Western-RPGs
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Building a better role-playing game story
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. Getting story right in role-playing games is crucial. Even if narrative is not your primary motivator, it's a key element to the RPG genre. But not all role-playing games have discovered the right formula. Its been my experience that there's no set checklist to ensure a successful story, but I've found that there are key components that can appeal to players with a narrative focus. I'd love to say "follow these pieces of advice and make a great RPG story!" but stories are never quite that simple. Still, I do think that these are good general guidelines for why some RPG stories are forgettable, while others are shine through.
Mars: War Logs brings the resistance back to RPGs
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. I probably wouldn't have noticed Mars: War Logs except for the PR email I received which included a line about how it had been influenced by the French film "Army Of Shadows." This piqued my curiosity for two reasons: first, it seems utterly astonishing to me that a game would advertise itself as being based on a 45-year-old foreign film that was buried for decades due to its politics. Second, after I discovered it via a feature on cult films, I watched it and enjoyed it, and have come to cite it as an excellent example of one of my favorite types of narrative: the resistance story. Role-playing games have a long and storied association with resistance stories. Many of the classic JRPGs of the 1990s began with the premise that an evil empire or corporation was taking over the world (and probably awakening an ancient evil), and only you and your ragtag band of spiky-haired misfits could stop it. Final Fantasy 6's Returners and Final Fantasy 7's Avalanche were two of the most famous resistance groups of their era, but they weren't alone. The Suikoden games, The Secret Of Mana, Wild Arms, and Grandia all had the equivalent of evil empires of their own. It's not limited to that era and type: there are also modern JRPGs like Radiant Historia, as well as classic PC RPGs like Ultima 5, Ultima 7 and The Magic Candle 2.
Revisiting Reckoning: How Kingdoms of Amalur got the single-player MMORPG right
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. Recently, I decided to play Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning in remembrance of its one-year anniversary this past February, knowing I'd have to contend with two things that dominated discussion about the game: the politics and failures behind the 38 Studios disaster and dealing with a game I had been warned was filled with fantasy nonsense names and detailed lore – a model of storytelling I find quite annoying. But when I finally played Reckoning, I was surprised to learn how much I enjoyed it. I had an instant gut reaction to the game's beauty. It reminded me of the best times I'd spent in massively multiplayer role-playing games, and that was totally unexpected. My first character in World of Warcraft, the MMORPG that consumed most of my time with the genre, was a Night Elf starting on the island of Teldrassil. What I remember of that first character's journey wasn't tied to game mechanics, player interaction or even narrative, it was the feel of that starting zone. I remember the lush setting, trees with a slightly exotic, magical tinge, luxurious purples and greens, the seemingly perpetual twilight, the hints of corruption and danger, and the music hinting at all of those things and the history of the Night Elves. Indeed, most of my best experiences while playing WoW solo took place in those verdant, corrupted provinces, with Feralas probably my favorite of the old world. I didn't expect to ever have the same feeling again, but Reckoning delivered.%Gallery-129421%
Fantasy strategy-RPGs and the limits of 'RPG elements'
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. In theory, fantasy strategy games should be my favorite kinds of games. I am certainly a fan of the fantasy genre generally, and role-playing games and strategy games are my favorite game genres. Fantasy strategy games combine all of those elements, so they should be a guaranteed success, right? And yet they're not my favorite games. I enjoy them, certainly, but if I were making a list of my all-time favorites, they wouldn't show up toward the top. Examining the subgenre as a whole makes me realize that combining RPGs and strategy games is part of the problem. Too many good things doesn't necessarily lead to great things. Elemental: War Of Magic was supposed to be the ultimate fantasy strategy game. It was supposed to combine the best of RPGs with the best of strategy games with an impressive fantasy setting. Ultimately it was crushed under the weight of its own ideas and egos, went through a disastrous development cycle and launched as a broken disappointment.
