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Thread: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
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2022-09-13, 05:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
Meaningless or not, that's how the word's been used for the last...decade? Two? Words mean what society says they do, not what we think they should
Really now? I'll give you combat, romances, and multiple endings. In particular the sheer variety of ways they allow you to approach any particular combat is amazing. It's an absolutely fantastic game. But the story reads like it was written by a writer for the Scooby-Doo show, and while the characters are all extremely interesting concepts, most of them are about as fleshed out as a skeleton. They're completely silent for the vast majority of the game. Larian is a fantastic game designer, but not much of a writer. It's fine for Divinity because the series treats itself like a comedy most of the time and you're not supposed to take the story seriously, but it certainly doesn't deserve any praise.
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2022-09-13, 05:59 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
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2022-09-13, 06:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
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2022-09-13, 06:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
I was just having a discussion about game genres yesterday, where I pointed out that in Telltale games, the only thing you do is roleplay... But they don't fit any definition of 'RPG' I've heard. Something's wrong here.
The last game in the RPG genre where I was able to come up with a character concept and keep all my decisions in character was New Vegas, and it was also pretty close to being the first game to give me that opportunity."I don't approve of society, so I try not to participate in it."
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Avatar of Karl the human by Bradakhan
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2022-09-13, 06:36 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2020
Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
I think what people historically called "RPG" should be renamed "Adventure-RPG", and we just abandon the plain RPG to anything that has level up element.
an Adventure-RPG is a game where the primary gameplay loop is not necessarily linked to combat. otherwise, it's an Action-RPG.
JRPGs are not Adventure-RPG. Fallout 1 and 2 were Adventure-RPGs.
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2022-09-13, 07:16 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2007
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2022-09-13, 07:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2008
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
Unfortunately for you, it cannot be wrong about this. Language is essentially widespread consensus among people that certain sets of sounds (or shapes representing sounds, when in written form) have certain meanings. If most people who speak a language use a word to mean one thing, they are correct by definition, because others who speak that language will understand their use of the word. The only way you could hope to change that is to simply try to convince enough people to start using it differently that your preferred use becomes widespread, which, well, good luck trying to force something like that.
Languages evolve and change, and words often end up meaning something very different over time from what they did in the past. Its the nature of the beast.Last edited by Zevox; 2022-09-13 at 07:35 PM.
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"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." -C.S. Lewis
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2022-09-13, 07:56 PM (ISO 8601)
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2022-09-13, 08:36 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
That doesn't make it less dumb. "literally" doesn't mean "literally" anymore, society has lost my respect for any of its "unchangeable nature of the world we live in" aspects. screw those aspects! they're what keeps making things horrible! we should stop pretending as if they're something positive in disguise.
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2022-09-13, 08:46 PM (ISO 8601)
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2022-09-13, 08:56 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
Without language, we'd have no good means to communicate with others - possibly no means to think in the abstract ways we can, even. Language is massive, fundamental good thing for humanity.
That it changes and evolves as it does is neither good nor bad, it's simply fundental to how it works at all. You can complain all you want about individual instances you personally dislike, but you almost certainly will never be able to undo them, and definitely cannot prevent the process from happening again. You may as well try to stop time.Toph Pony avatar by Dirtytabs. Thanks!
"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." -C.S. Lewis
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2022-09-13, 09:47 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
I fully acknowledge the factual reality of the situation.
I just don't feel need to follow the scripted emotional expected reaction of just shrugging it off, because no matter what the reality, I like my definition better, because it makes more sense than a decayed half-definition to vague to work anymore.
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2022-09-13, 10:17 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2016
Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
The problem is that it makes it quite literally (literally literally, not figuratively literally) impossible to hold a meaningful conversation if one person rejects the meaning of language everyone else is using.
It's sort of like going to Mexico and getting mad when everyone there doesn't speak English. I guess it's fine if you speak your own language, but it's odd to inject yourself into conversations where people are discussing a subject in the language everyone else speaks with "well in my lingo it doesn't work that way".
At a certain point you're going to have to "shrug it off", because you're not going to make everybody else accept your unique definition of a word. This leaves you with the only (reasonable) options being to either use the definition everyone else uses to keep participating, or bow out because your personal language makes it impossible to contribute.
