Obsidian: RPG Genre Can’t Evolve Because Players Are “Resistant to Change”

i got an idea.. how about instead of talking about making awesome games.. you do !!
 
It's not that are players are "resistant to change" it's that Obsidian is resistant to risk. Changing things up requires courage and risk. If you don't want to take the risk just STFU about being able to do much more, because the fact is you can't do more if you don't want to risk anything.
 
This is one thing I kind of hate regarding Warframe. I love the game, have hundreds of hours into it, have spent easily over a hundred dollars on it, but hidden stats are very annoying. You get a pop up on the damage you do but you can't pull the data down through a console, you can't figure out how your builds are going, etc... You are mostly guessing. It's still a great game but I don't like the dumbing down of stuff. Add it as an option and hide it from everyone else if you want but pls don't just take it away.
 
LurkerLito said:
It's not that are players are "resistant to change" it's that Obsidian is resistant to risk. Changing things up requires courage and risk. If you don't want to take the risk just STFU about being able to do much more, because the fact is you can't do more if you don't want to risk anything.
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Ya this is a strange statement from them. I mean I understand when you are having a publisher make your game that you can't take many risks because they won't let you. However Obsidian has successfully run Kickstarters in the past for games and indeed that's probably the only reason they are still in business (they got really fucked over financially on New Vegas). Ok well, bring your idea to Kickstarter. Show gamers your vision for a really different RPG, and see if they are willing to go in on it. If they aren't, then you have an argument for players being resistant to change. However if you haven't put the idea out to see if people will take you up on it then how do you know?
 
Ebernanut said:
I respectfully disagree on both counts.

Big choices that effect the overarching story or world are more of a modern addition(a good one I might add) and not confined to RPGs. Traditionally the biggest decisions in an RPG have been in regards to your character with the success of smaller choices dependent on your stats and how well your choices mesh with that. In old P&P RPGs the story was always set and what mattered was the strength and weakness of characters/party and how well their strengths were utilized.

The only way a set PC works in an RPG is if it's a starting point, if you can't change the character your playing a character not a role and I would argue it's not an RPG by definition. The Witcher games are a great example of an established PC that still allows the player to fit it to their play style or change things up; you can focus on combat, signs, alchemy, or some sort of hybrid and those choices change how you play the game.

I would also argue that "role playing" requires us to be able to identify with the character and limited customization makes that less likely; I know I'd have a hard time relating to a militant vegan, anti-vaxxer, hindu\christian\muslim\jewish\buddhist, nazi, ISIS, flat earther, hooker player character(well maybe the last part because who hasn't done something they regret for money).
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Fair point about customization.

Exavior said:
So every Tell-tell game is a RPG?
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Ehhhh... they're too on rails. Sure you get "choices", but it doesn't change the characters or the plot much. You can't even choose where to go or who to talk to, it's like you have no agency in the game.

Wasteland 2 is a better recent example. You can go anywhere shoot anyone in the face, at anytime, and completely derail the plot, if it fits your character. In Telltale games, you rarely get that choice.

Bioware's recent "RPGs" fall into that same rut too. All the dialogue options tend to lead to the same outcome, and the protags are pretty strongly defined.
 
iQuasarLV said:
I would set two groundwork arguments about Obsidian and their "definition" claim.

1. Obsidian is tired of making cookie-cutter RPG fare, and further taking outsourcing jobs from established IPs which further cement their position in the industry is hurting their image.

Think the movie 'The Other Guys' in which Mark Walburg's character yells, "I'm a peacock; you gotta let me fly!" I think Obsidian is just b*** and moaning about the very hole they dug themselves into. After they broke away from Bioware to form their own company, Obsidian accepted the role as 2nd fiddle to said company and take any job thrown their way.

2. Obsidian wants to broaden the accepted definition of what an RPG is and means when the term is used.

From the comments here I feel a lot of people want to coin a game an RPG because it has RPG elements. Yet, the core is an adventure game or shooter. I honestly say the closest a game came to losing its RPG tag in an effort to "blend" elements was Mass Effect 1. Sorry, ME2 and 3 were adventure games with RPG elements.

