13 ms·

This is sort of like when MMORPG's were all the rage and they said that they were destroying traditional RPG's, but fast forward a decade or so and guess what,

This is sort of like when MMORPG's were all the rage and they said that they were destroying traditional RPG's, but fast forward a decade or so and guess what, we still have great traditional RPG's. We have great MMORPG's. There's a lot of enjoyable gaming to be had. So there's in app purchase, okay. That's another way some games are going, but it's not the only way and it probably won't be. You can't make a AAA title like Halo or Call of Duty as a F2P with IAP. that's not going to happen anytime soon. However, some devs might try and nickel and dime players more because they can, but maybe just maybe this means that game developers will have a more sustainable business and won't be going bankrupt every few years as many seem to.

Qworg 13y ago
Maybe I spend too much time look at MMOs, but what recent RPGs are there? As for AAA with IAP, look at Planetside 2. Free to play, IAP, AAA by any measure. In many ways, we're training a new generation of gamers to have the following beliefs: - Games are not meant to challenge you, but to steadily progress you, no matter how good you are. - Anything difficult can be "spent" out of. While both are working theses, I feel that there are far too many games that will fall away if this becomes permanent.
- Fargren 13y ago
  Top of my head: Dark Souls franchise, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, The Witcher. Just in AAA, american style RPGs. J-RPG and indies are coming as strong as ever. EDIT: as pointed out below, Dark Souls is a JRPG.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    - jamesaguilar 13y ago
      Not in the meaningful sense (static multi member battles with combat menus and a focus on story telling over gameplay).
      - Fargren 13y ago
        The character progression and the general pacing are closer to those of JRPGs. It reminds me a bit of Vagrant's Story in terms of gameplay, for instance.
  - crapshoot101 13y ago
    To be clear, I hope we aren't talking about Dragon Age II, which was awful, awful gameplay on what was an intruiging premise. I enjoyed the original, but it clearly had some IAP (I don't mind, but I can see how someone else might).
- Mithaldu 13y ago
  Have a few links of the past year: http://playism-games.com/games/onewayheroics/ http://playism-games.com/games/onewayheroics/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Bounty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Bounty http://stoicstudio.com/game-overview/ http://stoicstudio.com/game-overview/ http://bluebottlegames.com/main/node/21 http://bluebottlegames.com/main/node/21 http://roguelegacy.com/ http://roguelegacy.com/ http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/avadon2/ http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/avadon2/ http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-vita/soul-sacrifice http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-vita/soul-sacrifi... http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-vita/toukiden-the-age-of-demons http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-vita/toukiden-the... While the mobile market is flooded with manipulative crap, both the PC and console markets have plenty of good RPGs available, even and especially when you look outside of big studio stuff like Mass Effect.
  - username223 13y ago
    Jeff Vogel probably isn't rich, but he seems to make a good and honest living running Spiderweb, charging $10 for the tablet versions of his games with no F2P nonsense. You can make a living doing something less evil than Zynga.
  - Qworg 13y ago
    I'm glad there are small publishers making RPGs. It just seems that MMOs have sucked all the air out of the room for PC AAA RPG titles. I can only name a few in the past 5 years (listed further down in the thread by someone else).
    - krzyk 13y ago
      Skyrim was releases something like 2 years ago, and you have Fallout series based on the same/similar engine from Oblivion (AFAIR Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas).
    - programminggeek 13y ago
      Mass Effect is a huge new RPG game series, also Dragon Age did pretty well. Both launched well after WoW went huge and everybody was chasing that market.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  Is it really training the gamers? I would say it is taking advantage of the similarity between a difficulty progression and time/spend ladders. Other than some amount of real world benefit from improved hand eye coordination they are just different ways of providing a reward stimulus that is relatively empty of extended value. (I don't mean that as an invective against fun, I just mean that the rewards from fun are mostly fleeting)
- kmfrk 13y ago
