In an interview with AusGamers, eccentric and passionately charged designer, Ken Rolston, laments on where he thinks modern RPGs failed.
"Let’s talk in the abstract about the worst thing that ever happened to role-playing games: recorded audio for dialogue," he told AusGamers. "I happen to believe that was the death of my joy. Because that limits... that causes production things... the content has to be nailed down at a certain point..."
The rest of the lengthy interview also goes into detail about his stance on RPGs, their limitations and more.
Why do game studios keep imploding?
Dysfunction is baked into the video game production process, as it currently exists. The big-budget games industry is dominated by a few large companies, the publishers. Like book publishers, they are responsible for distributing and marketing games (much but not all of this is entirely digital now, but most of the publishers established themselves when game distribution meant getting physical discs and cartridges on retail store shelves). Games are actually made by studios, which are generally either owned directly by the publishers or independent. Making big-budget video games takes an enormous amount of highly specialized labor. It is possible for one person to make a game, and even for that game to be a hit, but the biggest, most profitable games released each year are nearly always made by enormous teams of people, working directly or indirectly for those publishers.
Create their own studio ala Activision but never forget where they came from ala Activision
Unions breed garbage product no matter what’s being made. Passion and drive to make awesome stuff goes out the window and it’s replaced by laziness, seniority over skill, office politics and all around horseshit. As a welder of 23 years, I’ve seen it first hand, over and over again.
I’d say there’s a time and a place for unions. If work conditions have gotten so bad because the company is run by tyrants, unions will help.
But, on the contrary, I work for one of those rare companies that is better for the employee than a union is. Family owned, we purchased a new facility in Jersey and the workers voted the union out based on the offer (pay, hours, benefits, etc). Now we have UNION scabs, hired by the union, to protest against us at various locations.
DomiNations, and Rise of Nations developer Big Huge Games has been the victim of a cyber attack. It's the latest in a string of similar attacks.
Do you remember the good old days, when video games put fast hack-and-slashing combat sequences and extensive levelling systems first and a deep narrative with memorable characters second? BigHuge Games certainly banked on gamers holding some kind of nostalgia for those titles of yore with their fantasy RPG Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning.
This is hilarious that i would see an article after I went and re-bought the game and playing it all week! I love the QTEs in this game its satisfying, the combat is fluid where you can switch from weapons to magic so easily, the weapons, armor, quests, character customizations, lore, world, voice acting, are all great this game has almost everything you'd need and want from an RPG!
I really wish there was going to be a KoAR 2!
"Ken: Reckoning has got the best combat in an RPG and it’s the best pacing of any combat in an RPG -- the best theatre. And what I hope to do is... I always felt that RPGs are kind of slow paced and it’s kind of an artifact of the table-top, to the turn-based level, to the pretty good movement, but not very good combat of modern third-person games.
So what I’m hoping is, that by having good combat -- which is exciting and satisfying -- we will increase the pace of gameplay in some way, and the mean-spirited expectations of the users so that they will start insisting that we have faster-paced games -- which, personally, I just want to play faster-paced role-playing games. "
I really hope this is truth. I feel so many RPGs have terrible movement and terrible combat. Even The Witcher 2 tired me after two hours because the movement & combat system was really, really bad.
So far the videos of this game make it look like Fable. Sure, the combat is flashy, but flashy doesn't equal deep. They've also very awkwardly dodged questions about whether the world is on rails like Fable.
It's not on-rails at all, and is very open-world. It also has a very deep character creation, abilities and skills system.
It's also actually nothing like Fable