First I would like to clarify what the acronym means. RPG stands for Role Playing Game. This means that you are playing with an identity, your are another person. Todays RPG have lost much of what ould be called a personal identity. In world of warcraft the only thing unique is you name. So I ask, what makes this an RPG?

The true elements that make up an RPG has been lost in the games we make today, the bond between you and your character has faded away. Somewhere along the line Leveling, item hunting, and skill trees has become all that RPGs stand for. The genre of RPG seems to have fallen into darkness.

Alas, the tide is now turning. The RPGs now being created is becoming more and more fluid and personal, maybe in a few years the true meaning of an RPG will be regained.

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Many dream, few try.

I'd strongly dispute the theory that RPG's have fallen into darkness. WoW people can create their own character and roleplay as that character, creating a past, interests and so on. The same applies to any well made RPG. I would in fact say that it's not the games, but the gamers that have gone down in quality.

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Boo.

I wouldn't say that RPGs have gone down in quality as much as shifted from what the accronym stands for. In WoW you can indeed create your own character but the VERY limited variations of faces makes it not worth it. You say you can create your own past but i have seen no tools in WoW that enables you to do this. Perhaps you mean that you can immagine it in your head, which would have no effect on the game itself.

What i meant with my post is that RPGs today are very stiff and doesn't feel alive one bit. Feel free to think otherwise though.

I have to say that I have never while playing felt like I was the character i was playing. I wasn't Saromis the Hunter I was just going about killing monsters and gaining lvl. I dont think that any MMORPG can do that today (though maybe a singelplayer RPG could).  Though I have had a look at  Age Of Conan and i must say it is a step forward for the MMO industry.

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Many dream, few try.

Net-Ninja:

First I would like to clarify what the acronym means. RPG stands for Role Playing Game. This means that you are playing with an identity, your are another person. Todays RPG have lost much of what ould be called a personal identity. In world of warcraft the only thing unique is you name. So I ask, what makes this an RPG?

The exact things you state above? Excuse my ignorance but I guess that in WoW like in most MMORPG you do play as a certain character/race?

Net-Ninja:

The true elements that make up an RPG has been lost in the games we make today, the bond between you and your character has faded away. Somewhere along the line Leveling, item hunting, and skill trees has become all that RPGs stand for. The genre of RPG seems to have fallen into darkness.

Actually the true meaning of what makes an RPG has never been reached by any PC RPG I've played so far, you are always limited in your choices of character/background and most important of story.

Net-Ninja:

Alas, the tide is now turning. The RPGs now being created is becoming more and more fluid and personal, maybe in a few years the true meaning of an RPG will be regained.

As far as PC gaming is concerned that would have to read will be gained. :)

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"I don't care if the audience watches my movies, long as my producer doesn't lose money."
-Jean-Luc Goddard

Have you played Morrowind or Oblivion? They are the closest I have come to a true RPG, well together with Neverwinter nights. While the elderscrolls give you almost limmitless choises the character customisation of NWN is also remarkable.

I just think that RPGs should be more like Fable...

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Many dream, few try.

Computer RPG's can never on any level compete with a face to face pen & paper RPG. THe computer, no matter how clever it is, is still just a computer and can not cope with the random thoughts of your average player...

As for current computer RPG's WoW is a classic example of you get out of it what you put into it. If all you care about is how your character looks, then you  aren't roleplaying. Try going to one of the proper WoW RP realms and find a group...

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You know when you've been Profo'd

/agrees with prof

For a start, NWN was incredibly limited, you had a choice of 7 heads, 2 bodies and then whatever armour you wanted to wear, which would ultimately always be the same one depending on the class you chose. Sure, you had a large amount of classes and combinations available to you, but I never found one that was exactly what I wanted, that let me play exactly the way I wanted to play or that I didn't want to change my mind about later but I was locked in and could at best multiclass. Your interaction with the world is practically on rails. Hit it, open it, talk to it. That's it. Dialog is limited to , , Inbetweeny and the results rarely if ever differ.

I'd agree that Oblivion comes far closer to RPG heaven, the stats are influenced for the most part by what you do, not what you say you want to do. Yes you can customise how you look to a fairly large degree but the key is that you can approach any problem any way you like. Stealth, magic, diplomacy, trick the poor *** into falling off a cliff. It's limited only by your imagination. Unfortunately, if you haven't got one then you won't enjoy it (which is why so many people didn't :) ) because the game demands that you find your own place in the world, it doesn't hand you one.

