A video game being worse than its predecessor can not be laid at one man's feet.
It's not like he held people at gun-point and ordered that the player be made to watch, helpless as an NPC saves the world.

There are rpg elements though. You level up, get new gear, perks, change equipment. He never said it was a full blown rpg.

demon souls was awesome......unfortunately its an exception to the rule.

Any game can be hardcoe.
hardcoe is defined by who's playing it and how.

Super Mario Galaxy can be hardcoe, Demon Souls can be casual.

Getting new gear, and change of equipment have nothing whatsoever to do with RPG. Duke Nukem has those things, does that have any kind of RPG elements? Leveling up and perks when talking about an RPG mean something totally different when compared to talking about leveling up and perks in COD. COD is an FPS shooter, any kind of leveling up and perks have nothing whatsoever to do with creating your character.

Those are things featured in rpg games hence they are rpg elements no matter what type of game it is or how they are used in comparison to the genre they are prevalent in.

Thanks, TWITCH. I had not seen it yet.

I hadn't seen this, thanks.

well as unlikely as it sounds they must have did something right.

Good thing it's a one man project...

... oh wait, it's not...

It's idiotic to suggest that COD's RPG elements are shallow. A sniper with night vision and camo who can shoot through walls is a radically different build than a tank who charges into combat with a shotgun and the ability to resurrect himself if he dies, which is different still from a demoman who uses a grenade launcher and crossbow, and sets up claymore traps to lure his enemies into. There is a great deal of meaningful specialization in COD, you just need to, you know, play the game for more than 5 minutes to find it.

Part of this is a debate over what deserves to be called an "RPG feature". But even if one thinks that Todd was wrong to say that these elements of getting new gear, changing equipment, getting perks, in CoD are RPG elements, Todd's point can easily be rephrased to avoid that. He could have just said: "Some of the common features in RPGs are very similar to aspects of many FPSs. Even if, strictly speaking they're not the same features, because they're not playing the same roles in the game, people coming to TES from playing FPSs should find a lot of the features in TES (and RPGs more widely) to be quite familiar to them."

I didn't realize interviews had to be conducted in legalese.

I agree, in that the core of an RPG is in player creation and decision making. A massive staple of the genre is leveling up through gaining experience, and customizing your character's abilities and equipment. These are RPG elements, even if they appear in games that are not RPGs. CoD has these elements, and it is to these elements alone that Todd's comment was directed. He wasn't talking about adding quick-time events, or adding multiplayer to Skyrim, he was talking about how CoD players could be persuaded into giving Skyim a try. Given the site that this interview appears on as well, I think that's a very smart selling position for him to take.

I didn't see this before, thanks for posting it. I loved that interview, it didn't give any new game info, but it gave a great insight into how they are making it. I like the direction they seems to be going with the design and how they approach it.

I thought that was a very interesting interview. I don't agree with the opinion that games are worse now because they lack challenge, or that they by default have less depth because of this. Depth, complexity, and challenge are all three very different things. For example the first Mass Effect had complexity with equipment but lacked much in the way of depth with that equipment. Much of it was worthless and a player gets spammed by a constantly full inventory of randomly dropped and found items. The mod system had some hope but in the end several mods were far more worth it than others. It had complexity but lacked depth in my opinion, which is why I largely didn't miss it in ME2.

Mysticism is an example of complexity not meaning difficulty. Wrapping the spells from that category into others has zilch to do with how challenging the game is.

When it comes to challenge, many older games were outright unbalanced and overtuned. They had to be overly tuned for difficulty to make them last longer. People would have to replay levels over and over and such because most of those games were much shorter than modern games. Now that games can stand on their own and be entertaining to many gamers based on their content with moderate rather than frustrating challenge, that's a more appropriate difficulty in my opinion. For those that want more difficulty, that's what difficulty selection modes are for.

I find it interesting if people in the other thread got irritated by Todd's comments when he specifically says they don't pay much attention to trying to appeal to a particular gamer demographic, and instead just focus on making a good game. His CoD comment meant RPG features are not exclusive to the genre anymore so those types of players might be interested in it, and not that they want to make the game more like CoD. Something tells me half the people complaining about that never even played CoD either (I haven't so I'm not going to judge it all because it's popular).



He said it was in exchange for good story pacing and that they focus more on the experience than the main story. He didn't say they exchanged a good story for an open world. Naturally the pacing WILL be broken if you can do whatever you want, and I think that's fine. You can spend years between main quest stories in the games, and while that makes no sense story wise that's fine from a game play perspective.

A picture is worth a thousand words http://media.riemurasia.net/albumit/m34359/815061735.jpg

Yeah I don't think I'd have the patience for some older games without save states anymore. When I was a kid I didn't care about losing too much real life time having to replay a whole game due to running out of lives. Now? No thanks.

I knew someone was going to bring that up, and I counter that I wasn't even alluding to that. it looks like it doesnt it? I agree, but thats not the point im making.

I agree I would rather have a great open world game then an incredible based story game, If I want one of those I'll watch a movie. My comment was that I think you can do an Open World game and still have an amazing story regardless of pacing. Fallout 3's story was pretty good, sure it had it's moments of lame but other parts worked out fine.

I think you're exactly right about what Todd was saying, but I think I disagree that it's so difficult to balance a well-paced MQ (or other major faction quests) with the freedom to deviate from that quest-line whenever you like. I think Oblivion was a pretty good example of how to get the balance wrong. The MQ was thrust in your face from the beginning, and apparently the end of Cyrodiil was nigh if you didn't quick smart find Martin. And yet none of that happened if you just waltzed around the countryside picking flowers. But on the other hand, I think Morrowind did a far better job of finding a nice balance. Things were getting bad in Vvardenfell, but it was a slow doom. It kinda made sense that you would spend some time away from the MQ building up your character before you tried to deal with Dagoth Ur. And the quests weren't really presented as urgently as they were in Oblivion.

But I guess different people will find different aspects of stories more or less engaging. :shrug: