What I want to see in RPG's

I take it that most of you have played RPG’s.

Personally it’s my favorite genre of games. It has offered me the best gaming experiences out of all genres.

Games like Fallout 3, The Elder Scrolls series. Mass Effect, The Witcher. Dark Souls. etc.

Amazing games !!

But what I want to see in future RPG’s is something that only a Two RPG series has offered me. From what I have played at least.

The Elder Scrolls and Mass Effect.

LORE!

That’s what I want !

Tons and Tons of Lore.

Mass Effect has always had all these journal entries that I would always read.

Reading about all the different races and planets.

It just expands the The Mass Effect Universe immensely.

The Elder Scrolls series has the most lore in gaming from what I’ve seen.

And we’ve only seen the focus on one continent.

Akavir: an often hostile continent to the east of Tamriel

Aldmeris: a fabled continent from which the Aldmer came to Tamriel

Atmora: a frigid continent to the north, home to the ancestors of the Nords

Cathnoquey: a region of land that lies between Tamriel and Akavir

Esroniet: a small island kingdom that lies between Tamriel and Akavir

Pyandonea: a continent to the far southwest of Tamriel, home to the Maormer

Roscrea: a region of land that lies between Tamriel and Atmora

Thras: an archipelago to the southwest of Tamriel, home of the Sload

Yneslea: a region of land that lies between Tamriel and Akavir

Yokuda: a ruined collection of islands blasted by a cataclysm to the west of Tamriel, original home of the Redguards

This only being the continents/lands.

There are also Worlds. The worlds are all in the Aurbis.

Aurbis was created by Anu and Padomay.

There is a whole story between these to Primal Forces in the TES Lore.

As the story goes, Time began when the two forces entered the Void; the interplay between them led to all of Creation, starting with Nir. Anu is typically described in masculine terms, and Nir in feminine terms, and theirs is the first love story. Padomay took exception to Nir's love of Anu, and so the first love story ends in violence. Nir, wounded, gave birth to the twelve worlds of Creation before dying. When Padomay attacked and shattered these worlds, Anu fought him off and salvaged Creation by combining the remnants into one world, Nirn.

Worlds :

Aetherius, the Immortal Plane.

Mundus is the plane or realm of existence that encompasses Nirn.

Nirn is the planet on which the Elder Scrolls is set. It floats in the void of Oblivion.

The Planes of Oblivion are the dimensional planes which are home to all the daedra. Consisting of all the Daedric Princes’ Realms.

The Void is basically around everything including the Aurbis which Anu and Padomay have created.

So basically if that’s not enough, each world has their tiny details, history and cultures.

I have never seen this much lore put into one game.

The Elder Scrolls’ Lore just makes the experience so much more rich.

I want to see this in RPG’s more often.

Imagine Dark Souls like this.

Lore at this scale in Dark Souls would make that game so much better than it already is.

I don’t know what you guys think.

Tell me lore is important to you and if it could truly immerse you in these games.

If there are other games that has lots of lore that I haven’t played then I would like to know ’em.

Lore is something that I will just glance at. Also I find that immerse is overrated and subjective.

I want good game play that I can affect my characters' role in the game play.

@acp_45: I just don't read into lore that much. But frankly I want another rpg that's on the scale of super mario rpg. In my mind that was the best rpg of all time and I can't find anything similar where you have a turn based RPG with complex puzzles and the like.

Both TES and Mass Effect have an amazing lore. I think that for a game to have an interesting lore is necessary that it has excellent writers that can give you a story that you feel attracted to read in the first place, something that both of this games do very well :D.

My favorite rpg are jrpg, i like games like bravely default, golden sun, dragon quest...

Games llke mass effect dont like me.

What I want to see from RPGs is better gameplay.

No seriously, I'm not trying to be a douche (okay I am but thats not the point). In my experience a great RPG doesn't even need halfway decent gameplay to be good (how else does one explain Skyrim and Final Fantasy), and developers will no doubt take advantage of that.

Plus as TC already mentioned Lore is very important for RPGs.

See Role Playing is not like other genres, its not Mechanical, its more Idealistic (most of the game is power by your imiganition and your ability to suspend belief) , without its lore an RPG just turns into number crunching, unlike Platformers, Racers and Action games were theres underlying mechanics that make it fun.

And now you know..... :)

Play Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, it has lore out the ass. It's funny you initially mentioned the Witcher but then didn't bring it up when talking about lore. That game has more depth to it's lore than Mass Effect. Most of the Mass Effect lore is addressed with the main story. It doesn't have much outside the scope of the game to read about like The Witcher and Elder Scrolls games do.

100 % agreed.

I just want every game to be Dark Souls.

I don't want any particular thing mostly, but I had to choose, I would lean in favor of music and story over gameplay and visual proficiency. In general, I want a good adventure.

