Leading western RPG developer Bioware has criticised Japanese-style RPGs for a “lack of evolution,” and excessively linear stories.
Bioware co-founder Greg Zeschuk lambastes JRPGs for a lack of innovation in a recent interview:
“The fall of the JRPG in large part is due to a lack of evolution, a lack of progression. They kept delivering the same thing over and over. They make the dressing better, they look prettier, but it’s still the same experience.
My favorite thing, it’s funny when you still see it, but the joke of some of the dialogue systems where it asks, ‘do you wanna do this or this,’ and you say no. ‘Do you wanna do this or this?’ No. ‘Do you wanna do this or this?’ No. Lemme think — you want me to say ‘yes.’ And that, unfortunately, really characterized the JRPG.”
Ironic words indeed, coming from a company which itself has yet to deliver any significant innovations since its magnum opus Baldur’s Gate series, released in 1998…
Lol 😀 Evolve 😀
Bioware RPG are all same .
Their nonlinearity is not that great.
And what is bad about linear games anyway?:D
And bioware games are famous just because of biggest hype i ever saw .
Uber cool commercials etc.
no innovation? Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect ftw?
In Mass Effect you have control over whether major characters live or die, you can choose to help people in a variety of ways, selfishly, selflessly, extort them for money, steal from them, or just flat out kill them alot of the time. you can beat someone up or talk him down.
Even the final boss of ME1, you can talk him into suicide, avoiding the battle with him. In ME2 the final mission you enter into with 12 party members that you’ve gotten to know throughout the game, fully fleshed out characters that have as much personality and life as any major character in any rpg, some of them were even party members of the first game, but at the final mission, the suicide mission, you’re making big decisions that can lead to your entire group making it out alive, or any number of them dieing permanent story deaths in any number of ways.
it’s mindboggling how many outcomes the finale can have and how meticulous the calculations were in making something like that WORK from a programming level. you can even get the main character killed and still get a full fledged ending to the game based on your decisions, just with your character from the first 2 games in a coffin. Obviously this is a playthrough that you can’t carry over, but in a playthrough where you live you can still carry it over even if you only have 2 living squadmates out of the 12. there’s no forcing you down a path. it’s a real revolution of rpg story telling.
Even big missions give you choices that will effect entire races. in the first game you can cause the genocide of an entire species, in the second game you have the choice to instigate war between two races (the quarians and geth) or influence a peaceful outcome. decisions like these are why people are so excited to see how it plays out in the third game. there’s alot of carryovers from the first game into the second that just prove what kind of impact your decisions can have even on people you haven’t met.
depending on how you ended the first game humanity is either a part of galactic politics or has dominated them in something that other races see as fascism. You can negotiate over the lives of hostages or kill the terrorist leader outright, each with it’s own set of ramifications and each outcome is fully fledged with carryover into the next game.
so much of what makes MASS EFFECT such a revolution in the rpg world is that it really makes you feel a part of the game. It turns story and cutscenes into a gameplay mechanic that ties every element of the game design together, instead of the traditional japanese format of 3 modes “combat, exploration, cutscene”. Most japanese games these days are getting to the point where i’d rather they just make a dvd video insert like the street fighter 4 animes and just let me play the gameplay portions end on end and watch the movie portions end on end.
it’s getting to the point where switching between the two is just….archaic. that was the biggest problem with mgs4 and it’s the biggest problem with most japanese games in general. (thank god for demon’s souls) I can’t even stand to play yakuza because the stark contrast in “mode switching” is just so shattering. I don’t want to have to play the game to find the next cutscene fmv and i don’t want to be taken out of the cutscene fmv into a world where suddenly you are suddenly fighting 50 guys and walking arround a shitty overworld for an hour between scenes. In mass effect every decision you make changes the flow of the game, makes an impact on how everything plays out, frequently changing the nature and flow of upcoming battles. That is an evolution of the rpg. fucking do your research before you trash talk mister Artefact guy.
Too long, didn’t read.
Innovation is not the same as evolution, people.
they’ve nothing to steal, ops i mean borrow -.-