Strategy Informer has a preview of a game called Knights of Pen & Paper. I never heard of this game before but its mostly a parody of all RPG fantasy games.

Knights of Pen and Paper takes you into a tongue in cheek RPG fantasy world, in the true dungeon & dragon’s fashion. What’s great about this game is more of the narrative presentation than anything else - essentially you as the player play a bunch of players playing an RPG. The table where you guys are set up acts as your ‘avatar’, and moves around the world as you do, and there’s even a dungeon master narrating as you go along, whilst your other ‘player’ fires out random comments, both in and out of character. It’s all very meta and amusing, and it leads to an unusually rewarding game.

You get to control both the players and the Dungeon Master – the players choose where they go, and what quests the want to go on, but using the Dungeon Master you also get to customise the quests you go on, and the number of monsters you fight in each encounter. The more monsters you choose, the more bonuses you get but the harder it is. All of your players have abilities depending on their class, and who you have actually doing the role-playing. At the beginning of a new game, you can only afford two characters, but as you earn in-game currency you can buy up to three more (for a total of five) any time you want, and you can customise each slot to try out different party configurations.

The only other thing that could really make Knights of Pen and Paper better at this point would be some kind of multiplayer mechanic, in keeping with the Dungeons and Dragons theme. Would be a bit of a challenge mind you – it’s not like you can all control an individual character and do your own thing with it, the lovably simplistic design means that options for what you can do are actually pretty limited. One thing we will say though, and this is more of a comment on the changing face of the industry than Knights specifically – with the rise of mobile and tablet gaming, I can’t help but feel games like Knights of Pen & Paper are starting to feel... out of place, on the PC. At the end of the day, Knights of Pen & Paper started out in the mobile space and is porting over – which is fine, there’s nothing wrong with that, but I personally can’t help but feel that I wouldn’t really play games like this on the PC anymore. FTL is another game that I feel the same about, which is PC-only at the moment. Great game, with compelling design, but it’s not something I’d want to sit at my PC and play. Again it’s nothing major, but this is a trend that’s starting to shift who plays games on what.

Knights of Pen & Paper is a simple, fun yet smart game, and there’s no reason that its success on the mobile platforms can’t translate to the PC. The only real question is how they handle the inflated pricing that PC games usually get, even ports of mobile games, and whether there’s enough content to justify it... but now that they do have a PC version, they can easily add in more stuff that current mobile platforms just can’t handle, so either way good times should be ahead. Not that it’s within our remit, but it is worth mentioning that for those of you who already own the mobile version, they’re working on a way to get you to be able to upgrade to the +1 version for free, so hang tight. Knights of Pen & Paper +1 Edition will be rolling a D6 onto PC, Mac and Linux in Q2 2013.

Strategy Informer has an interiview with Leszek Lisowski of Wastelands Interactive, and Aaron Ethridge of newcomers Lucid Dreamers.

Strategy Informer: To start off, could you give our readers an overview of the features of Worlds of Magic?

Aaron Ethridge: Absolutely. It’s really a long list of features. I think the first one that really needs to be mentioned is that we are working hard to give birth to a real spiritual successor to Master of Magic. That may not seem like a feature to some, but it definitely is to us.

Strategy Informer: One of the key features in the original and in Worlds of Magic is the use of procedural generation to create the World Maps. How difficult is it to create a world generation system that produces something inherently playable?

Aaron Ethridge: At the basic level, it’s actually relatively simple, mainly because it is based on some mathematical algorithms that are old and very well established. We’re using the Diamond-Square algorithm to produce our base terrain, and the original used something very similar.

Strategy Informer: The recurrent issue with 4X games has always been the late-game: the amount of micro-management required by that stage and also just keeping things interesting. Are there steps you’ve taken to ensure that Worlds of Magic remains compelling as you get to the later stages of a game, especially considering some of the huge World Maps you’ve talked about?

Aaron Ethridge: This is something we’ve got our eye on and are very aware of. We’ve got some ideas, but at the current stage of development we can’t really talk about specifics, because we have made no firm decision.

We’ve got a lot of ideas floating about, one of them being that as the game progresses we open up more and more earth-shattering, game-changing spells. so the player has access to things that will speed along the end game. Master of Magic to a certain extent did that with the Spell of Mastery, and we have an implementation of that that we call the Spell of Domination. That’s one of the things we plan to implement.

Strategy Informer  has an op-ed piece posted on AI in modern games, particularly in single vs multiplayer applications. While it's not at all RPG-focused, there are some interesting general observations:

Neglecting A.I., and in effect the single player modes that often rely on them, seems to be an evolving trend in gaming. In some genres like shooters and real time strategy for instance, no matter how realistic a developer can design an opponent to be, it's never a substitute for the real thing...Fighting live players is generally always going to beat taking on a computer. A computer controlled player can only do so much. They can only react in so many ways. People on the other hand are unpredictable.

With online connections practically a given part of life in America and many other gaming countries, the prominence of the multiplayer experience has grown immensely in a number of different genres and with it, its arguable the importance of A.I. has fallen off. Looking at recent releases in the shooter category for instance, one can see plenty of examples of the single player experience being increasingly neglected in favor of multiplayer. Call of Duty 4, in example, has earned mounds of praise for its addictive and challenging multiplayer. It won countless awards, topping a number of reviewer's lists for that year, and yet you'd be hard-pressed to find a single review of the game that didn't note how markedly short its story mode was. The multiplayer mode was clearly meant to be the main draw of the game.

So is AI destined to remain underdeveloped while games rely on the unpredictable quality of human players to provide the challenge?

This is not to say A.I. is completely pointless. There are just some genres where multiplayer isn't all that fun. Turn based strategy games for instance tend not to work as well with more than one person. Part of the appeal of that genre is being able to take one's time plotting out each move, weighing the pros and cons of everything you do. Against a computer player this isn't so bad because while you might take awhile to do something, the A.I. can more often than not react more quickly. Pairing human players however is often a recipe for slow, tedious gameplahy...The development of better A.I. is a necessity to these kinds of games.

Furthermore, while multiplayer is assuredly more important than it was even just ten years ago, you'd have little luck finding anyone willing to spell off all single player experiences as pointless. The Darkness as pointed out earlier, might have been mediocre in some aspects of its design, but it still featured a story that was well worth the price of admission. Bioshock was void of multiplayer, but was centered on a plot that some gamers have proclaimed as downright philosophical.

Strategy Informer has an op ed up on the ever-recurring topic of the future of PC gaming.  As usual, the article says the idea of PC gaming being dead is exaggerated, and touches on digital distribution, anti-piracy efforts and the power of the internet:

Analysts, experts, wizards – they’re all in agreement that the web has evolved and the ripple effect is touching all that communes with it. Nowhere else but on the PC is this more evident with the huge surge in social networking sites and massively multiplayer online communities. Recently a study forecast from Strategy Analytics shows their prediction that within a decade one billion of us will be registered up to some online virtual world - that would equate by then to almost one seventh of the total human population. They allege this would generate $8 billion in service opportunities, now if that isn’t a sign that the future of the PC and its games has a bright horizon then what possibly could?

Conclusion:

Massively Multiplayer Online and casual bite sized games are not the sole saviours PC gamers have only to look forward too, there’s always going to be the triple ‘A’ titles and its unrealistic to think they’ll be gone one day. This is a platform that delivered the videogame to the world and it’s had its share of ups and downs for sure but, and as cliché as it sounds, the futures bright. There’s never going to be a victor, consoles are always going to come out every so many years and that’s an excellent thing. Having the competition helps keep those guys and gals with the pen and paper pushing their imaginations and trying to find new ways to make the games we love.