games where one gets rewarded for eliminating a city's population worth of foes, but are punished when one picks the dialogue option that makes companion 1 sad.
totally cool to kill thug1 thug2 thug3, but their boss, who has a character name?! and a voice actor!? How dare you! What an evil man you are for not sparing him.
@@Nebulaoblivion how dare you not let the war criminal live; sure he released the Europa-Pall and devastated a continent on Erebus-9 with that plague, but he also built massive hydroponic satellites filled with endangered flora and farms. also if you spare him companion 4 will give you a new heavy weapon The Desitronax (one of the tools required to get the good ending)
The reason why you see "sex sells" is because it's usually an answer to people trying to censor it. You don't see "violence sells" because its not only obvious, but not really part of any conversation.
Video games offer you the opportunity to live an experience you can't have in real life, through action and storytelling; Game Devs have to be honest with themselves would enough people want to spend labor capital and time capital on your product through the story alone to be finically worth it or are you fine with losing lots of capital as a labor of love when other products and real life exist, most of the time it's a big No, at the end of the day your producing a product to sell in the market and the market demands exist for a reason the market isn't wrong you can't force the market to your product.
torment: tides of numenera does this in a way. you can even stop mid-combat to intimidate enemies into surrender or running away, this game has so many good things in it but shamefully it hasn't reached its full potential
Question: if the combat in a game is so good that any reasonable person would choose it over the non-combat option every time, then is the combat really a result of the player’s choice?
As a player, I generally notice that the violent options usually involve more actual game play and player agency, while the social options are just a set of choices from a menu and a dice roll in the background, it’s not very interesting. Anti-social role playing is also more appealing because you can rarely do it in real life without consequences.
How would you envision more "actual game play" for social options? Perhaps more setup? Searching for information you can use against them? Finding items you can use to bribe the character? I'd argue that dialog **is** gameplay. Otherwise my entire Disco Elysium playthrough was a lie. RPGs traditionally aren't about skill-based gameplay. They're about choices, expression and discovery.
@@TehOwn I think the point still stands that non-combat gameplay is paper-thin in most Triple AAA especially when looked at how much of the gameplay systems are geared towards combat. Disco Elysium shows a really great example on how to expand the social gameplay by allowing for different builds in social gameplay. Most games just have the one or two 'non-combat' perk tree w/ not much variety that mostly just allow you to skip content of the game instead of finding new content.
This really is the big open question: how do you make rewarding gameplay for social interactions. Don't get me wrong, adding more choice-consequence, more branching, possibly content locked behind social only etc can get you intellectual enjoyment pay-off. But it is not the same as dopamine-releasing 'action' that, on top of everything else, also has much higher runtime and is a better palate cleanser for reading, which USians don't like to/can't do. I am vaguely aware of some games that tried to gamify persuasion/intimidation/etc with mini-games, though I can't remember where I've seen that off the top of my head, but I'm not sure that's the way (people on PC are not going to derive much reward from primitive mini-games, I don't think). As far as I can tell, this is very much an open question in game design and one that I personally can't see even the outlines of a solution for.
Getting in combat encounters is real life is only something you can rarely do in real life if you don't have the courage to go and sign up at one of the many combat sports gyms. Or go and be a police officer.
When I play an RPG game I pick violence not only because it usually gives me more XP/loot, but also because combat is just much more interesting. Because even if a game has some sort of diplomacy/non-violent path, 80% of it is just having high enough charisma to pass a check in a dialogue. Compare it to combat where it's not only about stats, but about positioning, clever use of your gear, etc. I think if most designers approached dialogs as a verbal combat, where you have to carefully weight every sentence to get an outcome you need, and reward players accordingly, people would engage with it much more often.
Deus Ex Human revolution had that to a degree. There was information about the person you were speaking to and a range of responses to try and find a way to get them to agree with your position over multiple back and forths. Something like that in a heavier RPG would be really interesting. It was kind of an evolution of the insult sword fighting from the early monkey island games.
@@andrewcross5918 That gamifies dialogue though, it becomes less of who you want to play and more how do I win at talking. A well designed dialogue tree should result in consequences, not just rewards or punishment, like in Disco Elysium.
A non violent path isn't just speech checks, usually it's a substantial amount of stealth. You're gonna spend a lot of your time sneaking through areas that most other players are fighting their way through. Really, I can't think of any games that just let you speech check your way through everything.
Hi Tim. As a cRPG enthusiast/veteran, the biggest problem I have with non-combat paths in RPGs is that they don't match the complexity and engagement of the combat path. While I'm not a powerplayer and hyperoptimizer, and while I consider a good cPRG a gesamtkunstwerk where a lot of elements need to have high quality and work together to become something greater than the sum of its parts, I find that a complex combat system is very essential, as systems interaction is an important aspect of most genres of games I play. Selecting a dialogue option and rolling an intimidation check does not scratch that itch in the same way as a complex combat encounter. (also there's no loot) I'd bring up Disco Elysium as a very good RPG that has (next to) no combat, so no involved combat system. While I did find the game fantastic overall, it's not something I'd go back to for "another ride" I don't think violence/combat needs to be the default in an RPG, but there should be something that's equal in complexity, and I have a hard time coming up with what that would be in a character/party centered RPG. There's non-violent systems interaction in management and sandbox games, but I don't see what a character/party centered RPG does while interacting with the world that can match that without it being combat. So speaking for myself, if someone were to make a "non-violent cRPG" they'd need to answer that question.
i wanted to comment just to acknowledge how well-thoughout your response and perspective was, it adds a lot to this conversation. thank you for taking the time to write it out. it hit the nail on the head, imho. as someone who adores cRPGs but always found the paths that aren't related to combat and violence in most games to be quite often superficial / rather shallow, when given a closer examination and chance.
I remember playing the Myst series of games, and wondering why more rpgs don't just incorporate more of that exploration and puzzle-solving gameplay. I always come to a similar conclusion: That takes more effort. Plain and simple. Whether that's true or not, I think the perceived effort vs appreciation for non-combat gameplay (as far as developers are concerned) is just not worthwhile. I personally think this is a society and games industry problem as much as it is a problem of developer and player judgment on a case-by-case basis. However, the only real way to change is to somehow show those alternative play goals to be worth doing. Which, I think they are, but I think most devs and even players perceive them as not being so simply because that is what has manifested for them in their experiences with games so far, and with their engagement in talking about and observing games on the internet.
the best way to solve this issue in my opinion is to design the dialogue gameplay as if it was combat gameplay, so in a turn based game for example you could enter a type of combat mode where instead of attacking with your sword or magic diminishing their HP, you attack with an intimidation, persuasion or a demoralizing attack so that your enemy would lose some kind of morality points MP or Conviction points CP, and bringing this points to zero would end the battle and your enemy would be sucessfully convinced to your arguments and your quest would progress or something in those lines. Thus making pacifist and dialogue builds way more interesting to play
I've never thought about it from from perspective you're describing. "Selecting a dialogue option and rolling an intimidation check does not scratch that itch in the same way as a complex combat encounter." This is an excellent observation. Thank you.
To add to this, combat gives immediate feedback that lets the player fine tune their actions to move towards some kind of exciting win state. This is emotionally rewarding and satisfying. For example, I was wondering why I find Vampire Survivors so addictive. I looked into the gameplay loops and realised it gives a LOT of feedback about how well i'm doing. Even though the game revolves around violence, the satisfaction i get from surviving another wave or beating a mini boss or getting the next level up makes it extremely fun for me.
A fantastic practical answer. I'd also want to add (in these comments) a theory-level answer I once heard -- "it's approximately the same reason movies are usually more action-orientated than books, in that visual mediums more often need physical manifestations of the central conflict."
@adamaccountname As did Disco Elysium. I could see a possible future timeline where the term "interactive fiction" undergoes a similar type of cultural assertion that the term "graphic novel" did. (For better or worse, to be clear)
@@aNerdNamedJames A timeline where adventure games invested in deeper engagement and not just moon logic puzzles. One of the acts of Torment felt like an adventure game as you spent the whole act collecting items to solve puzzles
Also worth noting is that action movies have quite a general appeal. Generally, more people i know would rather go watch a decent-looking action movie than a decent-looking drama movie, etc. This is kinda connected to the fact that there's often less of a margin of error for movies focusing on action rather than dramas, at least when it comes to how much the average person is able to enjoy the movie. Good action is somehow universal, even moreso in videogames than movies.
violence is also a pretty EASY way to make a game 'interactive'. Burn enemies, pick up items to throw at enemies, knock down enemies, dismember limbs, throw the limbs, etc etc. And like you point out, it would then be EASY to market this interactivity, compared to maybe a subtle dialogue interaction, or even puzzle sequence, you just show the dude burning and you instantly know you can do stuff like that. and interactivity, IMO, is the main thing that makes video games fun. How do you interact with the medium.
Institutionally I think violence is the easier way to make a game interactive but I do have to wonder if, to some extent, it's somewhat of a trap of a loop. We have made multiple games and developed the systems to make it incredibly varied. How much of it? Hard to say admittedly.
Dishonored, I think, is a great example if a game where Violence is always an option, and is often the simplest solution to a problem, but is never the only way. And the use of violence is punished in ways that the player may not he aware of at first, but becomes clear over time, and as a pattern of using violence to solve problems emerges.
I'm not sure I fully agree wrt Dishonored. The happier endings tend to rely upon low chaos which is honestly strange. Low chaos can have a surprising number of deaths but it often leads to players opting for a play style that I would argue is far duller than the other method. See through vision to help you stealth, teleport to reposition, in certain situations time stop or possess a rat to sneak along, use your sleeping crossbow bolts but mostly choke people out and hide them in a location where they won't get woken up or eaten by rats. The mechanical rewards for the game imo are in higher chaos scenarios. That's where you can stop time and bodyjack an enemy to walk into a bullet fired by themself & etc.
Many immersive sim games are that way like you mentioned Dishonored, but also the Deus Ex games .. System Shock games to an extent and you can play even through the whole Cyberpunk 2077 game with doing both all the main story missions and all sidequests without shooting a single bullet and kill even a single character (apart from Silverhand's flashback scenes)
“In ways the player may not be aware of?” When I was 12 I was so disgusted by how hard they made the “pacifist run = good ending” Schtick I stopped playing at the 2nd level. It was obnoxiously obvious that there was consequences to violence.
The people arguing against you are the reason why we get subpar world interaction. They truly did not understand the low chaos Dishonored run, and got upset.
Kingdom Come Deliverance had me thinking about this recently. You can do combat and likely will against weak enemies in the early game but all of the nuanced mechanics beyond button mashing are locked away from you until later so you're really better off talking or running away depending on the situation. Even the archery in that game isn't trivial and neither is maintaining stealth. It's also very fitting to the narrative to play peacefully earlier on but the violence will gradually scale up (which is also fitting).
