Role Playing Games

[Spooniest]

...Turn-based combat has now gone out of the Final Fantasy series mainline for the first time.

Thoughts on what this says about RPGs in general?

It would seem that the days of treating it like pen and paper gaming are kind of thought of as 'old hat' at this point. I feel a strong sense of sleepiness when considering replaying the ones that have it. I'm getting old, and menu based combat just plain ... I dunno, I've seen a lot of Fight commands and mid-battle equipment shuffling. I've used a lot of Items and summoned all the Summons and what have you...

...Where does traditional turn-based RGPing go from here? FF doesn't care for it today, and it'll be till the next mainline entry (if any!) till we see whether it goes back to it or not. Each new team just does its own thing, it's true, but perhaps it will swing back slowly, or perhaps quickly?

I mean, they've done the "refs to other FFs as a tribute and look back at FF"...what about a game dedicated to the gameplay styles of those older games, as a sort of "inside joke" throughout the game? I'm thinking of maybe something that has the CTB system of Final Fantasy Tactics, and just plain doesn't try to do any kind of gameplay element in an RPG that hasn't been done before. The focus on such a game would then, by default, fall on presentation and story first and foremost; who cares what I do to kill the monsters? I came here to find out things about a story and be like "awwww sheistenburgers, what happens next," and such....

I lost my train of thought. Where are RPGs these days? Turn-based is out; what's in?

[Pete]

Options are in. Options for everything, with a multitude of possibilities about how to approach every situation. Take Mass Effect for example. Decisions have repercussions, much like in real life.

Most FF games don't give you options that have great magnitude. It's "oh we'll take the left path and the rest of the party goes right." At the end of the day, you backtrack to where the other party went and collect the items you missed.

There's no major decisions where you have to make a gut wrenching decision of which party member gets sent to death, or what species gets eradicated because you did a sidequest in order to try to bang a crewmate.

It's really an ideological difference, where some games want you to appreciate the story for its plot and the overall journey, where others want you to be your own journey. You'll get to the end, but on your terms.

[Spooniest]

So, developing new ways to tell a non-linear story are really all the rage right now, eh?

The problem I have with non-linear storytelling is that it tends to have the effect of genericizing the plot...you can't have a steady "rising action-climax-resolution" curve in such a story, there's almost no way to keep it solid with that much variation possible in the plot, unless the non-linear elements do not affect some over-arching story. But if you do that, then the game becomes a series of vignettes that eventually just get used as color for the A plot...I dunno. How do you even plot such a game?

It would seem that intense experiences are taking precedence over themes or over-arching statements being made by a single story...

I guess?