That is, to my knowledge, the reasoning behind why the forum has a rule against speaking foreign languages or "typing incoherently". The post may be insightful but if it's not in a language others understand, it's not useful.Last edited by Rynjin; 2022-09-13 at 10:19 PM.
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2022-09-13, 10:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
Yeah but look at how annoying it is that you have to clarify the meaning of literally there, its stupid!
roleplaying game no longer actually means roleplaying, which is stupider! Its not 1:1 anymore, and that ticks me off to no end! instead its saying one thing and expecting people to know your talking about a completely different thing just because its popular. roleplaying referring to a leveling system is just so wrong and unrelated! its claiming understanding while being harder, less clear and more byzantine to understand, because things no longer refer to things they refer to, but rather something that is tangential to it! and apparently the only option is acceptance so we can't understand anything! Its so dumb!Last edited by Lord Raziere; 2022-09-13 at 10:36 PM.
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2022-09-13, 10:40 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2016
Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
I did that as a joke, I wouldn't read too much into it lol. Context makes it clear whether the use of literally is hyperbole (an accepted linguistic use for pretty much any adjective), verbal irony (ditto), or straight language; admittedly less clear in text.
The thing I don't really understand is what is this era of games that you consider "real roleplaying games"? Like what games, exactly, qualify?
Because to my knowledge for the most part RPG has pretty much always been a mechanical definition ("it plays like the D&D ruleset") and not anything else. Video games, especially early video games, are too constrained by the limitations of software to be "true" roleplaying games, and always have been. Thus, RPG meaning something MUCH different in video games than in tabletop.
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2022-09-13, 10:46 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh now I realize this is the part where you inevitably drag me down into exposing how my view is a narrow limited viewpoint within a snapshot of time and turn my empowering anger into nothing but depression and bitterness. thanks a lot, you've already made your point, I'm discussing this no longer.Last edited by Lord Raziere; 2022-09-13 at 10:47 PM.
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2022-09-13, 11:41 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
Then you're consigning yourself to turning into the "old man yelling at clouds" type of person when it comes to matters of language. Personally, that seems like all it will do is cause you grief to me, but it's your choice I suppose. Just don't be surprised if people you interact with don't take kindly to you complaining about such things.
Toph Pony avatar by Dirtytabs. Thanks!
"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." -C.S. Lewis
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2022-09-14, 01:56 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
I guess actors "play a role".
And I guess when your GM railroads the entire campaign, it's still, technically speaking, a session of D&D.
But I think both of us would agree that it's not a particularly good session of D&D. It may have been a great story and overall enjoyable experience, but it's a poor example of what we expect when we join a hypothetical D&D table, IMHO.
Kinda like getting served delicious tacos when you ordered pizza?
my strongest example of a "good" video-game RPG is a bit controversial... I'm talking about KotOR 2.
It's notorious for being an unfinished product, and as such it's hard to argue about what was developers' the "true" vision.
But I can list specific aspects that hooked me and explain why I think they represent "good" opportunities for role-play.
While yes, the "main" story is linear, many characters (not only the player's crew) have their own individual stories, some with multiple endings.
Now, you don't always have your entire crew with you. You have to choose which characters' stories you're going to develop and when. You may also choose to not visit some non-crew characters.
Once the story progressed, you could have missed some opportunities with some characters.
In effect, "character scenes" become almost like a resource for the player. You can "trade" opportunities for scenes with significant consequences, in a similar way as you can "trade" the opportunity to learn a new feat for upgrading an existing one.
However, in case of "character scenes", what you get isn't an optimised "build", but an "optimised" story, so to speak.
TL;DR how you play the game has lasting impact on the narrative, and the how part isn't merely about choosing specific items or skills, but actions that choose to do (or not to do), more importantly: actions that aren't mandated by the story.
Thinking about it, iirc STALKER had a hidden system that determined your ending based on "how" you play... but I'm not too familiar with the details on that.