Games like Horizon:ZD, Zelda, Tell Tale: Name a Game, etc that focus on static story A~Z, exploration, or choose-your-own-adventure story telling are adventure games. Hell it's there is the story telling identification. An RPG such as some have mentioned above focus on character growth not only through narrative but through bonding with the observer through attachment of character. This is achieved by customization. In the earliest days it was YES pen-and-paper DnD style that eventually evolved into video games.

Movies and music do this bonding through emotional manipulation and philosophical agreement. Given video game's form of interactive nature it has to be more than just emotional or philosophical. It breaks down to human nature and how we judge outcomes of effort. Movies and music = zero effort, so internalize the reward. Video games = minimal to total effort, so externalize the reward.

All adventure games = choose your own adventure
Assume a role, choose plot path, pick up whatever is thrown at your for inventory, follow story to the end.

RPG games = open story telling and character growth
Create a role to insert into the story world, react to story and plot developments to further expand the development of the overarching story,

Sorry, I could go on forever and type out a dissertation on this subject. Even GDC has had entire panels devoted to this very topic. Work calls and I have to earn a paycheck now. Keep the discussion going though, it is nice to see different viewpoints on the topic.
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Don't really have anything to add but Obisidan was never part of Bioware. Obsidian is made up of old Black Isle folks. Black Isle was a developer owned by Interplay. Both studios co-developed the Baldur's Gate games, Black Isle also licensed Bioware's Infinity Engine for the Icewind Dale games and Planscape.
 
Just quit your bitchin' and go talk to whomever you need to at Bethesda for a license to do a new Fallout. That's how you make your money, and then you can go take whatever risks you want.
 
Nolan7689 said:
Alpha Protocol, which most people praised the dialogue and choices but lament the actual gameplay.
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That's essentially the problem people have with his sentiment. It's like when the Mass Effect (I think) dev bitched about how having to have combat in the game was getting in the way of "muh story". It's not that a RPG with different gameplay is impossible, it's that the product we're sold will just have gameplay take a back seat. Those sorts of devs should just go write books or films.
 
It's a role playing game, defining the story is only part of what makes an RPG and RPG, defining the character is what matters, it generally separates my character from other people's characters, numbers like hit points are ussually the most characteristic way to modify a character. Also generally speaking it's alot easier to change a character as a variable than it is to change the entire games story to match player choices. The bottom line is RPGs are about making choices and dealing with the consequences of those choice whether permanent or semi-permanant. RPGs evolving further should be about giving more choices not less and making those choices meaningful but in the end it will always be in down to some kind of numbers as ever if you don't have hit points you would still have a health pool of some kind that in some way would be represented by numbers, Obsidian may be the remanents of Black Isle but in this case they are wrong evolution means complication by nature RPGs become nothing without quantifiable choices.
 
Exavior said:
At what point is a game no longer an RPG game?

This is like bitching that FPS games could be so much more but people think FPS game should be first person and involve shooting things. Think of how better that games could be if they were 3rd person tactical games that involved more stealth and less shooting.

If you remove stats and hit points from a game then what you have isn't an RPG game, it is an adventure game.
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I am pretty much on the same lines of thought, he mentions Skyrim with the Elder Scrolls series and while the game is good it still boils down to you got less than Morrowind and Oblivion. Rolsten said it best " players want the same game in a sequel, with less suck" In a way he was right a sequel should always be about more not less, Skyrim left you with less. A better example was Diablo 3 we see how that turned out, they took the godfather of Arpgs and turned it into Goldenaxe with a Diablo skin, companies are being stupid there is zero reason to reinvent the wheel and there is zero reason to redefine a game series as something other than what it is.
 
I choose what to shoot first and I don't take turns in DooM. So its an RTS now lol
 
Bethesda is an example how not to do an rpg. Not a model for emulating. *shudder*
 
Huh? What is the issue here?
Make the game you want just don't call it an RPG then. It's not like Quantic Dream calls their games RPGs. And they're fine. When I look at an RPG I expect things like hit points and stats.
 
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