Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 5, 2011
I still haven’t played the game, so I don’t feel qualified to comment. But maybe you can.
Mike Laidlaw explains changes to Dragon Age 2
I dunno, but it sounds telling to me how he takes pains to demonstrate how they aren’t trying to clone the gameplay in Devil May Cry: “There’s a LOT of territory between DA2 and DMC, and if we were truly headed in that direction, we would have made much larger changes. Cut party, remove crafting, one class, etc would all be changes that show a move to action game, but none of those happened.”
And then there’s this: “A lot of people on this forum had built up a grand conspiracy theory where we were deliberately stripping RPG out of Dragon Age because we are MEAN. I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: we stripped some stuff out of DA becuase it was busted. Other stuff was simply a design choice, and some of it was circumstance.”
Wait, so he’s saying that they stripped out the RPG from DA2 for a lot of reasons, but being mean wasn’t one of them?
I need to get my brain around this crap. Again, it would help if I had a better point of reference. I never even finished DA1.
He then explains the need for accessibility, but protests that it does NOT mean making the game “dumbed down” or “consolized” – and then he states that he doesn’t even know what “consolized” means. I won’t take this as a literal admission of ignorance or stupidity on his part, but rather an attempt to blur the current and historical differences between PC and console games, and the aspects of PC gaming that make it special and unique. In other words, he’s fully behind the publisher dream of the PC being nothing more than just another target platform.
Okay, I am going to my mental happy place here for a moment. I’ll be right back after I’ve calmed down…
… Okay. I’m feeling more zen now. Am I deliberately (if subconsciously) misunderstanding his words here? Am I just seeing “spin control” instead of honest dialog? I don’t know.
But here’s what I do know. Or rather, what I understand, and can assume to be truth. Again, I’m talking generalities and trends here, not talking about any specific game:
It’s been (thankfully) demonstrated that RPGs can still make metric crap-tons of money. But they still reach a smaller market than the best-selling action games, and they are more expensive to make than action games. Which means their ROI (Return On Investment) is lower – they spend more to make less. So from a bean-counter perspective, it would be highly desireable to get a higher ROI by (A) Increasing the size of the market, (B) Decreasing the cost of making these games, or preferably (C) Both.
And if I were a big publisher / bean counter, I imagine I’d wonder, “Is it possible to do both of these while still retaining enough of the genre’s uniqueness to make it stand out from the ocean of me-too action games?” When trying to please the stockholders, especially after spending enough money to fund a third-world country for a year to buy a major RPG developer, this would be a question that an executive with hopes on keeping his job would have to try and answer.
And that is exactly what I think is happening, across the board. This entire dialog is basically Laidlaw trying to rationalize approach (C). They tried to make it more appealing to a wider audience. And they cut a lot of corners to get the game out more quickly and cheaply – with apparently disastrous results in some cases. And they are trying to see if they can do this without completely whittling away whatever makes RPGs “special” in the eyes of their market.
Call me what you want, but I take an issue with trying to condense a favorite genre into nothing more than a special spice to sprinkle onto an action game to improve it’s marketability.
And here’s a problem with the “mainstream” games biz in general: When you are a studio working for a big publisher, or a studio owned by a big publisher, your customer is the publisher. The “real” customers belong to the publisher, and they are the publisher’s problem, and indirectly a studio is still making games for the actual gamers. But make no mistake: If you are a game designer wishing to keep your job, your focus will be on making your real customer – the publisher – happy.
It doesn’t matter if your game will sell a trillion copies if your customer is unhappy and cancels the project before release. Unless your name is Wil Wright and you are working on The Sims and have enough political clout to ram it down your parent company’s throat. But that’s an extremely small group of people that can pull that off, and getting rarer all the time as game budgets rise higher and higher, and game developers become more and more disposable.
One more reason to support your friendly indies with direct sales, huh?
I have no problem with playing with the formula, which pushing the boundaries of what it means to be an RPG, or even with a company trying to find ways of broadening the market and reducing costs for making them. Hey, I’m all about trying to make RPGs on the cheap. Those are all good things. But as an RPG fan, I demand that it be done with a respect and passion for the genre, not by bean-counters or wannabe Spielbergs or action-game fans who hate the very aspects of RPGs that we love.