The Oblivion of Western RPGs 304
1up has a piece looking at how Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion may just be what the western RPG genre needs to spring back from the brink of nonexistence. From the article: "Western RPGs focus on the characters, and the world around them is a tool to let the player-as-character do and see more. Eastern RPGs focus on the events unfolding around the characters, and how the characters affect the world around them. Western RPGs are based on the experience of tabletop role-playing games, limited only by the imaginations of the players and the game master, where Eastern RPGs are more re-creations of traditional storytelling. Oblivion has taken huge strides toward meeting fans of MMOs halfway by building A.I. that really lives alongside the player and ensuring that the actual missions are easily pursued."
"spring back from the brink of nonexistence?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Western RPGs ARE RPGs! (Score:5, Insightful)
Western RPGs is where YOU make the story, and how you want to do it.
hrm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Western RPGs ARE RPGs! (Score:1, Insightful)
"Western RPGs" are the only real role-playing games. If you don't play a role in the story, it's not a role-playing game. Battle systems do not a role-playing game make.
If anything, Eastern "RPGs" are going out of favor. Japan may love FFXII, but other than that recent fan-boy "defence of FFXII" article on Slashdot, I've yet to hear ANYONE in the US who's at all interested in that game. Oblivion, on the other hand, had/has people saving up money to purchase. Can't wait until I can afford a new computer...
Single Player PC RPGs Have Been Dying For Years (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay list them.
In case you haven't noticed, the "single slayer, PC RPG" genre has been all but dead for years. They morphed into something that is found mostly in its current MMOG form (think World of Warcraft) or something more "hybrid" (for instance RTS games with RPG elements).
So here is an excirse: go to the store to pick up a brand new copy of Oblivion but also look around to see what other single player RPGs are current on the self. Chances are there is Morrowind. There will also probably be Knights of the Old Republic 2 which is a pale shadow of its predicessor and not to mention a very shollow RPG. If you want to count things like Grand Theft Auto I suppose these could be RPGs and even closer to "a sandbox" that is found in Oblivion but again it is a very shallow if not an outright adventure game (Zelda is an action/adventure game even thought it has many themes common to RPGs).
So where are all of these Bethesda and Bioware games? Compared to the stuff online, compared to the sports games, compared to the movie franchise games, the fact that producers buckled down for Oblivion is a miracle. Just like Myst style "hot spot adventure games" went out of style so is the "single player RPG". On the console, there may still be refuge there for the "single player RPG" but who knows how long that will last as consoles gravitate to look more like PCs....
For the near future, I see Neverwinter Nights 2 and Gothic 3 and I suspect one of them wants to desperately have some sort of online play feature....
Re:WoW (Score:5, Insightful)
MMORPGs are a completely different genre and can't be placed in the same category as games like Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Fallout, Neverwinter Nights, Morrorwind or Oblivion.
When people talk about CRPGs, they're generally not talking WoW or EQ or anything like those, they mean the singleplayer games that are closer to pen and paper RPGs.
Re:My first TES game experiance (Score:2, Insightful)
Jaysyn
Re:My first TES game experiance (Score:5, Insightful)
yes and no, the world is full of riches, and if you're an alchemist walking through the woods transforms into a game of "find the material" as you run from bush to bush trying to harvest some plan or a shroom while being coursed by a troll that found you before you found him.
There are also quite a lot of stuff hidden in any area (caves, houses, shrines, bandit outposts, ...), so there isn't much truly empty space. Much less than in Morrowind. Even if you don't use Fast Travel.
On the other hand, the last 2 items are part of an RPG experience, an RPG can't be action-packed without dialogs or exploration, that's not an RPG anymore.
What you're suggesting is a 3D Diablo.
Repeat after me: Diablo is NOT an RPG
Re:"spring back from the brink of nonexistence?" (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you played Oblivion? If not, then how can you say what it has or doesn't have? If you bought it, why? Why buy the sequel to something you hated? Or did you play 5 minutes of a friends copy and get confused because you actually had to do something other than hit "auto-play" to let the "movie" unfold? Bah...this is too easy.
I've yet to see an Eastern RPG. Not sure one exists. Sure, you can call them an RPG, but that doesn't make them an RPG. They're movies with a lame "what should we do next?!?!" button on it. That's it. There, I've broken down all Eastern style "RPG's" for anyone that's interested. If that's your thing, then go to it!
Re:"spring back from the brink of nonexistence?" (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe you should've looked for one in the first place...
