If Quake Was Made Today…
Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 2, 2011
As a bunch of “old-school” RPG fans hang out here, we’re accustomed to griping about how “dumbed down” RPGs have become over the years.
But it’s not just our favorite genre. As much as we complain about RPGs becoming first-person shooters, first-person shooters aren’t what they used to be, either.
To illustrate this point, this excellent video by kmooseman:
In some ways, we’re victims of our own success. Games are mainstream now, and to sell the big numbers you have to appeal to all audiences, not just the existing hardcore crowd. Does that mean a particular style / class of game is gone forever? I doubt it, but it sure means it’s been relegated to a niche that most mainstream publishers are loathe to explore.
But I’m not really opposed to making games – maybe not all, but certainly the vast majority – more accessible to inexperienced players. While there may be reasons to make a game more opaque and demanding of experience from the get-go like they were in the old days, I can’t think of any right now. Tutorials are inevitably boring as hell to me, but every game has new things to learn, and I would still rather learn-by-doing than reading a manual.
Filed Under: Biz, Design, Retro - Comments: 11 Comments to Read
Frayed Knights Review at RPGamer
Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 1, 2011
Not an entirely glowing review this time – the reviewer’s primary criticism is the amount of randomness involved in the game, where Benjamin might hit for more damage than Arianna sometimes, or a character might go twice in a row (which may be due to haste, or simply the last person on one round getting lucky the following round).
But he still has plenty of good things to say about the game:
RPGamer’s Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon Review
I personally think of the randomness as being more of a feature than a bug (Except for the spells-missing more than they should thing, which is a bug fixed in version 1.04 but sadly existed in the original release version). Consistency is a good thing, and mathematically the numbers have worked out to provide pretty decent “groupings” in my tests, but in contested actions, particularly the heat of battle, a wider variation of results feels more believable to me. Less gamey, admittedly, but it feels more interesting to me when you do have to plan for contingencies and the occasional failure. That’s why there are drama star abilities like Fool’s Luck – to help mitigate the variance when it really, REALLY counts.
But that’s a design approach that clearly doesn’t appeal to everybody, and I knowingly chose to go that route with Frayed Knights.
Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 4 Comments to Read
Happy Halloween! Here’s a TREAT: Frayed Knights Discount Code!
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 31, 2011
Trick or Treat!!!
This is my favorite holiday (even beating out Christmas). So I figured I’d offer some copies of Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon for a steep discount. 41 copies of the game (10 + 31, get it?) are 50% off, but when they run out, they are out. The discount code can only be used 41 times… and then it’s gone.
Use the discount code BYQI000IR at BMT Micro to buy the game, and get 50% off.
To get your copy, go to the “Buy Now” Page at BMT Micro:
Buy Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon
And enter the following code in the “Discount code” box:
BYQI000IR
(Copy & paste for best results)
Then click the “Recalculate” button up below your total price. If there are any more uses of the discount code available, it will give you the new price.
Go for it! And if you already have a copy, you can gift one to a friend!
Happy Halloween!
UPDATE: Wow, these are going fast, in spite of it being a surprise announcement. Only a few codes left, but they aren’t gone yet…
UPDATE #2: The discount code is all used up! Congratulations everyone who managed to snag it! Enjoy the game, and Happy Halloween!
Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 8 Comments to Read
48 Hour Game Jam? How About a Zero-Hour Game Jam?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 28, 2011
This is a cool idea: Make a game in that hour between daylight savings time, between 2 AM and 2 AM. A game in zero hours!
Ludum Dare – 0h Game Jam! Make a Game in Zero Hours!
It’s a tough one, no doubt. And as an international competition, with different countries (notably the United States) practicing DST on different weeks, it’s going to be weirder still. I don’t know if some people will try and do it next weekend instead of this weekend, but I still thought that the idea was cool.
If nothing else, as a thought exercise it’s great! If you only have one hour to make a video game, how would you do it? What tools would you use, what language / API / engine, and what would your game be? That’s not a lot of time to develop a game, let alone debug, so a dirt-simple game with very familiar, easy-to-use tools would be the rule of the day.
