RPG Genre Fucked Up

The RPG Genre is Fucked Up

Article written by -K on 5/21/09
Last edited on 5/21/09

The term ‘role playing game’ comes from the games that have you create your own fictional persona. Together with other participants you create a story, mostly done in either the live-action form or with a board game and a dice that determines how actions unfold. And while I have no experience with any of these forms, this is what I consider to be real role playing: you actually acting as a persona and contributing to the story. This is pretty much the opposite of what CRPGs (computer role playing games) offer today.

I don’t want to spend much time with history lessons, but the earliest CRPGs were made by college kids, and some were really an innovation. ASCII games like Dungeon and Rogue really invented new gameplay elements like party-based adventures and having to feed your character. And those games were created in the seventies! To me, that’s quite an accomplishment. A couple of years later (’82) the first console RPG was made by an American developer, it was called Dragonstomper. This is where the creators of Dragon Quest got their inspiration from, and so the (in my opinion abominable) JRPG genre was born.

What’s my gripe with the CRPGs that are made today? Well, first off, the JRPG just bores me to death. I’ve played ChronoTrigger and I loved it; I really enjoyed the story and the music, and the battle system… well, it was turn-based, but you could combine attacks, that made it exciting enough at the time. This was my first JRPG and nearly every other JRPG that followed did nothing new enough with the battle system to make it exciting to me. But what annoys me the most is that these games aren’t role playing games, in any way. All you do is wheel your party from one location to the other and you listen in on their conversation. There is no interactive storytelling whatsoever. It’s pretty much like watching anime with turn-based combat, and the most boring type of turn-based combat while we’re at it; you just stand there and choose which attack you want to perform, but let’s not get into that too much. JRPGs have nothing to do with ‘acting as a persona and contributing to the story’.

So the term ‘RPG’ in gaming is actually faulty. Many action games claim to have RPG elements, but with that they refer to their leveling system. That is in no way role playing, it’s just a system that’s been used in the D&D-like board games which carried over in CRPGs. It was something that could be created in ASCII games, so they did, but it has nothing to do with the storytelling itself. I mean, you can level up Wolverine in the X-Men Origins: Wolverine game, but it has nothing to do with role playing.

‘But this game is an RPG! You play the role of…’ Bullshit. In Gears of War we play the role of Marcus Fenix, nobody calls that an RPG. ‘Yeah, but you can determine your own style of fighting.’ So if I only use a shotgun in Gears you’d call it role playing? There has to be some level of acting as a persona and contributing to the story. Sure, in Wolverine we can choose whether we want to increase his health or his damage dealing, but really, it’s an action game with a leveling system, nothing more.

What do I consider a good CRPG? Fallout 1 and 2 (they’re two separate parts, but it’s essentially one big story) are good examples. They offer you freedom, actions and consequences, all with great motivation. You are free to do all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, but beware the repercussions. This created a way to contribute to the story.

In the original Fallout games I’ve killed all kinds of living beings, including children. Sometimes I earned money by killing, sometimes people wanted to blast me away for it. I’ve made money of cannibalism. I fucked women to get what I want. I even had sex with a sixteen year old and got married to her because her dad caught me and forced me to the altar with a shotgun. I made promises to people and stabbed them all in the back, allowing me to get filthy fucking rich in the process. I made and sold drugs, and even used it to temporarily up my strength, and became addicted after a couple of uses too much. I had philosophical discussions with mortal enemies, and the list goes on and on. It even contained homosexuality, something a lot of so called RPGs avoid like the plague. At the end you could even join the ‘bad guy’. Now THAT is contributing to the story.

Also, in Fallout 1 and 2, you couldn’t experience everything with one playthrough. Makes sense, because you’re acting as a persona, and you have limits. You can’t be an amazing sniper, doctor, technician and thief at the same time. Who you created and what you did had consequences, forcing you to think before you start pressing buttons like a twitching idiot.

Modern day CRPGs like Mass Effect and Fallout 3 pale in comparison to Black Isle’s masterpiece. I thoroughly enjoyed Mass Effect for the combat, the epic story and the dialogue system, but when it boils down to it, everything consists of black and white choices. Fallout 3 is even less of an RPG: there’s no real dialogue. It’s just you asking people’s names, jobs and things like that. These are monologues, periodically interrupted by the player. And the choices are even more black and white than Mass Effect, but there’s no reasoning behind them. You can blow up Megaton and you receive a little money for it, but what does it do to you? You’re not hated for it by other people, there are no consequences other than the town being gone, so why would you do it? With my first character I had already slaughtered the entire town with a baseball bat and a 10MM pistol the before I even met this quest giver.

Let’s take some other examples. The Diablo series. I love Diablo and its sequel, but I don’t consider them to be RPGs. They’re purely action based games with a linear storyline (an epic one at that), because all you do is fight off monsters with premade classes, you’re not acting as a persona and you’re not contributing to the story. Awesome games that I still enjoy to this very day, but not RPGs in my book.

Fable 2 attempts to create a world in which the player can leave his marks, but it falls flat on its face most of the time. It gives you choices but no consequences, and that makes them hollow and meaningless. You can marry some brain famished broad who looks exactly like that other hot blonde across the street, but what does it change? It changes the fact that you’re married. The responses towards you won’t differ a bit. And you can buy all the houses and wreck the economy, but in reality there’s only a statistic displayed somewhere that tells you the economy is wrecked. But even worse: you can slaughter the Bowerstone Market, be feared by all, and simply fiddle around with sock puppets and belch to make the villagers forget the entire ordeal. So what does it matter if I kill this bitch? She’ll respawn sometime soon and I can easily make amends.

MMORPGs are possibly a grey area for me. If people go online and role play, that would be pretty much role playing by the book. Though as a player you could only really contribute to the story and be part of it if you imagine it. So the game provides a world for you and your friends to trot about in and it gives you things to do, but you would have to make up the story by yourself, much like the pen and paper RPGs. For most players, that’s a bridge too far.

For me, the list of true RPGs is quite short. Nearly any game involving Tim Cain or a studio he used to be part of (Black Isle and Troika Games). Obsidian Entertainment is looking to be a very promising developer within this genre, especially with their upcoming title Alpha Protocol. And the new Fallout installment will be developed by them and Josh Sawyer, known from Icewind Dale 2, a designer who wasn’t brought into the world by a mother who clearly drank during her pregnancy, like Todd Howard.

In short: the acronym RPG is tossed around too easily if you ask me. Hardly any game has a high level of role playing like the first two Fallout games, and that’s sad because this level of interactivity could boost the gaming industry as a whole. It’ll cause some controversy if it allows players to do ‘horrible’ things (see Mass Effect and Fuxx News), but it’ll make the freedom to experience it even sweeter.