Granted, stories in TES aren't handed to you (more like forced down your throat, really) as it is in Eastern style "RPGs". The point is that you make the story. A main quest is given to you (well not in morrowind, you had to look for it. It is in Oblivion though) and from there onwards you're the one who decides what the story is, which includes the ability to not do the main quest in the first place if you don't want to.
You seem like you want to play RPGs as you'd read books, being guided linearly at each steps, never being able to make mistakes, never having to look for anything and never actually creating the story, just hopping along a heavily scripted timeline. That's fine, really, but that's not the goal of PC RPGs, that's not how a TES or a Fallout works, and it's no reason for you to diss them the way you do.
Re:WoW (Score:2, Insightful)
There are plenty of things to like about WoW but roleplaying isn't one of them.
Re:"spring back from the brink of nonexistence?" (Score:2, Insightful)
So do I- I get together and play PnP. Or get on IRC and roleplay. A western RPG would be the absolute last choice I'd take- a poorer plot than an eastern RPG, and none of the interaction of PnP gaming. Western RPGs are not roleplaying games by any stretch of the imagination. Play a real roleplaying game for 5 minutes and you can tell how utterly lacking computer games are.
No, I didn't buy Obblivion. I did buy Daggerfall, I did play but did not buy Morrowind (A friend gave me his copy for a week or 2 to try out). I have no plans to buy or play Oblivion, I know what the past games in the series were like and it has no interest to me.
I'd like to play a Western RPG. But one doesn't exist yet. One can't exist, AI currently doesn't and most likely mever will pass a Turing test. They're just lame sandboxes with no point to them. I don't play games to figure out things to do, I play to be entertained. At least Eastern styles have a point in the game (to advance the story). I've yet to find a western RPG that had any motivation for my character to leave the first town.
They are called adventures (Score:5, Insightful)
Hands up if you ever seen a game claimed to have "rpg" elements when the only thing the game has is that units can gain "level up"?
For some reason some people have come to believe that levelling up == RPG. It of course does not. Many games level up. Being allowed to fly bigger aircraft in an aircraft sim is a form of levelling up. Getting a bigger gun in Doom is.
Take away the levelling up from games like FF and you will see that they play very much like the adventure games of old. In fact the old "Indiana Jones: Fate of Atlantis" also had fights in it.
Adventures however are not RPG's most notably because you do not choose a role to play but rather follow the lead character through a pre-determined story. Adventures are as much about roleplaying as a FPS. Sure, you can roleplay in Doom. Just as long as you roleplay a guntoting silent marine who shoots everything on sight.
FF does not give you a role to play.
So where does this leave oblivion? Well in limbo. The thing that is missing from the elder scrolls is choices. You can join any guild you want even if they seem mutually exclusive. Only a hand full of quests even have a choice in them as to how you complete them. Usually either giving an item to the cops or the criminals. You can very easily however complete both quests for the dark brotherhood (evil assasins) as for some noble band of knights.
The old taking a side in a quest is not part of the Elder Scrolls and I miss it.
Oblivion ain't a bad game, just that it is RPG light compared to the real stuff like baldur gate, KOTOR, planescape torment etc.
Oblivion is free as those games but the individual quests are pretty much on rails. I would have loved to have been able to choose a side in the whole dark brotherhood deal. Not in this game.
To some this makes Obilion a union of the worst elements of eastern and western RPG's. The "feeling lost" of western RPG's and the "on rails" of eastern adventure+levellingup games.
It almost reminds me of Doom3. Nice engine. Now can a real game company make a proper game with it? For me Oblivion is only acceptable because there the lovers of western RPG are not exactly swamped with choice. When is the next company going to revive the genre like Baldur's gate did?
What's the big difference? (Score:2, Insightful)
Face it, there's not such a huge difference between Oblivion, Baldur's Gate and Final Fantasy. There's a big focus on character development and their stories in the Final Fantasy games. So was there in Ultima 7. But the core of the gameplay is the same. You have a quest that takes you from A to B. Along the way you can take time of to do sidequests X, Y and Z.
There's more sidequests in Oblivion, that is true. They're also tightly scripted and though you have some leeway in what you do it's far from the free choice people pretend is there.
You can assault people, empty their pockets and rob their stores. That is freedom. But what do you gain from it? Either you pay the guards/thieves' guild to erase the record and it's as if it never happened, or you keep running from the law who somehow know your face on sight - unable to continue with the main story that is there.