MMOs though.... that's a different story. If you play an MMO to grind levels and get the bestest drops, you're wasting your time. I don't know about WoW but on CoH, apart from the awesome amount of costumes on offer, there's not a lot of customisation to be done. 1 race - human. 5 archetypes. A handful of power set combinations. The missions are repetitive both in theme and look, but that's not the point. You're a hero. You can write your own backstory, origin, super-team name, symbol etc and then try to live that character - the fact that you can choose your own origin type (mutant, magical, tech etc) to explain how you got your powers that has no real bearing on the game proper really underlines that. The first time you're in the hollows getting wailed on, and you can see a team of L30s arguing in character about whether they should get involved, devolving into an all-out catfight because one hero is banging another's mrs on the side, you realise what you're missing when you're grinding out the levels for the sake of XP.

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Yup. To state the obvious, roleplaying games are all about the roleplaying. And frankly, the onscreen representation of that has little to do with roleplaying - hell, in proper P&P roleplaying games, you're represented as a sheet of paper with pencil scribbles all over it. But that's not your character - your character is what you do in the game, how you decide to play the person you're being. What defines RPGing is what you do, the decisions you make, your interactions, your personality and so on, and I guess in something like WoW you've got great scope for playing a specific role of your choosing. It's entirely up to you if you actually role-play or not, though.

Nunberry covers Oblivion very well - it's pretty much the best pure-roleplaying game for PC on the grounds it gives you the freedom to roleplay rather than being an on-rails story. And as he rightly points out, this also means you need the imagination to be able to roleplay an interesting character, otherwise you'll probably end up with a bit of a dull character.

Of course, at the other end of the scale, you've got older PC RPGs like NWN, KotOR and Baldurs Gate, which are basically on-rails stories with a few very limited Role-Playing elements in them. But you've got little more control over roleplaying your actual character than you would have in one of those old find-your-fate books.

Personally, I think PC RPGs are closer to being role-playing games than ever before, to be honest. In the best of them, you've got more freedom than ever before to play a role that's very specific to you and your own imagination, and far less to do with a pre-designed role crammed down your gullet by the game creators, which they hope you will identify with. In fact, up until recently where more freedom of your own character personality rather than just character look has came in, a better name for PC RPGs might have been Role-Following Games....

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I miss the old pen & paper games...

Sat round a table, drinking beer and eating pizza, winding the GM up as much as possible by trying out things he hadn't planned for or being the GM yourself and being more crafty than the players whilst maintaining a level of fun for one and all...

PC RPG's will never replace that, atleast not for a while...

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You know when you've been Profo'd

Still play Call of Cthulhu from time to time. Last year I spent months planning a dazzlingly clever and intricate 13 part story that was literally the best stuff I've ever written in my life. We're talking a serious amount of work here - about 20 pages per part on average, with maps etc. Two weeks into it, they decide they don't want to save the world at all because all sounds little bit scary, and decide to get on the next Trans-Atlantic liner and go on holiday to Cornwal instead. So I have to wing the next 5 weeks until I can bring it back to something else far worse I wrote years ago...

Bastards.

 

EDIT - for the record, the world still ended for the reasons I'd written in the original story, it's just that because they hadn't followed that path, they had absolutely no idea why all the bad stuff happened or why they were suddenly inexplicably dead. Now, that's cause and effect of choice in Role-Playing Games

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I can highly recomend Deadlands, a wild west game set in an alternative reality where the civil war did not end...

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You know when you've been Profo'd

Not my choice mate - after last years sabotage I'm refusing to run it this Autumn. Not that I'm bitter or anything...

Well, that's a complete lie, actually - I am very bitter indeed. I found a draft copy of the scene-setting intro adventure for tha campaign...

http://TMoCT.co.uk/misc/Mythos 101draft.doc

and there were another 12 episodes round about that size. And it only begins to get going in the last part of episode 2 - by which point they'd buggered off to Blighty for a jaunt around the cream tea shops and whatnot. Months of writing and research! Wasted! All of it! Grr etc....

