10-30-2012, 03:13 PM
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#1119
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http://www.joystiq.com/2012/10/29/ki...ditional-rpgs/
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Quote:
Kickstarting (and not Greenlighting) traditional RPGs
The rise of indie gaming has been fantastic for platformers, good for adventures and strategy games, great for puzzlers, but not exactly a windfall for role-playing games. There are certainly some out there, but RPGs don't have the level of variety that the genres I listed above do.
We can see how this manifests thanks to the rise of crowdsourced, publicized successes and failures. Two of these have garnered a great deal of attention so far this year: Kickstarter (and other similar ventures, like Indiegogo) and Steam's Greenlight. The former has had plenty of press, and this writer is certainly excited to see the end results of Wasteland 2 and Project Eternity, as well as Shaker (when it comes back) and the currently-campaigning pseudo-sequel to the Quest For Glory games, Hero U: Rogue To Redemption. But these high-profile funding campaigns are notable because of their profile – they're RPGs made by people with expertise and previous success in the genre. It's rare (but certainly not unheard of) to see this kind of single-player, epic, story-driven quest outside of blockbuster games.
A glance at Steam's Greenlight starts to reveal why. Of the roughly 30 games that have been "greenlit" so far, 13 claim to be RPGs. I decided to take a look at them in order to see what sort of RPGs were winning the crowd over. For a traditional RPG fan, the results are not encouraging – only one of the games actually seems to be about making a character or party, then going on a quest.
The biggest immediate problem with the "RPG" category is that most of the games aren't really RPGs by most conventional definitions of the term. Half of them are complex builder simulation/strategy/adventure/maybe-RPG? sorts of games, clearly inspired by Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress. I'm fond of this genre of game, to be fair, but a lot of it seems like Steam users really, really want Minecraft on the platform, and anything that looks likely to scratch that itch gets votes. And given the difficulty in assigning conventional genres to these sandbox/open world-style games, RPG seems as good or bad a category as any to assign them to.
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Thought I would share this here.
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Last edited by cindersphere; 10-30-2012 at 04:29 PM..
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