Seasoned RPG devs from Obsidian and Bioware blame the temporary death of the isometric CRPG on 'vibes-based forecasting' from retailers
Seasoned RPG devs from Obsidian and Bioware blame the temporary death of the isometric CRPG on 'vibes-based forecasting' from retailers
"I can't stress enough how often I'd hear a retail rep declare a genre/style/look was dead with zero supporting data."
"I can't stress enough how often I'd hear a retail rep declare a genre/style/look was dead with zero supporting data."
CRPG apparently translates to "Computer RPG"
I'm still not sure what it means
It's an RPG on a computer? Specifically tabletop, like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder, but on a computer. Example games : Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, The Temple of Elemental Evil, etc.
I think the more contemporary meaning for the word is “classic” rpg. Which better communicates the old isometric view and party-based adventuring.
vs. Tabletop role playing games.
One tries to recreate an RPG campaign as close as possible to table-top RPG, but on a computer. Was the original definition back when "possible" was very limited.
Also refers to classic RPG. Usually specifically refers to isometric 'realtime with pause'/plausible realtime games, with 'complex' dialogue options.
It the same as Metroidvania or Soulslike where it's kind of a vibe with sticky design choice but not 100% clear. I remember seeing arguments about whether Divinity Original Sin 2 was one because it was purely turn based
Long time ago RPG used to refer to pen and paper RPGs like dungeons and dragons by default. When pc games using these systems got made, like baldurs gate, they were referred to as cRPGs to distinguish them.
Nowadays video games are so popular that when someone says RPG it means the computer game, but due to tradition / nostalgia CRPG is still used to describe the genre of games inspired by the pen and paper RPGs.
Top down RPGs heavily inspired or influenced by table top RPGs like pathfinder and d&d. Also either turn based and real time with pause. Classic examples include fallout 1 and 2, neverwinter nights and baldurs gate 1 and 2. Modern examples include divinity original sin 1 and 2, baldurs gate 3 and wasteland 2 and 3.
I always see debates about what's an rpg, crpg, jrpg and strategy RPG yet when I hear action RPG I think f allout or elder scrolls, when I hear crpg I think baldurs gate, when I hear jrpg I think final fantasy or persona and when I hear strategy RPG I think fire emblem or disgea.
There's also JRPG
Wouldn't it then be JCRPG?
It means people wanted a way to separate JRPGs from western fantasy RPGs and tabletop or pen-and-paper RPGs.
Off the top of my head I'm struggling to remember if the term caught up per opposition to pen and paper being the default RPG or to JRPG first, because JRPGs didn't get popular everywhere at once, but CRPGs were big in all Western territories pretty much right away.
I think the idea was to differentiate it from tabletop back when they were a lot more like tabletop RPGs than most of today's RPGs -- they were either turn based or pausable, party based, and involved, you know, playing a role. This was way back before basically every third person hack and slash was called an action RPG and the acronym lost all meaning. I realize that it makes me sound like a bitter old man, and I loved Nier Automata, but it ain't an RPG.
I mean... yeah, retailer gut checks were a major driver for the industry for ages. The entire myth of the videogame crash in the early eighties, blown out of proportion as it is, comes down to retailers having a bad feeling about gaming after Atari. I'm big on preservation and physical media, but don't downplay the schadenfreude caused by the absolutely toxic videogame retail industry entirely collapsing after digital distribution became a thing. I'll buy direct to consumer from boutique retailers all day before I go back to buckets of games stolen from little kids and retailers keeping shelf space hostage based on how some rep's E3's afterparties went.
That said, those guys really did flood the market with cookie cutter games in a very short time there for a while. There were a LOT of these.
Weirdly, Neverwinter Nights must have done extremely well for how much credit Bioware gives it for redefining the genre, but at the time I remember being frustrated by it. It looked worse than the 2D stuff, the user generated content stuff was fun to mess with it didn't create the huge endless content mill you'd expect from something like that today.
I should go look up if there's any data about how commercially successful it really was somewhere. Any pointers?