You'd never get that level of emotional response from playing a PC RPG, mind you

 

EDIT - Although I should poin out something about the fly-leaf inscription in the appendicies of all that - I think it's in Hebrew (I don't really remember, if I'm being honest) and no longer have any idea what it says. the content of it is entirely co-incidental - it's just I knew that none of the people playing would recognise the alphabet in question...

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Customization is not what MMORPGs needs. Think about Dungeons & Dragons, you could be a fighter, cleric, thief, wizard, paladin. If you shelled out money for more books, you could be a psionisist, bard, monk etc. The customization was all in the head because the stats were pretty cookie cutter for each class.

Of PC/console games, MMOs offer the closest thing to sit down role-playing (and some well crafted NWN modules). When you find players who actually role-play there is a lot of fun to be had. Ask anyone in my supergroup when they're looking for my alien who is happily rooting around in the dumpsters of Paragon City looking for a snack. Roleplaying on MMOs is what you make of it. Sometimes it's hard to find the role-players, but if you peruse the forums, they will eventually stand out.

I miss sit down gaming but my group is spread out across the country now. What we do to satisfy that craving is use a chat room to play our sit down games. There's a level of trust involved when it comes to stats, but we've all been friends for 10+ years so it's really not a big issue. It's also helpful if you can find a chat room that has a dice rolling function (AOL's do).

Why the hell do you make pointless threads, what is wrong with you man? how the hell does this go under development, besides PM has already clarified that fable is going to be a true RPG. If this is even about fable 2...   (You're dumb)

This is in the Game Design and Development sub-forum. Not the Fable 2 Sub-forum. Probably because it discusses elements of Game Design. The Sub-Forum title is meant to be a hint in these matters - it's partly how you can tell the entire of the Lionhead boards aren't dedicated to Fable 2 and Fable 2 alone

And please try not to be so rude in your posts.

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Err, but Zohaib's kind of got a point. Ninja's basically giving opinions in the forum section that people are supposed to suggest ideas for the games Lionhead makes.

No, this section is "A non technical forum to discuss game ideas and development issues."  There's nothing saying it has to be specific to Lionhead games, much like, say, Advanced Programming board isn't  there to only to discuss the Advanced Programming of Lionhead Games, and the Games Industry board isn't there just to discuss Lionhead Games in the games industry. In fact, if you've got a point specific to Fable, The Movies, B&W etc, you're probably better putting it in the relevant sub-forum for that game, and they can be found HERE under the subsection called, oddly enough, Games.

This thread, on the other hand, has quite correctly been made under the sub-forum called Development, the main page of which can be found HERE. See the difference? One is about specific games with an Off Topic section for constructive discussion relating to futher afield ideas, the other is a general discussion board for things not necessarily relating to Lionhead games.

But, TBH, this Zohaib Khairi person has joined the forums, gone immediately and directly to a pretty obscure corner of the boards, only made two posts and both of them are directly aimed at one specific person in a really rather rude tone of writing. Now, I'm not saying they're a Multi-Account, but if it was a multi, I'd personally be worried about what happens when it eventually gets linked to their main account by the Mod and Admin team...

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maybe you should stop crying, t says "game design and development" so far all of this topics just show him ranting about rpg's and things but he doesn't give any input so i'm not being rude.

 

What do you mean multi-account? if you're talking about jazi we share the same IP we're brothers we live in the same house.

Again with the being rude

This is a serious and genuine attempt to offer you some helpful advice - while your rude comments along the lines of "maybe you should stop crying" and "you're dumb" don't particularly bother me - I stopped being a 12 year old schoolkid twenty-three years ago - most people will take it as being deliberately antagonistic. If that's the sort of reputation you wish to cultivate then so be it, but people will not like you for it.

 

Apart from that, Net-Ninja, has raised some points about RPG gaming on pc's and consoles, which is quite relevant to game design and development, and that has sparked discussion on the subject. They have discussed things rationally and presented their ideas calmly (without 'ranting', I may add),  even in the face of criticism, and in other threads have made some points and helpful suggestions in relevant forums. If you have a problem with his posts, please take the matter up with a site administrator or moderator and they will take appropriate action, rather than being rude to members apparently attempting to promote reasonable discussion.

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Just to add my own 1 pence. I think the RPG tittle is being used on too many games, these days. I remember S.T.A.L.K.E.R labled its self a FPSRPG. But i didn't see any RPG. Bioshock was going to do the same, but didn't in the end. The last real RPG i played was Oblivion.