And there's a trophy for not killing a single person besides runt, so a true completionist has completed a pacifist run. I totally agree kcd has a very good way of laying it down like "yes there's a lot of combat, but death? That depends on actions and circumstance" you can try not to kill someone and just knock out in kcd but there's still the chance they bleed out or if they're unarmored a strong weapon is sure to kill them Something I appreciated about two games in particular, metro exodus for its moral choices and the choice of whether or not to confront enemies, kill them or just knock them out. Way of the samurai 4 is great for it as well, you can turn your katana blade on its back and fight everyone with non lethal hits the whole game, full pacifist, and unarmed attacks do not kill people unless you mean to. That sort of thing is meaningful
@@Gravheks Actually, knocking out in KCD is easy - fists are completely non-lethal, and weapons are always lethal. Problem is, the game's mechanics are obviously oriented towards weapons, since fists only have 2.5 attacks (kicks suck) and can't do master strikes or perfect blocks
@@cdru515 I'm pretty sure you can knock people out with weapons. I haven't done it recently but I could swear I did it a while ago. Also from a purely roleplaying perspective, there are absolutely times when even a peasant is NOT going to be using his fists.
My favourite example of this was Miranda's loyalty mission in Mass Effect 2, where you are required to shoot and/or vaporise 30-40 mercenaries in a factory area to help her resolve her issues with her sister. Imagine being the poor people who have to clean up the charred bodies afterwards to get the factory working again.
ME2 and 3 had hilarious amounts of combat for small side-stories or rather it would've been funny if I wasn't on the hardest difficulty and they all became a slugfest I loved the few opportunities in ME1 side missions to avoid combat (there's a citadel sting op, and some of the batarians on the asteroid mission)
It is hilarious how many renegade choices in that game outside the MSQ are kill them now vs paragon’s kill them later. Like the Krogan on Mordin’s mission that rants for like 2 or 3 minutes if you dont renegade interrupt him lmao
Yeah it's my favorite series ever but it's clear they made alot of choices based on the idea that they think players are dumb and have no attention span.
My first thought was of Fallout New Vegas, which is praised for its story, but had trailers consisting almost entirely of shooting lots of guns to the song "Big Iron."
I love rpgs where killing isn't your main source of exp. I was just thinking about you, I just started playing Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines. HOLY HELL this game rips! On my first playthrough, I'm a Malkavian. I love this games, I cannot wait to play every clan. Thank you.
@@DumpsterTurkey The cheat code to fly and go through walls. Basically, the Hollywood Sewers are one of the worst levels in the game, due to being labyrinthine, boring to look at, and full of enemies that you can't stealth past
Combat is just really fun, mostly. Its also very straightforward and easier to understand and develop as a core gameplay loop than puzzles and social systems, which require a much higher level of variety in solutions to keep feeling fresh throughout the course of a game. I love reading dialog too, but sometimes after a long day of navigating social situations I find just letting loose and pressing some buttons in combat to ironically be the MORE relaxing option. Though, I think games like Undertale and Deltarune definitely show there's still a lot of unexplored potential for non-combat "combat" systems, especially in turn-based games
In an overly polite society, where you can get cancelled for saying or not saying things, the power fantasy is absolutely a legitimate way to decompress. People are overthinking violence in video games. Better in the digital world than the real world.
Undertale/Deltarune works because even if you're not fighting, you still get to engage with the game mechanics. Whether you talk or fight, you still have to dodge when it's the enemy's turn. You don't feel cheated out of the fun part of the game just because you resolved things peacefully.
I think the main problem is that games have perfected combat systems to be engaging to play. Skipping combat with a simple diplomacy check is just not as engaging. That would be as if the whole combat system was simplified to a simple attack role. Right? You would need to create engaging and fun non-violent systems to compete with combat as a way to win encounters.
.. and how would you simulate that on screen in a way that is diegetic? You could do a mini-game of some sort, but it'll be worse than combat and won't have any relation to how we perceive diplomacy to work in the real world
Skipping a combat section accidentally in BG3 usually (unless I personally want the NPC to live) leads me to reloading. Even worse, if I start noticing too many such opts outs, if it starts feeling universally available, then it breaks the power fantasy immersion and ruins the entire game for me. There is no reason to find great items, level, or flesh out builds if you know you can skip everything. Even if you don’t use the option at all, the knowledge itself ruins it.
And I think having talking as a way to just skip combat is not a good approach. Diplomacy should have its own rewards that should not be obtainable through combat. Just like combat should be the only way to get some loot from some enemies each approach should be uniquely rewarding. Both in what you get in the end and how fun it is to perform.
@@player1_fanatic So what I'm trying to get at, is what the mechanic(s) for diplomacy would be that would be 'fun to perform' on the same order of magnitude as well-implemented combat. It's one thing to say 'ought to', as in 'we ought to live without burning anything for fuel and harming animals or the wild places' and another to actually come up with the "here's how".
ive seen something else irk people, where their character will drink alcohol without any choice in the matter, because some people dont drink anymore/at all and wanna roleplay their character that way, and when a game starts in a bar with everyone drinking they have to roll their eyes and pretend that its apple juice, it sucks!
Highly relevant GTMK video " Can We Make Talking as Much Fun as Shooting? " is a really good follow on to this video. the challenge is how can designers make talking more fun than just Speech [100/100] compared to shooting?
Or at the very least find a suitable, repeatable replacement. It's harder than it sounds: shooting guns in video games is really, really fun and has a subtle, engaging complexity to it. You've got weapons that deal different amounts of damage at different speeds, reloading, equipment management, accuracy, and satisfying feedback. Trying to find something with a similar degree of utility is a real challenge.
I've tinkering on idea where game has strong emphasis on communication. Like, all game characters communicate and information is passed that way. Current iteration is "minilanguage", like ok, oops, what, ping/pong, danger... and small vocabulary to describe things like one, many, big, little. Idea is that game characters are passing messages to others and that can be transpiled more verbose natural language.
Given the number of TTRPGs that have developed mechanics for resolving ‘social combat,’ I feel like it should be possible to do so and make it visually and viscerally engaging. Even the way that you make skill checks in Baldur’s Gate 3-with attribute, skill, tool and spell buffs, advantage/disadvantage, and Inspiration re-rolls-seems like it leans in this direction. I would LOVE to see a console RPG in the Dragon Age/Mass Effect style that focused entirely on social and skill dynamics, with no combat at all. I suppose that would be very much like some of the more mechanically-complex visual novels, but with active, moving characters rather than limited animation sprites.
My friend has 6 characters he made as superhero-ish comic book characters as a kid, and to this day in pretty much every game, he makes those 6 characters in the games he plays. They are quite diverse, one of them being a near brainless plant-matter being (before Groot was even an idea), another a true psychopath, and one the epitome of "lawful good" to a fault. I've always told him any game I make he needs to playtest it with those characters, since each plays in a very different way.
@@derekskelton4187 Do you often make assumptions without context? You are correct, groot is older than I am. He is not older than my friend, who created his idea before groot was published in Tales to Astonish #13, November 1960. Older people exist despite popular belief.
@@PretendCoding nonsense, everyone popped into the world between 1 January 1980 and 31 December 1999, and time has not advanced since somewhere in early spring 2020, which is somehow only a few years after 2007.
Thank you for this insightful video. A couple of thoughts expanding on it: 1. Might help to view violence and action as different axes of a plot. Can have a non-violent action game (farming games with day-timer and physical skill minigames, sports games, etc.), or violent non-action game (card games, turn based combat games, etc.). - Action is player's method of interaction with the game - fast-paced progress, making decisions quickly, relying on player's physical skills like reactions, hand-eye coordination. - Violence is player character's method of interaction with the game world - punch, shoot, use destructive powers to beat enemies. 2. There are additional benefits to adding/keeping niche gameplay options: - Increases replayability/playtime of the game (influencers play it more, players talk about it more) - Increases engagement on social media (players share their interesting experiences that arise from niche gameplay). Both of these lead to more sales, just indirectly.
8:25 - this is something I appreciated about Deus Ex: Human Revolution - I was able to get through the game with minimal violence, just knocking people out (the boss battles don't count). It still felt like an action game in spite of there being minimal actual combat in my run.
I wanted to write about Human Revolution as well. I was playing for the first time, trying to not kill anyone at all. But then game threw a curve ball at me: if I would continue being non-violent then a friendly NPC will die. It was cruel. I've never got that non-violent achievement but I was okay with this 🙂
RPGs that feature stealth, stealing and investigation/detective, mechanics, that can be REALLY cool, often features them in a so boring, fast done way that you often just wanna get back to combat because the combat bechanics are much better done, you can see they spent much more time on them
Like Elder Scrolls Online. You can steal, but it's not really fun and the context in which it is done is kinda lame. The quests all resemble each other and the dialogue options don't really matter. That leaves grinding the newest dungeon for the newest unbalanced gear, that will be nerfed shortly before the release of the next DLC and its featured gear or PvP. PvP is laggy and nigh unplayable. I've basically reduced my activity on ESO to getting login rewards and debate uninstalling but I've got 15 toons and the sunk cost fallacy, as I've been playing since launch, is very real.
My take: Most ppl want adventure, action and that usually eqauls to some fantastic feats of combat. I really love your games and i respect your attitude towards making different outcomes possible and viable and equal to the player. Hell I play bard in BG3 and LOVE that character where I ALWAYS have ALL the dialogue options, Still it takes a special kind of writers and actors to make dialogue as FUN as combat. Combat has its own mechanic its rewardiung. Writers need to put A LOT creative power and work with great actors to achieve the same thing IMHO.
They get progressively more cringe as the story progresses. The only reason to complete that questline is mechanical tbf. It's one of the worst stories in the game.
@@konberner170That is easily explained by the fact you can safely assume the episodes are the 1% of encounters they face, as the remaining 99% they encounter are too mundane for an episode.
Combat is the most overt metaphor/manifestation for conflict. Combat-as-default is low-hanging fruit. Besides, gamification--talent trees, rewards based on skillful play, etc--work very well with combat and is hard to replicate with non-violent conflict-resolution. Doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be done, but it is easier, lower risk (for the developers), and more popular.
Specifically regarding your point about ads getting shorter (but usually more numerous): I wouldn't call that a failure of people's attention spans. People have always hated advertising interrupting something they're watching and interested in. Shorter ads both mean less money spent actually putting together each ad, and that psychological trick of "at least it's short and taking up less of my time" even if the total ad break is just as long.
@@jfkst1 That's also partly because people aren't taught how to read anything longer than short excerpts. The practice of giving students a book to read over some time has mostly disappeared.
Would you be able to cite where you found that universities are having trouble getting students to read books to completion? It was my understanding the concept of attention spans is flawed, and what we consider an attention span has more to do with expected timing of dopamine releases from specific stimulus. That being one could easily ready a 300 page book if they find it stimulating but my struggle to get though a 10 page article that’s dry. I assume the shorter ads, if they have anything to do with “attention spans”, are just because it feels better to watch a shorter ad and therefore the audience doesn’t feel as negatively towards the product
@ I'd have to search for it, which means I'm not in a much better place than you for finding where I read it. I do know I've seen it both in one or two articles, and in at least one UA-cam video.
I loved the game Arcanum and I always appreciated that being an intelligent and smooth talking type of character can actually be the best way to get a happy ending for the different towns, cities and npcs you meet.