Agreed about Neverwinter Nights, BG2 was (and remains) one of my favourite games and I remember being super hyped for NWN. Being an earlyish transition to 3D really did hurt it visually, much the same as how Final Fantasy VI has aged much better than VII graphically.
The big letdown for me though was the cut down party size. BG2 was defined by the companions and party banter and I recall NWN feeling extremely lacking in comparison.
The post BG2 hype combined with the move to 3D and the very heavily advertised campaign builder probably built very intense hype though, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if NWN sold extremely well despite not having as lasting of a legacy as BG2 for example.
Wikipedia?
I'm no fan of sports games. I dont play sports games. Also the kind of people I hang with also dislike sports games. And the last sport games I read about, a decade ago, had horrible reviews and awful graphics. So therefor I declare the Sports game genre for dead! /s
The /s is not needed. I was quite impressed to hear that EA Sports is one of the main money makers of EA despite having each new game as a buggier version of a previous one, only with an updated roster. I had no idea they were so popular and the last FIFA I played properly was in 2003.
So we are out there and we do think like that.madden should be dead but the people who buy it are literally like heroin addicts
all year they swear they wont buy it, its going to garbage like the last game, and then it comes out and they spend thousands on it. rinse repeat. i wish somebody else could use the nfl liscence just so EA or the other devs have to actually try making a good game
Last fifa I played didn't even have number in it. It was called Fifa Soccer, I believe from '93? Good times back then...
For me, the problem is "isometric". There have been very few games like that I've finished compared to others. It feels artificially constrained, especially in a 3D environment, when visibility is limited to like <10 meters away from your character. It's worse if the camera rotates because then I find it quite hard to make a mental map.
I don't have this issue with a top-down perspective generally. Maybe those tend to be more 2D (even if rendered they can't really include environmental verticality) so it's easier to navigate.
IMO there's very few instances where an isometric camera makes sense these days unless you're explicitly trying to capture the nostalgia of old isometric games.
Dragon Age: Origins had the perfect camera that let you look around like an action game and then switch to the tactical camera. It's astounding that modern rpgs cannot match how good the camera was in a game from 2009.
I adore BG3. But fighting the camera is harder than fighting the mobs.
Although it did get easier when I started using a controller to get around and a mouse to fight.
I always assumed it was the rise of consoles that was to blame, as CRPGs are a bit more cumbersome to control on those platforms. BG3 proved it's possible, but it's certainly not the platform it was built to be played on.
Casual players, shorter sessions, rise of first\third person action games like TES\DA targeting the same crowd, acting and dubbing characters to the same standard BG3 just did. Classic CRPGs like NWN do seem risky and expensive.
It's amazing how much dubs can help hold a player's attention. My mate loves 40k way more than DND 5E but he can't play Rogue Trader with me for hours on end because it was strategically dubbed while BG3 was comprehensively dubbed.
Essentially they admit to having no self confidence and believe what any Gamestop rep tells them, then?
It was basically impossible to self-publish before Steam became massively popular. You needed a publisher to make the physical games and get them into brick and mortar stores. If the publishers all decided something, you didn't have a choice but to listen.
I have to assume the blame of losing confidence would have lied more on the publishers stopping funding, not on Sawyer and co.
Larian has had several massively successful Kickstarter campaigns and releases in the genre, proving those concerns wrong again and again. If a developer really wanted to make a great CRPG in all those years, nothing was stopping them. Clearly they weren’t interested enough in it. Of course many of them will now jump on the huge hype train of BG3 and claim they‘ve always been oh so faithful.
That is not to say Publishers aren‘t also to blame of course. It‘s a bit tragic that BG3 was only even possible to become such an elaborate project with a huge investment from Tencent. And I can‘t speak for Larian of course but I don‘t think that was their first choice going by how secretive they‘ve been about Tencent‘s involvement.
But yeah if any dev from Bioware or Obsidian now claims they considered to make a massively huge CRPG like BG3 or anything comparable. As in actually bringing it up during a meeting with execs only to be shut down. I‘d have to call them big fat liars.