What will I do? I would like to participate. A couple of ideas:
#1 – A text-based game. The kind I used to type in from BASIC Computer Games and More BASIC Computer Games as a kid. (It’s how I learned programming!) But I’d not write them in BASIC. 🙂
#2 – I’ve been playing with Unity lately, so maybe a really simple Unity-based game. Simple as in, “Would have made a low-budget Atari 2600 cart.”
What’s the point? It’s an exercise. It’s about putting your skills to the test, and completing (as much as is possible) one more project. Not a particularly exciting project, but one that was fun and quick.
And I’ll once again note that some fairly significant, successful indie games have begun life as little prototypes created in a game jam.
Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 4 Comments to Read
Desura, Dreamscape, Thailand, Game Bundles, and Frayed Knights
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 27, 2011
Okay, time for a little status update.
I’m supposed to be in Thailand right now on business for ye olde Day Job. Due to the terrible flooding in that region, that’s been delayed. So my schedule and plans have had to be a little bit on the flexible side (is that a good euphemism for “chaos?” I don’t know). To make it up to me, the day job is in something of a minor crunch mode right now, and life decided to hit me with a minor cold. Not fun, but compared to what the folks in parts of Thailand are dealing with right now, it’s not even worth complaining about.
A new update for Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon should be available in a few days (probably next week). It’s not going to radically change the game or anything, but there will be some nice improvements and a whole slew of bug-fixes. And there’s a major free bonus becoming available soon. I didn’t expect it to be as major as it is, especially since it’s free, but hey. It’s all good. There’s a recent review at True PC Gaming you can check out, and I expect several more to be forthcoming. It’s a big game and we’re in the middle of the big holiday push in the gaming press, so games journalist are a little on the overwhelmed side right now.
I haven’t yet made the existing Frayed Knights keys available for activation on Desura yet. That should be done soon, prior to the release of the update. On the topic of Desura: If you are inclined to pick up Aldorlea Games’ Dreamscape, I’d naturally prefer it if you buy it from Rampant Games, I did want to point out that Desura is building up their indie RPG catalog quite nicely, and has now included Dreamscape to their line-up. And it’s cheaper through Desura as well. You know, in the interest of full disclosure. *Sigh.* It’s just how it goes as an affiliate. 🙂
Speaking of cheaper, Desura and IndieGames.com have combined to serve up a new indie bundle deal called “Indie Royale.” It’s a “pay what you want” with an interesting twist – the minimum price gradually rises as people pay the minimum, but it falls if people pay more than the minimum. The minimum price is a little over $5 this morning (it was around $2-$3 when I bought the bundle yesterday), and it’s still a bargain for any one game in the bundle. I’d already owned Sanctum, so I now own it twice. I find that happens a lot with these bundles. 🙂 I’d played the demo for Gemini Rue and was extremely impressed – it looks like it could have been made by LucasArts or Sierra in their adventure game heydays. I just hadn’t had time to pick it up and play it with Frayed Knights entering testing. I’d never followed A.R.E.S. Extinction Agenda and Nimbus, and was very pleasantly surprised. Especially Nimbus. What a fun little game!
Well, there’s your info dump for the week.
Filed Under: News - Comments: 7 Comments to Read
The Face of the Nameless One
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 26, 2011
Heh – file this away under trivia:
The face of the Nameless One on the cover of Planescape: Torment is none other than Guido Henkel, the producer of the project for Interplay.
He’s got a story to go along with it: “What’s In a Face”
Maybe I’m just weird, but I love stories like this.
Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 4 Comments to Read
Greek Mythology? Yeah, Right.
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 25, 2011
Can someone explain what the heck this comic-book woman has to do with Greek mythology? I mean, she doesn’t really look Greek, does she? More like Emma Frost in full-on White Queen mode.
Yeah. I know. It’s like all those other online games that sell a scantily clad woman on the ad who either has nothing to do with the game (in one case, she was ripped off from a costume website), or has had something tacked on somewhere if they want to bother with protecting themselves from any kind of claims of false advertising.
Maybe she does have a starring role in a game that is NOT a rip-off of a dozen other online games about building and conquering cities. I could be wrong. I really don’t have time to research it. I’d rather just mock it.
Sex sells. No two ways about it.
And I suck at marketing. No two ways about that, either.
Hmmm… maybe I should launch an ad campaign for Frayed Knights with Chloe in provocative poses?
Think she’d go for it?
Maybe not.
Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 9 Comments to Read
IGF 2012: Bursting at the Seams
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
The Independent Games Festival is reporting a record number of entries into the 2012 competition – by a huge margin over last year’s record number of entrants. There are 568 entries altogether, which is just mind-boggling no matter how you slice it. And I know one of them, the IGF Pirate Kart, is a massive combo submission of something like 300 smaller games by over 100 developers.
In case you are wondering which game will be the 2012 winner…
IGF 2012 Seumas McNally Grand Prize Winner
It’s not like the competition is going to be intense or anything.
Actually, I very nearly skipped entering the competition. But it felt too weird not to compete. Yeah, I probably just chucked a hundred bucks away on a lottery ticket, but I’m very proud of Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, and feel it should get its chance to compete in spite of being perhaps too “traditional” for the festival.
But Five hundred sixty-eight entries! I’m still wrapping my brain around this. Looking at the screenshots, it’s clear that the quality is quite varied, but there are some dang good titles there. (I note that Frozen Synapse follows my game alphabetically. Good game if you are into turn-based tactics!). Alone in the Woods looks fantastic. BitShifter is something of a surprise… I played an alpha version of it something like six years ago. So I guess there are games that have had longer dev cycles than my own.
In an article at GamaSutra, festival chairman Brandon Boyer states, “The diversity — and the plain overwhelming number — of entries in the festival this year is proof positive that we’re in the midst of a true renaissance in games history.”
I agree. Every year, I hear people stating that two or three years previously was “the best time to be an indie game developer.” It is something apparent in hindsight. While the field is becoming incredibly crowded right now, it’s an indication of the power of the tools and amazing opportunities that are out there now to make your own games.
Filed Under: Indie Evangelism, News - Comments: 4 Comments to Read
Player Skill and Character Skill
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 24, 2011
In my mind, for a game to qualify as an RPG, it has to implement at least some of the player’s commands through the filter of character skill. The canonical example is attacking an enemy. In many kinds of non-RPG games, the player hits if he (or she) has aimed correctly, and does damage based on the weapon. In an RPG, the chance of hitting or the amount of damage that is done, or both, are determined by the character’s skill. The player’s “aim” may or may not be a factor.
But this does NOT mean that an RPG does not require player skill.
The dependence upon character skill and random chance does not remove player skill from the game any more than it removes player skill from Chess and Poker.
It’s all about interaction and choice. I’ll go back to Dungeons & Dragons, a game many readers will be familiar with at least by its computer analog. By my understanding, the lowly fighter (or “fighting-man”) was originally conceived as a beginner’s option in earlier versions of the game. Lacking spells, the fighter had fewer options than the other base classes (in original D&D, there was no thief class – it was just fighter, cleric, and magic-user).
But what options did a fighter have?
#1 – Decisions when and how to engage an enemy: While many fighters (and every other class) used Charisma as a dump stat, in theory they could parley (or bribe) as well as anybody else. They could avoid combat.
#2 – Tactics: There was an emphasis once upon a time (somewhat lost in the art today, sadly) on using your noggin to cleverly defeat monsters at minimal risk to yourself using surprise, the environment, or tools (quite open-endedly, requiring “Dungeon Master” – referee – adjudication) to provide an advantage. Unfortunately, some DMs got annoyed when players decided to bury a hydra in a landslide or engage a fire-breathing dragon from an underground lake to reduce fire damage, and would award reduced XP for cleverness.
#3 – Movement and positioning: This could also be treated as tactics, but was more universal. There’s a reason kicking the door open to fight monsters was so popular – the doorway provided a convenient bottleneck, especially when the party was outnumbered. Skilled players would maneuver to maximize their advantage, encourage the enemy to get into a convenient grouping, and so forth. A lot of games didn’t use miniatures and relied on more abstract, verbal descriptions of positioning, which limited this activity, but most DMs still allowed players to describe particular maneuvers so this could remain a skill factor.
#4 – Target selection: While this only rarely requires much rocket-science to make a good choice, skilled players combined this with #3 to make the most of the probabilities of the system. In the early days, enemy morale was another factor, and triggering a morale check at the right time could be just as critical to success as keeping the enemy away from your fragile magic-users. So sometimes it was better to knock down the weakest enemies first, and other times the stronger opponents were better targets. It was all in how you played the odds.