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2022-09-14, 02:24 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
It's not the lack of the RP in Telltale games. It's the lack of a G. The Telltale style tends to be billed as Interactive Fiction rather than as an RPG because, well... A couple of very easy often optional QTEs does not a game make. Telltale has much more in common with visual novel design than it does with any sort of real video game. If anything, I'd class them as fully animated visual novels, or interactive movies. Like the FMV games of my childhood, really, just a lot bigger and better done.
Something akin to Telltale with more mechanics to it could be an RPG, for sure. In fact... I think that's pretty much what Alpha Protocol was, honestly. And for all that it was a buggy imbalanced mess of a game, in classic Obsidian fashion it's probably still one of my favorite RPGs ever. Played through it three times, got a near completely different experience all three times.
Nope, sadly. They might have hoped to implement one at some point, but no STALKER game has ever had any such system. The ending of the first game, Shadow of Chernobyl, was either 'choose your own death' if you didn't do some investigating and dig up a few MacGuffins, or 'Pick from three endings in a conversation with The Big Important Thing at the end of the game' if you did. Clear Sky only had one 'real' ending, with a few scenes along the way that detailed what happened to the factions you could have picked as you played the game, but all three were totally binary.
I suppose Call of Pripyat technically had such a system, in that it was functionally an epilogue that detailed the fate of all the NPCs you interacted with over the course of the game, but it was really just about what outcomes you picked during the 'quests'. Very simple and straightforward, straight out of Fallout. Did you help the Bandits take over Yantar? Ending A. Help the Independents take out the Bandits? B. Neither? C. Repeat for the 10ish things in the epilogue, roll credits.Avatar by the wonderful SubLimePie. Former avatar by Andraste.
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2022-09-14, 02:36 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
Yeah I like Kotor 2 as well man. its kind of sad that it either gets dislike for being unfinished or gets dislike because some people don't like Kreia. personally I liked that scene when you give a beggar some credits and it plays out badly no matter what you pick because thats just the culture and conditions of Nar Shadda, you doing one good deed doesn't magically change it for the better and thats a good roleplaying moment because its properly placing the PC in the context of the world: they're just one person and they have to grapple with the fact that Nar Shadda is bigger than them, and thus that the action they take is important not for consequentialist reasons but because it is good or right to them, and that giving a beggar 5 credits was good even if they lose it right after.
that moment is more meaningful as roleplay than something like the entire story of Tales of Symphonia, because thats just a story, I'm not the protagonist in anyway, I don't contribute anything to that tale in reality, because if I went on youtube, looked up something like "tales of symphonia the movie" you'd get the whole stories cutscenes without any of the gameplay and still get a good experience. I did just that for Xenoblade Chronicles 3, just watched a video of its cutscenes with no gameplay involved and it told its story well enough that I didn't feel I missed anything. the gameplay was completely irrelevant to the story. its a story game sure, but its not really roleplaying even though its an rpg, because roleplaying doesn't happen in those cutscenes where all the story takes place, its just a movie cut up so that you have endure a long treks of a pointless kill-loot cycle in between parts of it. if you can cut the game part out of the story, you haven't made a game conducive to roleplaying even if its an "rpg", because your just watching a poorly-paced movie with kill-loot breaks.
but I can't do the same for Kotor 2, because there are multiple play throughs and ways you can do that game, the dialogue choices and puzzles and actions and such and so on are therefore actually important to experiencing the story how you want to do it. many times there different ways to achieve the same thing and thus you can't do the same thing because each playthrough isn't the same and thus can be different with a different character you make. like you said, how you play the game has a lasting impact on it, which can't be said for something that doesn't offer that.
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2022-09-14, 02:56 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
Ah, yes... I only remember being very confused after getting the bad end as a wee teen and never touching it again.
And the cheeky breeky, of course
I guess Dark Souls tries to do what I described with how you don't have to interact with certain characters, but on the flip side it doesn't have much in the sense of story, or even "scenes" in general...
