This is the first post that based mostly on the replies has inspired me to join and post my thoughts on it, and I apologize because as I sit down to type this, I feel that this is going to be a very, very long post - feel free to skip it, it's probably more of a rant than anything else.

/begin rant
Firstly, I would classify myself as an FPS enthusiast, if you looked at the time logged in games for me, you would find Counter strike (from 1.6 to CSS), Modern Warfare, Call of Duty, Bad Company 2, et cetera on the PC in the hundreds of hours for each, I've (maybe wasted) spent thousands of hours playing them. I literally purchased the xbox/360 for the HALO series, although not really a FPS - it was the only game I was interested in playing. However if you asked me the game that I enjoyed the most, and by an overwhelming investment of hours (as in, I played it actively 5-7 days a week, sometimes for 10-15 hours at a time) was Ultima Online. I throw that information out there because it might explain some of what I feel.

I started with UO about 3 months after it's release, I was young and actually got into it only because my brother played bought it the day it came out, and I (not to get too mushy) saw playing it at first as a way to spend time with my brother, we'd sit in the same room and play for hours helping each other out. There were some sources of information (Stratics mostly), but for the most part it was new enoguh and the guides/walkthroughs weren't a big thing yet that it FELT vastly unexplored. My first memory of being wowed wasn't the graphics, they were never THAT impressive, it was that I had walked in the same direction for three hours and not run into the next ocean. I made the decision to go kill enough stuff to buy a horse to continue on, I spent DAYS of that week just exploring the largely uninteresting continent I was on.

For anyone familiar with UO, I started playing while OSI was still in control of their product, a few years before EA bought it. This was when there was one world, the cities were basically safe (guards could be called in towns in response to any hostile action and would insta-kill the aggressor), however venturing outside of those towns was open PVP. What ended up happening as my play time progressed was I started frequenting the dungeons and areas that PVPers and PKers frequented. It's cemented in my mind the first time, outfitted in my best dungeon crawling gear, I was utterly destroyed in a matter of seconds by a fairly well known PK on the shard I was active on, which of course meant the loss of all of my gear (as there was no such thing as binding or item insurance). About the same time I became interested in PVP, OSI released the second age, the expansion that added a whole new world. I rushed out and bought it the day it came out, and was among the first I saw in the new world, I died left and right and couldn't find anything, I moved a desk next to my computer desk to lay out the cloth map (while there was an ingame map, it was small in comparison and the cloth map allowed me to plan out my routes better, and try to find landmarks when I was completely lost).

What happened after that probably cemented the way I play games to this day, I was lucky enough to get into one of the best known PVP guilds that ever came out of UO (Sinister, for anyone who might know), and it completely shifted the way I played not only that game, but every game that came after it. I was still constantly impressed at places I hadn't found (even after years of playing), but the fast paced (1v1 PVP in UO could be over in 3-5 seconds) fighting, the actual adrenaline rush of getting jumped or getting the upperhand in a close fight, hooked me to playing more than anything I'd done thus far, and nothing has matched it since. Unfortunately ,about the height of my UO fun, OSI sold to EA, and EA in their great wisdom decided to make a carbon copy of the world, split the identical copies in half and make one NO pvp (not even consensual), and the other left as Open PVP. Under the guise of not enough room for player housing among a few other things (the biggest reason was the basic carebear feeling of EQ, and EQ was getting a lot of players), it destroyed the game as far as I (and most everyone I played with) was concerned. I still played for years after that, but it was actually sad to watch the player built 'cities' and social events that had been going for years disappear and crumble, and then came the end of the counselor/seer programs (after some lawsuit, that I forget the details of), which took away the last bit of personality the game had, and yet, I played for years longing for having the fun I did before.


