Seriously what happened to the good old rpgs? Baldur's gate 2, morrowind etc? It seems nowdays the companies only cared for money. It is obvious that the TES games are getting shallower in terms of content. Of course, the graphics are getting better but what about the quests, features, character personalities, little things(e.g. more random conversations and lesser 'papa says i wont see roggvir anymore, but he wont tell me why not').

Dont get me wrong, i dont want to start an argument. I love the TES series and just about any other good rpgs, but it seems every new sequel an rpg sequel is made worse and worse.

Take a look:
-dragon age origins, one of my favourite games, the character personalities(e.g. decisions) and story is something skyrim should learn. But what happened to dragon age 2...
-Elder scrolls series. I played morrowind to skyrim only, but i can say morrowind is better than skyrim because of all the small things in the game. Its feature is also highly developed. Skyrim seemed rushed and there is a huge lack of choices, but still it is a great game, but not what i had expected.
-And not to mention what happened in mass effect 3....

The point is, has anyone actually REALISED that these games are getting shallower and shallower???? Is money really that important to those companies(who obviously, not all the time listen to their customers e.g. points at Nexon)

Well, in a world that has an attention span that only extends as far as 140 characters, what do you expect?

Is it really the industries fault, or the consumer base who keeps buying it? Its very hypocritical to say things are getting bad, then turn around and buy their games. Most people have the mentality that "Maybe this one will be better", so who is really the stupid one?

You answered your own question. Yes it's all about money nowadays.

mass effect 3 was an abomination, and I'm not talking just about the ending.

Well, EA bought BioWare, so there's your answer to DA and ME. (Incidentally, I wrote an article about the http://j-u-i-c-e.hubpages.com/_esforum/hub/art-and-integrity-mass-effect-3-controversy if you're a fan of the franchise. That's totally OT, but you mentioned it, so you have no one to blame but yourself. )

It's not just RPGs that are suffering. The survival horror genre has also been devoured by the action genre. The developers of Resident Evil 6 pretty much stated that it wasn't going to be a survival horror game because there is no market for it. Bear in mind that the term 'survival horror' was coined to describe the first RE. That is equivalent to Bethesda publicly stating that the next Elder Scrolls is not going to be a RPG but a straight-up action game.

The big studios are trying to duplicate Hollywood action blockbusters, simple as that. We're in the Michael Bay era of gaming. Your options are to go fund a Kickstarter or get used to it. Enjoy.

And, yes, the consumers are as much to blame for it as the developers. Most people just don't like trying anything outside of their comfort zone. For the vast majority of people, any game outside of an action blockbuster or Wii bowling is outside the comfort zone. AAA games are incredibly expensive to make. You're welcome to do the math, but I assure you, there are no mistakes in this arithmetic.

Did it continue down the same slope of derp that ME2 started on?

If you had been around here when Morrowind was released you would have heard Daggerfall fans say the same thing about Morrowind. Morrowind was nothing but a shallow "action game" with all the deep roleplaying elements removed to appeal to the brainless masses, dumbed down to appeal to XBox users, it had nothing to offer but shiny graphics, ect, ect, ect.

This kind of argument never ends. Curmudgeonism never goes away. It was always better in "the old days." Me, I just play the games.

Were humans its what we do haha

In the old days when graphics were abysmal developers would spend more time on the world and the story. Today, we can make beautiful pieces of art in video games but if you want a full 3D environment that stretches out for miles and miles it's going to take a long time to develop, which means a lot of people working and a lot of money being spent. So the game gets trimmed to make room for better graphics.

Most people today won't watch a movie if it's silent or even if it has sound but is still black and white. It's the same with video games. If it isn't top of the line visually a lot of people simply won't play it.

It was emotionally manipulative and cheap. They kill a kid (not really a spoiler, was in the promo material) minutes after you see him to try and make you feel sad.

It doesn't really work though, because it's really obvious that they wrote the character then killed him off for that exact purpose, which makes one feel cheated.

It's clear that the developers themselves have simply lost their love for these poor orphaned franchises. There's simply no inspiration.

The only real hope for innovation these days is coming from developing markets. Mount and Blade and STALKER are great examples.

My main gripe is the lack of choice - run on the railrouad route we'll give you some options but they end up leading to the same conclusion. DA2 does not exist in my books - a travesty of a sequel.

I've heard this same argument (shallowness, streamlining) applied to Morrowind, Oblivion and now Skyrim. Yeah, compared to what daggerfall did, morrowind was a much more smaller and focused game. And lets not forget that Elder Scrolls I had the entire continent of Tamriel (including Skyrim) available for play! But that version of tamriel was procedurally generated and frankly boring. I would rather have a realistically built world like Skyrim instead of some hugely ambitious game that fails to deliver in every way. What people sometimes don't remember that every game is constrained by time and budget. In Skyrim, every NPC conversation is personalized (e.g. Ysolda chiding Nazeem, a child complaining about food to his poor father). I don't know, this seems MUCH better than oblivion where every NPC would talk about mudcrabs and Kvatch. Remember that every piece of game dialogue has to be translated and dubbed to five languages too. If Bethesda scrapped those versions and only made the English version, they could allocate more time and budget to the English dialog. But then everyone would complain about the lack of multilanguage support. It's impossible to please everyone

People blame EA too much. It's not like a company is forced to accept being "bought", but if they care more about money than their integrity then it's their own fault when their games svck, not EA's.