12:28 to be fair Tim, how would I know if the other paths are there or not? Marketing will never say what a game DOESN'T have, then we will need to wait for more than review, but in-depth reviews, and these are never there at launch, and don't game companies want games to sell at launch?
It's a weird stance to have towards customers when the decision to include or remove those paths was made long before any customer ever sees an ad or review, so it boils down to three outcomes - Don't buy a game that you know only has 95% of what you liked from the prequel and hope that it still does okay for a sequel, but not well enough that the developer doesn't ask where a good chunk of their customers went - Buy it in spite of that missing 5% and the developer takes it as people didn't want that missing 5% and they can continue to cut "unnecessary" features off with no drawbacks. - Buy it without looking up in-depth reviews, because you trust the devs previous efforts and expect they'd expand upon what they'd done in the prequel and be annoyed (at best) when your favourite 5% of the previous game is completely absent.
One thing i think is a really interesting part of this discussion that isn’t often discussed is the idea that violence is inherently pleasurable in fiction. The thought process behind that generally seems to be that people react strongly to that type of audio-visual stimuli because people feel inherently disempowered to act out violence in their daily lives in a civilized society. This isn’t a “video games make people violent” discussion either, because I, like most people, find that to be bunk. I do think that a lot of the devs who come up with alternative approaches to interacting with the world with the option for violence vs nonviolence generally make better *art*, if not better games overall. I like games like fnv, bg3, and cyberpunk (as well as many of tim’s games) that allow people to act out a fiction of the depth of reality in this world-space. By that i mean, those games have to account for civilian life, militarism, and everything in between. Through that process of mechanical cohesion with the world and its occupants, it allows any player feel truly immersed in the experience in time. I would take a game that’s as deep as an ocean any day, no matter how many of my niche character builds and poor choices lead me to restarting again and again. That friction against the world really gives a feeling of survival and proper achievement when actually progressing your way, as opposed to a flat, scalable experience. Great video tim!
It's funny Tim, I'm 40, I played Fallout with my Dad back when I was about 13 or so (when it first released), I've never played a low int character and now I really want to! I also have a few other games you've worked on, Arcainum, Temple, Tyranny ect, I think it's time to go through and play those a bit different now. Thanks for the video!
This is such a great question and response, so apologies in advance as I have many thoughts. For starters, I think violence was always an option in tabletop, particularly since you were often questing against an inherent "evil" that you needed to vanquish. While that doesn't overtly state you will need to use violence to do it, I think in a party format you're likely to have some. I absolutely think any game developer (particularly RPG open world) needs to account for the likelihood that some who play the game will employ that technique whether due to their preference or their roleplaying. That said, looking at many of the AAA releases and their focus on weapons and skins should indicate clearly that while I agree it is based on what the customer wants, it's also that you're not giving them another option with equal benefit. If I am rewarded with XP every time I kill something in the world, wouldn't that be the easiest way to generate XP? Or wouldn't it at least appear that way? Weighting these elements in favor (or at least making it equal) to other techniques or approaches would "coach" the player into perhaps rethinking how they want to approach some situations. Last but not least, I played many adventure games back in the day where doing something would render the game unfinishable. I had zero issue with it then and feel the same way now. It is okay to test the limits and find that there are some things that will result in game over. As you said Tim, everyone's biggest vote is with their wallets and eyeballs, but major game companies have an opportunity to use creativity and game design to reshape the way we as players think about the game. Idealistic, maybe, but isn't that why we're here?
My thoughts about this: You need conflict for an engaging story, and action for engaging gameplay. Combat combines both, so it's likely to engage the most people. Another way to combine conflict and action is competition - like racing and sports games. But the variety of stories, worlds and characters you can create with those is much more limited.
So I still remember how blown away I was the first time I played Fallout (mostly by shooting things but with a lot of stealth and other skill checks... dam everything really does devolve into a stealth archer) but I had read all the stuff just because I was enjoying the world building and extra story stuff. Then I failed to sneak past the master and he started talking before the fight, when I just talked him into killing himself and blowing up his base because the super mutants were sterile... it blew my mind that I didn't have to fight the final boss, that he was written enough like a person with actual goals that learning it was all for nothing and that he was dooming rather than saving humanity was enough to just make him give up, it blew my mind. I mean sure I was 16 it didn't take a hell of a lot to blow my mind, but it still did.
Kinda Sorta Related Recently Just playwd KOTOR2 for the first time and was surprised there was a quest that didn't have a non violent option. I ended up looking it up to see if I could complete it without killing a set of guards and it just wasn't an option. Which did slightly upset me since not only did it feel like I was more or less breaking character because there was only a violent option to complete that quest.
Non-violence in RPGs is very strange to me. The genre is so focused on player agency, so it feels like it should almost always be an option (even if it's a bad decision in the context). But games could do a better job at responding to player violence and enabling richer non-combat oriented progression.
Combat is objectively the most 'fun' path in an RPG (evidenced by what people buy/rave or complain about). If you nerf the fun by introducing negative consequences for too much of the combat just to force people to engage with other mechanics, you're not going to make the game more fun for most players, you're guaranteed to make it *less* fun overall. And I'm someone who would dearly love to see a solution to this problem, this just isn't it. What would that 'richer' non-comabt progression look like? Can you make it meaty and engaging enough to rival combat or at least get in the same ballpark?
I like more immersion to game world through exploration, and RPG elements gives more depth that I like. So if the game succeeds in that immersion well, combat can be then "shit happens" encounter with something you want to avoid, because it can ruin your health and cost critical supplies. But also it is not so obvious you can easily avoid unpleasant encounters if game story drives player to more dangerous areas. Shortly, survival elements can greatly enhance immersion and progression can also happen through critical supplies.
This reminded me about my ideal game that I want to make. Think about Night City in Cyberpunk 2077. Instead of being a merc and follow the storyline, we're just a part of the city and have no storyline to follow. You can work as a small vendor employee to earn a chump change or become part of the violence to earn the high risk high reward. There could be many things like career path and personal connections or even start a business or gang. The problem would be it's required so much work compared to focus on the combat to be "fun" and have narrated storyline so you wouldn't have so much variables. Not to mention if you're not the AAA studios but just a small team or even solo, you can forget about the narrated storyline and just focus on the "fun". Maybe one day I can make such a game in smaller scale to present my ideas. Hope we're all stay healthy for long enough for me to work on such a lofty ideal game. But you're welcome to use this idea. My goal is to have such a game to play, not trying to monopolize or gain capital. I just wish there are more "fun" games to play.
i remember when it came out i didn't know cyberpunk 2077 would be so combat focused i thought it was going to be like an immersive sim or open world rpg or smth with a cyberpunk setting, when i realized what it was i refunded right away. i dont mind combat at all but i hate how its done. if you start out super poor and have to work for hours to afford your first gun, you die in one shot etc that would be amazing. instead its just a call of duty campaign
@@redblue5140 I actually wish for something similar, starting from somewhere low and climb up the society. The outcome of being a "movie game" is rather disappointing. But I think overall it's still good enough as another game of the same price. I'm not that picky cuz there's always something I could learn from games made by others.
I just finished reading "A Theory of Fun" (which came out >20 years ago) and in it the author laments that games are stuck in a rut of having the same mechanics used over and over just with different set dressing. There are some successful games that have overcome the violence trap - Return of the Obra Din, Outer Wilds, Journey, and any recent "Simulator" game come to mind as games that successfully have great mechanics that aren't outright focused on the player performing violence. But, as you point out, we're unlikely to see less violence in AAA because there's so much money on the line that they have to basically be guaranteed success. It's a lot easier in the indie space where there's less money involved. I also think this is a big reason that you hear the common refrain of "games are so boring now!" from people. They play a new game for long enough to see that the mechanics are all the same as every other AAA game they've played recently (shoot this, upgrade this, discover this, collect this) but just with different set dressing. You only have fun when you're learning new things and in the back of their head, they know that there's not really going to be anything new to learn. Of course, the average consumer just gets confused about this and stops playing games completely when what they really need to do is seek out games that teach them something new.
On releated note, this is also why full voice over sells. People do like good, movie quality, engaging dialog. But getting this to have depth is much more expensive than creating a good combat system.
I feel like it kind of took away from the experience in fallout 4. That wasn't really a problem with voiceovers specifically though, and more so that they chose to limit their dialogue options to make recording easier
I saw a GDC talk while ago about this topic. The presenter mentioned iirc that combat is in our genes and thus something that is instinctive and appealing (even small kids know how to wield sticks as toy weapons). Also, even animals will play-fight, etc (my dog loves it). It is also the ultimate drama: death is one of the outcomes. Hell, I rember as kid a motorcycle racing game had a option to hit the oponent and it was fun. So games tap into the play-fight instincts, perhaps?
Combat is in our genes. We learned it when we were still hunting mammoths. It was practically a highlight of everyday life back then. For this reason, the first-person shooter genre is one of the most popular.
1:32 "I realise my answer some people aren't going to like" I love when I find your answers disagreeable. I can already come up with explanations I like on my own at a drop of a hat.
I took a few weeks to creep my way through Dishonored taking in every nook and cranny. My roommate beat it in one--maybe two--nights, dashing through the entire game and killing EVERYONE. He's fine with the mainstream :)
I’ve always wanted to see an open world RPG, focused on a different basic mechanic instead of violence. Particularly for me, the idea of a game where you play as a press photographer, would be really interesting, bc in many ways it uses the medium very well as an inherently visual medium. You still have “gunplay” in the sense of equipment customisation and modification, and you recycle a lot of the usual movement, camera, etc. mechanics, but the objective is to get good photos. You could use machine learning, and other code to “judge” the photo in terms of trying to capture the “newsworthiness” of the images created, and there’d be a lot of fun open world, stealth, exploration mechanics, if you do the setting as a city particularly set in the 20th century or something like that. Even add risk of getting shot if you’re in an active crime scene or w/e. But the entire game hinges on a nonviolent creative act, while still offering interest, intrigue, and novel mechanics. Especially if you set it in the early 20th century with film cameras, and so on.
There's actually been a couple of games like that. Tchia's focus is on possessing items/animals to solve puzzles, not combat. Infiniti Nikki recently came out, and although it has basic combat, the focus is on just exploring the world, doing puzzles, collecting clothes, etc.
Plenty (relative to the number of ppl who are interested) of games like that. One involves exploring, which gives you inspiration, which then allows you to paint oil paintings or somesuch. It's just not an RPG and there's no way you'd get people who want to play an RPG to play it instead.
Undertale is pretentious dogshite however. It's bullethell system is fun but severely undercooked and the interactions you get from the npcs are far and few between.
I often treat combat as the fail-forward option. If I could talk or sneak, why are we being violent. The flip side is, that sometimes one just want the the catharsis of some fun combat or satisfying tactics. I think Rogue Trader (so far) have been able to provide me with both. I recall Fallout doing the same thing, and I really should pick up Outer Worlds one of these days (incidentally the combat in the trailer made me go "nah, not in the mood right now"
I really appreciate games like Portal. In fact one of the reasons I like Fallout so much is because it gives you the choice to not go in and shoot every thing.
