The name "hardcoe RPG" have been thrown around a lot, but never defined.

Now I really want to know how a "hardcoe RPG" would look like...

It does actually. The whole point of natural selection is that the bad is sorted out and the good kept alive. If the direction many of the RPGs are taking today turns out to be bad, it will show in time. The good games will eventually stay.

TES

it's refreshing to have no cliches whatsoever to deal with

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I think that we need to stop calling them game "designers" and start calling them what they really are, "Interactive Experience Artists". For too long, concepts such as "design" and "market share" have permeated the video game medium to the point where those who make the game have even forgotten who they are. They are not engineers or designers, trying to achieve perfection through efficiency of design. They are artists who are trying to create alternate worlds that others can experience with true interaction.

No, it doesn't, as it doesn't refer to natural selection either, not does natural selection means "the "bad" is sorted out while "the good" are kept alive.

Yes heard good things about that game, dont have a PS3 though so will wait for the sequel. My point was the vast majority of games are becoming dumbed down. Specially all the so called "AAA" games, which seem to try and distract people with pretty colours and explosions. Which unfortunately seems to work because it seems most people nowadays are total tools.

Then what do you believe it refers to? And why does this not do what is best?

It actually does, that's like... the entire definition. Things suited for their environment thrive and reproduce while things unsuited for their environment thrive less, and thus reproduce less. Over huge amounts of time, the designs that don't work are filtered out, and the designs that do work become more prevalent.

Grab a dictionary. Tell me where it says "for the better". And then define what is "better".
Also, natural selection doesn't mean evolution. There really need not be evolution for natural selection to take place, or vice versa. Change in the overall environment may will occur as a result of natural selection, sure, but natural selection in on itself is not evolution.

Bottom line, of all the usages of the word "evolution", the only constant is "change", and change is not always good.

The one problem is that the line between RPGs and FPSs has been blurred (a good thing), stomped into the ground (an over-reaction), and left for dead (until some small, daring company revives them), and games are now being marketed as something that they're clearly not. Companies are pushing products as "RPGs" because there's still a market for a true a RPG, and because getting those niche market players to buy the general-purpose product (no matter how little RP there is in the G) will boost sales, regardless of what it does to create forum gripes.

A lot of people complain about "die rolls", because the glaringly obvious effect of a badly implemented die roll system is annoying and not very realistic. On the other hand, having everything determined solely by the player's actions, without bothering about the character's abilities, is an "action game", not a RPG. Taking out the random element completely either gives you a purely "twitch" game experience (a much nicer looking game of "pong", with swords) or else a pre-determined and linear "activity", not a game at all. The real challenge is to strike a balance between what the player wants to attempt and what the character is able to do, and allow some "flexibility" in the command system to tell the character to either stay within "safe limits" or else "push the envelope" and take risks (die rolls, but not "obvious" or mandatory die rolls, because YOU control the ratio of risk and reward).

Games like MW, with blatant, uncontrollable random elements, were annoying for a lot of players because you had no apparent way of affecting the amount of risk you were willing to take. There was no way of telling the character to take an easy swing of a weapon that's all but guaranteed to be on target but won't do a lot of damage (or concoct a basic and simple potion that's not very potent), or else to attempt a more complex action that's less likely to succeed, but could pay off big if it does. You always had to take the "hardest" possible choice, with the highest rate of failure. There were ways around some things, such as having "training" spells tailored to your abilities, but it took a long time to find out what your options really were, by which time most of the "non-RPG" players had gotten frustrated with the game and quit. Most of those who were willing and able to invest the time and effort into learning what you could and couldn't do were well rewarded by an incredible experience, but a lot of players could never invest that kind of dedication to it, or at least had no interest in doing so. Some additional introductory "training", as was done in the OB tutorial dungeon, might have been a huge help in overcoming the problem. Instead, the next game was stripped of most of its meaningful RPG elements, and the character was never allowed to even attempt anything that wasn't a guaranteed success, yet it was still marketed as a RPG.