Music is essential to my adventure experience, and although I don't particularly care about the musical genre, I generally tend to frown upon popular songs being used in the soundtrack (like FFXIII). I am more restrictive on battle music ever since I played FFXIII, and now I really want my battle themes to have a proper base line (FF6 and Golden Sun were excellent themes). I'm picky now :). And I really like an adventurous overworld theme (again, see FF6 and Golden Sun).

By "story", I am referring to the script and the world and how it is delivered so that my imagination can go into that world. Thus, proper voice acting is a must (Vanille was almost singlehandedly responsible for killing my FFXIII experience; there were other things, but she really sealed my displeasure). When text is used instead of voice acting, the text boxes need to properly convey the speaker and their emotions (this can easily go wrong without the proper identifiers), so I like it when I have seen a character's current facial expression as an overlay to the text box. And a decent camera so I can see crap. I am disappointed if I can't see it.

So yeah, i kind of want everything :). And in Xenogears for PS1 and Xenoblade Chronicles for Wii, I got everything.

Agreed, good lore goes a long way. A good back story for your character and everyone you encounter makes it all the more believable and worthwhile.

I am on the other side. To me one of the most important thing in a RPG is the mechanics. You take out the number cumber crunching and you hurt the RPG. You can can have a great RPG with a linear story and poor lore. To me the one thing that is hurting RPG the most is the ideal that you pretend to be the character. They been focusing more on the pretending to be the character through "character choices" that they been weakening the role playing part of the game

@ wiouds

But those numbers are meaning less on their own, they are shallow imitations of the things they're named after, Especially for social attributes like faith, charisma and intelligence. There no mechanics. Its just racking up numbers and pretending they work right (they don't, grinding doesn't build charisma or intelligence).

However I agree with your other point about Role Playing, where does the player end and the character start ?

I love me some lore, but I've found that my favorite lore has been in JRPGs for the most part. I don't mind the sometimes heavy handed info dumps simply because a lot of lore is really damn unique and interesting.

Lore can go either way. For example, Dragon Age Origins had something like 20 hours of lore-dumps, and none of it was remotely interesting. It made me question why they spent so much time outlining a detailed history of such a boring and generic setting.

@Planeforger:

I would disagree about DA: O's lore. Those long lore dumps were some of the more interesting things to me. They were not presented in an exciting way, but instead like something that simply was and that was expected. I liked the racial and cast inequality undertones, and how deep some of the lore seemed to go. The creation of golems and darkspawn, for example, were particularly unsettling. They were not in your face, but that was some great lore for me.

You need stats for faith, charisma and intelligence because they reflect apart of the character. If you want a person to use their own charisma then you could be limited what some role a person can play. I played a table top RPG where one person always played a high charisma character because as he claimed he did not have that in real life.

Now if you want to talk about making sense. Some thing make less sense than "grinding doesn't build charisma or intelligence" is the ideal of the skill tree system.

They do work in the game and just like everything else in gaming it is how they are used that make it so they work or not.

A lot of games have lore actually, and as much as I love the lore of Mass Effect, I feel Dragon ages lore wipes the floor with it. Kingdoms of Amalur has good lore too, but I wasn't very impressed with the rest of the game. The Witcher games have plenty of lore, heck even FFXIII has lore(which you will need to read and understand to get the most from the game, either way it is still very weak compared to previous in the series), there are so many great rpgs with great lore, I don't even want to know what rpgs you have been playing.

I'd have to disagree with you there. I found the lore in Dragon Age very interesting more so than Mass Effect, and more so than TES(which has much more of it, just wasn't as well written, and interesting(not saying it was bad I like it, and I haven't read everything in them either)).

@ wiouds

I actually wouldn't if they were just measuring these attributes, but they actually use them....... Poorly. Worst case scenario is a skill check.... Mass Effect style.

It's cool to have, but i don't require it. It's nice for a game like Dragon Age though. I would rather have more storytelling than vague lore all over the place

If you like lore and like to read things about the characters and what not then Lost Odyssey is your game, seriously. I dont like to read a lot of the lore, unless a game really has me interested, but I went off a whim and read some of Kaim's memories (he's immortal so he has a lot of sad tales to tell) and I'm glad I did. This game made me like to read lore and what not in games now.

The only lore that I ever really got into was The Witcher 2: Assassin's of Kings. I found myself reading a lot of the books that you can buy in the world for a couple of reasons: strategic advantages and general curiosity. As anyone who has played the game knows, The Witcher series is essentially about monster hunting, with a politically dark and gritty plot. Reading books that explained the world really helped me get immersed in it's somewhat confusing story. Also, from my experience, The Witcher has one of the tougher combat systems of any RPG I've played. This is another reason why I read the books in the world, to get an advantage on the monsters that I would likely hunt. If I knew that a monster I was hunting was weak to a certain item or ability before I hunted it, it would definitely make the fight go a lot smoother.