Portal, really? You do remember that you kill (ostensibly sentient) turrets in that game and it's played as a joke, not to mention what you do to the final boss. Doesn't really embody non-violence imo.
Hmm, I'm not sure I entirely agree. I think it's less about the potential of making money, and more about consistency and high-level executives being notoriously unwilling to challenge industry standards. If you look the indie- and double A scene, you will see that games like Undertale or Disco Elysium can actually achieve amazing sales. Of course, if you compare these games to actual triple A games, their sales won't look as impressive - but that's because they're not triple A games. It's an unfair comparison. But there really is no fair comparison, either. I mean, think about it. When's the last time a major triple A studio released an original game not centered around combat, outside of Nintendo? Portal, maybe? That's one of the most beloved and successful PC games of all time. Personally I think a triple A RPG not centered around combat or violence could actually sell amazingly well - it would just be amazingly risky in turn, and that's a risk no one seems to be willing to take. But I think this might actually change soon. With the rise of "cozy", non-violent games, that trend is bound to creep into other genres. And even if you look at mainstream triple A RPGs lately, the combat actually seems to be one of the *least* celebrated aspects. Maybe we've just gotten used to it, or shooters and soulslikes do it flashier amd better. But when people talk about why they love Baldur's Gate 3, or the Witcher, or Cyberpunk, or even Fallout... do you really hear them mentioning combat all that often? Or even leveling up and developing their characters, which has long been a defining characteristic for what an RPG even is. No, I think RPGs have developed into a different direction. One where story, immersion, and worldbuilding are the primary methods of engagement. That's not to say the combat serves no purpose in these games, or that they would be better without it. But it means that it might not actually take as much as you may think to push the genre just a bit further and get rid of combat, or relegate it to a minor feature. The indie and double A world showed the way, the triple A scene will follow at some point.
Just reducing the number of enemies to something realistic would be a very good start. Take your country’s most violent criminal’s most violent month. How many people did they kill? Not that many. Probably 20 or less. A game with 20 combat encounters would be very different from the current paradigm. No faceless goons, but instead enemies presented as realistic people.
The thing is, what works (or can work) for indie and even AA, doesn't work for AAA. It's the same as asking 'why do VCs with 1bil+ under management not invest small amounts in promising teams with a pathway to profitability'. It's not because they're stupid, it's because they need to deploy 1bil. Same with AAA, they need to make games at scale with mass-market appeal, which a priori shuts out a) niche genres, b) weird mechanics, c) things that are not familiar enough to a wide audience, and d) things that are hard to market. It doesn't mean small-scale games can't exist, be a profitable business etc, but it does mean it's a *different* business with different rules. A short note on size of addressable market: AAAs want to reach *all* the players, this means console in addition to PC (which also happens to have lower piracy rates). So often mechanics that can't be practically encoded as controller inputs are off the table (cf the Mass Effect patented wheel of dialogue). This is a limitation on innovation in the space of mechanics (as are the tastes and expectations of the console audience). You're also hitting survivorship bias. Yes, Undertale and Disco Elysium exist. We know they exist because they succeeded. We don't know about hundreds and thousands of RPGMaker and narrative games that failed, because they failed to get any attention regardless of their quality. I just saw a beautifully drawn Disco Elysium style narrative game set in a steampunk Victorian London with fantasy creatures: interesting setting that hits lots of people'(niche) preferences, pacifist run possible, good story, the whole lot. They even got promoted by the Fallen London/Sunless Sea people. Just over 200 reviews (quite positive) on Steam, meaning they got at best 6-7k in sales. This is below break even even for a solo dev with freelance support. So, Disco Elysium, as successful as it was, is not a repeatable model. I don't even get Undertale, so can't comment on that in depth, but also obviously not repeatable. Both are also not scalable to the level of AAA. As for cozy games, note that they usually replace combat with a bunch of mechanics that, while they may not be very complex individually, form a complex whole. In other words, there's a lot of stuff to do in them. Same goes for city builders and the like, or life sims, or sim/management/business games, or automation games. In other words, what they offer instead of combat isn't fat-free, gluten-free, soy milk thin nonsense, but fat, meaty, engaging gameplay (often with plenty of dopamine hits via juice). They can do this because their genre allows them to offer those mechanics - they're diegetic. The question is how do we make 'persuade NPC' naturally have full-fat, engaging mechanics on par with combat, in a way that is diegetic, makes sense, isn't contrived/immersion-breaking/obviously-artifically-gamified. This is the real question and I have absolutely no idea how to do that, nor does anyone else as far as I can tell.
I don't really think a big budget version of Disco Elysium would be terribly successful tbh. I think Indies and AAA are just made for very different demographics. Indies almost always try to appeal to a very specific, niche, audience. AAAs get most of their revenues from the many ppl that buy maybe one or two games a year. I think that's also the real reason why there is so little willingness for AAAs to try something new. They essentially have to sell their game to an audience who doesn't know that many games. Btw, Death Stranding is a non-violent AAA game that's not from Nintendo and not a Valve sideproject. Wasn't a very big success tho.
I hate to be the semantic guy, but i think saying violence sells isnt as accurate as saying combat sells. Violence has its apeal for sure, but many games with combat are less or more violent than others. You could say games like Doom and mortal kombat use violence to drum up sales, but those games dont blow away other FPS, and fighting games out of the water based on violence alone. Combat systems are fun, and complex. There is so much variety as well. Whether the combat is grotesquely violent like mortal kombat, or cartoonish and light like Kingdom Hearts. Not many would use the word Violent to describe Kingdom Hearts, even though the main gameplay is fighting monsters. Some of the bosses are even people, but it isnt portrayed "violently". My point is you are correct in your assessment, but calling it violence muddies the discussion a bit due to how most people use the word violent in media discussion. We clearly draw some line between solving conflict with combat, and solving conflict with violence.
I've been playing video games since the late 1970s, and one of my biggest complaints over the decades is that so many games are built around killing things. For me, that aspect of gaming got old a long time ago, but I still play plenty of games that feature combat because they have other elements that hold my interest. In RPGs, this typically includes exploration and narratives. An RPG that is entirely combat focused and isn't strong in these other areas will rapidly bore me to tears. In the early years, I gravitated to Ultima rather than Wizardry because Ultima is stronger in exploration, while Wizardry is a long, combat-focused slog through dungeons. Additionally, I've never liked challenging action games. I'm an old nerd who doesn't have reflexes, and I find these games frustrating. Naturally, if combat is present (and it usually is) I prefer turn based or real time with pause games. Sometimes, I even enjoy turn based combat, as it is a tactical puzzle that is interesting to solve if it is unusually well designed. The one advantage to action-oriented games is that I can get the combat over with very quickly, as long as there is a super-easy mode. The best example I've seen recently is Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Combat can be nerfed so thoroughly as to render it irrelevant, which is just how I like it. Non-violent and low violence games have always been present, but through most of gaming history, they have been niche products. The text adventures and text-and-graphics adventures of the 1970s and 1980s are usually low to no violence, as is the case with their more recent descendants, the walking simulators. Simulation and management games can also be devoid of violence. When SimCity came out, I was overjoyed. Finally, there was a game with a great deal of interactivity and endless replay value that didn't constantly want me to kill something. Nowadays, city builders and related simulation-type games account for the majority of my gaming time. Of course, some of these have raid mechanics, but there is often a peaceful mode that allows for a more relaxing, raid-free experience. As for RPGs, it should be possible, albeit challenging, to create a non-violent or low violence RPG by expanding upon other systems, but I can't think of many examples. Disco Elysium is the only one that immediately comes to mind. Considering how successful it was, there must be a market for this sort of game. However, I have to agree with Tim here - such games are bound to be difficult to market, and those of us who are looking for less violence in our games seem to be in the minority. I'm seeing a missed opportunity here. Video games, as an art form, are capable of so much more than combat. If that game mechanic were removed, it would encourage developers to get more creative about other aspects of games, as they would sink or swim based on other game mechanics that are often seen as afterthoughts. Though the audience for these games is likely smaller than the audience for combat-oriented action games, this audience is currently under served, and a non-violent RPG that gets everything right has the potential to be commercially successful. Furthermore, improvements to non-combat systems could make combat-oriented games better.
I feel very same. I'm not against of violence as I like horror games and shooters for example, but it is just boring if everything is based on killing. Late 80s and early 90s was golden era of point and click adventures. I love those so much that I still play them. Next in my list is to replay Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places). From that era, Sid Meier's Pirates had RPG elements, and violence, but violence was low. There are low violence indie titles that I like. Example "The Vanishing of Ethan Carter", "The Witness" and it is important that we have games that are not based on some weapons and killing. There is one important reason also why I like games with low violence: We also play games together with wife or friends, puzzle based games are then way better. While I like RPG games, they are like turn based strategy games. Works better when played alone. Shooters are also games that works better when played alone.
One of the things I loved about Shadowrun Dragonfall and Hong Kong is that you got karma (experience) for finishing the mission, not for combat. So you could choose how you did the mission and get the same or maybe more karma for nonviolence then for just going hard.
Some of my favorite games are non-violent e.g. Subnautica, Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic, Anno series, Sims 3, Oxygen Not Included. But it is true that all of my favorite games have violence as a main theme, and Fallout is certainly in that category. It is a very violent world and companions are specced for violence even if you aren't. In any case, I do tend to prefer my violence to be against other-than-humans in games. This is why 7 Days to Die is among my favorites. Baldur's Gate and such are also mostly monsters or very bad guys. But if the game is good enough, like Cyberpunk, even if it is mostly human opponents and heavy violence, it can still be a top game for me.
I'm those persons who actually enjoy violence in games but simultaneously, there is so much violence in the games and games that depend on violence that it starts to get boring. After looking this video just check my last game purchases and noticed that I've long time actually bought games avoiding violence, or at least games where player don't get some "points" killing characters. Recently I've enjoyed horror games where is violence but that is found from setting, not by having some gun and shooting characters.
most interesting stories need a conflict, and violence is the most obvious form of that, so i figured its just the nature of narrative in general. i mean it would be fun to have a political intrigue game in theory, but i tried the red strings club and it just felt like i was missing half the game because i did the dialogue trees “wrong” and i had no idea why or how its a lot more obvious when you miss your swing of your sword and get pummeled for it haha
Part of the problem is games training people to play one way, you need a game designed to be played in different ways and teach the player all the options. Lot's of games iv played say they have options but in reality they dont, then a lot are just not well balanced. The classic example that comes to mind is instant fail states for forced stealth in games, it's a bad system that's not fun for the player. Id also point to 4X games like Civ or Stellaris, they have options past just war but they also tend to be harder to learn/win with. Immersive sims like Prey (2017) do a good job, combat/fix tech/stealth as a coffee cup/pick up heavy object to clear path etc.
THANK YOU! havent finished but just by the title i agree. I feel like combat is the only gameplay mechanic there really is anymore in a lot of triple A games.
