CRPG Book Project - Warren Spector Interview

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Felipe from the RPG Codex posted a new interview with Warren Spector from his upcoming book. Also as a reminder here is the thread on our site for the book.

Mr. Warren, in 1998 you wrote an article for Game Developer magazine, where you argued that RPGs were betraying their role-playing roots by focusing only on “statistics or exploring randomly generated worlds of crate-filled buildings”. That was sixteen years ago, do you think things have changed since? Has any recent game impressed you in that regard?

WS: I think things have changed some, but not enough. We’re still stuck in a world of character classes and traditional RPG statistics. I like to think that games like Deus Ex made a bit of a difference, changing the way people think about RPG’s but maybe I’m fooling myself.

To my mind, the Thief games from Looking Glass did a great job of putting players in the role of an intriguing character without any of the classic RPG tropes. More recently, I thought Deus Ex: Human Revolution did a pretty good job.

One of the biggest challenges in editing this book has been deciding what games to include. Over the years the “RPG” term seems to be more and more used as synonym precisely to those “statistics”, with even games such as Call of Duty and Battlefield claiming to have “RPG-elements” in the form level-ups. As a side-effect, this led to games with no stats, such as Thief and the first System Shock, to not be considered RPGs. What are your thoughts on that?

WS: I don’t think I’d include Call of Duty or Battlefield as RPGs. However, that isn’t because they lack stats. I think games that have no stats can be the ultimate roleplaying games. They force players to adopt a role instead of depending upon rolls (if you see what I mean).

RPG’s should be defined by character and interactions, not by levels and stats.
More information.
 
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Call it stats, attributes, skills, levels etc. characterizing for a CRPG is that you can improve your character(s) in some way over the course of the game.

I would call games that play like CRPGs without any kind of character progression simply Adventures.

Good Example: L.A. Noire - I love this one and I definitely play a role in this game, too.
 
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just hope its gonna be less mathematical / combat oriented in time
 
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The problem being that depicting all these role things organically requires an AAA budget and is out of scope for most developers.

fyi The LA Noire developers went bankrupt.

That game did some things amazingly well
i.e Charisma effect shown on the face and body of the person your influencing ~ a smile, a frown etc

But the actual detective elements felt underdeveloped for me, can't remember what it was exactly, but the interogations options felt too generalised because of the mechanics employed.

Abstraction and details can be a good thing and I don't like conversation options being limited by voice over and animation budgets.
 
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It sounds like Warren Spector's criticism of RPG genre is that it is too "RPG-like". Although I am definitely not a fan of randomly generated worlds of crate-filled buildings, the statistics are definitely something I enjoy. Building your characters is a big part of the fun of CRPGs, and part of the reason why I tend to prefer WRPGs over JRPGs where your character is usually has a predefined class / race / level progression (not to mention appearance and personality). A character generation system doesn't need to be extremely complicated (I really like Shadowrun Returns fairly simple attribute / skill system) nor does it need to have dice rolls / random aspects (I prefer a skill point system to rolling virtual dice all day to get an effective character).

But if you completely take away the stats, then IMHO that's not an RPG anymore. If all it takes for a game to be an RPG is having the player "Play a role" then basically every action / adventure game is an RPG. Hell, a sports game could be considered a role-playing game where you play the role of the coach / manager. Combat doesn't have to be influenced by randomness (I will admit that "Action RPGs" are RPGs) - I'd argue that an RPG doesn't even need to have combat. However, I think at a minimum to be considered an RPG you need to have some sort of stats or at least a way of keeping track of character progression / skills.
 
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Of course, no matter the presentation to the player, if it's a computer roleplaying game, there there are numbers under the hood representing the player's capabilities. If the capabilities are static, or don't vary or change much as the game progresses depending on player actions, it could still be considered roleplaying, but not that's not very interesting to me.
 
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Of course, no matter the presentation to the player, if it's a computer roleplaying game, there there are numbers under the hood representing the player's capabilities.
The point is, every game is like this. When you play Counter-Strike, God of War or Street Fighter there are numbers under the hood being calculated for each strike/shot/defense. Ak-47 shot does 20 damage, reduced in 5 by the Kevlar Armor and with a 1.05 modifier due body part, etc...

But if you wanted to play "Street Fighter" in the 70's, it would have to be through a RPG tabletop system. "I use Hadoken" "You roll 12 and missed". That was the only way to play something like that in the olden days.

Now that there games are able to process all that under the hood and leave the rest up to player skill, the only genre still openly displaying the RPG mechanics is the RPG genre.
 
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One of the biggest enjoyment factors, for me, is pondering over stats, attributes, dice rolls, etc.

I would say it's just as much about the "rolls" as it is about the "roles", at least for me it is.

An RPG without statistics may be in vogue as the more streamlined approach nowadays, but I will always prefer deep and complex stat systems to be used in my RPGs. Not only used, but entirely visible as well.

Spector may have made some great games in the past, but his views about RPGs in the present I simply do not agree with.
 
Spector may have made some great games in the past, but his views about RPGs in the present I simply do not agree with.

But that was always his view. As I pointed in the interview, he wrote a very angry article about this back in 98 saying the same thing. Deus Ex was his attempt at changing this.
 
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I'm still waiting him to deliver us an other great game such as Deus Ex now that he has done his thing with Disney...

Sadly this may be only fantasy.. I've gotten this sense that Mr. Spector doesn't really enjoy videogames anymore.
 
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