personally i’m thinking more like the skyrim of final fantasy
everything about this feels aggressively bethesda
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hashtag jankthesda
the car pushing and the sand worm that takes 3 real time days to kill and the camping with your buddies and going on some quest involving a wedding dress you and your bros read about in a fashion magazine just made me more interested in the game
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Yeah this shit all sounds kinda delightful.
This is why we are the plight of humanity
we actually dig this stuff
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I don’t want to be that person that goes all Codexian and shrieks about decline but seriously everything named here was done better in 90s cRPGs. The only real change here was the melding of mid-cRPG choices and consequences with Final Fantasy emphasis on production value, with subsequent costs that come from making the writing much more expensive to produce (by making full voice acting the default universal of these games). These costs are generally a decrease in how much revision the text can receive before being finalized, how much text can actually be included, etc.
I guess I can’t stop myself from saying it, so: Arcanum had better party dynamics than anything to ever appear in a Bioware or CD Projekt game, and that game was a glitchy mess. It had better party dynamics because
(because it’s normally upsetting when players receive an outcome they don’t expect and want)
is a rule people believe is true but isn’t true in practice.
Anyway this is all a tangent, I just think the shibboleth of “western devs are so innovative in their RPGs” needs to die.
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yeah this was basically what was chafing at me above, I didn’t take issue with many of the bullet points themselves.
bearing in mind that I’m the “mass effect 3 is the best jRPG of the decade” guy and that I basically couldn’t get into any cRPGs in between fallout 1 and witcher 2, I’m extremely skeptical of holding up witcher 3 specifically as a response to final fantasy storytelling.
(I’m far less skeptical of holding up dragon age or mass effect as a response but those are very inconsistent at best)
the only way i can tell crpgs and jrpgs apart anymore is if they have battle transitions
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Hmm, yeah, I don’t disagree. My thought has well-worn channels from conventional knowledge that are all too easy to slip into.
As far as ‘upsetting’ conversations and outcomes – I don’t disagree that it’s better fiction but I do think it limits your audience – in the same way that setting expectations is critically important for mainstream success, for AAA-sized audiences you work on delivering what people set out wanting.
The real answer is not to play – not to let your budget get so big you need to sell millions of copies, of course.
So this logically leads me to argue that Obsidian’s new tack of legacy RPGs is a dead end just like JRPGs and that doesn’t quite feel right. I think it’s somewhat true, except the foundations of western RPGs have held up much better – while JRPG storytelling methods have been absorbed by other genres, CRPGs have not, while their combat and progression systems often are sufficiently tactical and interesting.
exactly
B-)
Is this about Tryranny now? I was so exhausted by that Conquest mode thing they make you play if you want The Complete Experience that I saved and quit as soon as I could move my character. Why’s this stuff have to be so exhaustive
rpgs are such a confusing genre to me tbh.
i keep approaching them and, i enjoy them, but i’m never entirely sure why.
i like stories that are interestinga nd unique; usually this means “sidestories in a game with a really dull main story.” this is the #1 thing planescape torment got right: nobody gave a shit about the nameless one so it was all just a long sequence of cool thematically bound sidestories.
i like gameplay that has interesting tactical choices. you change your fight up to the situation, enemies that require different battle plans. sit down and think about fights until you can reasonably solve them within the constraints given.
i like gameplay that has interesting simulation level choices, wrt character growth and management. the long-term simulation aspects are what attach you to your characters and their individual personalities and quirks.
i can’t think of any game that has all three of these. nocturne’s complete apathy towards its storyline brings it pretty close!
western rpgs tend to fail miserably on all of them in my experience, choosing story over the rest.
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i spend a lot of time thinking about fundamental design choices by categorizing and breaking down my tastes
and then i end up more confused going out than i was going in
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Well, I think there’s a form-function argument here. Old dense CRPGs fit the non-voiced, top-down model well and remain good. Old breezy JRPGs fit the SNES model well and games in that mold (Mother 3, some mobile RPGs like Bravely Default (up to a point)) fit.
When the form changed the function had to; JRPGs didn’t do this well and therefore died, CRPGs became Mass Effect and now Witcher and weathered it much better.
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Hey, in a sea of mediocrity any game only needs one standout aspect to be worth some time.
I’m surprised you feel specifically call out sidestories, tactical choices, and progression as strengths of JRPGs because I’d identify those precisely as the strengths of western RPGs!
I find the good JRPGs generally have really compelling systems! Progression generally not so much but they potentially have a lot of cool tactical stuff going on that is completely underappreciated because you can grind past it all in virtually every one.
Western rpgs have historically had greater focus on long-term character growth more than periodic drops of You Got A New Tool, often in ways that work best on the first playthrough and not so much on ubsequent playthroughs.
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I’m not sure ‘tactical’ is a helpful word here because of its known vagueness.
Let’s define it for this discussion:
Tactical choices in RPGs are decisions made during battles - action selection, positioning, etc. We’re probably not talking about non-combat conflict resolution, also.
This is distinct from progression systems, related to purchasing equipment and items, gaining loot, and upgrading characters.
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ff12?
my hope of modern final fantasy ever being something i could hold up on a pedestal died with 12.
however, this game looks to be full of glorious dumb shit with lavish production values, and i’m hella interested.
i mean prompto takes photos off the stuff you do every day and you get to review them when you settle down to camp. as you page through the photos in the menu to decide which ones to save, you come across a nice shot and gladio remarks, “oh, hey, i look pretty good in that one.” woah! it was a cool, dumb moment.
outside a diner you stop at there’s a bench with a worn-down plastic mascot, you can sit down at the bench and have prompto take a picture of noctis with it. the picture shows up in the day’s film roll.
you enter a convenience store and the guys will go off and browse the shelves, occasionally saying stuff like “haha, woah dude check this out.”
i am ready for a full game of this dumb, incidental shit.
the combat is wierd. i find myself wanting more precision out of it, but also kind of like how it feels like things are slightly outside of my control and that i can just kind of chill with it and things will work out. i think this game, pretty heavily, is just a huge invitation to chill with it. it wants you to furiously chill with it.
also yes the main cast looks dumb but the bestiary in this thing is fucking top-notch. every monster i have come across looks rad and moves fantastically, especially the bigger ones. maybe it’s the closest thing i can get to a monster hunter with a huge budget.
in summary i am fucking excited for this dumb game bring it on baby
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