Posted October 08, 2012
The more RPGs try to present moar options, the harder they fail.
Planescape: Torment - so you can do whatever you want, to, right? Make yourself anew, be a hero, be a villain, anything? Well too bad, the game shoehorns you into atooooning for your siiiiiiins. If you don't want to die, this is not the game for you. Like, seriously, there's the whole multiverse out there, and you're one of the most epic dudes that ever walked the planes. Fight immortal vikings! Bang elf chicks! (Bang elf dudes, too, there's no difference.) Kill a god! Kill the Lich Queen, because why not! Storm Carceri and raze it! Mass-produce Swords of the Planes and stop the Blood War! But noooooo, no matter your alignment, no matter your philosophical persuasion, you must choose death or lose the damn game. It's *extremely* preachy, and it goes against all that talk that belief matters; you try to mess with the inevitability of death, you're DAMNED. Because you're MORTAL, geddit, and every other immortal in your party is also so TORMENTED. Now don't get me wrong, PS:T is a great game and must-play for a multitude of reasons, including but not limited to writing, visuals, characters, rescuing githyanki and modrons from the scrap heap (IMPOSSIBLE!), but the chassis is bad bad bad.
Fallout 1: find the water chip or lose the game. Again, theoretically, you can be anyone, believe in anything, join any faction you want. But if you do not help those assholes who kicked you out to find them a water chip, all alone, instead of, you know, getting their shit together and migrating outside. you LOSE. Why? The Vault population dying of thirst or dispersing in search for supplies makes the mutant army LESS of a threat.
That single-minded focus makes no sense in any roleplaying game that prides itself on freedom of choice.
Add to this double dis-ingenuity of the so-called choices and consequences (where those choices actually exist; don't even get me started on the ohsodeep LINEAR crap forced on the player under the guise of a TOUGH MORAL DECISION). Interactive media has insanely high preaching potential, unrivaled by any non-interactive media, more powerful that REAL LIFE. Because you don't get to clearly see the consequences elsewhere. But in videogames, it's all clear-cut. You do this, you get a happy ending and a mercedes full of cheerleaders. You do that instead, you get screwed for all eternity. You do not get to speculate on what-ifs, it's all hardcoded. And all that pile of wtf is completely arbitrary, depending on what IMPORTANT LIFE LESSON the devs wanted to teach you, or whatever they felt will bring them the most press buzz. They do not draw those outcomes from even a vaguely realistic distribution.
And then there's the opposite fallacy, where every option is just as valid as the next one. Excuse me here princess, but oppressing your people is not a viable economic strategy IRL. If we're going DEEP, REALISTIC and MATURE, not cartoonish, wish-fulfilling and fanwanky, it shouldn't be the "evil" option, it should be a loser's option. Go for megalomaniacal self-aggrandizement, and the game is exponentially more difficult. Promote quackery, and the brainwashed citizens storm your research lab and you're left with sticks and stones against Prof. Zakharov's orbital nukes.
World-destroyers are a staple of RPGs for a good reason: the world is where you keep all of your stuff, every alignment can agree that stopping one should be top priority. That keeps the plotline manageable. But then the dominant arch-story is "how characters of all stripes are saving the world", not "different things that different characters do". They all do the same, it's kind of the point. And if they don't, Q = programmer man-hours per typical gameplay hours explodes exponentially. That's another reason why I'm not convinced by PE's projected 80-hour epic playthrough length: I'd rather finish [TITLE REDACTED] (not an RPG) in an evening and go through the week reeling from the concentrated AWESOME.
Settings. Tabletop fantasy settings are inherently bad (ask me why). CRPGs have an advantage here in that they can claim simulation of wish-fulfillment and exceptionalism on part of the PCs, but CRPG settings that are directly derived from tabletop are ALSO inherently bad.
TL;DR: RPGs fundamentally suck. A lot of them are fun and entertaining, but the platform does not support serious stories and never will.
(I actually planned to make a coherent post about all this, but I'm two weeks late so here goes.)
