to structure the real roleplaying. But as DTE said, that's another discussion alltogether.

Übereil

 

[KazikluBey]

Ubereil: Tabletop RPG's sprung out of miniature war gaming and the first version of Dungeons & Dragons was basically just a fantasy add-on for the war game Chainmail, so the first RPG's were pretty much all about the rules. The actual role-playing developed out of that.

 

[Ubereil]

Eh... KazikluBey, you're being off topic! Stop it!

Übereil

 

[dteowner]

Actually, he's no more off-topic than you. Fortunately, he's right, and refutes the argument I knew was coming--that role playing is about the role.

@Dhruin- I would say, given the relative level of available technology, that U4 wasn't that much less tactical than BG1. Similarly, I'm not sure horace's point was that BG=KQ so much as that BG has more in common with KQ than it does with old skool titles. Finally, I think the fact that you refer to a "branch" for U4 reinforces horace's theory. The original theory was that the "branch" has outgrown and choked out the "trunk".

 

[Ubereil]

Actually, he's no more off-topic than you. Fortunately, he's right, and refutes the argument I knew was coming--that role playing is about the role.

I know, I just said it because he completely crushed my argument . But if you want to be like that... Role playing IS about the role, wether my argument is right or not. That RPG's got developed from war games is simply a good reason why early cRPG's was so focused on roll playing, not the reason why combat is essensial for role playing (besides, combat ISN'T essenssial for roleplaying).

Übereil

 

[dteowner]

Which again points back to the branch/trunk theory. The genre began as roll playing, but as technology progressed it split off. As computers were able to deal with a wider range of actions, it became possible to set up a framework for a player to create a role.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

I agree.

And therefore we have several different factions of roll- or role - playing.

One faction is the one that horace seems to belong to: and to me, it appears to be the oldest one: the facttion that still sees role-playing as just an extension of the battling of war-miniatures.

And then there's the "dungeon crawling" faction as well, which is also very much combat oriented.

Maybe i can say that the story-only faction is relatively young, and has never been supported to a ffull degree - whereas the combat-oriented faction reached its ultimate peak in the almost-nothing-but-combat - oriented games by Blizzard, which feature action (hence "Action-RPG") over a totally and radically simplified and almost-to-nonsense - reduced story and character interaction, the story-only faction has never had its peak except in PS:T maybe.

The reast is just a mix between these three factions, imho.

And of course there might be some factions left out because I don't recall them. Add them as you wish. Like turn-based-combat-oriented (Wiz8), for example (in contrast to realtime-combat like in Dungeon Siege).

And, wait, there's a new flower slowly coming out of the earth: "social RPGs", which imho began with the social interaction and the "romancing" of the BG series ...
It it's imho too early to tell whether this New Flower On The Block will grow much more or not.

 

[dteowner]

I think you can simplify your factions down some. You've really got 2 groups: "build a better killing machine" (focusing on combat and character optimization) and "tell me a story" (focusing on....wait for it....story and interactions). I think you'll find that you can slot all of the factions you mention into one of those two groups. Now, that's not to say a game can't dabble on both sides of the street, but I'd say any given game will aim for one or the other. I'm not passing judgement on either group--although my taste lies pretty firmly on one side, that certainly doesn't lessen the value and validity of the other.

 

[Lucky Day]

I had made a point in the Economy thread about "pure roleplay" servers and how unfun they are. Its not that developers don't know how to make a good role playing game, quite the opposite. Its that, for the most part, they know what people actually have fun with.

If you look at most RPG's the story is between the combat. The story is the main focus, sure, and the motivation, but people get tricked into spending hours of fun with combat.

The problem to me comes when Devs abandon the RPG for the "fun" parts. JRPGs and Diablos are terrible in this regard by relagating any story to Cutscenes.

What if Puzzle Quest didn't have the puzzle game between it or vice versa. It would just be bejewelled and you'd probably get bored after awhile. The "role play" elements motivate you to move to the next options.

