A highly biased article that nonetheless brings some good points and makes a decently accurate prediction of the future of RPGs. While I actually enjoyed the first Mass Effect and am currently enjoying the sequel, I still think that while there’s a lot of things they’ve done surprisingly well, there are also some elements of gameplay and storytelling that leave a lot to be desired.

This is where Mass Effect 2 comes into play. Everything that is wrong with RPGs is gone from ME2. There are no idiotic JRPG tropes or useless level grinding. You never have to keep track of your inventory, or gather tons of loot that will serve no purpose other than to be traded for currency later. The game boils down what an RPG really is: character progression, story, and most importantly, having you play a role.

EVERYTHING that is wrong with RPGs is gone from ME2?

Don’t think this just affects JRPGs. Western RPGs don’t fare any better. While most of them are already rich in character development, they are so weighed down by confusing combat systems and the always-imposing thought that you can break your character at anytime. Trying playing through the original Fallout or Fallout 2 without some sort of character guide so you don’t make a useless build. Or take a look at Arcanum’s character screen. While the game’s story, world, and character progression are excellent, there are about 20+ stats that you can build, all of them vague and confusing. You never know which one to really build or where to invest. It’s overwhelming and is just not fun at times.

Character builds are a BAD thing?

Come on, let’s not get extreme for no good reason. It’s quite obvious that the author of the article has no background in traditional RPG systems. I remember what an excruciating experience building my first Baldur’s Gate character was (at that time I’ve never even heard of D&D), but it was also an important step in getting to know what RPGing is really about. And yes, sometimes building a character from a crap-load of dice rolls *IS* what it’s all about. I’m not saying that it’s necessarily good, but it’s not necessarily bad either.

While it makes no sense for a game built on entirely new universe (like Mass Effect) to include overly complicated character sheets (and, come to think of it, ME1’s character sheet was pretty simple from my point of view, but whatever), it’s only natural for them to appear and play an important part in games based on traditional RPG systems - like Arcanum and the Fallout series.

SO, to conclude: this article is biased, but it DOES present a view that will probably become dominant in the next few years (if it already hasn’t). Mass Effect and its sequel are good but NOT perfect games. ‘Overly complicated’ RPG systems sometimes exist FOR A REASON.

Yes, in this case - evolution equals streamlining. But does that mean that we can just verbally excrete over every single thing that’s ever bugged us in any RPG game and call it ‘not really roleplaying’ or ‘unnecessarry’ or just plain bad game design? HELL NO.

One of the first thing people always talk about when it comes to this topic is the amount of technical expertise you have to come in with. This one should seem obvious. When you talk about the inner workings of a role playing game, you’re looking at a lot of data that has to be organized, computed, crunched, what have you—constantly. You’ll be handling inventories, character statistics, battle calculations, and so on. It can be hard to keep track of, especially when your development team consists of one person. You need to be adept with things like arrays and data structures and all that fun stuff—this should go without saying, but I programmed my first RPGs without these, and it sucked. Hard. Projects like RPGs don’t exactly go by quickly, either. The code you write needs to be functional, annotated, and organized enough so that you can come back to it even a year later and still know exactly what it does. When new game makers start off by saying they want to make their dream RPG, as I did, this is usually the reason why they’re told that they can’t.

To be frank, I’ve never really played an indie RPG. Maybe I should give one a shot.

D&D 4th Edition is out now, Warhammer Roleplay is stronger than ever with a fantastic new system, and there is a new Warhammer 40K RPG, Rogue Tradee, focusing on trading and intergalactic travel. Call of Cthulu is as strong as ever, but Betheseda has shown no signs of releasing another game based on the system. Yet in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you couldn’t move for Forgotten Realms games, or other D&D titles. So what’s happened?

I have fond memories of Baldur’s Gate, the game that introduced to me the concept of tabletop RPGs, however most of the ‘new-generation’ games based on D&D (Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2, Temple of Elemental Evil, DragonShard… basically everything that wasn’t made in the Infinity engine) were just - meh. So, I guess I don’t really miss licenced D&D titles all that much.

The fact that they can’t use the D&D licence has, in a way, removed shackles from BioWare and ‘forced’ them to create wonderful new universes like Dragon Age and Mass Effect, so I’m cool.

Everyone wants to hop on the Halo/Call of Duty/Gears of War/Uncharted/Left 4 Dead money train, and that includes RPG developers (especially when they’re trying to hit absurd sales numbers). And after seeing how successful BioShock, Fallout 3, and Borderlands were, you don’t have to connect many dots to understand why the traditional role-playing genre that we know and love is being cast aside for greener pastures. 

Given the way things are going, I see a bright future for DOSBox.

In a new entry on 1UP’s RPG blog, the author compares Mass Effect 2 to that of a Macintosh in that it’s so “streamlined” (why do I suddenly despise that word?) that players can just roam the galaxy killing aliens and saving humanity without having to “fiddle” with any numbers or statistics.

…

If RPGs keep going in this direction, I hope some developer at least has the sense to add a switch that will enable the display of all the numbers (armor ratings, damage ranges, resistances, etc.) that are being calculated behind the scenes. They can even default it to “off” and require the editing of an INI file or something, I don’t care. Just give me back my numbers.

Hellz yeah. For me, as a concept, PC pwns Mac any day. To be fair, I *am* an obsessive-compulsive masochist.