#5 – Magic item usage: For fighters, magic item usage generally meant “potions,” and more often than not “healing potions.” Knowing how and when to sacrifice an attack to drink a potion – or change weapons, or use some other magic device – was another differentiator for skilled and unskilled players.
#6 – Bugging out: Er, “disengaging.” This was (and still is) pretty difficult to pull off once combat is joined, especially since heavy armor tends to slow a character down. For less-skilled players, the difficulty of disengaging makes it something they never consider… every combat is a battle to the death. For skilled players, it’s a difficult decision, which may result in leaving characters or treasures behind, but always a potential option if exercised early enough and carefully enough.
#7 – Non-combat activities: While the results of attribute rolls might not favor the intelligence or wisdom checks for fighters, outside of combat the player could contribute to puzzling their way through the challenges of dungeon exploration as well as anybody else.
While an unskilled player might perceive the early D&D rules as being nothing but chance and “character skill” as they do little but rolling for attack and damage every round (“hack-and-slash”), skilled players recognized their rolls (pun intended) and took an active part in maximizing them and mitigating the impact of randomness.
A good RPG does not favor character skill over player skill. Neither must it assume that “player skill” must be a direct action-based analog of the character’s activity – swinging a sword or picking a lock. A good RPG should be a blend of player decision-making and activity (whether action-based or a more thoughtful pace) with character-based skills and limitations.
Filed Under: Design - Comments: 8 Comments to Read
The Players Who Delivered the Smack-Down on the Skull of S’makh-Daon
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 21, 2011
I invited folks on the forums to post about their experience beating Frayed Knights: the Skull of S’makh-Daon. Warning to those still playing – they try their best, but it’s not easy to talk about how you built your characters and dealt with some challenges without dipping your toe a little bit into spoiler territory. Nothing worse than what I’ve probably already shared on the blog, though. 🙂
Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon Roll of Winners!
Please feel free to add your own story, if you’ve finished the game.
As a side note, it’s weird to me to see people beat this game in less than 0.5% of the time it took me to make it in the first place. But these guys are better gamers than I am a developer, I s’pose. It’s awesome.
Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 4 Comments to Read
Guns, Phones, & Magic
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 20, 2011
No, this isn’t a post about mixing guns, phones, and magic in the same fantasy setting. Though as a fan of urban fantasy – I’m 100% for it!
This post is actually about attitudes towards magic in fantasy worlds. Specifically RPGs. It’s something I’ve touched on before, and will again. It’s about the impact of “magic” on a fantasy world and the characters in it.
In most RPGs, magic is fairly mechanical. In many action-RPGs, a spell-casting player character spam-fires so much magic that it makes Tim the Enchanter look positively subtle in his application of the arcane arts. There’s not a whole lot “magical” about that kind of magic, really. Magic is like a gun… you pull the trigger and it goes off, though perhaps not always with perfect accuracy or reliability. And yet this incredible power seems to have little impact on the game world, which seems to just shrug it off and treat it as a tacked-on appendage to the culture. Which I guess it is.
One of the few pen-and-paper RPGs I have played that really had a different feel to magic was Mage: The Ascension. In that game, magic was pretty open-ended, flexible, and – most interestingly – had to be kept secret. Flinging fireballs around in Times Square was just not going to end well. Magic practiced in the presence of mundane witnesses (“sleepers”) was best performed with subtlety, lest their subconscious reinforcement of their expectations of reality make the magic to backfire in some way. In fact, the whole background story involved an “Ascension War” where two major factions of mages were warring over the sleepers’ perception of reality to make their style of magic more dominant… and the “Technocracy” was winning.
I have loved that system and how well it incorporated magic into the the world. Whereas in most games, magic has something of a tacked-on feel. Usually, the worlds are just idealized variants of medieval Europe, but with the lots of wizards and magical monsters. But wouldn’t these beings alter the entire world and culture by their very presence? Would we even get anything resembling medieval European culture if wizards, druids, and reliable magical healers could be found in almost every community, and most regions sported at least one dragon and other powerful monsters?
And what would be the attitude of the commoner – or anybody without access to magic – towards all these magic-using folks? Or does everyone have access to magic in some way?