Publish those numbers! Why RPGs must be transparent about their mechanics
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. The debate about what makes a "real" role-playing game flares up from time to time, with articles, comment threads, or message boards torn up about whether a Mass Effect or a Skyrim deserves to be treated as a true RPG. The arguments about these games tend to hinge on them being too action-oriented, or not offering enough customization. Turned on their side slightly, though, I think these arguments reveal a core value of the genre: RPGs are built on transparent, simplified abstractions of complex real-world concepts. How role-playing games have dealt with and continue to deal with transparent abstraction defines the genre in many ways. Most all games abstract some manner of real-world behavior. Press the jump button in a game that allows it, and it'll make your character leap into the air in an animated approximation of how humans jump, but that's usually it – the rest of the jump has more to do with the needs of the game's level design than anything else. Even those aspects that aren't real, like casting magical spells, have consistent in-game rules, which often abstract other concepts, like a mage theoretically chanting magical words in a way irrelevant to the player. What separates RPGs from most other genres in terms of abstraction is the style's origins in pencil-and-paper games. You want to punch an orc? You can punch that orc, but game rules simple enough to work with a couple of die need to exist in order to make that orc-punching workable for a group of people playing a game. Players need to know what the numbers are in order to make informed decisions. So you have things like 'strength statistics,' 'unarmed damage skills,' 'orc hit points,' 'dexterity rolls,' and so on. Shifting to the computer may have allowed these mechanics to be calculated faster as well as potentially more complex. But critically, even though those mechanics could have been masked, RPGs generally kept the numbers transparent and public.
For the love of leveling
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. I gained one thousand seven hundred and twenty-one levels in the last year. Around the end of 2011, fellow game writer and RPG fan Phil Kollar asked his Twitter followers how many levels they thought they'd gained over the course of the year. The idea of calculating my progress seemed fascinating and throughout 2012 I decided to keep track of my earned levels. The levels were earned from a variety of different sources. Some levels came easily: I played two BioWare games, for example, both games have a large casts of characters and 30 or 40 levels to gain. Allies in those games gain levels alongside the protagonist, so if those characters ever made it into my rotation, I counted each level. Some levels were more difficult to earn: the post-30 levels in the immediate aftermath of Star Wars: The Old Republic's launch, when repetition, lack of motivation, and some nasty bugs slowed my progress and eventually drove me away. Some games featured both: In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim my pyromaniac mage torched her way through 15 levels easily, but upgrading to fireballs in the game's odd skill system brought her leveling to a screeching halt.
Waiter, waiter! There's an RPG in my FPS!
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. It would be easy to say that many of today's first-person shooters are more RPG-like than ever before. Between the Borderlands franchise, Dead Island and the recent Far Cry 3, several high-profile FPS games have included quests, experience points, and skill trees. The mix seems like a great match – first-person shooters are built around perspective and interface, whereas role-playing games rely more on mechanics and statistics. Nothing says they can't go together. Indeed, they traditionally have gone together. Many RPGs during the 1980s and into the 1990s used the first-person perspective for dungeons or the entire game, although it was usually tile-based (you moved forward, sideways, or backward one large step at a time). In the early 1990s, there was a race between the shooter Wolfenstein 3D and the RPG Ultima Underworld to become the first free-movement first-person game. As the FPS genre became increasingly popular, deviations from simple shooting became more common, like Strife, a game that used the Doom engine but added non-player characters and branching quest lines involving player choice, or Jedi Knight, which included Force skills to develop. At the end of the 1990s, the superb Deus Ex managed to fuse both role-playing games and first-person shooters into a coherent whole. This wasn't an RPG with shooter bits, nor was it a shooter with RPG elements; it was both genres, in their totality, together at once. This was a neat trick, and one that hasn't really been duplicated, not even by Deus Ex's sequels.
What gives role-playing games their longevity?
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. Ask an RPG fan for a recommendation, and you are perhaps as likely to hear about a game that's a decade old as you would a recent release. That's because role-playing games can stand the test of time. Take a look at GOG.com's best-selling games, and the first eight are all RPGs, with many more filling out the top parts of the list. It would seem that with most other genres, there's an assumption that a newer game is a better game – unless there's some kind of terrible design choice. What makes role-playing games specifically have such long-term value?The strong stories in role-playing games are one major reason for their longevity. Alongside adventure games, RPGs have long been at the forefront of storytelling innovations within the medium. And a story isn't going to become outdated. I may prefer Ultima VII's or Mass Effect 2's interfaces and graphics to Ultima VI and the first Mass Effect, but I find the storytelling more appealing in the chronologically earlier games. Improved technology can't make this obsolete.