1. Happy new year, Tim! 2. I'm sure that the n.1 reason why violence is the default path in the vast majority of RPGs is, as you say, money. 3. I wonder, though, if another reason - that of course reinfonces the previos one - is that stealth and dialogs are somewhat undercooked systems compared to combat in almost all RPGs. I mean, in the best case scenario they are supported paths throughout the game, but they are never as delepoled and as fun to play as combat. The only exceptions that come to mind are a couples of immersive sims with very good stealth mechanics/paths, but still undercooked diplomatic options. I can't think of a single RPG where quests, maps and encounters are designed, balanced and tested to be "a fun ride" for all kinds of characters. Nor I'm aware of a single (virtual) ruleset as deep in non-combat options as in combat ones. Now, I do understand the practical reasons behind that, but I also think that nothing will ever replace combat as the "main" path in RPGs as long as it remains the most delevoled system in those games. It looks like a self fulfilling prophecy scenario...
Like it's self-fulfilling. If all development time and money goes into combat then yes the combat will be more fleshed out than stealth, dialogue and puzzles.
OK, arguendo, how do you make non-combat as meaty, complex and appealing as combat? In other words, what would those mechanics look like if a studio decided to prioritise them in development? And, this is important, if they were to do that, would they still even need the RPG elements or would those be extraneous fluff in what would otherwise be, for example, an excellent, streamlined and focused stealth game?
Well, arguendo: You copy from the best games out there. You have stealth action games (Metal Gear, Thief, Splinter Cell, etc), stealth games in real time with pause (from Commandos to Shadow Gambit), even turn based ones (Invisible Inc.) to copy from. And someone have already tried with interesting results. As for dialogues, you probably know that there is this new wave of "narrative RPGs" (Disco Elysium,Vampires: Swan song, Pentiment, etc) which have no combat at all and are experimenting with dialogue systems in interesting ways... All that being said, I do understand that the game best at everything is a game that won't ever see the light of the shelves. But, still, I hope for a CRPG good (or at least decent) at everything. A CRPG that supports in equal measure all 3 gameplay pillars, which is an unseen object as we speak. PS: Don't get me wrong. I love games laser-focused on a single future. I play mostly these kinds of games. But in CRPGs I search for sandbox/open ended experiences. The more GOOD options I get, the better. My character, my story, my play-style. All equally supported. That's my ideal CRPG.
@@Alessandro_Gambino I understand the desire, I just don't think it can work. Every genre mash-up ends up as one of two things: 1) too niche because it requires the player to be a fan of all the constituent genres, or 2) not good enough in one or more of the constituent genres to satisfy fans of that genre. With the latter, I don't think it's just a matter of execution (eg Space Rangers). You just can't compete with a game that's solely focused on, say, stealth in a mash-up: a focused stealth game can afford intricate mechanics for stealth because it's what the player came there for (and the player doesn't have to learn two more sets of intricate mechanics for RPG and combat) and the level design + story can serve the stealth focus. In a mash-up, you necessarily try to serve many masters and not overload the player with the genre he may not be all that into. There's a reason no RPG combat is as 'good' as Dark Souls or whatever you think has good combat. Also, from a commercial perspective, if you can make a game with 3 genres done to an excellent level that can compete with the best in those genres, why would you not make 3 games you can sell separately?
@@paulie-g Well, what you say could definitely happen, it has happened many times but it don't necessary HAS TO happen... Genres that today we recognize as such started out as a mashup of pre-exisiting genres. This is even the case of the soul-borne genre, despite the fact that young people seem convinced that Demon's Soul came out of nowhere. As a rule of thumb, I'd say that a mesh-up works when it combines elements that enhance each other; doesn't work when it does the opposite. And said mesh-up doesn't need to satisfy the fans of the genres it combines; It needs to find its own public... A practical example? Many Immersive sims nowadays are a blend of stealth, FPS and RPG elements. They don't excel in any of the things that these genres do best, but they are the best games out there if you are searching for emergent gameplay and freedom in play-style. RPGs, to me, should be even more focused on the pursuing of this kind of freedom, and even at the cost of being the proverbial jack of all trades and master of none. It is doable, it has been done with a certain degree of success but there is still room for improvements...
Well, to be fair, DND grew out of TACTICS and WARGAME " Chainmail" And the first RPGs were players about VIOLENCE Clearing DUNGEONS by groups of mercenaries with different capabilities
Part of the problem, at least from the side of what players gravitate towards, is that usually the non-combat options just aren't as well developed as the combat ones. Combat gets whole systems and gameplay loops dedicated to it that challenge the player. A lot of the time the dialogue options are just menu choices and stat checks. It's a choice to skip gameplay. I guess if you literally only cared about the narrative, that's fine, but then why are you playing a game? I suppose stealth is sort of non-violent gameplay, but not entirely. You're still doing something against someone who wouldn't want you to be doing that and sometimes the "non-violent" approach still involves doing what amounts to stealth kills that the game just says are incapacitating instead of lethal. There are also just rarely meaningful consequences to violence. These aren't real people and if the game isn't going to punish you in terms of gameplay or narrative, then the stigma violence carries is kind of irrelevant. If anything in RPGs it's often encouraged because you get stronger through fighting. I'd really like to see some RPGs which make solving the problem through other means just as core to the experience as fighting. That said, games can't really be good at everything, so maybe it's just not that feasible to essentially design 2-3 full sets of mechanics, gameplay loops, and levels just to accommodate all that.
most of Hogwarts Legacy was killing poachers and goblins, and while i thought the combat was fun, there was a narrative dissonance because i was a 15 year old student
Something I love about the Temple of Elemental Evil quests inside the Temple, is how you can manage to do almost every of them (and ending the game) with almost no killing
Tim, have you played Disco Elysium? There’s only one unavoidable fight and no combat outside of dialogue. The devs cited Fallout 1 - an objectively hyper-violent game - as a major influence.
To be fair, Disco is made to be a very simple game and its dialogue mechanics are hardly any different than most cRPGs. It just removes combat outright and the joy of the game (mechanically) is expressing your character and how the main character's thoughts color how he and the player perceive the world. There is no social combat, not really. Combat encounters are just dialogue. In that sense it is very much like those rules light Tabletop RPGs where the mechanics are very simple, and combat has no special rules. Fighting in those games is the same as talking or exploring. Disco is clearly inspired more by those kinds of TTRPGs than Fallout. Still amazing though.
I have similar thoughts on combat pacing in PvP titles- MOBA and MMO in particular being RPG offshoots. Based on general design and balancing trends there are clearly waaay more players (in these genres) interested in winning at all costs, as quickly as possible, with as little effort as possible. I love winning and I love loot, but a good fight with some interesting back-and-forth is something even more special. I wonder how many developers would otherwise prefer to focus more on combat satisfaction in higher TTK fights vs "pewpew big crits now gimme my deserved loot and ego hit"
I think the core problem is we don't really have a mechanical substitute for violence that feels just as good for the player to engage with. That might be an evolutionary thing at the end of the day it's pretty tough to beat the most basic of instincts which is the fight in fight or flight. I think the best we can do is just always try and put as many non-violent options out there as you can.
That's it, even just for combat it's not balanced in most games. In Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura Magic is the most fun, magic is over developed then bows are over powered and the rest is under developed. The story and world make the game work, still reality’s of game dev wont let you polish every game.
In real life there is three basics stragies if there is danger: attack, hide, escape. So I find it boring when games are based on mostly attack. That is why I enjoy playing currently "Amnesia: Dark descent" because mechanics are based on sanity-hide-run
The core problem is violence appeals to everyone no matter where you land on the bell curve. Whereas diplomacy, persuasion, investigation...no so much.
@@gruntaxeman3740 For me it's hiding I can't stand since at the end of the day hiding is just a delayed escape and if I'm going to have to escape anyway I'd rather skip the waiting and get on with it. I couldn't get into Amnesia but I really enjoyed Still Wakes the Deep since it was mostly escaping with very little hiding and a much heavier focus on story.
Hey Tim Cain you might be interested in the game Wayward Realms from Once Lost studio formed by some of the OGs that worked on the early Elder Scroll's games One of their goals is to provide role playing options that don't necessarily require violence to progress a questline Ted Peterson and Julian LeFay are heading up the studio If you have worked with them maybe you guys could coolaborate on a vid/interview together
Ok. Here we go. I'll try to be very short. It's not a new issue, not an issue off video games rpgs, nor rpgs in general or games. It have been a problem about narrative. And it has two folds. One is that violence doesn't require further explanation. There's no "what happens later", because death is definitive. It helps to deliver the audience a final result, in short terms. The second fold is, dramatically speaking, it's far easier to set up a physical conflict than navigate non violent arguments. If you get good movies, there's those with violence and those without it. But bad movies usually appeal to simple and straightforward violent actions, because it doesn't demand much. In the end, yes, there's money involved. But there's also some creative issues.
I don't think this tracks with the observable reality. Most films for the majority of the medium existence were about people talking, with violence, if there even is any, being the climax of the story. Fighting on screen is ludicrously expensive! You are very constrained in the amount of takes, you need your actors to also be good athletes, learning choreography takes a lot of time and effort, etc Videogames are basically the only medium where on-screen violence is both cheap to produce and actually engaging.
I can add Skyrim to games with ability to play with less violance. I've made a character in Skyrim who hadn't practically fighting skills, even write a song about it. About story mode. I guess people skip it because most of games give a reason to think that this is not a full game experience, so you didn't have that much fun or even didn't have some loot, missions etc. About money. Software companies and game developers in particullar usually get money from investors not directly from players. To get these money developer needs to show plan of approx. profit for specific game genre. When developer gets its share if sales will be good if not they will find an excuse as well as investors, because they need a reason to tell themselves that we didn't put money into bad project. Then dev will go to ask investors to pay more money for the next game. That's why people didn't feel a money control over AAA development. Because they can do anything, sale broken game, put microtransactions into it, make a obligatory internet connection etc., and when people who paid money say wtf, "oh you don't understand how hard is game development".
Alright, even though The Outer Worlds isnt a AAA product, you still mention it quite a lot in the video (which makes sense, since it's a game you made) so I wanted to talk a bit about it. The Outer Worlds still has this "violence as the default" feeling THROUGHOUT the game. Especially the DLCs. Sure, you can talk your way out of some situations, but there are still SO MANY trash encounters who aren't really fun considering the two options you're given. Option 1: Kill them all (Violence as the default) Option 2: Stealth your way around them. This isn't fun either. Mostly because crouching in bushes isn't exactly the most exciting of gameplay, but also because this doesn't feel like non-violence. You're only given two choices, kill everyone or not kill everyone. Stealthing isn't pacifism if your only other option is to kill them all. Let's compare this to the first Pillars of Eternity: there are still a significant amount of trash encounters, but there are SO MANY encounters that start with the potential enemy engaging in conversation with you before attacking, and often offering alternatives that aren't violence or stealthing. This can come in the form of a bribe, a persuasion, a threat or even a team-up, but you're often capable of solving potential encounters peacefully, while still admitting that violence of stealth was an option. What this means is that, in the occasional encounters that you can't (or don't want to) talk down your opponent, violence most often feels like a last resort and self defense rather than "oh look, more health bars for me to deplete", as it often does in TOW.
combat is more interesting typically because it involves more user input and interaction with the console/pc via the controller or kb/mouse; it is literally more physical input requirements that make it more interesting. Selecting a dialog option or sneaking past the entire game is incredibly boring, especially in most of the titles Cain has been involved in because by sneak level 50 the effort to sneak by everything in the game is TRIVIAL. I would love to see more "dominate" spells or proper mind control of NPC; where the npc is aware they are being controlled and verbally opposing the actions they are being forced to make. Most spells/skills of this nature are underleveled and only interesting in the first 3 hours of the game when you can "calm" a wolf; then the fun is over.