With games like Skyrim and Fallout though, I feel as though the lore just comes up naturally, through dialogue with NPC's. The books and scrolls, at least in my case, were secondary.

If that is what you believe then so be it but I can guess there are just as many that thinks it is a good system. Then again that more about the interactive story and less about the role playing.

Let my character have stats so he/she can persuade a character to help with a quest.

@ wiouds

Its not a belief, its a fact.

Also just because they liking something does not mean its good, the entire genre has been dragging it ass on the ground for a while now.

"Let my character have stats so he/she can persuade

a character to help with a quest"

Thats all good and well for the character, and what will the player be doing while this is happening probably "press X to persuade".

I find it strange that after so many threads, you still insist on missing out on some of the fundamental points of RPGs.

The point of roleplaying is that you're playing a role. It's right there in the name of the genre. You might be the smartest and most charismatic person on the planet, but if you're playing an RPG as a big dumb orc, your big dumb orc should barely be able to talk his way through a Macdonalds drive-through.There has to be a disconnect between player skill+knowledge and character skill+knowledge, or else you wouldn't realistically be playing as that character.

Skill points are a rudimentary numerical analogue for your character's abilities, and skill checks are a convenient way of checking to see if those abilities are successfully used. Those systems also provide a neat way of disconnecting player skill from character skill, and help characters stand out from one another.

@ Planeforger

Finally ! Somebody who I agree with one hundred percent !

However, it seems that RPGs forget the fundamental aspect of gaming itself, which is not to disconnect the player from the elements one needs to play the game , attributes are one of the features that make up RPGs but as you said, in order for the player to Role Play then the game must ensure the player can't directly control these attributes the character possessess themselves. So, good RPGs are bad games.

Also people aren't aware of that, nor do they want to be. They Role play for they Autononmy despite that in order for that to happen, (direct) Controll must be sacrificed.

And because of that, RPGs maybe also the most psychologically addictive of all the genres, it may lead to one creating an Avatar with attributes they wish they themselves had, leveling up those attributes only reinforces the addiction.

Thats another thing players don't want to know about Role Playing. Its such a Deceptive Genre. Make Believe at an advanced level.

I liked Oblivion and Skyrim, but i always disliked how their main storylines were so short and less interesting then the sidequests you do in them. And also, adding into this - also Mass Effect... i disliked how when your playing the games storyline, its so predictable you can actually sense when the games going to end... I want a game where your tricked into beating it just to realize you've got way more fun stuff to do still... sucks when your playing and the whole ending of the game feels like an ending and you know it....

however don't do the Halo 2 thing and just end the game and have people go, wtf is this shit? Surprise us. (ya i know halo 2 isnt rpg game, but its ending is the worst random abrupt garbage ending ive seen in a story based game before)

RPGs need a balance of lore and mechanics to be good, the balance should be slightly tipped to lore though. MMOs in my opinion need more mechanics than lore as most people will probably focus on mechanics when involved with other players. For single player RPGs though I would really like a story line that makes me feel as if I am keeping up with my favorite TV series, trying to figure out what will happen next and hopefully being surprised when it happens. I agree that the main story lines of Oblivion and Skyrim were a bit short and slightly less interesting than some of the side stories.

Good point! Definitely oblivion.With both games (Skyrim and Oblivion, I wouldn't change Morrowind any) I always thought they should have tied the main story quest in with all the guilds and dark brotherhood somehow. I know they are side quests for a reason but having more things connected in the elder scrolls RPGs would have went a long way! I did everything to level my guy up before finally finishing the main story but then at that point it was a cakewalk and I would have a little unsatisfactory feeling. I think an RPG should be challenging to beat not just time consuming. I don't think it should be on a demon/dark souls level or anything but have a lot more depth than just one big quest line and boom you're done, now go explore and buy DLC.

On a side note, I just bought The Witcher 2 and hopefully it will address these concerns.

I for one am very, very fond on turn paced strategy in RPGs, due the fact I grew up with them, so if the gameplay stays like that in some games, or at least it feels... not too hurried, I'm ok with them.

This is because I want to enjoy story and lore in RPGs, but it feels like I don't get a chance on it if there's this feeling of hurry always pushing me forwards.

To me, RPGs are more of a... "Sit down and enjoy" kinds of games. Really, like reading a book. If I ever want a game where I want to be hurried forward, I'll play an action games like Metal Gear Rising

@ bowchicka07

Well that depends on the type of Challenge your looking, not a single RPG will challenge the player as they are character oriented games. You'l only be as good as your avatar.