Breedbate post=9.68481.630253 said:
Have your main story writer create the world, it's history, important characters, and main quest. Now hire a few other writers, as well as keep your main one on board if you wish, and have each one work within the set theme to work out a few different main quests, to give the hero some variety. Then have even more writers (probably for free, since even a heroin junkie could write this) work on different side-quest lines and mini-quests. Have each writer work on each individual character involved with his/her quest. Check it all with your editors. There's your mother-friggen story content, play and replayability.
Go here, kill that, get that, bring 'em back to me. Well... why don't you kneel down, unzip my fly, and pleasure me? Please, make sure each writer you hire does not plan to make every quest like the one I just described in the first sentence of this badly constructed paragraph.
Now, take a note from The Elder Scrolls, and hire a thousand more writers to give your player every god damn opportunity imaginable.
I'm sure this is exactly how World of Warcraft was written, so you're not bringing anything new to the table, but it isn't enough to just write a lot of stuff. The writing has to be
good (heroin junkies writing for free is not a recipe for success), and then someone has to actually turn the writing into content and gameplay. Someone has to create art assets and sound effects, record voice acting, create items, script the quest so that it does something, test to see that it works, ensure it's in line with the rest of the game etc.
I don't know about other ES games, but Oblivion doesn't give you "every god damn opportunity imaginable." It's quite a shallow and limited game compared to something like Fallout.
Khell_Sennet post=9.68481.630369 said:
To me, fixing the RPG genre is easy.
Quit with the fucking 3D graphics, and go back to what worked in the Dos-Win98 eras.
Sprites are fine, why did they get abandoned so quick?
Sprites are limited and difficult to work with compared to 3D models.
Stone Keep, Final Fantasy 3US/6Ja, Lands of Lore, Albion, hell, even the Nintendo cartridge "Robin Hood: Prince of thieves" were better than the so-called RPGs today. They weren't complex, they were fun.
RPGs used to be more complex, not more simple. Just consider how dumbed down Mass Effect is compared to Baldur's Gate or Fallout. RPGs are supposed to be complex.
Its the simple things. In an RPG I want control over my character, but not total control. If I choose the name, have the look pre-set. If I choose the look, have the name pre-set.
That's... completely arbitrary. I don't get it.
Don't go the Icewind Dale route where the player supplies the character's every aspect AND backstory, or none of the plot can revolve around the character.
RPGs are Role-Playing Games. The idea is to create a character and assume his or her role and persona. You're basically asking RPGs to be less like RPGs.
Breedbate post=9.68481.630581 said:
A thousand writers was an exaggeration. I'd say a dozen, moderately good writers. Which you can all find on this, a forum, for games. Not a forum for Readers Digest. A forum for games.
No. Just no. Most gamers can barely string together coherent sentences, let alone write quality material for a roleplaying game.
TheKbob post=9.68481.631083 said:
It might be sad, but I cannot get into the classic RPGs you all rave about. They aren't bad games, but the barrier to entry to someone who started RPGs in the PS2 era and has played, now, SNES thru current... It's DAMNED hard for me to get into them because I think they are archaic dinosaurs in terms of mechanics. The stories might be damned well awesome, but they mechanics are so ancient that it feels like I need to read a guide to play the game, which is bad game design in today's standards.
The mechanics aren't archaic or ancient, but simply more complicated than what you're used to. You probably do need to read the manual for many older games, but that's only because they lack tutorials. If there wasn't a tutorial in Rainbow Six Vegas you'd have to consult the manual because the controls and mechanics are fairly complex.
If you want to keep the same vein, that's fine, just use modern systems like Mass Effect's dialogue system, as an example. It acually feels like a real conversation instead of "Read a dozen options and choose one", which I love to read books, but I don't like reading all those outcomes.
I like the idea behind Mass Effect's dialogue system, but it's just too unpredictable because of the vague and often utterly misleading options.
Most of these older titles, I feel, are more like modern strategy RPGs. Sorry old PC gamers, but I like the way the modern RPG is evolving and I'm hoping Dragon Age is a blend of the great stories of the past and modern mechanics of gameplay.
"Devolving" would a better word choice, and I guess by "modern mechanics" you must mean "dumbed down." In Mass Effect you can't choose what weapons you're carrying, you can't take off your armor, can't choose to go alone, can't use items other than medigel and grenades, can't buy anything useful from vendors, can't customize your character beyond choosing from predefined classes... it's all just very, very limited and shallow. Even the level design is preposterously uninspired and lazy.
j-e-f-f-e-r-s post=9.68481.632841 said:
We'll never produce a Citizen Kane or a Watchmen with the industry in the state it's in. We need to get true storytellers involved in videogames, not just writers who can write for a penny a word.
What many people don't seem to be aware of is that Citizen Kane was a technically innovative film that pioneered many of the filmmaking techniques that have since been taken for granted. Many video games have done similiar pioneering work within the medium, and therefore we've already made several Citizen Kanes. As for good storytellers, we used to have plenty of them but they were driven out of town after gamers decided that Metal Gear and Halo are mankind's best achievements in storytelling. Gamers are simply getting the level of writing they deserve, and the death of adventure games sure as hell isn't helping the situation.
I don't think there's any need to start coming up with crazy new ideas for RPGs when the old ones still haven't been utilized to their full extent. The brief renaissance of RPGs in the late nineties was cut short. They had the right idea, but then Black Isle went out of business and BioWare started dumbing down their games. If I were to make an RPG, it would be isometric and turn-based. Hardcore roleplaying with no hand holding or dumbing down. There would also be no voice acting because it restricts the amount of dialogue choices in the game and also eats up money and development time. If you set your intelligence really low in Fallout, your character became an idiot unable to communicate properly, and all the dialogue in the game, for both you and the NPCs, was changed accordingly. Try pulling off that shit when you have to voice act every line in the game.
If I wanted to use voice acting, cutscenes and other cinematic devices to tell a story, then I would make an adventure game.