Many of the more "action oriented" games leave out any choices which could be "wrong", remove the chance of failure entirely, lead you by the hand or point out the objective in bold, flashing colors so that you can't ignore it even if you try, or otherwise turn anything but actual combat into nothing more than time-wasting "activities". At that point, you have a FPS game with irrelevant RPG "decorations" that really serve no purpose. Why not just call it what it is: another hack&slash FPS

Evolving? Hopefully not. Weeds are evolutionally highly successful. No, they're just taking a vacation until some small company decides that the FPS games being sold as "RPGs" hae gone too far to the other end of the pendulum's swing, and market their own. Then they'll become the new "big company" playing it safe and trying to "broaden" the franchise base by watering the game down into more generic garbage to force-feed the masses, while resting on the reputation they built by producing a product that was nearly perfect for the niche market that it was written for, rather than merely "marginally acceptable" to everyone.

Mass Effect and Dragon Age, 1 and 2 for both series, were very well done in my opinion. Both games had an amazingly well done world created for them, memorable characters, and player choice in nearly everything that they did. I've been playing RPGs for about a decade and a half now, I've seen a very wide spectrum of games. Never once have I, while playing ME2 one of the 5-6 times I've gone through it, thought to myself "Since this combat is more fast paced, this isn't an RPG." As far as I'm concerned, the role of the battle system in a game is just to make the parts between story scenes and events fun. I found ME1's gameplay to be rather dull, but the world was so well done and the characters were so easy to get attached to that I continued on anyway. ME2 solved the gameplay issue for sure. As for Dragon Age, hilariously enough they did the same thing for me. I finished DA1 because the world was fleshed out, the combat was pretty bad. (Especially since I played as a melee Arcane Warrior. Throw up 5 buffs and auto-attack the archdemon to victory!) DA2 fixed the gameplay issue. (At least for console gamers.)

As an aside, I'm going to throw out how much I absolutely adore what the Dragon Age world has done with magic. It's the only game to ever really get it right for me. Mages are extremely powerful, everyone is wary of them because of these supernatural powers that the normal folk can't understand. They are hunted relentlessly. It all came together very well for me.

When it comes to TES, I feel that they sacrifice what BioWare has in telling awesome story for an even more in depth world. There is no questioning that Bethesda is king at making new worlds for their players. And that's why many of us play them.

TLDR: Combat does not an RPG make. Story, choice, and a compelling world are what is necessary, and I believe BioWare and Bethesda are both kings of this domain.

I hate to get technical about the whole evolution thing because it's not entirely relevant, but evolution is not actually the same thing as natural selection.

Evolution is what happens - there's no doubting the evidence (unless you're some religious nutjob). Natural Selection is the leading current theory as to how it takes place.

So as an anology for what some people here believe is happening to the RPG genre, it's evolution would not necessarily suggest improvements - that would depend on whatever the process is that drives the evolution.

Funny that you mention that. My favorite game of all time is, as you can tell by the handle, System Shock, the 1994 System Shock, which I believe was the very first game to truly combine FPS and RPG into a game.

Considering the fact that RPGs are a thousand times more popular today than in the past, I'm pretty sure they'll survive. I get the point though, but just because the RPG has a ridiculously complicated and redundant method of keeping track of your character, doesn't mean it's a great RPG. So yeah, I'd say it's evolving.

"hardcoe" usually translates to "it's not hardcoe unless it has what I personally want." Alternatively it can mean:
Complex stat system.
Broken (in my opinion) stat system that punishes you if you don't level "correctly."
Lots of exploration.
Lots of grinding.
Long.

i don't think story is absolutely necessary, i think if the world is compelling and detailed enough then it can benefit from having optional stories, but doesn't necessarily need one.
i've played hundreds and hundreds of hours of oblivion, i've never once finished the main story or any of the guild quest-chains, yet it's all been pure rpg fun.

One of the few things certain in life is that everything changes. Not much to do but to roll with it or be embittered by it. That part is up to us and I tend to be one who embraces change.

I'm not sure why this is in Skyrim section instead of CD but this far into it, I'll just leave it here to finish filling.

The market use to be full of them. Among my favorites were the Wing Commander series, X-wing and TIE Fighter. And if you go back even further, there was the old Sierra game F-19. Now, though, they're almost non-existent, except for the one you named. Every account I've ever read places the blame for this on "mainstreaming." In other words, the genre couldn't be mainstreamed enough, and therefore most companies simply stopped producing them. Are they gone completely? No, but for the most part, they exist only out on the fringes of gaming.

Taking that as an example, it's very possible for RPGs to go the same way.

If you go back far enough we have H.G. Wells, "Little Wars".