I'm one of those rare people who liked all the games. Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, etc. Except Skyrim. I just don't like Skyrim. Imo, Oblivion did it right for the most part. Yes it had it's annoyances, but it took both what the "new audience" wanted and what Morrowind had. A little bit. Not all the way. But Oblivion was doing right, imo.

Skyrim did none of this right and instead became an action adventure game.

And Dragon Age Origins was amazing. Dragon Age 2 was a pile of dung. Returned immediatedly.



I bought seeing the trailer and thinking this is going to be good. Now that I know where the industry is headed, I won't buy any more TES games.

Between Project Ten Dollar, removing co-op multiplayer from Need For Speed, and a host of other misdeeds, they haven't really done much to make me like them lately.

For the casuals! To infinity and beyond!

I didn't say I like them, but people seem to put complete blame on them when they're the publisher but not the actual developer of a game.

Oh look, it's this thread again. We've had the "dumbed down for casuals" and even the old "graphics over gameplay" fallacy trotted out to play.

Yeah, that may have been true back when games had a handful of designers and had to fit on a floppy with half a meg capacity at best, but in the last fifteen years or so? Hah! They are not pulling the guys away from making attributes and deep plots and complex systems and whipping them until they make shader effects and high-res textures. It's just not happening.

1) Companies are, surprisingly enough, out to make a profit. They always have been. They are not "on your side", no matter how much some fans of these companies would like to make you think. It's cool to hate some and you'll get blasted for hating others, but they all want to make money.
2) Where did games like Baldur's Gate go? I've seen Dragon Age Origins mentioned, but aside from being from the same developer they're two very different beasts. DAO was practically a single player MMO, even down to the skill hotkeys, timing, and strategy. The reason we don't get games like Baldur's Gate 1/2 any more are because the people who get the licenses are far more interested in making yet another free-to-play MMO (with the dollar signs of freemium play shining in their eyes) over a long single-player experience. That's just one case, but it's a pretty big one. The last SP D&D game was Neverwinter Nights 2 - in 2006, though it did get expansions up until 2009.
3) Oddly enough, most of the reasons Bethesda changes their games comes from these very forums. Not trying to attract the Call of Duty crowd (Oh God, the horror. Hide your books, the casuals are coming) or the Angry Birds players. Level scaling? "Hey, I'm a god by the time I'm level twenty in Morrowind and nothing challenges me ever". Voice acting and schedules? "Everybody has the same boring dialogue and they never go anywhere". Quest arrows? "I can't find this cave in the middle of freaking nowhere for the MQ, why are the directions so bad?"
4) Nostalgia. Someone mentioned it already, but every single time a game comes out the fans of the previous one(s) have to post in every single thread how Game Y is so much worse than Game X and how awful it is they're trying to reach out to someone except them personally.

that explains why. thanks

It's an oversimplification, but that is part of the reason.

Has there ever been a generation that hasn't complained about how things were so much better "in the good old days"? I'm sure people who grew up with older RPGs than the ones you mentioned thought those were trash for various reasons, too. Link below is very relevant.

http://i41.tinypic.com/ddco52.gif

Sort of. I think Mass Effect 2 is a better game than Mass Effect 1, but Mass Effect 3 took the "Bad" (Autodialog, ignoring lore, limited exploration) and really blew it out of proportion. Ironically, the "Gameplay" RPG stuff was strengthened. I was really fond of the weapon upgrade system and mod systems, as well as expanded character differentiation with the triple evolved abilities.


As for why Elder Scrolls is devolving (Something I don't personally believe at face-value), it just has to do with the gaming market no longer being a "Niche" or fringe art. So there's a need to make something everyone can enjoy, rather than a select few. Elder Scrolls is amazing at compromising to the masses while maintaining its identity as an Elder Scrolls game.

The biggest change that hurts The Elder Scrolls though, was definitely full spoken dialog. In a series that defined itself by making the world the main character, full spoken Dialog bloats datasize and eats the budget by a disproportionately large amount compared to the gain. Elder Scrolls games still managed to hold a tentative grip on their identity by sheer quality of contextual storytelling and detail, but at the end of the day, there's no realistic way to create a richly filled world without involving the citizens on a level that would be unreasonable to implement.

Each ability in Mass Effect 3 can be evolved three times. So at the end of each tree, there's actually six options, two for each block. You can only pick (Evolve) once for each block.

So for example, Lift, the first 3 are basic Duration and cooldown buffs. The first evolution lets you choose between duration or cooldown, the second Evolution let's you choose to augment your lift with a Damage over time effect or allows it to detonate as a biotic combo more violently, the third evolution lets you fire off two simultaneous lift bolts, or further reduce the recharge rate.