What makes a classic RPG? Everything!
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. In the past few weeks, I've noticed a few different sources that have used isometric perspective as an indicator of classic role-playing games. First, GOG.com advertised the new throwback RPG Inquisitor by saying it was "true to the isometric roots of classic PC gaming." Then Obsidian's Project Eternity Kickstarter heralded its isometric perspective regularly.I found this focus on perspective to be a little confusing. Certainly I love Diablo and Fallout and other isometric RPGs, but the genre has such variety in it that focusing single components seems narrow. But what if I was wrong? What if classic RPGs actually are almost all isometric, or turn-based, or story-driven, or open-world? What if there isn't that much variety after all?So I decided to test my theory that classic RPGs come in a variety of flavors. I made a list of the most important and famous western, non-massively multiplayer role-playing games – which spanned 50 titles. Then I looked at the components that usually distinguish RPGs from one another: perspective, combat style, complexity of character development, story importance, whether there are puzzles, geography, and how the game provides the character(s) you control. What I found is that the RPG genre is not easily categorized. What I found was a genre filled of diverse titles.
The glory of Quest For Glory
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. Last week, when GOG.com announced that Quest For Glory was the newest addition to its collection, I was delighted. In fact, I'm not sure that there's a game series that could have induced as much joy. I think some others, like Wizardry or a collection of old SSI games, might have been better and more important, sure. But I have more love for Quest For Glory than those other games. I'm not the only one, either: The Quest For Glory games are great games, yes, but they're also special games.Quest For Glory is a five-title series of adventure/role-playing hybrids, with the first release in 1989, and the last in 1998. They were published by Sierra – a company whose fate was recently detailed to Joystiq by Leisure Suit Larry creator Al Lowe – and used similar interfaces and graphics as other adventures, such as King's Quest or Gabriel Knight, combined with combat systems that varied from game to game.Being a genre hybrid is one of the surest ways to become a beloved game. Panzer General, Deus Ex, and Mass Effect are all crossover hits, thanks in part to combining role-playing with other genres. Quality hybrids manage to feel both fresh conceptually and comfortable to actually play, a winning combination.
Freedom Force: Superhero role-playing done right
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. The Avengers' huge success in its first week of release may represent the pinnacle of the superhero takeover of mainstream culture. Superhero comics have long been comparable to video games' bigger brother, with many of the same criticisms and stereotypes and similar slow paths to respectability. There's always been a great deal of crossover between the two, especially in terms of games based on comics. Most of these were platformers or brawlers, and most, like licensed games generally, were mediocre at best – with a few exceptions.Roleplaying games especially seemed to be a natural fit for superhero games. Both usually have origin stories, over-the-top villainy, straightforward morality and, most importantly, characters overcoming adversity by gaining more strength and greater power, with single characters or small party dynamics. There were a few attempts of varying success, like the simple RPG/adventure hybrid Superhero League Of Hoboken, but it still took until 2002 for a great superhero RPG to be released: Freedom Force.
A Diversity of Roguelikes
This is a weekly column focusing on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. Once upon a time, the "Roguelike" genre was a semi-hidden cache of secrets in gaming. Games like Rogue and NetHack were passed around from floppy to floppy, not sold in stores, not discussed in magazines, and certainly not treated as part of the same tradition as an Ultima or even a Gold Box game. Maybe it's because the genre name is just so stupid. We don't call first-person shooters "Doomlikes" or puzzle games "Tetrislikes." Unfortunately, I don't have a better term for it. Perhaps over the course of describing them in a column we can think of something. Here are the consistent attributes of the genres: it involves a series of randomly generated levels, starting hard and getting progressively more difficult. They're usually stripped-down role-playing games, where you roll a quick character, pick a class, buy a couple items, and then get killed permanently by a slime and have do it again. They're also designed for short play sessions.