I sometimes use the firearms analogy – particularly how the presence of firearms (and cannons) changed the face of medieval warfare. Although I think the longbow did plenty of that on its own. But when arrows, bolts, and gunfire could allow any farmer with minimal training to take down a fully-armored knight who’d spent a lifetime in the saddle practicing warfare, things were gonna change.
In Frayed Knights, I fiddled with these ideas a little myself. The casual attitude of adventurers towards magic is one example – including the reference to sorcerer-turned-ferret Kagin as a “spell monkey.” The historical ease of flight and of magical tunneling (though, as Chloe explains in one dialog, she does NOT do that kind of magic) has caused a relative dearth of castle-like structures (which are still vulnerable from above), and has instead encouraged underground fortresses.
I stumbled over another gun analogy recently, chatting online with an acquaintance in Australia. I grew up in the 80’s in the Washington DC area, where gun ownership was much more rare and restricted, and the attitude at the time could get a little paranoid about handguns. I live in Utah now, where guns are much more commonplace, many people have concealed carry permits “because they can,” and the attitude towards handguns and gun ownership (at least outside of downtown) is casual enough almost to the point of invisibility. It’s no big deal. I was involved in a new startup once where our potential investors wanted to “scope us out” and invited the founders not to a traditional game of golf, but to go shooting. This was fortunate for me, as I sucked less at shooting than golf. And we secured the funding we needed. So it was all good.
In a world where the power offered by magic is a rare and inaccessible to the common man, one would expect a lot more paranoia. Those known to possess those powers might be viewed with suspicion at best, or possibly hated and feared. And the less well-understood magic is, the more suspicion and anger generate from random events. Did your cow die, or your crops get blighted? Maybe it was the work of the old woman who lives up the hill who some suspect is a witch. Has the local priest been known to cure people dying of illness, but for whatever reason couldn’t or wouldn’t save your brother?
But in a world where the power is relatively common – and practically anybody could get their hands on a reliable potion or minor magical trinket – what would magic become? Would people talk about using magic as casually as people in the United States talk about flying across the country? Noteworthy more as an event than as an act of “magic?” Like the attitude towards guns in many communities in Utah, is it considered no more interesting (or threatening) than someone’s ownership of an automobile?
Another analogy – the telephone (and cell phones). Communication in the modern western world is so constant and ubiquitous that it’s more notable when it is not there. I remember how much more slowly news and information flowed when I was a kid – and how we were still out of communication much of the time – and even then what we had was miraculous. A couple of years ago, I was in Hawaii, shopping in an open-air market for a gift for a friend. I had a question about his preferences, and so I whipped out my cell phone and called his wife with my question. I was having a casual conversation with a friend from three thousand miles away, and the only concern was the time difference. What kind of impact would something like this have made on a fantasy medieval culture? And how would someone from even our not-too-distant past react to our casual approach to cheap, easy, near-instantaneous communication and access to information?
And is it really “magic” when it becomes predictable and commonplace? Doesn’t the word suggest something that in violation of the understood natural laws of the world? If it’s a predictable system, with its own understood laws, doesn’t it become some kind of science?
These kinds of questions should be answered in a fantasy game world, even one that’s just part of a dinky little indie RPG. No, they don’t need to be front-and-center (though I felt that the degree to which it was in Dragon Age was very well done). But a world where it at least seems like these questions have been thought out are answered intelligently really becomes much more alive to me, even if it’s just a little five-hour dungeon crawler. Where indies may lack the budgets to throw incredible visuals into their games, nothing’s stopping them from filling them with imagination.
Filed Under: Design, Geek Life - Comments: 13 Comments to Read
Darklight Dungeon Eternity – All Maps
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 19, 2011
I got a message from Jesse Zoeller that all FIFTY (count ’em) dungeon levels for his upcoming Darklight Dungeon Eternity have now been “carved out.” The release date has been pushed back to early 2012. Considering the fact that hours into the alpha I still hadn’t gone past the fifth level or so (and that level was kicking my butt!), I’d say this is going to be quite the extensive dungeon crawler.
Click on the thumbnail to the right to get the full-sized image of the collection of maps. He hopes to have the last few levels of content finished and balanced by the end of this month, and then there’ll be many weeks of beta testing.
