Bioware, what happened to you?

[exar333]

I don't think this explains the lack of 2D RPG's in the marketplace. Even if you are right that Bioware is screwing up and you are right why, they are just one developer. If the games that you envision would in fact be successful, then why isn't anybody making one? There are plenty of programmers who could use the work these days.


BG was released in 1998, when VCR's used to sell pretty well too. You simply can't take sales figures from 12 years ago and assume that it would sell well in 2010.


Both of these seem like decent explanations for why we don't see 2D RPG's being developed these days.

I never actually said sales from 10 years ago would translate into sales today, I was responding to the post that neither BG/BG2 franchise sold well. It sold remarkably well.

To be honest, I do believe a BG would sell very well today as well. Look at games like Civ4. It was MUCH more complex than any previous Civ game and it did very well from 2005-2007.

Edit: Interestingly enough, Civ5 (dumbed-down Civ4) has been much less received than it's predecessor.

 

[exar333]

I think it is funny that the current gaming generation is being called 'twitch'. BG came out in 1998. 2 years AFTER the biggest twitch FPS game ever released, Quake 1 (1996). In 1998, Quake 1 had a massive following, gigantic community. In 1997, QuakeWorld and TeamFortress came into existence. Ultima Online came out in 1997. Tribes came out in 1998. Unreal Tournament Came out in 1999.

So if I look at the games that came out in that time frame. How the fuck was anyone interested in a slow-paced, text based Baldur's Gate? It didn't even have good graphics for that time period!

Why? Why? Why? The answer is obvious, because people don't want 53 versions of the same exact fucking thing. I've said it before and I'll say it again: people don't want a WoW clone and they don't want a CoD clone. You might think it's an easy cash in but you'd be wrong 99/100 times.

Now if the answer is obvious, why do developers keep doing it? Because it is easy to sell it to producers. "CoD made 32 gajillion dollars, we want to make a game just like it, except here is why ours is better, fund us". It's so much easier than "take a risk on this game that I put my heart and soul into, I have absolutely no financial data for how well it will do". It is very rare that a studio gets to do what they want to do like that, often you only get that kind of love from a small studio that hasn't been bought out and answers to no one. It's one of those reasons I love Id Software so much: not because of how their recent games have gone, but because they do exactly what they want to do for as long as it takes.

Now let's talk Blizzard, "they warped Warcraft into an MMO and look how that turned out". Yea but Blizzard does it right, they always do. Look at the timeline: they came out with an incredibly successful Warcraft 3, giving everyone what they wanted, a revival of the Warcraft series with pretty much 0 faults and a modding community to keep it alive for ages (basically they quenched any nostalgia). Then they turned around and immediately went to work on WoW (possibly sooner). The cool thing about WoW is, yea it was a change of genres, but they did a lot to make it look familiar with the previous setting, so that you could go from WC3 to WoW and a lot of things looked familiar and enticed you, lots of lore was there, meet amazing hero characters from WC3 'in the flesh'. Not only that, they hired an incredible crew of inside developers and raiders alike to make sure they made basically the pen-ultimate mmorpg on the market. In hindsight? fucking flawless execution. And just when the RTS crowd was starting to get hungry for something else? They throw out SC2.

As for where is the current demand for good RPGs? I'd say the Witcher was exactly that. Nobody is making decent RPGs so some Polish studio had to step in and show the industry how it is done. Interestingly enough:

To look at some other current computer RPG devs: Piranha Byte's is in Germany. Ascaron is in Germany. Radon Labs is in Germany. Larian is in Belgium. .... So basically if it wasn't for Germany right now I wouldn't have a single good RPG? Nice.

Awesome post, I agree 100%. It's annoying that people somehow think gamers are "dumber" than they were 10 years ago. Sure, there maybe more people playing games now than previously, but that doesn't mean that the market that purchased a game 10 years ago doesn't still exist. Let the masses buy 10 million copies of COD, I would be fine with an awesome RPG selling 1-2 million copies.