Now, I apologize, that's a wall of text that seems like a history of UO, but I felt it was necessary to address several of my points about RPGs and todays games in general. I might suffer from the nostalgic feeling that no other game since then has been able to really instill the same emotions and excitement that UO was able to do so many years ago, and here's where I think some of the things fell short. I think Raph Koster (who as a designer I have great respect for) makes a great point that UO never set out to make an MMORPG, or even an RPG, but a virtual world. UO, although it was entirely static, felt like it was a living breathing environment, much more so than Oblivion or Morrowind or even Fallout ever made me feel. It was much more like you could be a part of any story you wanted to be than following a script of a story you may or may not be interested in. While UO did have a story, and an active story-line, it was much like I consider real life to be in that my day to day and week to week actions had a little or as much to do with the story line as I ever cared for it to. I found much more joy in being able to participate in feuds and conflicts that were purely contrived by people and had little or nothing to do with the actual "story" as it were.

The other things that stood out and still stand out as failures to me in that respect, originally again in UO, your idea of what a magical item did (without use of an identification wand), were absolutely zip. You had to use it, or put it on (Whether it was good or bad) to find out what it did, it was constantly amusing. Their items, at the time, also gave way to entire strategies (most mages walked around with spell reflection on, so that the first attack spell against them would flag their opponent as the aggressor, AND reflect the effects back onto them, which of course meant most first-attack spells were tiny damage spells with the full knowledge it would bounce back against you, however wearing a garment that had charges of magic reflection on it, produced the same effect, and could be thrown on after your spell was brought down, bringing another much more powerful spell brought back on its caster). Your only indication of a weapons usefulness were things about how it was crafted (grandmaster tailored items/weapons/armor were much better than those bought in NPC shops or done by a less skilled smith), by what it was made of (silver weapons did double damage to undead things). There was no "katana 25-50dps", although after EA got a hold if it, it followed the way of World of Warcraft and each item has a page of stats associated with it.

It also seemed like combat in UO (whether PVE or PVP) was much more fluid than most RPGs I've played, you had to constantly change your tactics to adapt to what was happening. I think the most disappointed I've been with a game was with WoW, I had only tooled around with it (for maybe 20-30 hours total) while some of my friends had at the time maxed out to level 60 (at the time the cap), I was at a friends house, he went to the bathroom, and I managed to kill 5 level 50 characters 5v1, with no idea how to play his character, by simply hitting the same button repeatedly, and healing every few minutes. I never logged into my own account after that, and haven't played it since.

I honestly view WoW as one of the biggest setbacks that RPGs have seen in a long time, it's taken the whole game back to when controllers had two buttons, and to me feels completely soulless and pointless. I was excited at some of the other options that popped up (I was in the beta and played on release day of, for example Shadowbane). Shadowbane in advertisement was everything I hoped RPGs would be, dynamic, completely open (whether PVP or story wise), and fun. Yet by the time it released, it had conceded on so many of the ideas that were to make it outstanding it became yet another tile in the floor of failed RPGs.

Fallout 3 was fun for me, it felt more like a "choose your own adventure" book than a video game or movie, but, the story was well crafted enough and the gameplay was fun enough I did enjoy it, but it never garnered a second play through. I can't think of a game that has (besides HALO, which only got played through multiple times due to friends playing together and it being easy to beat in a few hours). I think that developers in general need to look at games that truly captured people (whether it's Mario Brothers, Ultima Online, or the original Final Fantasies), and what's different between them and current games.

I like several people enjoy Dwarf Fortress not because it has even mentionable graphics, in fact in its true form, although tilesets are available, it's just ascii. Purely because it has no story and is completely up to the player to turn it into something that they want it to be, while providing the foundations for all those interesting interactions to take place.

/end rant.

To sum it up, I think there's a few things that modern RPGs should turn around and look at their predecessors and redo.

I can't stand that the first 30 minutes of any RPG I play feels like an expanded, unskippable tutorial (and god forbid you have to restart the game for any reason, you're going through it again). Even some of my favorite games (portal for example) for me felt like it suffered from a prolonged needless tutorial (in portal's defense, it fit into the game, but I still felt it was long).

