There is no such thing as an RPG. Really. It might be a surprise to the legions of RPG fans around the world, but what can I say? I’m sorry. I share your pain.
Of course I am not talking about that nerdy table top game, which these computer games are trying unsuccessfully to emulate. There is also the Rocket Propelled Grenade, which as we all know, is a sort of device that allows you to jump up to great heights, ignoring a significant amount of gravity, providing you are healthy enough. I am not talking about that either. At least not directly.
I am talking about RPGs as video games. The sort of game in which you kill dramatis personae, get their stuff, level up, and kill even more powerful dramatis personae or failing that exterminate the wild life until you can. Apparently I am talking about those, since I understand this is the definition of RPG if you look at things through video game style goggles.
Originally, RPG as a table top game is a pretty interesting cooperative affair which pretends to be competitive sometimes. There are two asymmetrical teams: One team is made up of several players, the other usually has only one person in it: The Game Master or shortly GM. Players try to overcome the challenges presented to them by the GM. However, rather than being the goal of the game, this is just a tool to achieve the objective, the objective being telling a story interactively.
It’s a bit akin to musical duels by folk musicians or a poetry showdown. It requires creativity from both sides. What the GM is doing is creating conflicts without being able to determine how the main characters would respond to or resolve them. The main characters, created and played by players, in return, resolve the conflict in their own way, creating for the GM a new problem about the story. This process of back and forth slowly builds a story in a very unique and organic kind of way. It’s a very peaceful, new, hippie game. No wonder it was invented at the beginning of the 70s.
When it works well, it is a fascinating process. However, most of the time it doesn’t work well. The main reason for this is that the game, due to its nature, requires creative and intelligent people on both teams. This is a prerequisite not easily fulfilled in any kind of social activity.
Computers are stupid. They may act as if they were clever, but they are not. The term Artificial Intelligence is misleading. There is no intelligence involved there. It is just a bunch of scripts trying to give the impression of being intelligent. The computer can neither play an RPG with you nor assist you in playing an RPG with other people, because to do that, you’d need a computer you can code with your thoughts alone, or failing that, a real AI. Some kind of artificial device which is capable of thinking creatively. I’m not saying this can never be done. I just think there is still some time until we invent Skynet.
As computer games, RPGs are basically trying to do the same thing: Telling a story with the help of the players. But because we aren’t dealing with an intelligent person in real time, the scope is limited to pre-programmed stuff. You end up playing a computer game and being told a story you cannot really influence much. Pretty much all computer games fall into this category.
It doesn’t matter how dumb the story is. There is no difference between Eye of the Beholder from Westwood and Project X from Team 17 in that regard. In the former you have descent into the earth to find a bad guy ruling an army of fanatics and in the latter your task is—and I am quoting from the game box—“to penetrate deep into the planet Ryxx, destroy the aliens’ base, and escape with your ship intact.” Both games let you choose from a variety of classes with different abilities for your on screen alter ego. In both games enemies killed by you drop some kind of power ups in form of blue bubbles or points. In both games you have the option to arm yourself differently depending on your play style. One game is called RPG, the other is called shoot’em up. In both games you play the role of a character.
In regards to video games, an RPG is similar to the games we used to call Movie Games in the past. That is saying that RPG is not a genre but rather an amalgam of genres, a series of different games connected to form a cohesive whole in order to tell a story. The difference between classic games like Pool of the Radiance and Pirates! is that one of them tries to or claims to be like a table top RPG game, and the other doesn’t.
Of course today many complex games are made up of a variety of game mechanics. But these game mechanics themselves are smaller games. A typical RPG makes use of the point and click adventure’s dialog system for character interaction, an experience based power up system based on table top RPGs, item based puzzles of—again—adventure games, and some sort of other system to resolve the combat.
Naturally one of the most important and relatively easy to develop parts of those games are combat. It is much harder to make a realistic dialog tree or a game which would invent random story elements based on the pacing, the characters and past player choices etc. Therefore in most RPGs, combat is the defining and dominating aspect.
Essentially most of Fallout is a tactical combat game not that much different from X-Com. The Elder Scrolls series is a variation of the first person shooter. Diablo is a beat’em up fundamentally not much different from Final Fight. Sure there are other game mechanics there to make them more complicated, more cerebral or more storytelling-friendly if you will, but at heart all these games are called RPGs just because there are experience points and some exploration are involved.
The problem here is that most western developers don’t really get that there is no such genre as RPG. They are blindly flailing around trying to do what table top RPGs are doing. In contrast, the eastern developers, who probably have seen the RPG genre for the first time as a video game, are busy perfecting the twisted vision they got from western developers.
There is no RPG. The sooner you realize that, the cleaner your design will be. It is stupid to praise Bioware for its innovative and original “action combat system” on Mass Effect. It will make you sound like a moron and will twist your vision of design. Because that “action combat system” is neither innovative nor original. The shocking reality is that Mass Effect is a third person shooter. And that’s it. Plain and simple.
In their wisdom, Bioware decided they have made enough real time strategy games now and they should switch you another mechanic for combat. Because as you can easily realize the dominant mechanic of Infinity Engine games such as Baldur’s Gate was real time strategy, as it was beat’em up with Jade Empire. Now it’s third person shooter for Mass Effect.
It is nothing revolutionary. In fact it’s probably not the best third person shooter around, if you compare it to heavy weights such as Gears of War and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. But such is the way of those amalgam games. Mass Effect is more than the sum of its parts, thanks to the storytelling parts and the character progress mechanics which complement the third person shooter parts of the game.
As previously mentioned, an RPG is a genre made up of several different games. The way to make a good RPG goes through making all these individual games good. Each little part of the RPG should ideally be good enough to be a game worth releasing by itself. If the game itself is not fun, it becomes an obstacle in the way of the story.
If there is any praise Bioware should receive for their flawed but relatively nice Mass Effect, it should be for realizing the nature of RPGs.
Let’s hope others, too, will realize this fact soon.