  RPGs are basically coming out of Kickstarter today, aside from the fairly boring AAA games like Elder Scrolls and Witcher.
- corysama 13y ago
  >In many ways, we're training a new generation of gamers to have the following beliefs: - Games are not meant to challenge you, but to steadily progress you, no matter how good you are. Working in f2p games, I've thought about this quite a bit. From my observation, you have causality reversed. There's a new audience that is demanding progress-based games and that new market is pushing a lot of game designs away from skill-based challenges. Going back to the pac-man era, games had to be extremely challenging because they couldn't have enough content to stay interesting otherwise. That selected for gamers who enjoyed overcoming great challenges and pretty much defined "what games are" for 30+ years. Meanwhile, there has always been an unserved audience that does not like overcoming great challenges and preferes steady progression based on effort rather than mastery. That huge, newly discovered audience pushes back /hard/ when the games they play swing towards rewarding mastery. They just want to show up, know exactly what routine needs to be performed and know that if they do it, they will progress. For them, it's not about winning the gold at the Olympics. It's about tending a garden/getting fit/going on a hike. Imagine going on a hike and some weird old man stops you to say "No. That guy hiked better than you. You must go back down the mountain and start over from the beginning until you hike better than someone else." You'd never come back. Meanwhile, the classic, challenge-oriented audience is still there and games are still being made for them. But, a lot of them are discovering that sometimes they just want a nice hike as well. Thus more and more products are responding to that new demand. Gaming is a bigger world now. After 30+ years, the focus has shifted from being laser-locked on catering to hardcore gamers like you and me. Now there are not just different genres of fun challenges, there are different genres of fun.
  - moron4hire 13y ago
    > Meanwhile, there has always been an unserved audience that does not like overcoming great challenges and preferes steady progression based on effort rather than mastery. > They just want to show up, know exactly what routine needs to be performed and know that if they do it, they will progress. That rather handily explains degree inflation, too.
  - Qworg 13y ago
    Sure! Gaming is definitely a bigger world. I suppose games that are being made for "steady progressionists" also are those with "and here's a cash money way of ensuring the steady progression, so you don't have to work too hard". That seems to short circuit the reward for playing. Example: Angry Birds is has their Eagle that beats a map for you. Beating a map unlocks another map. Assuming a steady progression, being able to buy your way past a map removes any requirement that the game designer creates a steadily ramping progression, and instead encourages them to put up as many "little roadblocks" as possible.
- saraid216 13y ago
  I'd lump the entire Assassin's Creed franchise into the RPG category.
- ANTSANTS 13y ago
  There's a small irony here: The enormous success of the Dragon Quest series (currently approaching its 30th anniversary) in Japan was, in no small part, due to the fact that it was designed so that anyone could complete it if they put in enough effort. There is little real strategy or challenge to the main paths of the games (the secret dungeons are another story), you just keep "grinding" for money and EXP until you eventually get strong enough to venture into the next area and move the story along. Even if you die, you don't lose your progress, you just restart at the last town with half the gold you were carrying. It might sound a bit dull when I put it that way, but the series is enormously popular in Japan amongst all kinds of people that you wouldn't ever consider to be interested in video games. Each game is far lengthier an experience than you would expect out of a "casual" game, but the fact that you can make a little progress every time you play, no matter how frequently you do so or how bad you are at video games, really appeals to people. I obviously see the difference between that style of play, and paying for progress, but I just wanted to throw out there that games that are more about progress than skill or strategy have existed almost since the beginning, and they're not necessarily a bad idea.
  - aidenn0 13y ago
    DQ III to this day is my favorite console RPG. I'm also somewhat surprised the battery hasn't died on it yet. I will lose probably 60 hours of progress for my current save when that happens.
sentenza 13y ago
It is true though, that an MMORPG is very likely to destroy an RPG franchise. Anybody still waiting for Warcraft 4. How about a new Elder Scrolls game?
- ama729 13y ago