I suppose arguably BioSock does give some scope for RPGing - it's fairly open ended in how you approach things and there's a level of being able to do things in a distinctive fashion of your own devising. Looking at how I've played it so far, I notice that without realising I've developed a strange aversion to using guns and melee weapons, for example - I've customised my character using plasmids and tonics (much as you would in a standard RPG model when leveling abilities) in such a way that I can now spend most of my time turning the enemies against eachother and also so I hack and adjust the environment so it turns levels into elaborate traps for them. Essentially, I've slipped into role of someone who doesn't like killing people, but is prepared for them to go to their deaths through their own actions. Plasmids and Tonics offer the player choice in how their character approaches the world - It's pretty limited RPGing much like Deus Ex had, but it's there.

I can't really comment on STALKER, though - I understand it had a big freeform element and some character customisation was available, but I got sick of trying to get the sodding thing to work on my PC at the settings I wanted, so I gave up on it after less than a day

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I've never thought of an RPG like that. You have opened my eyes. I always think of RPG's as setting up your own character, with your own name ect. But you have opened my eyes with the whole Bioshock thing.

It depends on what you think of as 'role-playing' really. I'm an old pen & paper RPG'er, so from my point of view the important thing about Role-Playing Games is playing a role. You basically act out  the character according to how you've decided this person talks, behaves and reacts in the world,  improvise what they'd do in any given situation - and all the character generation stuff is secondary. They define your abilities, certainly, but no twho the character is. They have some effect on what you're capable of doing, but all the stats and scores and rules and mechanics and so forth are just there to fairly moderate the bits that can't just be role-played - for example having role-played that your character wishes to fly a plane into a storm, the game mechanics are then used to see ability as a pilot enough to get them safely through on that occasion. But the important thing is who that character is and what they believe about the world, not what their stats say.

It's much harder to do this in a PC RPG. The technology just isn't there to give players that level of choice or conversational/behavioural interaction, so the focus of PC RPGs is usually more on the mechanics and abilities than any actual role-playing. Quite often you're not free to play the role of your choice - you're made to follow a role that's pre-written in the game with a few crude branches. And quite often the actual  role-playing element in PC RPGs extends to 'you are a thief' or 'you are a fighter' and that's about it.

But I'd argue that role-playing is always about giving the player more choice over what they can do with a world.

 

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Game RPGs are only really similar to tabletop RPGs in their mechanics.

The playing for atmosphere and story feel is gone from computer game RPGs, as you don't have the freedoms necessary. (It's slightly returned in MMORPGs, as you can roleplay basically anywhere you can talk with people – this forum being an example)

But I know what people mean when they talk of RPGs in a computer game context, and that they can not be productively compared. (Basically the same for sport games and real sports) And that's fair enough for me.

matneee:

I can't really comment on STALKER, though - I understand it had a big freeform element and some character customisation was available, but I got sick of trying to get the sodding thing to work on my PC at the settings I wanted, so I gave up on it after less than a day

I don't even consider Stalker an RPG in the video game sense, let alone in the tabletop sense.

It's a nice, fun, game-mechanically elaborate shooter. But having an inventory, weight limits, stat-increasing artifacts and shops does not make it an RPG.
There is no levelling system of any kind, which really is the defining element for a video game RPG.

I think that's part of my problem with PC RPCs - to use the sports sim analogy again, much like a football game does al the footballing for you, a PC RPG does all the role-playing for you - it becomes more role-following.

The last two Elder Scrolls games, for example, worked for me because you had more freedom to do what you wanted yourself, a degree of freedom to express a role. Not, obviously, through character interaction and conversation, but more in your specific outlook on the world and how you approach it. Because there was simply more choice available to the player. There's not many games where you can play both as a murdering *** and a complete pacifist if you so desire Conversely, some people didn't like this level of freedom and found it too unfocused. But I'd be repeating a lot of what Nunberry said if I went into that.  This is, of course, personal preference, but I much prefer the freedom afforded by games like that than something such Final Fantasy or Baldurs Gate even, where you're essentially stuck on-rails going from one fight to the next. Both series have produced undeniably great games, but there's just no role-playing in there - someone else is doing it all for you. You know that inevitably your character will make a decision whereby he takes another inevitable story step towards the next big fight, and you have no say in the matter at all.

Maybe we need to rename PC RPGs as RPG sims?

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