Game Design Essentials: 20 RPGs

Gamasutra has an amazing indepth article about the history of RPGs and what makes RPGs well, RPGs.

From D&D to WoW to Oblivion to Final Fantasy, it's all there.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4066/game_design_essentials_20_rpgs.php

One paragraph that stands out:

D&D arose out of a marriage between wargaming and fantasy fiction, so narrative is in its blood, but early on the most frequent type of adventure was a simple free-form dungeon crawl. If you count OD&D as a role-playing game, then you necessarily have to admit that RPGs don't have to be games of storytelling, or at least not games of "top-down," DM-driven storytelling.

I never thought about it that way. Especially games like Oblivion - most of that game can be played without even touching the story. Most of my experiences with open-world games like Oblivion and Morrowind have always been about shaping my own story. Yet, if an RPG was released with no main storyline, I'm sure it would be torn to pieces by critics.

 

No built-in story at all would require far more sophisticated AI/content generation to react to your actions, I think. It may be fun to think of stories as things happen but if the world doesn't react at all I think that would be rather dull. Probably why I've never got into the Oblivion-style games.

Though I think it's worthwhile drawing a distinction between the 'tactical RPG', with the focus on character-building and tactics (such as the aforementioned dungeon crawls), and the more standard 'story-based RPGs'.

 

Definitely. There's many sub-genres of RPGs, all with different narrative styles.

The fact that I often ignored the story in Oblivion never bothered me. I mostly treated it as a dungeon crawl - developing my character, exploring different styles of play and essentially getting into a "role".

Which goes back to the definition of RPG. Story driven RPGs like Mass Effect have you basically playing as the character of Shepard. You can choose how he/she looks and acts, but is it really playing a "role"? Or just simply dictating the actions of a pre-defined character?

 

My general guideline for defining RPGs is that if the player spends more time thinking about fighting teams of bad guys than about the story, it's an RPG; if he spends more time thinking about the story, it's an adventure game. But this is the definition that existed in the genre five or ten years ago.

You can certainly take an RPG engine and create a pure story-game in it even today, or a hybrid with any balance you think might be appropriate. Most "Western" RPGs today blur this line even further, from Mass Effect to KotOR to Fallout 3 to the Elder Scrolls series, and I don't think you can really point to a single, all-encompassing definition anymore and expect everyone to hew to it without exception. This is the Age of Miscegenation, RPG-wise.

(On another note, the cockles of my heart are massively warmed due to the fact that I never saw Final Fantasy VII name-checked once in that entire article.)

 

Aye, and building a character. Planescape: Torement is a good example. The character building and tactical part was such a small part compared to the story, I'd say it was more adventure game.

Being shoe-horned into a role imo kinda detracts from being classified as a RPG, and RPGs as are way more tactical. Baldur's Gate is a RPG. Something like Mass Effect is a blend in between RPGs and adventure.

 

I make a lot of mental distinctions regarding RPGs, and I often strongly disagree with some games getting the RPG label. For me, what makes an RPG is the ability to choose a role. I don't mean to decide whether I want to use swords or sorcery, I mean I want freedom to handle the moral and ethical choices that my character makes along the way. While I'm generally disappointed by how black and white many RPGs are with their choices, it's still the kind of thing that for makes or breaks a game as an RPG.

Games like the Dungeon Siege or Final Fantasy series may have fun combat systems and interesting stories, but there's no role playing involved. One of those games is essentially just a combat engine. The other is a little like watching an anime movie that you have to put on pause every five minutes to fiddle with the remote for a bit in order to get back to the story. The Elder Scrolls games offer some actual RPG options, and for that I like them. But the BioWare and its long string of RPGs are what I love best in the computer gaming market.

Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect and Planescape: Torment are in my mind the three best RPGs out there. Knights of the Old Republic sticks to a simple light/dark set of options. You can either do the decent thing, or you can be EVIL. It's weak, but at least there's a choice - and the game itself has such a fun and epic plot I'm willing to forgive it for being so strictly Good vs. Evil with regards to choices. Mass Effect did a good job discarding the Good vs. Evil simplistic set of choices, and instead offers what I think is the best way for new games going forward. Basically, offering the practical vs. the idealistic. Planescape: Torment went furthest into putting me into the role of the main character, and making me feel like I was shaping him.

Basically, that's what I want an RPG to be: something where I actually play a role, where I can choose my own path. Tactical RPGs, JRPGs, they have their place. But at the end of the day, they're not really RPGs.

 

I pretty much agree with Raven. I am interested to hear Flare's distinction between the BG games and Mass Effect, because to me there isn't a huge gap.

 

That brings up an important points that I don't think that I emphasized strongly enough in my previous post: the combat system isn't relevant for me in terms of deciding whether or not a game is an RPG. It could use a first person shooter interface, it could use a top-down RTS-like interface, it could use a command based system like many Final Fantasy games, that doesn't really factor in to whether I consider the game an RPG or not.

For me, a game is or is not an RPG when you can decide how your character reacts to the plot.

 

Which brings up the important distinctions between "Western" RPGs and Japanese RPGs:

The very definition of a JRPG is to eliminate role-playing from the start. They are -- by and large -- non-interactive animé stories on rails. You don't play a role, you watch the story of an effeminate boy as he rises from a lowly chicken farmer to becoming the key to saving the universe from an effeminate man, all while living a great romance with his brain-damaged girlfriend that culminates in admitting they like each other and almost kissing, and watching as friends die and then return to life with no explanation. Meanwhile, the player presses the "X"-button continuously for 30+ hours. And at some point, you may have to hump a giant ostrich.

And I make all of these observations as someone who's been playing and enjoying JRPGs for over twenty years.

 

I admit, I've never played a single JRPG, not so much because of the structure, just the whole Japanese aesthetic doesn't do anything for me.

 

Personally, to give a similar example, I don't think Jade Empire (which is an enjoyable game that I've played multiple times) matches KotOR II on a story level, but then I feel like BioWare's dialogue and stories tend to be a lot more about the end result than the why. KotOR II might be a BioWare-style RPG in terms of the gameplay, but the story is extremely different. The game was developed by Obsidian, a.k.a., the old Black Isle guys (the same guys who did the story for Planescape: Torment). I think the caliber of their writing has always been a step above your typical RPG ride, even certain stuff coming from studios like as high-toned as Bethesda (Fallout 3 excepted, obviously).

KotOR II is definitely more of a contemplative sort of experience. The first Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire, on the other hand, do build up to some pretty epic finales, where it seems like the fate of everything hangs in the balance. I wish that KotOR II could've been finished properly, but considering the nature of its story (where the threat is more of a silent thing, and the galactic community is already in a ruined state), there's probably no way the last area could've been as epic as, say, the Star Forge in KotOR I.

 

A lot of non-RPGs can offer your character ways to react to the plot, are you talking about when a game presents a specific list of ways to react? Or just freely deciding how to react to the game?

I guess for me, an RPG has to have elements of character progression, but not in a pure narrative way. Plenty of games offer character arcs, but an RPG has to give you choices about character development, be it physically or mentally.

 

Well that turns out to be not true. I've been playing Mount&Blade, a realistic medieval based RPG (no monsters, magic or instant healing), and it has no main story at all. There are quests to do and people to work for, but it's a complete open-world experience.

It's not a perfect game, but most of the reviews I've read don't criticise its lack of story. I guess you can make an RPG with no story if the rest of the game holds up.