I think this is a great season for aficionados of good ol’-fashioned dungeon crawlers. 🙂 Between this, Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon (if I do say so myself!), The Legend of Grimrock, and the revised Sword & Sorcery: Underworld Gold, I’d say dungeon delvers will have plenty to keep them busy for the next few months.
Now if I hear that Knights of the Chalice 2 is due out before the end of the year, I’m officially cancelling my Skyrim preorder!
Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: 7 Comments to Read
Star Corsairs Released!
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 18, 2011
You know how we keep talking about RPGs that don’t have a fantasy setting? Here you go! This is an indie MMORPG from Machine 22 and veteran indie MMO developer David “Golemizer” Toulouse:
- Real-time epic space battles
- Pilot fast fighters or powerful capital spaceships
- Create and upgrade components for your spaceships
- Travel anywhere in the galaxy without any restriction
- Fight aliens, mine asteroids or engage in PvP battles
- Public missions to easily find players to play with
- Form an alliance and conquer space systems
Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: Read the First Comment
Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon Now Available on Desura
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 17, 2011
Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, that quirky hardcore comedy indie RPG (how’s that for a pile of adjectives?) is now available on Desura:
Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon at Desura
I feel like I’m in good company, as Gaslamp Games’ Dungeons of Dredmor was just released there a few days ago. Let’s hear it for humorous hardcore RPGs / Roguelikes! Granted, the games (and their approach to comedy) are of pretty different style, but I’ve noticed that a lot of people who enjoy the one also enjoy the other.
Will Frayed Knights become available through other distributors? I don’t know. I’m still waiting to hear back from them. But with its indie emphasis (though you can also buy some older mainstream titles like the older Fallout games), I’m pretty fond of Desura. If you absolutely need the amenities offered by an online distributor, and love indie games, they seem to be an outstanding way to go.
Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 9 Comments to Read
Why the RPG Hate?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 14, 2011
There’s an obviously linkbait article over at IGN (which works, I’m linking to it here) which praises the upcoming Elder Scrolls title Skyrim by talking about how it doesn’t play like an RPG. The article summary states, “Even if you think RPGs are dumb, this is a game that will command your attention.” While most of the actual text of the article is fine, the author’s angle at the start is to set himself up as a non-RPG fan. Or more specifically, someone who takes an active dislike in RPGs (and thus making his praise of Skyrim more remarkable):
“The only reason this is worth mentioning is because I really, really don’t like RPGs. All that leveling up, those tiresome stats, all those dreary fantasy tropes, the endless tinkering with skills and items. Yawn! “
My first thought was, “Holy crap, what games are he talking about? I haven’t seen a mainstream release like that in years! I want to play whatever it is that he’s railing against!” *
Maybe he’s talking about Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon. In which case, sorry dude. But I really don’t think your average PC game journalist has even heard of my game yet, so it’s unlikely. If you limit it to just mainstream games, I really don’t know what non-MMO game would fill the bill in the last seven or eight years. Was Mass Effect 2 a stats-heavy leveling nightmare that overdoes it on the fantasy tropes?
Okay, snarkiness aside — I’m actually on board with the idea of RPGs designed to appeal to new audiences. A HUGE chunk of the role-playing games I affiliate at RampantGames.com are designed for non-fans of the genre. The Aveyond series, Ella’s Hope, the Lilly and Sasha series, Millenium series, the Witch and the Warrior, and others. I don’t really expect these to be “gateway” games that will eventually lead to more hardcore RPGs. Yeah, I used to hope for them being more “entry-level” titles that would lead down that path, but it’s not a common occurrence. I’m okay with that. And I’m mostly okay with mainstream games trying to do that too, to appeal to a different audience. And I really do enjoy these games. These casual, girl-friendly, RPG-lite, jRPG-style titles have been known to suck me in for hours. And I have little doubt I’ll push triple-digit hours playing Skyrim on its release.
I just wish there were enough game devs (indies & mainstream) trying to fill that gaping void in the genre where the kinds of classics I love used to come from. But it’s a more niche audience and it’s a lot harder to make the numbers work. (I’m talking budget / dev time / cost numbers, not the internal game numbers, though that can be challenging too).
Which brings me to the question of the title of the article. Why is it so popular these days for journalists to bash on a subgenre that’s been an endangered species for over a decade? Why the fear and loathing of RPGs? Why the RPG hate?