  > Anybody still waiting for Warcraft 4 That's because Blizzard is a very slow developer, which is not unheard in the industry. People were(are) also waiting for HL3, Prey 1 and 2 or Duke Nukem: Forever. > How about a new Elder Scrolls game? Skyrim came out in 2011, it's unlikely there'll be another one before 2015-2016, Morrowind came out in 2002 and Oblivion in 2006.
  - sentenza 13y ago
    Fair enough. My sense of time is gone since having kids. Though I'm fairly confident with my prediction about Warcraft 4. There are probably a lot of people at Blizzard, right now, thinking about how to make "the next WOW" work. A Warcraft strategy title just feels like small fry compared to that. Also, there might actually be brand dilution, since it is quite likely that many WOW players don't know about the old RTS games.
    - plorkyeran 13y ago
      Working on two RTS games at the same time would be a very odd decision, and Blizzard's been working on Starcraft 2 since 2007 and the third part is still at least a year out. Even if WoW never existed and Starcraft 2 was started earlier, Warcraft 4 would probably not be out yet.
    - saraid216 13y ago
      It's not just that it's "small fry". It's that the Warcraft lore is irreparably broken at this point. A Warcraft 4 would need to be a reboot, after WoW faded.
- philosophus 13y ago
  Not sure if you're joking there -- Elder Scrolls Online comes out in June. There is some controversy because you can pay ~$10 extra for the "imperial edition" that is the only way to play the imperial race ...
pnathan 13y ago
Maybe I've been out of it, but I can't remember a really A-class MMO that came out in the last 4-5 years. Which is the period of time that F2P & pay to win started making heavy inroads on the MMO market. I was rummaging around looking for a modern (post 2010? 2012?) AAA MMO the other night and couldn't find it.
- epmatsw 13y ago
  Star Wars, Guild Wars 2, and the upcoming Elder Scrolls MMO are the ones that come to mind.
  - minimaxir 13y ago
    Star Wars TOR went F2P and apparently, it was extremely successful for them and made the game profitable. Guild Wars 2 has an initial purchase fee (usually on sale for $30), but no monthly fee. New content is subsidized through both functional and cosmetic IAP, although neither is game-breaking. Elder Scrolls Online, however, is $60 + $15/mo, with no IAP. Everyone is expecting it to die a horrible death.
    - epmatsw 13y ago
      True. Though I think all 3 would fit the AAA MMO description (especially considering that all of them have a relatively high upfront cost), even if they have IAP.
    - pnathan 13y ago
      > Elder Scrolls Online, however, is $60 + $15/mo, with no IAP. Everyone is expecting it to die a horrible death. Because it's $15/mo with no IAP...?
      - minimaxir 13y ago
        It's hard to justify both $60 and $15/mo for a game that isn't super good. (apparently, reports from beta users indicate that the game is average)
Smegger 13y ago
well have traditional RPGs destroyed? Compare planescape torment dialogue options to say skyrim. this is an example of planescape http://www.gameranx.com/img/13-Apr/ravel-planescape-torment-choice.png http://www.gameranx.com/img/13-Apr/ravel-planescape-torment-... Can you honestly say that RPGs have gotten better or even stayed the same level?
rwallace 13y ago
Great MMORPGs? A friend sent me a video of MMORPG 'gameplay' a while ago. I don't play these things, she does and is aware of my opinion of them and chose this as the best sample she could possibly find as a way to try to change my mind about them. It was a major boss battle, something that should've been the highlight of what the game had to offer. There was no gameplay. The boss monster was rendered as a hundred foot tall demon, but it didn't fight in any meaningful sense of the word. It stepped back and forth over and over again, executing some canned move the same way every time. The two dozen players did the same thing, wasting half an hour of their lives mindlessly pressing the same buttons over and over again until the boss monster 'died' (scare quotes because obviously it popped up again later for the next batch of victims). MMORPGs aren't games. They're Skinner boxes, exploits for security flaws in the human motivation system. The real challenge is at the meta-game level: the developers win if they successfully exploit you, and you win if you successfully prevent yourself being exploited. And the way to achieve the latter is to stop playing.
- mattmanser 13y ago
  You simply just didn't understand the gameplay. Raids are great fun and challenging. The repetitive bit is a totally different part of the game that you actually don't have to partake in. I hate platformers, but don't randomly declare them not to be games because I don't understand them. With mmorpgs they have to have these time sinks simply to have content for the hours people actually want to put in.