I hate the 'kill 10 rats' quests, followed by 'kill 15 kobolds', for no reason other than grinding XP, this is especially exacerbated in MMOs, how many kobolds could possibly be around Goldshire? The million people who've been through there haven't utterly obliterated the Kobold population? However, those quests are second only to the quests that I absolutely, violently detest, and what I've always referred to as 'fedex' quests. The quests where the only point of them is to deliver some pointless item from one NPC to the other, and I can't decide what infuriates me more, when the NPCs are standing down the street from each other (walk your lazy ass down the street), or on the other side of the world (really? I have to travel for 45 minutes to give someone A PIE?).

Expanding on the quests that I hate, when I think back to FF3 which I loved, comparing it to current games (and even Fallout 3 as a recent game), I can't think of any of the 'quests' in those games that made me feel like I was doing something completely arbitrarily stupid. I felt like I was doing those things because I was interested in where THAT part of the story was going, and not that I was doing a menial task for no reason other than wasting time and running up the hours played clock so that a developer could say they have 70 hours of game (of course you do, I had to run back and forth across the same place 500 times for no reason, with no fun involved).

Another thing that relates especially to the difference (for me) between older games and newer ones is, there's NOTHING wrong with a quick fight, but at the same time, I think it's completely insane that you have NO CHANCE against some things until you've leveled up appropriately. I understand that a peasant with a pitchfork versus a dragon is probably not going to end well, but there should be the chance that, given your quick manuvering, maybe a bit of luck, but definitely your fair share of planning and skill - you could do it. UO did this for me in that, on your first day, pvping against someone who'd played for months, or wandering down against a lich or balron or something - was probably going to be over quick and not in your favor, but - it wasn't impossible, and if you were creative - it could be done (for example balrons getting taken down by grandmaster alchemists throwing a seemingly unendless supply of exploding potions as they brewed them up on the spot). It doesn't seem to be that way anymore, at all.

Sadly, I haven't played, seen, or heard of a game probably in the last 5 years that I was excited to play, I've almost abandonded RPGs in total (like I said, I play mostly FPSes now) for that reason, it just seems like there's no joy to be had, and I've completely given up on MMOs. I don't have any desire to stand around in Second Life (whether you're in second life, world of warcraft, age of conan, or whatever, same game) where I can't follow you out of town and drop you dead for saying something stupid. Seems like the same reason I've all but given up on RPGs, I've saved the princess and slayed the dragon 100 times, give me an interesting story, where I don't have to deliver packages for 3 hours to get there, and with the ability to spend hours doing nothing at all related to the story for the soul enjoyment of exploring, even if the areas I'm exploring are nothing more than interesting geography, I don't need 500 dungeons that are copied and pasted. I don't want to see the same model 15 times with 15 different names progressively harder to kill as my reward for spending 40 hours leveling up, much less in the same copied and pasted place I fought them the last 15 times, with different lights and foliage telling me it's a different place.


Sorry for the long post, I'm sure most people won't read the whole thing. :)

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Original post by Wavinator We took notes. [grin] Sometimes I feel the major difference between RPGs of today and RPGs of yore is a bit like the comparison some folks make between growing up in the city and growing up in the country-- regimen and structure. I think many RPGs started out like life in the open wilds, without a big brother to tell you every second where to go or what you had to do. Many games had freakin' MASSIVE worlds-- Daggerfall's hundreds of towns, entire continents in Ultima, 200 stars and 800 planets to explore in Starflight. I get a little sad when I see how small modern games are in feel. There's not a world or universe to explore, there's a postage-stamp sized area littered with DO and DON'T signs safely fenced in for our protection. God forbid that we should be frustrated by a puzzle we have to sleep on or an enemy we have to experiment with to finally beat. My dream RPG would probably be anathema to many AAA RPG players these days: There's a story but you can tell it to go hang itself while you do your own thing; there's as much combat as you seek or avoid because the game offers variety in stealth or negotiation or other non-linear strategies; and the world or universe is really that-- cohesive, thought out, filled with small little activities and HUGE.

Agreed.