I don’t know if many of the folks in question have actually played an honest-to-goodness hardcore stats-heavy RPG before. Or maybe all the stats in Mass Effect taxed their patience. Or maybe they are tilting at mental windmills based on secondhand descriptions and brief encounters with older games that were unplayable without RTFMing** (a skill that seems to have been lost in the mists of time now).
Ultimately, I think it might come down to a phobia (or really, an intimidation factor) that is probably inherited from the earliest days of pen-and-paper role-playing games:
RPGs seem like they require too much work in order to have fun.
I had to come to grips with this one myself a year or so ago, when I tried once again to play Might & Magic 1. I’d never played it when it was new(ish), but I thought that with my previous experience with a later game in the series and having played some of its contemporaries, I’d be in good shape. Not so much. I’d wasted three or four hours in previous futile, frustrating attempts. Finally, I took a mere 30 minutes or so to RTFM**. Voilà! I discovered an amazing and fun game.
Was a half-hour of reading a book “too much work?” Not for me. But maybe for others. I don’t think thirty minutes is excessive, but I’d agree that the reputation of RPGs is not baseless.
As an aside, this probably explains the near-extinction of “hardcore” combat flight simulators as well. They make most RPGs look like a game of Candyland.
The goal for an RPG system should be “Easy to learn, challenging to master.” That should really be the goal for almost any game system, RPG or otherwise. Earlier D&D-based RPG systems failed on both counts, from my perspective. They were challenging to learn – with lots of breadth, but lacked much useful depth. Third edition D&D – which I preferred (and its descendant, Pathfinder) rectified the latter by providing a great deal more depth, but in spite of their mandate probably made the “basics” even more difficult to learn.
Fighting games, popular in the 1990s, have long served as my example of this principle. A cat could randomly step on the contr0ller buttons and put up what would look like a reasonable fight. Players could feel competent from the outset, but experience and skill would make a huge difference. But even so, the depth of gameplay in these titles was more one of ability to execute, rather than a depth of tactics (which was still present, don’t get me wrong, but the ability to pull off a counter was a bigger challenge than deciding, “I’m going to use a counter!”) While by no means easy to do well, this type of depth a heck of a lot easier to design and develop for. And for something like a turn-based RPG (or strategy game), you are really talking about tactical depth.
But there’s another issue: For packaged, single-player RPGs, you aren’t selling a game system. You are selling a game. That makes a crucial difference, particularly if you are selling a game that is more story-based, with an ending and no emphasis on practically infinite replayability (like a roguelike). You are selling a boxed experience, and the system is secondary at best. “Simple to learn” remains important, but the game may be over before mastery really becomes an issue. So you have, “Simple to learn, no need to master.”
That’s where the “dumbing down” trend comes from. Some players may never get to that depth, and as a developer you don’t want to cut them out of the endgame, so things stay at a pretty easy surface level for most of the game. And by avoiding putting that depth in at all, you make the game system even easier to learn, and avoid that anti-RPG angst about them being too much work.
This isn’t something I’m particularly pleased about. It’s not something I think is immutable, either. I think it may have as much to do with marketing, business, and presentation as it has to do with game design. The road more traveled seems to be watering down the genre, stripping it down to the bare bones, and disguising its genre.
I don’t think that’s the only way to deal with the “RPG Hate.”
* But at least there are some semi-recent indie examples of games to hate on:
Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon
Eschalon: Book 1 and Eschalon: Book 2
There are others that would probably fit. But not enough…
* RTFM: Read the (fine) manual
UPDATE: Per Charles’ suggestion, added links to some of the offending indie RPGs…
Filed Under: Biz, Design - Comments: 24 Comments to Read
RIP Dennis Ritchie
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 13, 2011
Dennis Ritchie, 1941 – 2011
Creator of the “C” programming language, by far the most influential programming language of all time. Also a key developer of the Unix operating system. If you have ever used Java, C#, Javascript, PHP, C++, TorqueScript, or one of a slew of other programming and “scripting” languages, Ritchie was a critical influence.
Jobs, now Ritchie… I still have a mental image of the software industry being such a young, new field. And with respect to many other industries, it still is. So it’s weird seeing some of these industry pioneers go the way of all the Earth.
Filed Under: Programming - Comments: Read the First Comment
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