Qworg 13y ago

Maybe I spend too much time look at MMOs, but what recent RPGs are there? As for AAA with IAP, look at Planetside 2. Free to play, IAP, AAA by any measure. In many ways, we're training a new generation of gamers to have the following beliefs: - Games are not meant to challenge you, but to steadily progress you, no matter how good you are. - Anything difficult can be "spent" out of. While both are working theses, I feel that there are far too many games that will fall away if this becomes permanent.

Fargren 13y ago
Top of my head: Dark Souls franchise, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, The Witcher. Just in AAA, american style RPGs. J-RPG and indies are coming as strong as ever. EDIT: as pointed out below, Dark Souls is a JRPG.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - jamesaguilar 13y ago
    Not in the meaningful sense (static multi member battles with combat menus and a focus on story telling over gameplay).
    - Fargren 13y ago
      The character progression and the general pacing are closer to those of JRPGs. It reminds me a bit of Vagrant's Story in terms of gameplay, for instance.
- crapshoot101 13y ago
  To be clear, I hope we aren't talking about Dragon Age II, which was awful, awful gameplay on what was an intruiging premise. I enjoyed the original, but it clearly had some IAP (I don't mind, but I can see how someone else might).
Mithaldu 13y ago
Have a few links of the past year: http://playism-games.com/games/onewayheroics/ http://playism-games.com/games/onewayheroics/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Bounty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Bounty http://stoicstudio.com/game-overview/ http://stoicstudio.com/game-overview/ http://bluebottlegames.com/main/node/21 http://bluebottlegames.com/main/node/21 http://roguelegacy.com/ http://roguelegacy.com/ http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/avadon2/ http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/avadon2/ http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-vita/soul-sacrifice http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-vita/soul-sacrifi... http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-vita/toukiden-the-age-of-demons http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-vita/toukiden-the... While the mobile market is flooded with manipulative crap, both the PC and console markets have plenty of good RPGs available, even and especially when you look outside of big studio stuff like Mass Effect.
- username223 13y ago
  Jeff Vogel probably isn't rich, but he seems to make a good and honest living running Spiderweb, charging $10 for the tablet versions of his games with no F2P nonsense. You can make a living doing something less evil than Zynga.
- Qworg 13y ago
  I'm glad there are small publishers making RPGs. It just seems that MMOs have sucked all the air out of the room for PC AAA RPG titles. I can only name a few in the past 5 years (listed further down in the thread by someone else).
  - krzyk 13y ago
    Skyrim was releases something like 2 years ago, and you have Fallout series based on the same/similar engine from Oblivion (AFAIR Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas).
  - programminggeek 13y ago
    Mass Effect is a huge new RPG game series, also Dragon Age did pretty well. Both launched well after WoW went huge and everybody was chasing that market.
maxerickson 13y ago
Is it really training the gamers? I would say it is taking advantage of the similarity between a difficulty progression and time/spend ladders. Other than some amount of real world benefit from improved hand eye coordination they are just different ways of providing a reward stimulus that is relatively empty of extended value. (I don't mean that as an invective against fun, I just mean that the rewards from fun are mostly fleeting)
kmfrk 13y ago
RPGs are basically coming out of Kickstarter today, aside from the fairly boring AAA games like Elder Scrolls and Witcher.
corysama 13y ago