And if you think about it, Fallout 3 has a world so large it could surpass even Starflight in the "massive" aspect IF the quest system was designed to do so.

Just think about it, what would Starflight feel like if you had a list of "to-do"s pointing to the next step on the starmap?
I think the game can be beaten in 1 or 2 hours this way. And why the hell would you care about the 800 planets which you already know that dont make any difference to your main goal?

I remember my starmap was written all over, lots of notes pointing to home systems, ruins, clues, curses :D...

The world in Ultima VII isnt nearly as huge as in Fallout 3. Worse yet, it doesnt have 1/4th of the content. But it appears to be much larger, simply because exploring it is necessary, and VERY dangerous if done blindly. So it was in Starflight: if you took the wrong turn or flux and ended up in U'lehk space, you were in deep trouble.

Why not provide a log system to the player write down his onw notes, a map with a tag system which would allow someone to mark down important points? Why making this stuff automatic if it isnt supposed to be?

You see how crazy this thing is? There was a supposed attempt to make fallout 3 non linear, but the map would plot down LINES automatically telling you where to go... Fail.

MadisonD, don't fret. I am very glad you went into extreme detail. I am reading your post now and will post my thoughts on it after I've dug through it. :)

I agree that Fallout 3 and Oblivion feel more like FPS with RPG elements than actual RPGs. In my opinion, it is a pity that even though the CRPG->FPS/RPG transition is becoming commonplace, few games learned from Deus Ex. It is an immensely successfull blending between RPG, FPS, and stealth gameplay. It avoids the open-but-boring-world problem by essentially being linear, but only in a broad context, and by staying focused on the plot. The irony of it is that the Deus Ex world feels much more nonlinear and vast than the worlds in Gothic 3, Fallout 3, Oblivion. The same can be said about Vampire Bloodlines, which is widely regarded as the spiritual successor to Deus Ex.

I don't consider myself a casual gamer but I usually like the hand holding aspects just because very few games can find the sweet spot between spelling out everything and the point and click adventure game stupidity where the entire game grind to a halt until you figure out you have to combine the penguin with the desk lamp at exactly 2:15 to make the safe key appear.

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Original post by Kaze I don't consider myself a casual gamer but I usually like the hand holding aspects just because very few games can find the sweet spot between spelling out everything and the point and click adventure game stupidity where the entire game grind to a halt until you figure out you have to combine the penguin with the desk lamp at exactly 2:15 to make the safe key appear.

It depends on the game, situation, and amount of hand-holding.

If the safe key is vital to finishing the game, then sure, the game should offer a bit more guidance. If the safe key is a side quest for some epic loot, then it should stay that hidden.

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Original post by TheBuzzSaw Quote: Original post by Kaze I don't consider myself a casual gamer but I usually like the hand holding aspects just because very few games can find the sweet spot between spelling out everything and the point and click adventure game stupidity where the entire game grind to a halt until you figure out you have to combine the penguin with the desk lamp at exactly 2:15 to make the safe key appear. It depends on the game, situation, and amount of hand-holding. If the safe key is vital to finishing the game, then sure, the game should offer a bit more guidance. If the safe key is a side quest for some epic loot, then it should stay that hidden.

You could also have more than one way to open the safe but for one reason or another developers have trouble getting this right.
I find it especially frustrating in all the open world games with a completely liner main story quest since its basically giving me hundreds of options but ONLY ONE correct answer on what to do next.

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Did older RPGs have something good that has disappeared from the modern RPG landscape?

No.

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Original post by kseh For anyone that figures that games back in the early days were so much better than they are today I have 6 words for you... attack attack attack defend defend defend

In my case, it would be
attack attack attack defend Mangar's-Mind-Blade Mangar's-Mind-Blade...

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What old RPGs had over modern ones is that they were the ones blazing new trails. Anything that was in one of the early RPGs was new and exciting. And those days were good. These days, as an older gamer, I find the novelty has worn off of certain features, it's harder to be suprised, and I've already heard a lot of stories.