I don't think the true or traditional RPG will ever die in the video games industry. They've started off strong, declined a bit, made a comeback, evolved and I'm sure they will eventually go back to their roots. There will still be Bethesda-like RPG developers out there who will not sell out and will create a quality game for traditional RPG gamers. I do agree though that many RPGs lately are becoming more and more dumbed-down to action/adventure games (many of which are button-mashers) to appeal to console gamers. I am currently playing DA2 on PS3. I'm enjoying it, but they've definitely removed a lot of the features from DA:O, i.e. Party and Inventory Management, to streamline the game to appeal to a wider audience. On console, let's face it, it is a button-masher. They have a great thing going story-wise, but I don't think this game can be considered a true RPG. I love Bioware but I'm not sure I like the direction they are going with their RPGs. Give me a modern-day RPG similar to the Baldur's Gate series which I fell in love with years ago.

I am a console gamer (PS3 and Xbox 360) and my favourite games to play are in the Fantasy and Role-playing genre. I do own a PC but it's an older one and I play on consoles because I don't have the disposable income to keep upgrading my PC all the time. I know that on a top of the line PC, most games will play and look better. Regardless, I still think games on my console/HDTV setup look pretty sweet and work just fine for my casual style of gameplay. Now, there is a misconception (mostly among gaming PC owners) that all console gamers are ignorant, button-mashing, FPS-playing neanderthals, but this couldn't be farther from the truth. Many of us, myself included, enjoy spending hours upon hours on an RPG, managing our inventory (and party if there is one), buying/selling items, dungeon crawling, exploring, finding hidden areas, and trying to figure out the best type of attack to defeat a certain enemy. We don't just want to mash on a button or perform a sequence of button taps, or explode everything in sight. I'd bet there are quite a lot of console gamers who, like me, were RPG gamers on their PC, long before consoles became so mainstream. Don't know if anyone remembers this game, but I used to play a side-scrolling game on the Commodore 64 called 'Rags to Riches' back in the day

Anyway, my point is that there is nothing wrong with FPS games on consoles, but if you're going to develop an RPG for consoles, don't think that you need to simplify it, because true RPG fans will still be intelligent enough to play your heavy, task-oriented game. If you are going to come out with an action/adventure or FPS game, call it that and leave it out of the RPG category.

For all you FPS gamers out there, don't think that I'm taking a pot shot at you, because I'm not. Those types of games are a ton of fun to play and aren't really button-mashers either. But this thread is about the possible decline of the RPG and I'm hoping that even though developers are going to be catering to other types of systems besides PC, that they remain true to the RPG format.

Some games got complex back years ago.. for no other reason then at a time complexity itself sold games. x skills x quests x hours gameplay x races x weapons x spells x armors x pairs of underwear...

But complexity didnt actualy make the games any better and soon enough people stopped asking for x skills and x races and just looked at what games werre FUN.


Daggerfall was funner then arena... mw was funner the daggerfall ob would have been funner then mw if the ai hadnt gone haywire at the last minute. It was still dang fun.

Skyrim will be FUN. Since when did anything else matter?

Interesting. I saw that "good flight sim" question, and the two programs that first entered my mind were..... Microsoft Flight Simulator and X-Plane. You know, flight sims, not flying games.


(Of course, I'd already been thinking about X-Plane recently, what with all the "I want as much realism as possible!" comments people have been making. Since at the top level, X-Plane counts for flight sim training with the FAA. Doesn't get more "realistic" than that.)


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re: Dragon Age 1.

I played it. It was a good game. But even though it had many choices to make (different character backgrounds, relationships, ways to solve quests, etc, etc, etc), I wasn't able to force myself to play it a second time. Because the combat ranged from crushingly difficult (on Normal diff, I switched to Easy but still had issues with random instant-death periodically) to incredibly tedious. So..... interesting RPG, interesting story, but the combat dragged it down. So, the alteration to the combat in DA2 sounds kind of interesting - it's a shame that the rest of the stuff sounds like it's not that great.

Just because you're not flying a real plane, it doesn't make it any less of a simulator. But if you want to go that way, I have an old F-14 combat flight sim that was a lot of fun, too.

CFS2/3 With mods made them great, Flight sim series with mods made them great, IL2 series Lockon.

DOS based flight sims. Aces over Eruope/Pacific, Red Barron series, A10 Warthog series, TFX


If you look you can find many great flight sims.



I find the term "harcore" to be an elitest term. Its not realy definable and opinions vary wildly