Planescape: Torment - so you can do whatever you want, to, right? Make yourself anew, be a hero, be a villain, anything? Well too bad, the game shoehorns you into atooooning for your siiiiiiins. If you don't want to die, this is not the game for you. Like, seriously, there's the whole multiverse out there, and you're one of the most epic dudes that ever walked the planes. Fight immortal vikings! Bang elf chicks! (Bang elf dudes, too, there's no difference.) Kill a god! Kill the Lich Queen, because why not! Storm Carceri and raze it! Mass-produce Swords of the Planes and stop the Blood War! But noooooo, no matter your alignment, no matter your philosophical persuasion, you must choose death or lose the damn game. It's *extremely* preachy, and it goes against all that talk that belief matters; you try to mess with the inevitability of death, you're DAMNED. Because you're MORTAL, geddit, and every other immortal in your party is also so TORMENTED. Now don't get me wrong, PS:T is a great game and must-play for a multitude of reasons, including but not limited to writing, visuals, characters, rescuing githyanki and modrons from the scrap heap (IMPOSSIBLE!), but the chassis is bad bad bad.
Fallout 1: find the water chip or lose the game. Again, theoretically, you can be anyone, believe in anything, join any faction you want. But if you do not help those assholes who kicked you out to find them a water chip, all alone, instead of, you know, getting their shit together and migrating outside. you LOSE. Why? The Vault population dying of thirst or dispersing in search for supplies makes the mutant army LESS of a threat.
That single-minded focus makes no sense in any roleplaying game that prides itself on freedom of choice.
Add to this double dis-ingenuity of the so-called choices and consequences (where those choices actually exist; don't even get me started on the ohsodeep LINEAR crap forced on the player under the guise of a TOUGH MORAL DECISION). Interactive media has insanely high preaching potential, unrivaled by any non-interactive media, more powerful that REAL LIFE. Because you don't get to clearly see the consequences elsewhere. But in videogames, it's all clear-cut. You do this, you get a happy ending and a mercedes full of cheerleaders. You do that instead, you get screwed for all eternity. You do not get to speculate on what-ifs, it's all hardcoded. And all that pile of wtf is completely arbitrary, depending on what IMPORTANT LIFE LESSON the devs wanted to teach you, or whatever they felt will bring them the most press buzz. They do not draw those outcomes from even a vaguely realistic distribution.
And then there's the opposite fallacy, where every option is just as valid as the next one. Excuse me here princess, but oppressing your people is not a viable economic strategy IRL. If we're going DEEP, REALISTIC and MATURE, not cartoonish, wish-fulfilling and fanwanky, it shouldn't be the "evil" option, it should be a loser's option. Go for megalomaniacal self-aggrandizement, and the game is exponentially more difficult. Promote quackery, and the brainwashed citizens storm your research lab and you're left with sticks and stones against Prof. Zakharov's orbital nukes.
World-destroyers are a staple of RPGs for a good reason: the world is where you keep all of your stuff, every alignment can agree that stopping one should be top priority. That keeps the plotline manageable. But then the dominant arch-story is "how characters of all stripes are saving the world", not "different things that different characters do". They all do the same, it's kind of the point. And if they don't, Q = programmer man-hours per typical gameplay hours explodes exponentially. That's another reason why I'm not convinced by PE's projected 80-hour epic playthrough length: I'd rather finish [TITLE REDACTED] (not an RPG) in an evening and go through the week reeling from the concentrated AWESOME.
Settings. Tabletop fantasy settings are inherently bad (ask me why). CRPGs have an advantage here in that they can claim simulation of wish-fulfillment and exceptionalism on part of the PCs, but CRPG settings that are directly derived from tabletop are ALSO inherently bad.
TL;DR: RPGs fundamentally suck. A lot of them are fun and entertaining, but the platform does not support serious stories and never will.
(I actually planned to make a coherent post about all this, but I'm two weeks late so here goes.)