There's definitely some truth to this, across all game types to be fair. As time goes on, it becomes harder to find something entirely new, when you compare to what went before. It's a bit like pitching a tent in a field - the first one is in the middle of nowhere, the new few can also be a long way from each other, but eventually the field is going to end up densely packed and every single tent is near another.

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And since developers have moved more towards things that seem trendy rather than searching for innovation, I don't expect grand trail blazing elements anymore and just enjoy what's at hand.

And yes, there's pressure from the other side - as developers have learned what sells and what doesn't, they focus more on the features that they know will sell, rather than the risky ones that might be a breakthrough but more likely will fail. This is partly because of development costs, but it's a choice to throw a massive team at a project. Similarly it's a choice to make the models so complex that we can't easily render or create larger worlds. Developers don't have to make those choices. Yet they do, and I expect that is mostly based on commercial pressures.

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Original post by Wavinator Sometimes I feel the major difference between RPGs of today and RPGs of yore is a bit like the comparison some folks make between growing up in the city and growing up in the country-- regimen and structure. I think many RPGs started out like life in the open wilds, without a big brother to tell you every second where to go or what you had to do. Many games had freakin' MASSIVE worlds-- Daggerfall's hundreds of towns, entire continents in Ultima, 200 stars and 800 planets to explore in Starflight. I get a little sad when I see how small modern games are in feel. There's not a world or universe to explore, there's a postage-stamp sized area littered with DO and DON'T signs safely fenced in for our protection. God forbid that we should be frustrated by a puzzle we have to sleep on or an enemy we have to experiment with to finally beat.

Yeah, modern RPGs typically take the easiest and simplest of the old mechanics, and throw them into an elaborately modelled but quite small play area where you're shepherded from place to place - if not physically, then logically via overexuberant quest markers and the like. And yes, we took notes (I treasure my old Ultima notes fondly) and made our own maps. Someone earlier in the thread remarked that the character's skill is giving way to the player's skill - this is true in terms of combat resolution and so on, but in other ways the exploratory side of the game is moving from the player to the software. I agree with what shoyoninja said about perhaps providing tools for a player to do this rather than doing it all automatically.

Things like quest compasses exist for a reason. Case in point, Daggerfall. As soon as you got into a dungeon, actually finding the quest object came down to whether or not you were lucky enough to stumble upon it. Actually finding it was just an exercise in seeing how much you could have your patience taxed before breaking down and cheating. Endlessly wandering around in circles is not fun.

I don't think Oblivion had a particularly graceful way of doing it. Call of Pripyat, though? That just points you to the general area you need to be in and you have to figure out what do from there and it works fine.

In any case, my point is that a lot of stuff players refer to as "dumbing down" were things created in response to valid complaints. I mean, while we're at it, we could complain about how automated quest logs/journal entries dumb down the experience, because it means the game takes notes for you. Except nobody would seriously argue that because there's nothing inherently fun about note taking. Finding out information? Sure, that's fun. Acting on it? Also fun. And the end result of discovery? Totally fun. But actually compiling all that info to work from can get sort of annoying.

Also, the notion that only modern RPGs are handholdy is sort of flawed. Console RPGs from pretty much any era tend to be really handholdy. Even oldschool ones from like the 80s.

You could also argue that oldschool PC RPGs could've benefited from SOME handholding because a lot of time it's less a matter of solving a puzzle or a quest and more a matter of figuring out whatever moon logic the developers were working with/deciding whether or not they were on crack when they programmed the game.

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I agree that in the case of RPGs, the focus should indeed be on the character's skills, not the player's.

See, I totally disagree with that. Games are player centric and should require the player to be good at them. That is, focus on the player's skills. Because the more you focus on the *character's* skills the more passive your playing experience is going to end up being, and passive gameplay isn't really fun unless you have some sort of enormous amount of patience.

I don't. I need to be constantly doing something or I get bored. That's why I don't like linear RPGs. If I only ever have one problem to worry about at a time, my ADHD riddled mind will start wandering -- to other games.