Where are all the first person rpg's?

Do4600

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Dr. McD said:
1. First person is shit for melee combat, plain and simple:
I'm supposed to be trying to kill someone, not swatting flies.

2. Real time is shit for bringing a team with you:
It's got nothing to do with tradition and everything to do common sense. Strength in numbers, plain and simple. You could be a fucking idiot and bring only two at most companions who will be nothing but meat shields to the dark overlord Von Fondlebottom's castle, or you bring your entire team. Commander Shepard doesn't have a party of companions, he has two useless meat shields that will inevitably fall within seconds.

3. Real time is shit for tactics:
Remember what I said about Commander Shepard's useless meat shields? Well it's even worse in Bethesda games, you can have one "companion" (and they're so utterly braindead as to not even be useful as meat shields) because "three's a crowd". Of course you can't actually give them commands to cease fire unless attacked so you can use stealth, nor can you call them from far away. And you can't have a sniper set up on a nearby tower with a silenced sniper rifle and aid you infiltrating a massive raider encampment because they'll just shoot anything they see. This leads to another problem, the "solution".

4. As a result of problem #3, you end up being the do-anything soldier:
There is only one playable character in Bethesda games, Mary Sue/Gary Stu. This character will rarely encounter any obsticle because there is only two quests, "go here, kill that" and "go here, get this thing". There are statistics but they don't actually do anything, they're just there so Bethesda can pretend they make RPGs. There is no replayability, you can gleefully accept quests with a happy smile on your face, or can do with an angry frown while rolling your eyes but you can't actually not accept the quest or have an alternate solution.

5. There's no fucking point in customizing your character if you can't see them:
Seriously, I don't care how many hairstyles you have, I'm not going to be looking the character anyway.
It's not strictly a first person RPG but there is a game that breaks these limitations, Mount and Blade: Warbands.

1. The melee combat is tense and strategic, the game actually takes into account your speed in relation to the direction of your swing, so lunging forward while thrusting will give you a distinct increase in damage while moving backwards or away from the direction of an enemy's attack will minimize the damage to you. Essentially, footwork actually plays a role. There are four types of attack, which are changed by the direction you move the mouse during your attack, there are also four directions to block that correspond to the directions of attack, in addition to this you can perform a feint, if your opponent blocks early you can change the direction of the attack in mid swing.

While it's possible to take on 5 equally armed people in melee on foot, it's very unlikely you can keep up with all of them, it's determined by your skill in reading them and your character's strengths and weaknesses. Also, the Mounted combat is uniquely exemplary. Because speed determines the advantage of the attack mounted combat is quick and dangerous, and going head to head with another lancer almost insures that one of you won't be getting back up. Against enemies on foot mounted combat is devastating, it truly allows you to see why a full plate mounted knight was the medieval equivalent of a main battle tank.

2. In Mount and Blade you can bring 2000 of your closest friends to battle, including allied lords with their own armies. The largest battle I ever fought was 3400 vs. 4400, the size of the on screen battle is only limited to the power of your PC and the depth of your character's pockets.

3.The tactics are limited but perfectly functional, you can ask your archers to stay back while protected by ground infantry while you tell your mounted troops to charge and there are plenty of mods that add onto this functionality with formations and such.

4. Not only do you have your main character, you have a selection of for hire heroes which you can choose the development of, they have their own in group dynamics and it can be difficult to find out who works well with who, but in the end you choose who specializes in what and as such you can do whatever role you find the most interesting and leave the doctoring, architecture and troop morale to others.

5. The default view in Warbands is third, but it's incredibly helpful to switch between them depending on the circumstances, you'll get plenty of time to see your work.
 

SquidSponge

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Dr. McD said:
[...]
1. First person is shit for melee combat, plain and simple:
I'm supposed to be trying to kill someone, not swatting flies.
[...]
Gotta disagree with that point. First person for melee combat is rarely done well, sure, but it's quite possible. The fun I had with melee on Dark Messiah: Might and Magic, oh yes. Someone else has mentioned Mount & Blade (1st person melee worked well, but only when on foot IMO), and 3rd person tends to have camera problems in confined spaces.

As for the rest of the points I'm mostly with you. The buddies in ME series were great characters and good for conversation, but in combat their only function was to draw fire so you don't get ganked or bum-rushed by sheer numbers quite as fast, and Bethesda companions are worse than dead weight - they're actively a hindrance, at least to my playstyles (which, admittedly, tend heavily toward stealth).

Bethesda might not be an entirely fair example though - I'm pretty convinced they don't know how to make an RPG. To give an example, Skyrim's destruction spells' damage doesn't scale with level. At all. You have to patch that in to make destruction viable - otherwise you're stuck with the choice between the wrong spell "shape" or so little DPS it's not worth bothering with. And like you say, the quest paths are often unsatisfying (or worse). There are some things Bethesda does well, and others they don't - unfortunately, some core elements of RPGs fit in the latter category.
 

