Mister K said:
What they do offer however (well, Shadowrun at least, I am yet to play WL2), and what I will defend, is a relaxing gameplay experience, where thanks to simplicity of a gameplay developers could afford to spend a bit more time and budget on writing good characters and stories. I mean, the crew you get in Shadowrun Dragonfall are the most interesting party I've had in any modern WRPG, with special mention going to Glory, my favourite combat medic/razorgirl.
Dragonfall was alright, but I wasn't as impressed by it as you. It's the best of the Shadowrun titles, but that's damning it with faint praise.
The Madman said:
And if most studio had the time and money to make something of Witcher 3's caliber you'd almost have a point, but they don't, very few do, and even if they somehow did then in a few years time we'd all just be complaining about how more rpg need to do something different and stop copying the same Witcher 3 style formula.
"You'd almost have a point". BE CIVIL, Madman.
Trotting out the budget argument would make sense if Pillars of Eternity had been a humble indie project sold at low prices to nostalgics. There are a lot of budget titles out there filling that niche admirably. The Avernum games come immediately to mind. But Pillars marketed and positioned itself as a AAA RPG, complete with AAA pricing. Wither 3 was actually LESS EXPENSIVE.
And no, I don't expect every RPG to copy Witcher 3, any more than I was happy every RPG decided to copy Skyrim after it sold eleventy billion copies. What I admire about Witcher 3 is it showed ambition in design. They were striving to push the genre forward, not jog it back twenty years with 1999 production values and 2015 prices.
The Madman said:
Diversity is good. Some people like myself really like the isometric perspective for games, enjoy the party mechanics and the silly banter between group members. Calling them 'lazy' and 'creatively bankrupt' is a disservice in so many ways especially considering till the whole Kickstarter craze began, this entire style of rpg was effectively dead. Also I've yet to have seen a better way to portray the whole D&D style group of adventurer's in a game, have you?
This isn't a pro/anti isometric argument though. You can have an isometric game and not marry yourself to all the classic Infinity Engine problems, from the static perspective to the goofy pathfinding. Similarly, engine-agnostic concepts like "party mechanics" and "silly banter" do not require re-visiting aging design. These games ARE lazy, and they ARE creatively bankrupt. Do you remember the Simpsons episode wherein Lisa's new doll design gets shoved aside by "Malibu Stacey - now with a new hat?". That's POE and its ilk in a nutshell. The same old thing, now with a new hat. Every POE that gets made and takes up development time and creative bandwidth is a fresher, more imaginative, more trail blazing game that does not get made. Obsidian is capable of better work than this. They should be held to a higher standard.
Since I Kickstarted a lot of these titles, I was on board with revisiting the era...but I wanted the SPIRIT of the era, not the actual fucking era. The closest I've seen to that has been Divinity, which at least featured a semi-modern engine in which to show off seldom-visited RPG concepts like tactically crunchy combat. It's a flawed game to be sure, but at least it tried to be its own thing. It wasn't Baldur's Gate with some names changed around. LAZY.
