What Makes an RPG?

March 16th, 2010

RPG is a very broad category that covers many different games with very different systems and mechanics. Most game genres have clear cut definitions. FPS games are all about running around and shooting things in the face from first person perspective. RTS games are all top down perspective strategy games that do not use a turn based mechanics. The definitions are basically right there in the name. But Role Playing Games… You don’t actually role play anything when you play a video game.

The name of the genre is carry-over from the pen and paper based roots of the genre. The original RPG’s do entail actual role playing. These are games that require bunch of people to get together, sit around the table and pretend they are barbarians and wizards, while rolling handfuls of dice. They are governed by complex rules intended to simulate real world situations such as combat. The rules were designed so that different people could play different characters with various skills, strengths and weaknesses. They added randomness and luck into the equation to make things exciting. There was nothing about these rules that was endemic to the RPG. They were simply there out of necessity – to provide a workable framework against which the players and game masters could work of. What made RPG games what they were, was the actual role playing – people getting into character, and having imaginary adventures together.

When we decided to port RPG games to video game platforms, we couldn’t really implement the that particular social aspect of these games. We also could not really carry over the concept of a game master, or the free-form, open ended world where the only constraint is the GM’s imagination. So we ported everything else – among other things, the rules. And so CRPG’s tend to include the following:

  1. A set of skills or attributes that define the character
  2. A mechanism to advance these skills/attributes by gaining experience either from quests or from combat
  3. Inventory system that allows you to carry, modify and sell items
  4. A mechanic which allows you to add non player character followers to your party
  5. A system that allows you to converse with NPC’s that inhabit the game world

There is nothing RPG specific about these things though. Skills and attributes exist because that is the only way to simulate things like expertise and proficiency in a pen and paper environment. In a computer game you can easily make a warrior visibly stronger than a scholar without actually ever exposing any number stats to the player. On the other hand inventory screens and dialog screens are simply a factor of the weakness of our chosen medium. In a real RPG talking to people, or picking up items is something you naturally do during the course of the game. After all that’s what you do in real life too – you walk around, talk to people and sometimes they give you stuff you can put in your pockets.

So originally CRPG games were simply an effort to emulate pen and paper experience in an electronic medium. They were sort of a bastard baby spawned by the unholy matrimony between Role Playing and technology. But this is no longer the case. The bastard child grew up, graduated and gained a whole new audience: people who have never actually sat around a table and never rolled dice while scarfing down potato chips, drinking Mountain Dew and quoting Monthy Python. These new players did not know what the pen and paper experience was – but they did have opinions on what was and wasn’t fun to do in a video game. And so RPG genre evolved into the shape it is today – an amalgamation of different engines, systems and mechanics.

For example, how is that Mass Effect 2 and Torchlight are in the same genre? The former has no inventory and mostly a vestigial skill/experience system. The later is pretty much missing everything other than inventory and skill/experience system. And yet, most people would put them side by side on the same shelf.

The five characteristics I mentioned above do not really apply to all video games considered to be RPG’s. Not all games have all five of them present. Furthermore, games can contain several of them without actually being classified an RPG. For example, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. had quite an extensive inventory system, but most people consider it an FPS. The Secret of the Monkey Island had an inventory management component as well, but it was a point and click adventure. In Half Life 2 you would often team up with Alyx and/or participate in rather complex scripted conversations. But no one can really claim HL2 is an RPG.

Of course you can say that the last 3 items on my list are irrelevant. What makes an RPG is numerical attributes, skill points, experience and leveling up. But it seems that even this stance can be challenged. Both Fable III and Final Fantasy XIV seem to be abandoning traditional level up dings and character sheets in favor of more organic character progression. They will hide the numbers from the player, and allow their characters to grow and become stronger based on their in game decisions. Both these games are sequels to established RPG series. And it is usually rare for games to switch genres between sequels.

I guess what I’m trying to say here, is that RPG is very amorphous and vague description. There is no clear cut definition of an RPG. When asked, most of us simply uses their gut feeling to see whether or not a game is an RPG. Is Mass Effect 2 one? How about Torchlight? How about an experience-less Fable III?

Fuck if I know.

Happy Belated Pi Day

March 15th, 2010

I know, I know – the π day was yesterday. But as you know, I am way to lazy to post here on the weekends. Look at it this way: thanks to me you can celebrate the π holiday one day longer than usual.

