Thread #3935180
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RPGs peaked in the early 90s and it's been downhill ever since. RPGs didn’t start out story heavy. Early console RPGs like Dragon Quest or Wizardry had simple “save the world” plots or "find the special item" and dark souls style "lore" and that was more than enough.
Story existed, but it was sparse due to hardware limitations, and localization constraints. The focus was gameplay, engaging with systems and fun battles, not cinematic storytelling!! not narrative! and dialogue info dumps! The shift toward long cutscenes and dense dialogue and heavy-handed storyshite really took off in the mid to late 1990s once CD storage made bigger narratives possible. And RPGS/jrpgs have never (ever) recovered ever since. This is why a true rpg fan is someone who is also a retro gamer first and foremost. Full stop, I don't care if this offends you!
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>>3935386
No, just perfectly reasonable taste given that videogames are games and storyellers and their retard fans inevitably crowd out gameplay to present their shit-tier narratives.
The absolute worst is dialog-driven branching storylines. HOLD EVERYTHING the player needs to make a crucial decision on the spot about this moral dilemma I copied from my philosophy 101 homework, and it will determine the course of the whole rest of the game (or not, if I don't feel like it, I'm the GM I can do whatever I want lmfao)
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>>3936353
>be Larian
>promise “17,000+ ending permutations” in BG3
>release game
>there’s like 3? Maybe 4 endings and you pick one at the end of the game, just like Deus Ex or something
>there aren’t even any ending slides, maybe we can add ending slides in a patch?
>make tons of money
>profit
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>>3936361
>17,000+ ending permutations
Imagine being someone who really believed that upon hearing it, it's like the 1000s of NPCs with unique routines that Cyberpunk promised or the 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets of No Man's Sky.
I almost wish I had the chutzpah to con retards instead of these pesky principles.
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>>3935180
True.
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>>3935180
Problem is industry has basically started thinking production values can carry a game. JRPGs got impacted hard by this. What would once be a ten second dialog box exchange now has to be a choreographed cutscene with full VA, for example.
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The gameplayfags of /vrpg/ have successfully opened my eyes and redpilled me.
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>>3935180
I've had people beat me over the head with their game recommendations solely based on the perceived merit of their "stories", especially when it comes to the RPG genre. I've played through a sizeable number of their games. My verdict is, do not listen such people. They don't read books. They lack media literacy. None of the stories they continuously overpraise are worth your time.
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>>3935386
No one said story bad. It's devs making a games primary value based around the story = bad. Imagine pulling up a porno and it's a 20 minute cinematic intro and you get to the part where they have sex but it's just dry humping and a sad handjob. Modern RPGs are the video game equivalent of that. Take Xenoblade Chronicles for example, that would have been a fantastic anime. But instead the made it an anime where you need to do shitty MMO combat between cutscenes. I f I want anime I'll watch anime, but if I want to PLAY a role playing GAME then I want good GAMEPLAY. Having a story there is nice but the GAMEPLAY is the part that makes it a GAME.
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>>3936812
>Funniest thing is these "gameplay first" dudes flocking to RPGs, one of the most story focused genres out there.
You know nothing of the historic origins of RPGs. They started as complex (for the time) combat/exploration simulators like Wizardry and Ultima. You had to read the manual for the basic story. The genre became bastardised into tranime storyslop in the mid to late 90s, but you wouldn't know that because you were most likely born after 2008. But at its core it is a gameplayfag genre. It's a shame the j*nnies ban anyone for mentioning the name of this boards rival forum, because some of you fags could learn from them.
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>>3936837
>Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, first released in 1985 for the Apple II, is the fourth in the series of Ultima role-playing video games. It is the first in the "Age of Enlightenment" trilogy, shifting the series from the hack and slash, dungeon crawl gameplay of its "Age of Darkness" predecessors towards an ethically nuanced, story-driven approach.
>Garriott said he wanted to become a good storyteller and make certain the story had content, and that 90% of the games out there, including his first three Ultima games, were what he called "go kill the evil bad guy" stories. He said, "Ultima IV was the first one that had ethical overtones in it, and it also was just a better-told story."
IV also had Roe Adams credited as writer. VII had Raymond Benson.
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>>3936846
Compare to Doom's development
>The designer Tom Hall initially wrote a science fiction plot, but he and most of the story were removed from the project
>John Carmack not only disliked the proposed story but dismissed the idea of having a story at all: "Story in a game is like story in a porn movie; it's expected to be there, but it's not that important."
>Hall was upset
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