>In many ways, we're training a new generation of gamers to have the following beliefs: - Games are not meant to challenge you, but to steadily progress you, no matter how good you are. Working in f2p games, I've thought about this quite a bit. From my observation, you have causality reversed. There's a new audience that is demanding progress-based games and that new market is pushing a lot of game designs away from skill-based challenges. Going back to the pac-man era, games had to be extremely challenging because they couldn't have enough content to stay interesting otherwise. That selected for gamers who enjoyed overcoming great challenges and pretty much defined "what games are" for 30+ years. Meanwhile, there has always been an unserved audience that does not like overcoming great challenges and preferes steady progression based on effort rather than mastery. That huge, newly discovered audience pushes back /hard/ when the games they play swing towards rewarding mastery. They just want to show up, know exactly what routine needs to be performed and know that if they do it, they will progress. For them, it's not about winning the gold at the Olympics. It's about tending a garden/getting fit/going on a hike. Imagine going on a hike and some weird old man stops you to say "No. That guy hiked better than you. You must go back down the mountain and start over from the beginning until you hike better than someone else." You'd never come back. Meanwhile, the classic, challenge-oriented audience is still there and games are still being made for them. But, a lot of them are discovering that sometimes they just want a nice hike as well. Thus more and more products are responding to that new demand. Gaming is a bigger world now. After 30+ years, the focus has shifted from being laser-locked on catering to hardcore gamers like you and me. Now there are not just different genres of fun challenges, there are different genres of fun.
- moron4hire 13y ago
  > Meanwhile, there has always been an unserved audience that does not like overcoming great challenges and preferes steady progression based on effort rather than mastery. > They just want to show up, know exactly what routine needs to be performed and know that if they do it, they will progress. That rather handily explains degree inflation, too.
- Qworg 13y ago
  Sure! Gaming is definitely a bigger world. I suppose games that are being made for "steady progressionists" also are those with "and here's a cash money way of ensuring the steady progression, so you don't have to work too hard". That seems to short circuit the reward for playing. Example: Angry Birds is has their Eagle that beats a map for you. Beating a map unlocks another map. Assuming a steady progression, being able to buy your way past a map removes any requirement that the game designer creates a steadily ramping progression, and instead encourages them to put up as many "little roadblocks" as possible.
saraid216 13y ago
I'd lump the entire Assassin's Creed franchise into the RPG category.
ANTSANTS 13y ago
There's a small irony here: The enormous success of the Dragon Quest series (currently approaching its 30th anniversary) in Japan was, in no small part, due to the fact that it was designed so that anyone could complete it if they put in enough effort. There is little real strategy or challenge to the main paths of the games (the secret dungeons are another story), you just keep "grinding" for money and EXP until you eventually get strong enough to venture into the next area and move the story along. Even if you die, you don't lose your progress, you just restart at the last town with half the gold you were carrying. It might sound a bit dull when I put it that way, but the series is enormously popular in Japan amongst all kinds of people that you wouldn't ever consider to be interested in video games. Each game is far lengthier an experience than you would expect out of a "casual" game, but the fact that you can make a little progress every time you play, no matter how frequently you do so or how bad you are at video games, really appeals to people. I obviously see the difference between that style of play, and paying for progress, but I just wanted to throw out there that games that are more about progress than skill or strategy have existed almost since the beginning, and they're not necessarily a bad idea.
- aidenn0 13y ago
  DQ III to this day is my favorite console RPG. I'm also somewhat surprised the battery hasn't died on it yet. I will lose probably 60 hours of progress for my current save when that happens.

sentenza 13y ago

It is true though, that an MMORPG is very likely to destroy an RPG franchise. Anybody still waiting for Warcraft 4. How about a new Elder Scrolls game?

