Now that the fi rst big wave of crowdfunded titles is landing JOHN GILLOOLY looks at the past, present and future of the RPG.
In his missive to Kickstarter backers announcing the release of Wasteland 2, Inxile’s Brian Fargo made a point of the fact that without crowdfunding the game would never have been made. This is in spite of the fact that the original title is widely held as one of the seminal early RPGs, inspiring a generation of developers and acting as a huge influence on many games made in the 25 years since its release.
As you’ll see in our review of the game this month, the game has been a huge hit in the PCPP offices, bringing with it a flood of nostalgia for a genre many of us grew up with, but one whose pickings have become incredibly slim in recent years. It isn’t so much that the RPG has gone away, but it has morphed and splintered into all kinds of different things, its influence felt across all kinds of genres. But along the way the big, meaty isometric epic adventures have become thin on the ground.
Once upon a time the PC was home to a huge number of such titles. Whether it was the seemingly endless number of titles based upon Dungeons and Dragons, Ultima in its many different forms or those based upon Steve Jackson’s S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system gamers were usually spoiled for choice when it came to such titles.
Despite this, the traditional RPG designed peaked with a flurry of iconic series like Baldur’s Gate and Fallout from companies like Bioware, Black Isle and Interplay, peaked in the form of Troika’s Arcanum of Magika Obscura, then almost disappeared, seemingly at the hands of a combination of the push towards fancier 3D graphics and the generally dark environment surrounding the PC and piracy.
At the same time the rise of the console brought with it a new generation of RPG, ones that focused more on simpler tales and action than the deep, diverging storylines that marked the previous era. This peaked with franchises like Bioware’s Mass Effect, a thoroughly enjoyable epic tale, but one that very much felt like RPG-lite than the hefty adventures of yore.
Don’t get us wrong, there have been some excellent titles that emerged over that period - The Witcher, Knights of the Old Republic, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, Dragon Age and Fallout: New Vegas in particular stand out. But they have been thin on the ground, and few titles have managed the complexity and nuanced storytelling, the personal adventures, the feeling of actual influence on the world that was once par for the course.
Talk to those in the industry and the reason for this almost universally comes down to cost. Publishers are naturally risk averse. Even when the most simple, inear story is involved production costs have spiralled over the years due to an expectation that games need to have rendered cutscenes, full voiceovers and highly detailed models and environments. This makes RPGs a somewhat terrifying thing to get behind, because all of the costs increase exponentially.
The pricetag of voiceovers alone can potentially spiral to tens or hundreds of times that of a linear title. This is because a great RPG has many branches to its story, so many little bits and pieces that may never be seen by the majority of players. This is relatively cheap to make when it is just text on the screen, but doesn’t look so good when cost/benefit analysis is being done on hiring voice actors.
This leads to a limitation of scope when it comes to designing such games, and virtually eliminates the edge cases that make the traditional CRPG such a wonderfully textured experience. Play the original Fallout, for example, with a character sporting unusually low intelligence and your experience is vastly different from a character with higher int. Or run through Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines as a member of the insane Malkavian Clan and it at times feels like a whole different game as you do things like converse with Street Signs.
The really frustrating thing about all of this is that franchises like The Elder Scrolls have proven that you don’t need such production budgets and voiceovers for every circumstance to deliver a fantastic game. But that is unfortunately the exception, not the rule.
DAMN THOSE CONSOLES!
These costs have spiralled upwards with the release of the next generation console platforms, which looked like it was going to drive the final nail into the coffin of the RPG, a fate that has now been avoided thanks to the rise of crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, Indiegogo and the like.
Crowdfunding has allowed developers to regain control of the development process itself. As we are seeing with deals made between Inxile and Deep Silver over physical copies of Wasteland 2, and Obsidian and Paradox Interactive over Pillars of Eternity the publishers are cut out of the loop altogether, rather they are being returned to the traditional role of actually publishing and distributing the finished game.
By doing so developers have finally been able to return to the strengths of the RPG. Games like Wasteland 2 and Divinity: Original Sin are text heavy, deep affairs, where things can change remarkably based upon your actions. Both of these titles used turn based combat, rather than trying to shoehorn a real time action game over the top of the RPG experience, which allows the developers to play to their strengths even more.
Of course this doesn’t mean that we are suddenly going to see a flood of such titles. Despite the fact that developers have found a solution to the funding side of the equation, these games are still highly complex affairs, and ones that take years to build. What we are currently seeing though is the beachhead for more such games in the future, the proof that the model works.
In reality there are still only a handful of such games that have been funded so far, part of the first big spike in crowdfunded games. Since that spike it seems that both consumers and developers have been adopting a wait and see approach to the whole concept. Consumers appear to be doing so because they want to see proof that the pledges they make result in the games they want, and developers appear to be waiting to ride that wave of confidence. We will see over the next year or so whether there will be a second bubble.
But surprisingly continued crowdfunding successes may not actually be needed for the continued revival of the RPG. If titles like Divinity: Original Sin, Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity and Torment: Numenara are commercially successful they will do two significant things for the genre. Firstly, they will further enable the development houses to operate independant of the publishing system, and secondly it will demonstrate to publishers that getting behind traditional, isometric, PC only RPGs can actually be a financially viable endeavour without the spiralling budgets needed for voicing and cutscenes.
While the genre certainly isn’t out of the woods quite yet, it is looking a lot healthier than it has in many, many years. Between modestly budgeted titles like the current crowdfunded crop, and a few high stakes AAA titles like The Witcher 3 and Dragon Age: Inquisition on the horizon the future is looking very bright indeed for the RPG.