If the combat is too easy then that game probably won’t sell well. But for actually good games where the combat is fun and the power earned: for those specific examples even at that point it can plenty entertaining being creative in combat.
I will never forget getting to the end of The Outer Worlds and Vicar Max remarking something like "this will be tough, but I'm confident your silver tongue will get us through it again." And it did. I diplo'd my way through most of that game I realized.
yeah, voting with wallet seems to be working. if you look at some newers releases Flops like Star Wars outlaw, Veilguard, Concord and Suicide squad, shows that people are getting Tired.
Violence was actually on my mind when worked on my indie game "Encounter" last year, the game is based on a 1983 game where the only way to pass obstacles is to kill the opponents, and I did not really like that to be the only option so I added some non lethal paths, these require much more work but you are rewarded with higher scores (because it makes sense that as a private investigator you are not supposed to kill people, that would probably ends up having you lose your licence and finish in jail).
I agree with you that violence sells, but I'm curious as to why someone might see that as a problem? Violence is a part of life, and a big part of video games and especially RPGs is to reflect life. I suppose one problem might be someone younger playing a violent game and getting weird ideas from it, but that's what the ESRB ratings system is for. Wouldn't a better question be: "Why don't other mediums (books, T.V., Movies, music) get criticized to the same degree that video games do for having the same problems with violence?"
Movies were criticized a lot for violence a few decades ago, before video games showed up. Then attention shifted to video games, now nobody cares about violence in movies.
Ive always been a massive Doctor Who fan, so playing a character in an rpg that talks their way into/ out of situations instead of fighting has always been my dream.
I have to partially disagree with Tim here. Every game has a core gameplay loop. It's the thing your players are going to spend most of their time doing. That core gameplay loop is what sets the expectations. A good example are reviews for different games in the same franchise. Case and point a quote from a GoG review of Dragon Age Origins: "I played for 8 hours I guess, GOG didn't track my playtime, and like a show with bad first episodes, I don't see why I should keep playing it, and I was thinking: why do people even like this ? The combat system is very bland for a CRPG, compared to Divinity: OS2 and Pathfinder: WOTR. Maybe the music ? I could just listen to it on UA-cam. The graphics ? Obviously not. So the story ? Those 8 hours of playtime were of complete boredom, nothing special happens, 8 hours of just "go talk to that person, and now that person makes you talk to three more people about mundane topics about the world." This is a game, I don't care to learn about their fictional religion or politics in a room with nothing happening. 8 hours in and the game doesn't show anything to catch the player's interest, you don't even see the main villain, there's a war happening, you should care but why ? At least Inquistion has nice graphics, better combat, beautiful effects and maps that aren't completely mud." -NorthStarFist, August 15, 2023 The player wanted combat. Having played Inquisition he expected combat. The most praised thing about Dragon Age Origins is what drove him away. He didn't want a story, he wanted combat. The core gameplay loop of Dragon Age Origins was not something he enjoyed. On the other hand, the ever more pervaisive "story" mode most CRPGs have nowadays is the exact opposite, a game mode made for people who only bought the game for the story and who don't really want to engage with the combat aspect of a game. The problem though, is that when you try to make your game for everybody you are more often than not going to be making your game for nobody. Every difficulty setting takes at least some time to implement and check. It takes time and money. And that's true for AAA as it is for indie studios. Making games that can be enjoyed by everyone is a losing proposition. Especially for AAA game studios. The problem is that most AAA games nowadays cost so much even a game that sells well might be considered a failure. While everybody likes to clown on Concord and accuse Veilguard of being woke and not selling well, a more pertinent example is Mass Effect Andromeda. Despite the bad reception from entrenched fans, and the fact EA considered it a failure for not having sold as many copies as it they wanted. The game made it's money back and was profitable, but that didn't matter because it didn't meet expectation. Why does that matter? because that's the mistake most AAA game studios make. They try to make a game for everyone but they forget that given the opportunity gamers will optimize the fun out of their games. If a game has a violent and a nonviolent option, most people will pick the violent option. Hell, unless you make it absolutely - yellow paint on a ladder - clear that there is a nonviolent option, most gamers will assume violence is the intended solution and will be shocked to find out there is a nonviolent option. This is one of the main reason 0 violence indies like The Witness hit it big every once in a while. People that want nonviolent games will assume the same thing people that want violent games would about any game that has violence - that that's the not only the intended solution, but that it's the only solution. Violence is a particular form of action a player can engage in. If the player thinks that's the core gameplay loop of your game nonviolent options will be considered undesired deviations from the core gameplay loop. Similarly, adding a gun to a game like The Witness - unless done for comedic effect like in the Looker - would go against the core gameplay loop of that game. Options sound nice until you realize they're contradictory. One AAA example that comes to mind if Warframe and it's New War quest line. That quest is loved by people that mainly play Warframe and despise by other, especially if they play other games. Why? Because Warframe has a fast paced looter shooter core gameplay loop while New War is a AA console game - and I mean that as an insult. Every 15-20 minutes New War changed the gameplay on you. Every 15-20 minutes you get to engage in a completely different type of gameplay. IF you mainly play warframe that's a breath of fresh air. Finally, something different. But if you play other games, Warframe is just doing badly things you've seen in a dozen other games. For some people New War is fantastic because it deviates from the core gameplay loop, while for others it's a quitting point. They want the fast paced violence of the normal gameplay, and the slow paced, sometimes nonviolent gameplay of the New War quest is something they dislike so much they're considering quitting the game. And why? expectation. If people expect violence, and a certain kind of violence, at a certain pace to boot, and you don't deliver they're going to be disapointed. Similarly, if they don't expect violence and you force them to engage in it they might quit playing. AND if violence is an option, most people will always assume that it's both the intended way forward, and that it's the only way forward. Violence sells, AAA games will not become nonviolent any time soon, and while thoughtful game devs like Tim will continue to champion complex games with multiple solutions that have different gameplay loops at their core, the executives in charge of studios will just look at how people interact with their games and go from there. On the bring side, indies are only becoming stronger. PS. if you read all that have an internet cookie on me.
I used to get into a lot of voluntary street fights as a kid (13 to 19). All stopped as soon as I started playing my first action video games (God of War on PS2). Later, when I got my driving license, I used to drive carelessly and dangerously it turned to a new source for getting the action. All that stopped as soon as I played my first Forza game. People pretending that all humans born with the same neuro structures with same emotional needs are wishful thinkers. Action games sells because of evolutionary reasons. I am a software engineer coming from five generations of soldiers before me. Of course, the classic God of War is the GOAT game for me. Performing fake/virtual violence is way better than real violence. I know, the point of this video is to how make violent actions voluntary in your design and make it to be a player's choice. As a solo developer who loves making action puzzle games, I simply can not afford spending that much time for the parts that I don't even like to play them. For AAA games in other hand, sure if you have the budget, go for it.
Griftlands is a pretty much the only example I can think of where combat is a large part of the game, but you can play through every story without killing a single person. Talking to people isn't just a skill check, its a gameplay system just as deep as the battle one. Talking people down is also mechanically safer than killing people, as most people have relations with other characters you'll obviously damage if you kill them.
We have Book of Travels - a phenomenal indie RPG where violence isn't the base focus yet it has playercount so small it isn't even visible on the community page and the dev team on the brink of closure which saddens me greatly because the game is a real gem
Unavoidable combat just for the sake of combat can absolutely feel like filler in a narrative-driven game, and undermine the narrative itself. This is not exclusive to RPGs. I often felt like the narrative of Red Dead Redemption 2 was interrupted by meaningless "shooting gallery" moments that had zero impact to the actual story. Something actually suspenseful and interesting happens, and then suddenly 50 gunmen with no regard for their own lives spawn out of nowhere, and the only way out is pew-pew? And this happens in literally EVERY town in the game. But return to the town later, and it's like nothing happened. Why did the gang run from Blackwater again? The random gunmen had infinite respawns?
Cool question with a great answer. I'd phrase a similar question with romance dialogue/scenes. As I get older romancing npc's doesn't appeal to me when I'm busy trying to save the world or universe. So I wonder if leaving romance options out of rpg's would affect sales one way or the other?
Romance in mainstream RPGs is a very big deal - it gives people permission to engage with that sort of gameplay under the cover of "I'm here for the mainstream RPG" rather than straight up installing a japanese schoolgirl simulator. You would absolutely lose sales and enthusiasm if you cut it, although obviously RPGs without that option (or with a very surface treatment) are plentiful.
Something as a point of contrast. The reason violent games sell well, is the audience game publishers fostered like violent games. The target demographic still is like 20-50 year old men who grew up playing violent games. But when you look at the mobile market which has a much more balanced gender split, non-violent games shine. Even when you look at console games popular with women, Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, Tetris, etc.
Hi, Tim! On the comment about how short ads must be as compared to earlier decades: I imagine players nowadays just want to jump into the action immediately, rendering slowburn stories obsolete. Do you feel like this "short attention window" is something that has impacted game design in a harmful way? Do you think there's anything good that has come out of it?
Hi Tim, Your content is such a gem - and you’re absolutely right about demand and its relationship to violence in AAA games. Although games like Balatro or Minecraft do break through that pattern, it’s often against a confluence of factors. To me, violence makes for satisfying stories, and that’s part of why this pattern exists. Not that violence *is* satisfying, but rather in the context of creating scenarios with an enticing beginning, gripping midpoint, and definitive ending, a fistfight will accomplish that more easily than a complex discussion of competing philosophies. Narrative is often substituted by action, because action functions as narrative shorthand. Why devote a ton of time and money to crafting twenty branching paths for a cutscene depending on the dialogue chosen when you can just as easily make three where the outcome is a fight won, lost, or stalemate? I have a question of my own, if you’ll indulge me. I’m curious about whether a game like Fallout or The Outer Wilds, which both carry built-in criticisms of systems like capitalism and imperialism, are capable of conveying that ethos in gameplay? The revolution problem, essentially. If you’ll have to overthrow a violent state with violence, doesn’t that mean a greater amount of violence overall? How can you suborn a system of control and artificial scarcity of resources if you have to first take control of all the resources in order to allocate them more fairly? In a game that allows you to take multiple paths as you mention, like dialogue, or combat, or stealth, how would/could you represent a sophisticated or more granular solution to a problem? Ex. If a town in the New Californian Republic was suffering from caps based inflation (say an NCR guardsman found a bottlecap maker), could the player start attempting to verify which currency is counterfeit? Or somehow manipulate the supply by introducing a different currency system? I don’t know if there’s any solid answer, but I’m curious about your thoughts on this, and perhaps also how complicated gameplay systems can be before they become unwieldy? Cheers, Callum
Video Game RPGs are derived from Table Top RPGs. Table Top RPGs all stem from the basic fundamentals of Dungeons & Dragons. Dungeons & Dragons is built around the idea of "killing enemies and getting stronger" Killing is at the very essence of the DNA in any RPG. Mystery solved / Moving on.