It's not really an opportuniy to change the story, it's just a pastime. It's far from anything revolutionary either, and it has about as much ultimate effect as if you set your characters in FF to attack eachother.
They're just games. And the AI in Oblivion sucks immensely. It's still a good game. Overhyped, which was fuelled a lot by Bethesda's bullshit (they're good at propaganda, I'll grant them that) but still a good game. Mind you, I enjoyed BG2 more and I will definitely remember BG2 longer.
Did you know Torment, one of the most critically acclaimed western made RPGs ever and using BioWare's famous engine, included a thank you note to Squaresoft for Final Fantasy in the credits?
Oblivion is not all that special and definitely not very innovative - and in places horribly designed. It's a good fun RPG though. And so are Final Fantasy, Fallout, Pools of Radiance, World of Warcraft and countless others.
has the article writer even played the game? (Score:2, Insightful)
I've played this a total of about 25 hours now, and I must say the answer is NO, it has not. The AI is horrible makes amateurish mistakes and isn't a stride towards anything good. I've seen countless enemies stand there and do nothing while I spend 2 minutes shooting fireballs at them. I've seen them ignore comrades being attacked from range, and get caught on crazy terrain features like stairs.
Xbox360 AI developer comments [typepad.com]
read up on this and you can see how the xbox360 gimped the AI, and since this game is a port with no real improvements being made on the PC its quite telling about how the game was put together. The AI isn't even the worse part of the game. The level-scaling is attrocious and completely removes the feeling of immersion since every enemy you face is either leveled or replaced with a more powerful version. You only get ahead of meta-gaming and power-leveling.
Is the game enjoyable? Yes it is.
Is the game everything it was reported to be and should be? No, not by a long shot.
Thief had better AI awareness 8 or so years ago. Enemies reacted appropriately to things happening around them. They only react now if you're in range. You can stand there outside their response range, which is not outside your sight range and rain holy fire down around them. Unless you hit them, they don't care. You can do the same thing in a town.
Re:The Shills are Everywhere (Score:4, Insightful)
No, you're just being as elitest and oblivious as the next guy, and well, it looks like I'm the next guy, so I'm definitely not excluded from this catagory.
You do realize that one of the defining characteristics of sheep is that they think that everyone else is a sheep except them. The international coorperate machine has made millions off of making people feel like they're being individuals.
Me? I'm a total sheep, I realize that there's really no way of escaping it, and get on with my life. The more you try to fight back, the worse it gets, really. You just end up playing into the hands of a different coorperately manufactured demographic. I love my iPod because it makes me feel like I'm supporting a movement of aesthetics and innovation, I drive a Toyota because it makes me happy to give a big "fuck you" to the redneck american auto industry. I'm sophisticated and elitest, and I'm playing right into the hands of a lot of major companies. And ya know what? The best I can do, most of the time, is acknowledge that I'm doing it, and move on. And yes, I'm feeling quite "holier than thow" right now for having said this, but whatever.
So don't go around spouting about shills like you aren't one yourself. It's fairly obvious, from your list of examples, that you're trying to use your arguement to put down those things you don't like (namely console gamers), which is petty and shortsighted. Both sides are equally at fault for deluding themselves into following whatever the latest trend is. Unbelievable.
Re:"spring back from the brink of nonexistence?" (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me think about that for a second...
No?
For heck's sake, thousands of games don't even have a story in the first place (story in Tetris? or in Every Extend? or in Train Simulator? or in Railroad Tycoon? or in a Multiplayer TA game? Hell, even TA's single player story was weak anyway). Making a story or reading a story is just a different take on gaming. You like reading stories, other people prefer creating them. You like seeing events unfold before your eyes, other people prefer creating the events. That's all there is to it. The point of a game is playing, having fun, that's all there is to it. Whether you have fun by playing Diablo, Starcraft, Metal Slug, Age of Empires, Civilization, SimCity, The Sims, World of Warcraft, or posting self-starred horse porn on the internet doesn't matter, do what rock your socks, just respect what other people want to rock their socks with... (well, maybe not the self-starring horse porn one, that's disgusting)
Truely Open Gameplay (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Single Player glory! (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway I'm happy there is a game once for a while in which I can be a thief and not be chopped to pieces by the guards when someone catches me pickpocketing.
Re:So wait, you never played Deus Ex? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not many years after System Shock II!
Any other tabletop RPG players... (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, one could also argue that there's as much point in roleplaying by yourself with a computer as performing a play in an empty room.
CRPGs are storyline based adventure (and sometimes puzzle) games.