Also, I'd be careful of what you call "social RPGs" Alrik. "Social" on NWN servers has become a euphemism for cyb0r servers.

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

What sometimes seems to be overlooked is that while RPGs share a common ancestry with wargames and tabletop games, I'd say its actually what makes them different from these games that defines the genre, not what the kept in common with them. The seminal new thing in (P&P) RPGaming was indeed that each player took the role of one charracter (instead of plotting the tactics of an army or squad) and that you had someone dedicated to controlling a story (the dungeon master). In fact, tactical strategy games or wargames have always been better at combat then RPG's simply because its their only focus.
In that sense I always thought it was funny that today party based, tactical CRPGs are considered the "classic" RPG, when in a sense that was a regression from what "made" RPGs back to the wargame ancestry. For the same reason the first RPG that truly captured me was Ultima Underworld - in my mind it was the first game I played that really "got" what table top RPGing is actually about.

 

[horace]

And how then would you categorise The Witcher, or the Gothics?

Action CRPGs, as advertised. I appreciate them and think they can be very well done, but inevitably you'll never see the depth of tactics and development options that a turn based combat, party-based model can give.

 

[Lucky Day]

we're sidetracked on a few of these threads on combat and RPG's

I'm going to start a new thread in a bit to consolidate them.

 

[Dhruin]

@Dhruin- I would say, given the relative level of available technology, that U4 wasn't that much less tactical than BG1. Similarly, I'm not sure horace's point was that BG=KQ so much as that BG has more in common with KQ than it does with old skool titles. Finally, I think the fact that you refer to a "branch" for U4 reinforces horace's theory. The original theory was that the "branch" has outgrown and choked out the "trunk".

In hindsight I don't like my own use of "branch" but leaving semantics aside, horace's theory uses Ultima as an progenitor of the CRPG family as a stat-heavy, combat-centric genre and Ultima just doesn't fit that mould. Even before U4, the series just isn't very stat-heavy and this disproves the theory as a whole, although I agree there was a significant element of the genre that was combat-centric.

BG's ancestor is Ultima. I'm not arguing the quality of BG as a great (or bad for that matter) RPG but simply that it can't be cast aside as an adventure game.

 

[Lucky Day]

new thread found here.

 

[horace]

In hindsight I don't like my own use of "branch" but leaving semantics aside, horace's theory uses Ultima as an progenitor of the CRPG family as a stat-heavy, combat-centric genre and Ultima just doesn't fit that mould. Even before U4, the series just isn't very stat-heavy and this disproves the theory as a whole, although I agree there was a significant element of the genre that was combat-centric.

BG's ancestor is Ultima. I'm not arguing the quality of BG as a great (or bad for that matter) RPG but simply that it can't be cast aside as an adventure game.

I'm not casting anything aside, I'm telling you what draws people to the game. its adventure game elements drew people to BG and other BioWare games. Every review of those games I read admitted that the combat sucked but it was still a great game. In effect it was an adventure game.

As for U4 not having very many stats and therefore not being a combat/development based CRPG, well, since U4 and all Ultimas through U6 were in fact combat/development CRPGs simply based on the amount of time spent in game on that activity, your point is clearly moot and not having a lot of stats is clearly not mutually exclusive with being a combat/development based game.

(U7 was an adventure game *in effect*- and not surprisingly a game that started to appeal to a much wider audience).

I truly believe that a lot of CRPG 'fans' have quite a bit of cognitive disonance about this. They don't like combat and they don't like character development, they really like a cool escapist story to tool around in.

But that doesn't seem 'grown up' enough so they pretend to be CRPG fans. They're adventure game fans.

It's funny, when a non-CRPG is said to have "CRPG elements", everybody knows what that means: character development and stats.

And yet in games supposedly WITHIN that very genre which is DEFINED by those elements, those elements are scoffed at and ridiculed as relics of a bygone era.

Game design is becoming a lost art. There doesn't seem to be a single person employed at Bethesda, the last big gaming house for single player PC CRPGs, who understands even the basics of it.

Storytelling and world building ain't game design.