 

[darkewaffle]

Awesome post, I agree 100%. It's annoying that people somehow think gamers are "dumber" than they were 10 years ago. Sure, there maybe more people playing games now than previously, but that doesn't mean that the market that purchased a game 10 years ago doesn't still exist. Let the masses buy 10 million copies of COD, I would be fine with an awesome RPG selling 1-2 million copies.

That's pretty much exactly the point though. Put yourself in the developer's shoes and then look at those numbers. They're only human.

They could put their heart and souls into an RPG for a few years and come out with a, pretty optimistic, 2M selling title. Or they could do the same thing, or perhaps even less, and develop a title in a new genre and quite possibly sell multiplicatively more all while capturing interest in a new audience.

It's a huge, untapped market for them. They're people probably largely unfamiliar with the Bioware legacy, probably mostly new to Bioware IPs, and obviously with some budget for gaming.

 

[snewdle]

I think your view summarises what's fundamentally wrong with the RPG developers' philosophy to this day: They have decided to offer games that only cater to the trigger-happy crowd because this is what makes sense financially. However in opting for the allienation of the story-oriented market segment they have done a disservice to the RPG genre, eventually constraining it to a mere FPS with a veneer of character management system that causes no radical changes to gameplay. As a player, your options are essentially limited to how nasty you want to be while you follow a more or less linear destructive path to the final stand-off. You don't have a choice to take a non violent path, which would be driven by dialogue rather than incessant battle. To me, the only RPG that trully achieved that, was Planescape: Torment. Baldur's Gate was only just passable in this regard. I understand developing such a deep gameworld that would serve all audiences is very costly, but I reject the accusation of stubbornly refusing to be pleased.

I think game devs should stop favoring the waste of millions into developing 3D engines for unengaging duds likes Oblivion and NWN2, over creating an universe that is fascinating to explore and its many stories will stay with you many years after you've played, even though it's done in isometric. Also, they should stop dwelling on the same-old Forgotten Realms rehashes and instead turn their attention into other, vastly underutilised and brimming with adventure potential, campaign settings, like Planescape. If they did that then perhaps afford to make some well balanced and really interesting games, that everyone will be willing to get.

Yes I agree. KOTOR (at least to me) was the beginning of that whole trend where cinematic graphics began to take precedence over the more traditional aspects of RP games that really define the genre. After its release, games began to steadily do away with them and, partially as a result, I began to lose interest in PC gaming due to what I saw as the dumbing down of the one genre that I felt best defined the PC over consoles (well strategy games count too). And look what has happened today as a result. Console ports to the PC are becoming startling frequent when in fact it should always be the opposite due to optimization/hardware issues.

 

[exar333]

That's pretty much exactly the point though. Put yourself in the developer's shoes and then look at those numbers. They're only human.

They could put their heart and souls into an RPG for a few years and come out with a, pretty optimistic, 2M selling title. Or they could do the same thing, or perhaps even less, and develop a title in a new genre and quite possibly sell multiplicatively more all while capturing interest in a new audience.

It's a huge, untapped market for them. They're people probably largely unfamiliar with the Bioware legacy, probably mostly new to Bioware IPs, and obviously with some budget for gaming.

It's not just numbers though. Sure there may be more people that play FPS, but the market is very saturated as well. High risk, high reward. Plus, gamers are fickle. COD hasn't been this huge for a long time; people played MoH, BF, etc. beforehand. Getting the top game isn't easy and there is a lot of competition.

If you look at the recent big-budget RPGs, they have done very well. ME 1/2, DA:O, etc. If anything, people are craving good RPG games because stuff like BG, NWN, and the like have disappeared.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Sure ME and DA:O are "big" games but they feel like a lighter experience overall to me. I'm still pretty torn up about bailing on Dragon Age. I had to start over so many times that I have no desire what-so-ever to start yet again and actually finish it. The mod community looks much less lifelike now as well, as I feared it would.

 

[BladeVenom]

Mass Effect Tournament 3, coming soon.