Why Mainstream RPGs Are FUBAR

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 15, 2010

Gareth has the principle commentary:

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words, Part 1

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words, Part 2

The important note to make about the second one is that it was made from the perspective of a Japanese RPG developer. Final Fantasy = JRPG, Tomb Raider = WRPG? WTF?

Okay, I get it. Maybe. The old labels – the marketing boxes that games were always trimmed to fit inside – never sat well with me in the first place. Slapping the “Real-Time Strategy” or “First-Person Shooter” label on a game might have been helpful getting games to find their audiences, but I think they were bad for games in general and stifled innovation. So I’m hesitant to call heresy too loudly here.

But it’s one thing to push the boundaries of what a game type can be, and it’s something else entirely to flee to the comfort of homogenized mediocrity. Even if said homogenized mediocrity has kick-butt visuals and an epic movie-quality story and acting.

Filed Under: Biz, Mainstream Games - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Peachfuzz said,

There was a possible explanation for that second picture here:

http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=9023627

It’s probably some sort of corporate thing. Tomb Raider and Hitman might not have much in common with actual RPGs, but they are published by Eidos, who are owned by Square Enix, who employ the developer who made that slide.
Xenovore said,

Like I mentioned on Gareth’s blog, Square just needs to stop making games and start making feature films — they are very good with the film part, but they completely suck with the game part.
WhineAboutGames said,

… except that’s the exact opposite of how the market feels, n’est-ce pas? their games sell a lot. their film attempt flopped.
LateWhiteRabbit said,

Point number 1 of the slide, they are absolutely right, and GarethF and others are missing the point. Yes, if you have a stable and loyal fanbase of customers who like something, you can do well, but not indefinitely.

One of the first things I learned when getting my business degree is that you must innovate constantly, and I believe the same is true for a franchise or a genre. Here’s why: Your product or service, or in this case, gameplay, can maintain the same quality indefinitely, but eventually, inevitably, someone is going to come along and do it/make it/design it better than you do. And that “stable” fanbase is going to move on. Not all of them of course, but you are going to see a serious dip. Which means you aren’t doing as well anymore. Which quite possibly means you can’t maintain even the same quality anymore. Which eventually causes you to lose more of that fan or customer base.

On Point 2 of the slide: I think they may well have a point. Core gamers or fans ARE limiting the RPG market in several ways. More than any other genre, it seems fans of RPGs are never satisfied. Any time something is changed or tried deviates from the standard STATS/INVENTORY/LEVELS practices of old, it is savagely attacked if the developers dare call their game an RPG. (You know, regardless if it has “role-playing of a character where you can make significant choices that change the story and determine personal character growth on a story and not just stat level.”) Developers and designers and most of all, storytellers, are creative people, and I imagine they do chafe at players wanting to restrict them to an “RPG ghetto” of design choices.

On Point 3 of the slide: Emotion and drama are more compulsive than stats or huge, multi-layered inventory systems. It’s why I’m following and eagerly awaiting Coyote’s Frayed Knights game after playing the pilot. I’m personally not thrilled with another game using elves, goblins, and a quasi-medieval fantasy world, but the dialogue and interplay between characters is fantastic and “compulsive”.

On Point 4 . . . okay, Lionhead is smoking crack. Where the heck did this statistic come from? What are these magical 50% of features that millions of players apparently completely missed? Sources, Lionhead. I want sources!

On Point 5, Industry drive to simplicity. This is, I’m sure, getting a lot of hate, but it is the exact right thing to be doing. Good writers write as simply as they can and still get their point across. (I fail here ;P) Engineers will tell you that the best machines and designs are the most simple ones that can do the job. I will point to Mass Effect 2 as a game sample in regards to its weapons. In Mass Effect 2, if you get a more powerful weapon, you automatically equip it. You can change to another if you wish, but why force players to scroll through their inventory and laboriously compare stats? Mass Effect 1’s inventory was a sloppy mess of too much everything (speaking of the Xbox version, I hear the PC version corrected a lot of complaints). Make it simple. Why force me to open my inventory, remove my old weapon, scroll to the new weapon and equip it? Especially if I just picked up “Uber-Super Awesome Endgame Best Weapon”. Who isn’t going to equip that?

On the final point of the slide, about needing to sell 5 million plus units, well, that is just messed up. That is just industry budget bloat running rampant. Developers need to cut back and build games for lower budgets if they need to sell millions of a well-known and popular game franchise to break even. I sure any of us indie developers could do freaking magic for a tenth or even 1% of Lionhead’s budget for Fable 3. I see the same budget bloat on movies. How these companies manage to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in two or three years of development(or filming) is beyond me.

Well, this is turning into a blog post in itself, but I thought I’d offer a devil’s advocate opinion of some of the point’s made by others.
Rampant Coyote said,

Ever notice how the absolutely best thing about this blog is the comments? That’s where the best content is…

Anyway – my concern isn’t so much about developers going forward in bold new directions to challenge the meaning of “RPG-ness.” My problem is … settling.

It’s like television a few years ago, when suddenly everything was either a reality show or a procedural crime drama. I mean, I have nothing against either genre, but sheesh! And every single studio made a big PR blitz about how they were innovating, and boldly pioneering in this growing field…

Bullcrap. They were lemmings chasing the money trail. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, but for all the fertilizer they were piling on to excuse it.

And that’s analogous to what I see the mainstream industry doing right now with RPGs. True innovation is expensive and risky. What they are trying to do is redefine expectations of their product to the point where they can reduce the variance that comes with game profitability. You throw in X dollars, you churn out a game of Y quality which can sell Z units. A money-making machine.

Again, I don’t blame them, necessarily (who wouldn’t want a money-making machine?). But… as a consumer I’m not all that thrilled by the direction they are taking their products. And as an indie — I’m thrilled that they are abandoning an audience that may be receptive to what we have to offer.
(name here) said,

Since when did game development budgets grow to 30 million dollars?
Rampant Coyote said,

Since Square Enix decided to start running up the bill on its movies.
Original, Hardcore RPGs? Nah, Those Won’t Sell! said,

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