Here is the obligatory π day question: how many digits of π do you have memorized? And if your answer is more than 5, I have a follow up question: why? No seriously, why? There are so many other things you could memorize instead. Things you could actually use in your daily life such as the stats of D&D monsters, video game trivia, internet memes or, I don’t know, Quenya vocab words. Practical things. There is really no reason to memorize a hundred digits of π because there is never situation where you would need more than 4 or 5 and were without means to look up the remaining ones. In fact, if you use that much precision it would be recommended to look it up, rather than rely on your memory.

Obligatory pi day cartoon.

The proper answer to the question “What is the 25th digit of π” is “I don’t know, but I can look it up”. That is a scientific approach. Remembering a million digits of π is not even geeky. It’s just… Silly. I think the amount of respect you get for remembering digits π tops out around 5 or 6 and then starts falling sharply. It’s like: “you know way to many digits of π sir, I don’t know if we can be friends”. I don’t know if I can actually trust anyone who can sit there and memorize numbers like this. I mean, I hardly even have time to think about memorizing stuff – my brain works overtime as it is. If you can memorize so many pi digits you either don’t have that much going on upstairs (so you can spend time memorizing instead of thinking about things) or you just have a very good memory. Both possibilities disturb me.

On the other hand, calculating π is cool because it actually does something productive. It pushes the limits of what we can do with technology. The discipline is all about creating efficient algorithms. That’s something I can get behind. Everyone can memorize bunch of numbers given enough time and effort – rote memorization is a dumb busy work though. Not everyone can write an algorithm that will calculate 27 trillion digits of π within 130 days using a desktop PC. That’s the current record btw – 27 trillion.

Mass Effect 2: Ansiblenet

March 12th, 2010

In Mass Effect 2 your character takes command of a brand spanking new spaceship, which has many new interesting upgrades. Those upgrades include double the amount of elevator rides you have to make between missions. The old Normandy only had two levels and you only had to use the elevator twice between missions. Once to get from the CIC to the lower floor to talk to Tali, Wrex, Garrus and Ashley. Then again to get back to the CIC. The new ship has 4 levels and your team members are scattered throughout them. Each elevator ride is punctuated with a lengthy loading screen. The funniest thing is that when combined, all these 4 floors are still smaller than most of regular Mass Effect 2 levels. So I’m really not sure why each needs a loading screen. Clearly it is due to some advanced upgrades in the elevator system.

Another interesting upgrade is the quantum entanglement communicator in the conference room. It is essentially a high bandwidth Ansible that allows for instantaneous point-to-point communication with Cerberus command from any point in the galaxy. It transmits life size holographic image and audio stream which is actually quite impressive. In most universes Ansibles are kinda crappy. In Le Guin’s Ekumen universe they can only send/receive text. The device installed on Normady is much, much more powerful.

In fact, existence of such device in the universe makes one wonder why most civilizations build their communication network Mass Relays instead of these awesome Ansibles. In fact, you can even ask the ship AI about it. This conversation pretty much goes like this:

Click to embiggen.

EDI basically hand waves this away (which is actually pretty impressive seeing how it has no hands) and gives you some bullshit about point-to-point communication. It is quite obvious that no one at BioWare reads this blog. If they did, they would know that I already came up with a clever idea for galaxy wide internet based around Ansibles. In case you are to lazy to read that article let me re-iterate it here:

  1. Establish point to point Ansible connections to bunch of your neighbors
  2. Plug all this Ansibles into a router
  3. Connect the router to the planetary internet
  4. Set it up to route outbound off-world requests to appropriate Ansibles
  5. If you get an inbound packet that should go to a different world route it out using an appropriate ansible

It would take some coordination, but if everyone would do this, Mass Effect universe would have instantaneous packet switched internet that covers the whole galaxy. The best part is that all you really need to do this, is good old 20th century TCP/IP networking. And yes, they would probably still be using IPv4. Isn’t it funny that all modern OS’s and modern hardware support IPv6 but no one actually uses it for anything?

So yeah… BioWare – read my post, and please take it into consideration when making Mass Effect 3. I’m expecting a galaxy wide internet, or a good explanation why it is not there. The fact that your Ansibles are point-to-point doesn’t mean shit.