Also, I just remembered Mount & Blade, which "allows" you to make your own story by being a sandbox in the first place. This comes at the cost of there being no characters... (only named persons with little progression, if any at all)
Someone already mentioned Crusader Kings 3. I am aware of it, and it does basically all the things I'm looking for. All that's keeping me away from it is the pricing policy
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2022-09-14, 03:13 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2019
Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
As much as I love the Baldur's gate series (and I have the dozens of playthroughs to prove it. I've probably played through it at least every other year or so since my early teens and I'm now in my late thirties), I think this is overstating the amount of choice. Yes, there is a lot of (usually very well written) dialogue but its impact on what happens is limited at best and most quests are fairly linear. Don't get me wrong, there are certainly more choices than some games and the games are fantastic in general, but it is also rather limited in some ways.
Last edited by Batcathat; 2022-09-14 at 03:18 AM.
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2022-09-14, 03:16 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
Yeah Dark souls is.....weird, from a roleplaying perspective. there is a lot of choice in terms of gear and build, it leaves a lot open to how your character thinks about all that they do and such because protag's silent, so there is a lot to fill in, but there isn't really anything to encourage it either? like there is just enough lore and characters to not be flavorless, the environments and such do have a story behind them they just aren't told outright to you and the only resolution is killing them all because your past the point where anything can be done except restarting the cycle of ages basically.
like in Elden Ring I picked the thief class, and I roleplayed as a bandit from like Caelid with a cockney british accent, so she went about everything real pragmatically when going through the Lands Between, was both sad and triumphant when she killed Radahn because that was her leader once and he truly tried to protect Caelid as best he could and went all the way to the Haligtree to get revenge on Malenia, was happy to see Patches, did her best to save the girl-lizard, things like that. it was a lot of empty space filled by roleplaying, but I didn't really need to roleplay.
like thinking about it, I'd say something like Dark Souls or Elden Ring is roleplay-neutral or mostly roleplay-neutral. you don't have to roleplay and fill in the blanks, but you can do if you want, unlike Xenoblade 3 which can you can cut out the gameplay to treat it as a movie and thus not roleplay at all, or Kotor 2 which actively encourages roleplaying.
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2022-09-14, 05:18 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
The STALKER 1 fake/bad endings actually were based on your situation at the end, but that situation depended on how you had played previously. For example, whether you had accumulated lots of money without using it, and that's something you had to do all along the game. If you had less than X money, a good reputation, and hadn't killed faction leaders, then it was another ending. Other endings depending on your reputation, amount of money, and the number of living or dead leaders. It's interesting that these endings were all about the personality and wishes of the character.
Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955
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2022-09-14, 12:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
But my response was to your critique of what constitutes roleplaying. You're forgetting my first statement was that RPGs have the character development mechanics, like attribute points and leveling up. To be an RPG, you have to combine the roleplay with the game elements that are common to the genre.
Halo has none of that.Last edited by KillianHawkeye; 2022-09-14 at 12:57 PM.
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2022-09-14, 02:00 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
I think a good reference is found in this video:
A good RPG happens when the player can make choices in defining their character mechanically that give them different approaches to solving problems that extend beyond "which colour fireball do you shoot them with".
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2022-09-14, 03:33 PM (ISO 8601)
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2022-09-14, 05:29 PM (ISO 8601)
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2022-09-14, 09:01 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
Dishonoured and Thief are interesting.
They probably give the player the best in terms of mechanical choices as to how you can go about solving a problem, but I dare say that the end result is more or less the same regardless.
I haven't played Dishonoured 2, so maybe I'm missing out. But I have this impression that most choices you make in that matter mechanics-wise, more so than story-wise.
Which isn't a bad thing, by any means. That's what the game is going for, obviously.
I think Prey, the more recent one, was kinda like that too?
And Undertale...
Yes, Dishonoured is the Undertale of stealth games.
And Betehsda's Prey is the Undertale of Bioshock games.
PS: personal insider joke here. I consider Bethesda's Prey to be a (spiritual) sequel to the Bioshock series, because the gameplay and setting are basically identical to Bioshock, just with a "space" skin on it.
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2022-09-14, 09:25 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2014
Re: Video Gaming Role Play Woes
Dishonored does have different outcomes, based on how ruthless you are. As does Prey. They are both absolutely tremendous games and well worth your time if you want a solid immersive sim.
And if you think Prey is Space Bioshock, you should investigate System Shock 2. It IS Prey, just with a different coat of paint and way more horror.Last edited by NRSASD; 2022-09-14 at 09:26 PM.