Ender910_v1legacy

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bartholen said:
I would ask this: what does first person essentially add to an RPG? As Zontar says, it's ultimately about playing a role, or a character. A role or character that's not always you. Third person gives that wall of separation between you and what's happening on screen. When you can see your character's face, their movements and appearance, you're not thinking "that's me", but "that's the character I'm playing as".
I see where you're coming from, but at the same time, I don't really see the need for that wall of separation. If I'm reading a really good novel for example, I don't imagine myself watching the character (as though I were watching a movie). I imagine myself in the character's shoes, inside the story itself. I read what the character sees and imagine it in my mind, I read how the character feels and can sometimes feel a small semblance of the same thing. In a way, it's the same way I experience a well done and immersive game with a first person view. I honestly don't get that same feeling at all from most third person games.

bartholen said:
I usually completely forget what race I'm playing in Elder Scrolls, because aside from some minor differences in abilities, all the races play essentially the same, and are going to eventually be covered in 70 layers of increasingly complex and ornate armor anyway.
I think this is largely an art design problem a lot of first person view games suffer from, rather than an inherent problem with first person view itself. Silent "Gordan"-esque characters; arms, torso, and legs/feet never being visible when you look down, and even when they do there's rarely anything especially distinctive (save for maybe the protagonist's breasts in Trespasser). While not exactly an RPG, Vermintide did things a little bit differently (with fairly impressive results imo):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V0vqxOMNNc

Not sure how well some of the design techniques would translate into an RPG format(especially where customization is concerned), but I think it's a good representation for better first person view implementation, and immersion.

Ezekiel said:
I think there are too many first person games. Far too many. They're so common because it's a lot easier to do than third person. The perspective doesn't work that well. I like being able to run straight while still able to look to the sides. In a first person game, especially all the ones that only let you sprint forward, you have to slow down and turn to see your surroundings. Moving around like a tripod or primitive robot with arms always in my view is getting stale. First person games also offer pretty limited spacial awareness. In third person and real life, I can peek to the sides and behind myself instantly without turning and I can feel what's at my feet. I wanna see how my character relates to the environment, since I sure can't feel it or really be in their shoes.
Largely true, although VR does fix most of those issues. So I guess give it a year or two and... you might find first person view a little more palatable.
 

DoPo

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Ezekiel said:
I think there are too many first person games. Far too many.
What is your definition for RPG? Because from where I stand, there are very few.
 

DoPo

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Ezekiel said:
DoPo said:
Ezekiel said:
I think there are too many first person games. Far too many.
What is your definition for RPG? Because from where I stand, there are very few.
I was talking about games in general, not specifically RPGs.
The thread is about RPGs, though. Moreover, we could also claim that there are far too many third person view games and topdown view games, as these three encompass the majority of views available in games. Does that make all of them "far too many"?
 

DoPo

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Ezekiel said:
I don't feel like singling out RPGs. I'd still be happier with fewer first person games across almost all genres.
Again, this is a thread specifically about RPGs. As has been outlined above, it's not like they really have that many first person games to begin with.
 
Sep 14, 2009
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Do4600 said:
2. In Mount and Blade you can bring 2000 of your closest friends to battle, including allied lords with their own armies. The largest battle I ever fought was 3400 vs. 4400, the size of the on screen battle is only limited to the power of your PC and the depth of your character's pockets.
I am really curious, how many did you *actually* get to spawn and battle at the same time though? I think I usually would get a couple hundred vs a couple hundred (then they'd bring in reinforcements depending on when people died), although one time with one of my characters I purposefully turned him into a god with cheats (not god mode, just his stats were through the roof) and I'm 99% sure that is directly tied to how many bandits there are when they attack one of your towns, so I did manage to spawn like 2500 bandits one time but my computer chugged pretty hard at that, down to like 10 fps I think.
 

raankh

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Lots of interesting opinions from both sides of the fence when it comes to FP-RPG as a genre in of itself.

However, the discussion has kind of reinforced my opinion; you wouldn't even have to compete with Bethesda in that market-space, there's plenty of room for more studios. There have been attempts, and certainly other platforms than the traditional 1PV platform (ie kbd/mouse) have their representation, but most are either rather old or niche titles (such as Consortium).

It hasn't been explored all that much, Im thinking; the discussion about mechanics above really point to that-- even what works and what doesn't hasn't been covered yet.

It really seems to be an area where a serious start-up game dev could make large inroads and make a name for themselves. Here's hoping it isn't DigiTurd HomiShite.