On Twitter Ron is collecting “quest based RPG games that get beyond just kill, fetch, escort”:
That’s an interesting question - especially if we focus on RPGs wit a “strong narrative”: The RPGs I have played in the last few month were very weak at narrative/story (and/or adventure game elements).
Does someone has some more interesting suggestions? I liked Invisible, Inc. (Ok, it’s more a strategy game, but 2D with a lot of role playing elements).
Imagine a game by Ron Gilbert, but like Ultima 7. Open world, with magic-based puzzles (like Loom or Thaumistry or Spellbreaker).
(magic-based puzzles are meant to defeat the problem of the open world, where you can buy any common object. So there can’t be puzzles that are solvable with common objects).
Suppose he also finds a way to make them online multiplayer…
There is always Cyberpunk Scifi (Shadowrun), Postapocalyptic Scifi (Wastelands), Alien Invaders Scifi (XCOM), Lovecraftian Horror (Call Of Cthulhu), Vampire Horror (Masquerade) and many others. Maybe there are even Western and Pirate RPGs, who knows?
Recently, I read that multiplayer games were getting more and more popular, while single-player games were becoming a niche. Honestly, I already observed such a trend about 15 years ago (see Counter Strike or Diablo). It’s a pity for point & click fans, of course.
Though, it would be interesting to see a multiplayer RPG from Terrible Toybox with a strong narrative, a lot of complex puzzles and maybe with a 2D design similar to The Cave.
Interesting! It’s great how light effects can enhance the look of such old-school 2D graphics. Though, it would have been more immersive, if the scale of the character and the level was a bit bigger and more detailed, just like in The Cave, but not necessarily 3D.
By the way, voices would have been nice, too. I understand that voices for the dialogs are expensive, but, at least groaning or laughter would make the character appear more realistically.
I’m currently playing The Witcher 3 and I thought it had some fairly unorthodox quests, though I guess on closer examination the “kill, fetch, escort, and collect” aspects were just better disguised . Perhaps it did so by focusing more on the people involved than the quest objective itself, which often took a back seat in favour of exceptional characters and circumstances.
In my opinion, games that deviate from this quaternity usually turn out to be RPGs in name only. Unrest is one such “narrative RPG” I played not so long ago.
And, for purely technical limitations, my own small contribution to the world of video games falls into the same category.
Aaargh … what’s with the multiplayer? Well, the rest sounded too good to be true at any rate, given that Richard Garriott couldn’t repeat the feat either :-(. The next best contender to possibly get the sandbox aspect right (keeping my fingers crossed) might be the up and coming Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
But as far as puzzles are concerned, it seems modern RPGs have little room for those. So kill, fetch, escort and collect it is.
If having to do some combat is the price I have to pay to be able to play more Gilbert puzzles and characters, it’s ok for me. If combat is not too prominent. Otherwise it would become repetitive.
I mean, RPG can be a way to “disguise” an adventure game, embedding it in a format that sells, while preserving the spirit of adventure games.
Suppose for example the game is 1/4 combat, 1/4 exploration, and 1/2 adventure game (puzzles, story, dialogs). Could be a good compromise to play another Gilbert game.
And having magic-based puzzles is another compromise that I think is acceptable. (because in the town shops you could buy, say, a battery charger, so you could not have puzzles like “use battery with fence”)