ama729 13y ago
> Anybody still waiting for Warcraft 4 That's because Blizzard is a very slow developer, which is not unheard in the industry. People were(are) also waiting for HL3, Prey 1 and 2 or Duke Nukem: Forever. > How about a new Elder Scrolls game? Skyrim came out in 2011, it's unlikely there'll be another one before 2015-2016, Morrowind came out in 2002 and Oblivion in 2006.
- sentenza 13y ago
  Fair enough. My sense of time is gone since having kids. Though I'm fairly confident with my prediction about Warcraft 4. There are probably a lot of people at Blizzard, right now, thinking about how to make "the next WOW" work. A Warcraft strategy title just feels like small fry compared to that. Also, there might actually be brand dilution, since it is quite likely that many WOW players don't know about the old RTS games.
  - plorkyeran 13y ago
    Working on two RTS games at the same time would be a very odd decision, and Blizzard's been working on Starcraft 2 since 2007 and the third part is still at least a year out. Even if WoW never existed and Starcraft 2 was started earlier, Warcraft 4 would probably not be out yet.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    It's not just that it's "small fry". It's that the Warcraft lore is irreparably broken at this point. A Warcraft 4 would need to be a reboot, after WoW faded.
philosophus 13y ago
Not sure if you're joking there -- Elder Scrolls Online comes out in June. There is some controversy because you can pay ~$10 extra for the "imperial edition" that is the only way to play the imperial race ...

pnathan 13y ago

Maybe I've been out of it, but I can't remember a really A-class MMO that came out in the last 4-5 years. Which is the period of time that F2P & pay to win started making heavy inroads on the MMO market. I was rummaging around looking for a modern (post 2010? 2012?) AAA MMO the other night and couldn't find it.

epmatsw 13y ago
Star Wars, Guild Wars 2, and the upcoming Elder Scrolls MMO are the ones that come to mind.
- minimaxir 13y ago
  Star Wars TOR went F2P and apparently, it was extremely successful for them and made the game profitable. Guild Wars 2 has an initial purchase fee (usually on sale for $30), but no monthly fee. New content is subsidized through both functional and cosmetic IAP, although neither is game-breaking. Elder Scrolls Online, however, is $60 + $15/mo, with no IAP. Everyone is expecting it to die a horrible death.
  - epmatsw 13y ago
    True. Though I think all 3 would fit the AAA MMO description (especially considering that all of them have a relatively high upfront cost), even if they have IAP.
  - pnathan 13y ago
    > Elder Scrolls Online, however, is $60 + $15/mo, with no IAP. Everyone is expecting it to die a horrible death. Because it's $15/mo with no IAP...?
    - minimaxir 13y ago
      It's hard to justify both $60 and $15/mo for a game that isn't super good. (apparently, reports from beta users indicate that the game is average)

Smegger 13y ago

well have traditional RPGs destroyed? Compare planescape torment dialogue options to say skyrim. this is an example of planescape http://www.gameranx.com/img/13-Apr/ravel-planescape-torment-choice.png http://www.gameranx.com/img/13-Apr/ravel-planescape-torment-... Can you honestly say that RPGs have gotten better or even stayed the same level?

rwallace 13y ago

Great MMORPGs? A friend sent me a video of MMORPG 'gameplay' a while ago. I don't play these things, she does and is aware of my opinion of them and chose this as the best sample she could possibly find as a way to try to change my mind about them. It was a major boss battle, something that should've been the highlight of what the game had to offer. There was no gameplay. The boss monster was rendered as a hundred foot tall demon, but it didn't fight in any meaningful sense of the word. It stepped back and forth over and over again, executing some canned move the same way every time. The two dozen players did the same thing, wasting half an hour of their lives mindlessly pressing the same buttons over and over again until the boss monster 'died' (scare quotes because obviously it popped up again later for the next batch of victims). MMORPGs aren't games. They're Skinner boxes, exploits for security flaws in the human motivation system. The real challenge is at the meta-game level: the developers win if they successfully exploit you, and you win if you successfully prevent yourself being exploited. And the way to achieve the latter is to stop playing.

mattmanser 13y ago
You simply just didn't understand the gameplay. Raids are great fun and challenging. The repetitive bit is a totally different part of the game that you actually don't have to partake in. I hate platformers, but don't randomly declare them not to be games because I don't understand them. With mmorpgs they have to have these time sinks simply to have content for the hours people actually want to put in.