I remember playing this free indie game called Emily is away. Basically you’re an early 2000’s high schooler talking to your crush over aol. The dialogue options had a range from insipid to genuinely impactful, but it was hard to tell until you made the choice and got a response. Despite the melodramatic tone I think it’s a good demonstration of how you can create a lot of tension and consequence with the absolute minimum. RPG’s should take one’s personal kindness, humor, etc into account when doing renown systems, otherwise they just become another experience bar you advance by killing the right things. The issue is just that it’s easier to make a dozen enemies and copy paste them than write thousands of dialogue options and consequent responses. I think that llm dialogue following doctored guidelines could help fill the gap. That said there’s plenty of other examples of rpg where dialogue and charisma are more important or as practical as violence, like fallout 1 and 2
I see the main problem with violence in AAA games in a completely different aspect: writing. Or rather, a lack of everything else in sufficient quality to be on par with violence. Over time, I'm becoming more and more convinced that a game as an art form is - is what it truly is - an art form. An art is made by artists. If you want to industrialize it, to turn all that craft, passion and self-expression into that huge thing that prints a lot of money - you inevitably lose the art component. The problem is that is works. Hollywood printed out movies after movies like a well-adjusted print press, with no real consideration for cinematography. Mr.Beast's videos are about the same, the lowest form of entertainment in an easily consumable format. AAA industry did the exact same thing with games. In the 90s and, to some extent, in 00s, it was carried by enthusiasts like yourself as well as technological advancements of the era. We had a good amount of mindless slop as usual, but some of those games came above of all their competitors and are still remembered today, even if the initial intent wasn't that of making pure art for the sake of it (like, for example, Hong Kong 97...), but to make it work as a business -- because, well, you do need money to make games. Somewhere around 2007-2012 the technological advancements slowed down and the novelty wore off, the public interest in video games has increased to the point that AAA has become its own Hollywood. Big money, big budgets, a lot of repetitive work that could now carry the product that those budgets could still be converted to (like graphics, 3d models, environments, etc.). Big games now take 5-8 years to make instead of just 2. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a good example of this -- it was massively carried by just its big budget -- lots of environment/level design work, lots of minor systems that just take time to implement instead of talent, etc. It worked for another 10 years, but ultimately, the industry has hit a wall here as well. Once the standard is set, you cannot release Battlefield 2042 that had less minor systems and polish compared to Battlefield 1. The systems became the content. Yes, the way your character opens a door while sprinting IS the content that players now pay their 150$ of the Ultimate Deluxe Early Access edition for, however stupid that may sound. The focus of the industry has turned to quantity instead of quality because it is an infinitely more reliable metric, and businesses don't like risks -- it's natural. The writing. As Hollywood cannot come up with a good script for a movie, AAA games cannot come up with a good script for a game. In an industry driven by corporate values, there is no place for an individual vision. It's not even about money, as the industry was doing fine just 25 years ago while still focusing on making money first. The talent is gone and replaced by DEI, the responsibility is spread throughout the middle management, the vision is replaced by a perpetual collective misunderstanding of the game they're making, and dictated by a local societal norms that tend to be very detached from the world outside of the company. So if no highs are possible, you need to take all your lows and pick something that will make money. If a game cannot grab you with its plot and characters, it still needs to provide at least some entertainment with action and violence. You may call it an Action RPG, but the point is, if the RPG aspect doesn't work (and it never will in these curcumstances), the Action aspect should, else it wouldn't sell. I don't care much for movies, but there's a reason we have many more successful manga/novel adaptations instead of original anime, because, on average, a single person making art will compromise less and won't allow external factors to dictate what goes into the work, than a company making product. So as a company, when all you have is compromises and safe content, you really have no choice but to make something that worked in the past, hence violence. I see no solution to this, and frankly, I don't see a problem to solve. I've stopped buying games I don't care about a long time ago, but there is still an audience that can be exploited and it's not going away. Someone will always buy a 70$ horse, a season pass, a battle pass, and a 250$ supporter edition with extra skins, and the industry will still produce games where you need 8 headshots after a stealth takedown to kill a single PvE enemy because you didn't buy a premium experience booster from the cash shop for 7.99$ and your level is too low. It's not going to change, but we as individuals are not required to continue buying AAA games. There is no point in playing a bad game (because everyone else plays it and you're not/the marketing departament tries really hard/it's the best thing since sliced bread) and then thinking that you're old/don't like games anymore/modern games bad/etc. The fight for your time and money is in your own head. I am disappointed that so many people don't understand this. By the way, people talk about a crisis in AAA industry, but I don't believe it's true. All I see is multiple AAA companies shooting themselves in the head with dumbest possible decisions. Companies that don't do stupid desicions are completely unaffected by the Western AAA being idiots, and still sell tons of copies and get tons of players (like Wukong, Palworld, Baldur's Gate 3, Marvel Rivals, PoE2, etc.).
Yup thats the big "uff", especially when it comes to RPG's. Most of them were aimed at "hardcore gamers" from the beginning. But with increasing complexity became drastically more expensive.Thus had to cater to the mainstream as well, to even enable developers to implement such complex systems. And now we are in a situation where the mainstream dictates where these games are going, even believing that they always were how they are today, which oftentimes is an oxymoron. Ending in the unfortunate reality that the mainstream oftentimes rejects attempts to steer complex RPG's back to their roots. And sadly, only very few studios can handle the very delicate balance of catering towards the mainstream, while at the same time tackling complex moral, social and political topics or extremely complex rule systems like D&D and alike. Things that for the most part, still only hardcore gamers are interested in. But that is how most of them used to be. Unfortunately today, in the current climate, that is barely possible with the next shitstorm right around the corner. Almost tragic...
@@The_ViciousOne I don't believe in "hardcore" vs "mass casual" audience. What matters is how accessible your game is. Some of my friends are "casual" FFXIV players who played the game strictly as a visual novel and a Barbie simulator but for some inexplicable reason ended up completing hardcore bossfights with high dps output on their main class. Baldur's Gate 3 brought a massive "casual" audience despite being a niche game for Divinity fans. Path of Exile 2 even had corpo vtubers playing it - people who are the complete opposite of a hardcore gamer as they can't spend too much time on one game and have to make their streams entertaining instead of nerding about the game's systems. Yes, it's very hard to go the "classic" way for a text-heavy RPG - with finding a publisher, funding, etc. but there is still a way of going indie/small and then gradually scaling your games up to the desired size. BG3 basically started from Divinity/Original Sin or even before that, PoE 2 had 10 years of fans making their own Diablo 3 (in a form of PoE1), Miyazaki had 5 clones of Demon's Souls before shipping Elden Ring, etc. Then there's Disco Elysium. I want to believe that the industry has learned that games for everyone usually turn into games for no one, and we will be seeing more projects for specific audiences instead of just "mainstream" slop, with more limited, healthier and more sustainable budgets and development times - 8 years for a single game is detrimental for the quality of the game because of key staff changes, morale, etc. - and it will also limit complexity. Deus Ex 1 did not need a horse pooping mechanic but turned out to be one of the best games in history. I think that this balance will be achieved from the indie developers and small studios growing bigger over time, while already big corporations will continue to lose money on DEI and Concords and close their offices, there is no saving them but there are alternatives. And they don't dictate the mainstream anymore. There has been no mainstream for quite some time anyway, at least since E3 has closed, the niches are strong and more populated than before, and occassionally slip into the mainstream. The future is bright.
I buy almost only AA games instead of AAA. And movies... I don't watch that much Hollywood movies anymore because they are garbage today where some guy flies through an apartment building with the camera rolling around. They are just not good as they were in past. I just use google and find interesting filmmakers what other stuff they have made or talk to people from different countries what good stuff is made there. Type of movies I found interesting are war movies made in Europe. They have gritty feeling that works for me.
Yeah, it's interesting how violence is so common to see in fictional media, despite being one of the worst and most unacceptable things in real life. So, maybe instead, we need more games where OTHER societal taboos are the default, such as public streaking, yelling at random people, disrupting the workplace, disobeying your teacher or parents, etc. This may in turn actually help people to feel better since they'll be able to do more things fictionally instead of doing it in real life with real consequences.
games where one gets rewarded for eliminating a city's population worth of foes, but are punished when one picks the dialogue option that makes companion 1 sad.
totally cool to kill thug1 thug2 thug3, but their boss, who has a character name?! and a voice actor!? How dare you! What an evil man you are for not sparing him.
Starfield
@@Nebulaoblivion "If you kill him you'll be just like him!" said the NPC ignoring your countless massacres up to that point.
@@Nebulaoblivion how dare you not let the war criminal live; sure he released the Europa-Pall and devastated a continent on Erebus-9 with that plague, but he also built massive hydroponic satellites filled with endangered flora and farms.
also if you spare him companion 4 will give you a new heavy weapon The Desitronax (one of the tools required to get the good ending)
Obviously the best games.
Interesting, now that I think about it, people always say "sex sells", but rarely "violence sells", which seems to be even more true.
There is an quote attributed to newspaper mogul William Hearst "If it bleeds, it leads."
I vaguely recall that one and the other are connected based on fMRI scans.
The reason why you see "sex sells" is because it's usually an answer to people trying to censor it. You don't see "violence sells" because its not only obvious, but not really part of any conversation.
Video games offer you the opportunity to live an experience you can't have in real life, through action and storytelling; Game Devs have to be honest with themselves would enough people want to spend labor capital and time capital on your product through the story alone to be finically worth it or are you fine with losing lots of capital as a labor of love when other products and real life exist, most of the time it's a big No, at the end of the day your producing a product to sell in the market and the market demands exist for a reason the market isn't wrong you can't force the market to your product.
"blood is compulsory"
Even the Disco Elysium trailers show punches being thrown and guns being shot.
That's real Marxism.
I adore when combat is a consequence of player choices in RPG's rather than the default solution to every problem
It definitely makes things more engaging.
torment: tides of numenera does this in a way.
you can even stop mid-combat to intimidate enemies into surrender or running away, this game has so many good things in it but shamefully it hasn't reached its full potential
Question: if the combat in a game is so good that any reasonable person would choose it over the non-combat option every time, then is the combat really a result of the player’s choice?
distinction without a difference.
@@lior414 I understand why. Writing in Tide of Numenera is overwhelming
As a player, I generally notice that the violent options usually involve more actual game play and player agency, while the social options are just a set of choices from a menu and a dice roll in the background, it’s not very interesting. Anti-social role playing is also more appealing because you can rarely do it in real life without consequences.
How would you envision more "actual game play" for social options? Perhaps more setup? Searching for information you can use against them? Finding items you can use to bribe the character? I'd argue that dialog **is** gameplay. Otherwise my entire Disco Elysium playthrough was a lie. RPGs traditionally aren't about skill-based gameplay. They're about choices, expression and discovery.
@@TehOwn I think the point still stands that non-combat gameplay is paper-thin in most Triple AAA especially when looked at how much of the gameplay systems are geared towards combat.
Disco Elysium shows a really great example on how to expand the social gameplay by allowing for different builds in social gameplay. Most games just have the one or two 'non-combat' perk tree w/ not much variety that mostly just allow you to skip content of the game instead of finding new content.
Combat is vastly easier to simulate in an entertaining way than almost any social interaction is.
This really is the big open question: how do you make rewarding gameplay for social interactions. Don't get me wrong, adding more choice-consequence, more branching, possibly content locked behind social only etc can get you intellectual enjoyment pay-off. But it is not the same as dopamine-releasing 'action' that, on top of everything else, also has much higher runtime and is a better palate cleanser for reading, which USians don't like to/can't do. I am vaguely aware of some games that tried to gamify persuasion/intimidation/etc with mini-games, though I can't remember where I've seen that off the top of my head, but I'm not sure that's the way (people on PC are not going to derive much reward from primitive mini-games, I don't think). As far as I can tell, this is very much an open question in game design and one that I personally can't see even the outlines of a solution for.
Getting in combat encounters is real life is only something you can rarely do in real life if you don't have the courage to go and sign up at one of the many combat sports gyms. Or go and be a police officer.
When I play an RPG game I pick violence not only because it usually gives me more XP/loot, but also because combat is just much more interesting. Because even if a game has some sort of diplomacy/non-violent path, 80% of it is just having high enough charisma to pass a check in a dialogue. Compare it to combat where it's not only about stats, but about positioning, clever use of your gear, etc. I think if most designers approached dialogs as a verbal combat, where you have to carefully weight every sentence to get an outcome you need, and reward players accordingly, people would engage with it much more often.
Deus Ex Human revolution had that to a degree. There was information about the person you were speaking to and a range of responses to try and find a way to get them to agree with your position over multiple back and forths. Something like that in a heavier RPG would be really interesting. It was kind of an evolution of the insult sword fighting from the early monkey island games.
Dialogue as verbal combat reminds me a bit of The Secret of Monkey Island.
@@andrewcross5918 That gamifies dialogue though, it becomes less of who you want to play and more how do I win at talking.
A well designed dialogue tree should result in consequences, not just rewards or punishment, like in Disco Elysium.
@@kyleching8491 Disco Elysium is a bad example because that game is all (mostly) focused on that.
A non violent path isn't just speech checks, usually it's a substantial amount of stealth. You're gonna spend a lot of your time sneaking through areas that most other players are fighting their way through. Really, I can't think of any games that just let you speech check your way through everything.
Hi Tim.
As a cRPG enthusiast/veteran, the biggest problem I have with non-combat paths in RPGs is that they don't match the complexity and engagement of the combat path. While I'm not a powerplayer and hyperoptimizer, and while I consider a good cPRG a gesamtkunstwerk where a lot of elements need to have high quality and work together to become something greater than the sum of its parts, I find that a complex combat system is very essential, as systems interaction is an important aspect of most genres of games I play. Selecting a dialogue option and rolling an intimidation check does not scratch that itch in the same way as a complex combat encounter. (also there's no loot)
I'd bring up Disco Elysium as a very good RPG that has (next to) no combat, so no involved combat system. While I did find the game fantastic overall, it's not something I'd go back to for "another ride"
I don't think violence/combat needs to be the default in an RPG, but there should be something that's equal in complexity, and I have a hard time coming up with what that would be in a character/party centered RPG. There's non-violent systems interaction in management and sandbox games, but I don't see what a character/party centered RPG does while interacting with the world that can match that without it being combat. So speaking for myself, if someone were to make a "non-violent cRPG" they'd need to answer that question.
i wanted to comment just to acknowledge how well-thoughout your response and perspective was, it adds a lot to this conversation.
thank you for taking the time to write it out. it hit the nail on the head, imho. as someone who adores cRPGs but always found the paths that aren't related to combat and violence in most games to be quite often superficial / rather shallow, when given a closer examination and chance.
I remember playing the Myst series of games, and wondering why more rpgs don't just incorporate more of that exploration and puzzle-solving gameplay. I always come to a similar conclusion: That takes more effort. Plain and simple. Whether that's true or not, I think the perceived effort vs appreciation for non-combat gameplay (as far as developers are concerned) is just not worthwhile. I personally think this is a society and games industry problem as much as it is a problem of developer and player judgment on a case-by-case basis. However, the only real way to change is to somehow show those alternative play goals to be worth doing. Which, I think they are, but I think most devs and even players perceive them as not being so simply because that is what has manifested for them in their experiences with games so far, and with their engagement in talking about and observing games on the internet.
the best way to solve this issue in my opinion is to design the dialogue gameplay as if it was combat gameplay, so in a turn based game for example you could enter a type of combat mode where instead of attacking with your sword or magic diminishing their HP, you attack with an intimidation, persuasion or a demoralizing attack so that your enemy would lose some kind of morality points MP or Conviction points CP, and bringing this points to zero would end the battle and your enemy would be sucessfully convinced to your arguments and your quest would progress or something in those lines. Thus making pacifist and dialogue builds way more interesting to play
I've never thought about it from from perspective you're describing.
"Selecting a dialogue option and rolling an intimidation check does not scratch that itch in the same way as a complex combat encounter."
This is an excellent observation. Thank you.
To add to this, combat gives immediate feedback that lets the player fine tune their actions to move towards some kind of exciting win state. This is emotionally rewarding and satisfying.
For example, I was wondering why I find Vampire Survivors so addictive. I looked into the gameplay loops and realised it gives a LOT of feedback about how well i'm doing. Even though the game revolves around violence, the satisfaction i get from surviving another wave or beating a mini boss or getting the next level up makes it extremely fun for me.
A fantastic practical answer. I'd also want to add (in these comments) a theory-level answer I once heard -- "it's approximately the same reason movies are usually more action-orientated than books, in that visual mediums more often need physical manifestations of the central conflict."
Planescape Torment effectively being a book as a videogame certainly helped it keep combat to a minimum.
@adamaccountname As did Disco Elysium. I could see a possible future timeline where the term "interactive fiction" undergoes a similar type of cultural assertion that the term "graphic novel" did.
(For better or worse, to be clear)
@@aNerdNamedJames A timeline where adventure games invested in deeper engagement and not just moon logic puzzles. One of the acts of Torment felt like an adventure game as you spent the whole act collecting items to solve puzzles
Also worth noting is that action movies have quite a general appeal. Generally, more people i know would rather go watch a decent-looking action movie than a decent-looking drama movie, etc.
This is kinda connected to the fact that there's often less of a margin of error for movies focusing on action rather than dramas, at least when it comes to how much the average person is able to enjoy the movie. Good action is somehow universal, even moreso in videogames than movies.
violence is also a pretty EASY way to make a game 'interactive'. Burn enemies, pick up items to throw at enemies, knock down enemies, dismember limbs, throw the limbs, etc etc.
And like you point out, it would then be EASY to market this interactivity, compared to maybe a subtle dialogue interaction, or even puzzle sequence, you just show the dude burning and you instantly know you can do stuff like that.
and interactivity, IMO, is the main thing that makes video games fun. How do you interact with the medium.
Institutionally I think violence is the easier way to make a game interactive but I do have to wonder if, to some extent, it's somewhat of a trap of a loop. We have made multiple games and developed the systems to make it incredibly varied. How much of it? Hard to say admittedly.
Dialogue interactions are boring and outdated.
Dishonored, I think, is a great example if a game where Violence is always an option, and is often the simplest solution to a problem, but is never the only way. And the use of violence is punished in ways that the player may not he aware of at first, but becomes clear over time, and as a pattern of using violence to solve problems emerges.
Prey, too, had a "bad boy" tech tree which was optional.
I'm not sure I fully agree wrt Dishonored. The happier endings tend to rely upon low chaos which is honestly strange. Low chaos can have a surprising number of deaths but it often leads to players opting for a play style that I would argue is far duller than the other method. See through vision to help you stealth, teleport to reposition, in certain situations time stop or possess a rat to sneak along, use your sleeping crossbow bolts but mostly choke people out and hide them in a location where they won't get woken up or eaten by rats.
The mechanical rewards for the game imo are in higher chaos scenarios. That's where you can stop time and bodyjack an enemy to walk into a bullet fired by themself & etc.
Many immersive sim games are that way like you mentioned Dishonored, but also the Deus Ex games .. System Shock games to an extent and you can play even through the whole Cyberpunk 2077 game with doing both all the main story missions and all sidequests without shooting a single bullet and kill even a single character (apart from Silverhand's flashback scenes)
“In ways the player may not be aware of?” When I was 12 I was so disgusted by how hard they made the “pacifist run = good ending” Schtick I stopped playing at the 2nd level. It was obnoxiously obvious that there was consequences to violence.
The people arguing against you are the reason why we get subpar world interaction. They truly did not understand the low chaos Dishonored run, and got upset.
Kingdom Come Deliverance had me thinking about this recently. You can do combat and likely will against weak enemies in the early game but all of the nuanced mechanics beyond button mashing are locked away from you until later so you're really better off talking or running away depending on the situation. Even the archery in that game isn't trivial and neither is maintaining stealth. It's also very fitting to the narrative to play peacefully earlier on but the violence will gradually scale up (which is also fitting).
And there's a trophy for not killing a single person besides runt, so a true completionist has completed a pacifist run. I totally agree kcd has a very good way of laying it down like "yes there's a lot of combat, but death? That depends on actions and circumstance" you can try not to kill someone and just knock out in kcd but there's still the chance they bleed out or if they're unarmored a strong weapon is sure to kill them
Something I appreciated about two games in particular, metro exodus for its moral choices and the choice of whether or not to confront enemies, kill them or just knock them out.
Way of the samurai 4 is great for it as well, you can turn your katana blade on its back and fight everyone with non lethal hits the whole game, full pacifist, and unarmed attacks do not kill people unless you mean to. That sort of thing is meaningful
@@Gravheks Actually, knocking out in KCD is easy - fists are completely non-lethal, and weapons are always lethal. Problem is, the game's mechanics are obviously oriented towards weapons, since fists only have 2.5 attacks (kicks suck) and can't do master strikes or perfect blocks
@@cdru515 I'm pretty sure you can knock people out with weapons. I haven't done it recently but I could swear I did it a while ago. Also from a purely roleplaying perspective, there are absolutely times when even a peasant is NOT going to be using his fists.
To this day I'm still horrendous at the archery.
@@omnipenne9101 I mastered it to win the Ledečko archery competition, then took a break from the game and lost all capability...
My favourite example of this was Miranda's loyalty mission in Mass Effect 2, where you are required to shoot and/or vaporise 30-40 mercenaries in a factory area to help her resolve her issues with her sister. Imagine being the poor people who have to clean up the charred bodies afterwards to get the factory working again.
ME2 and 3 had hilarious amounts of combat for small side-stories
or rather it would've been funny if I wasn't on the hardest difficulty and they all became a slugfest
I loved the few opportunities in ME1 side missions to avoid combat (there's a citadel sting op, and some of the batarians on the asteroid mission)
It is hilarious how many renegade choices in that game outside the MSQ are kill them now vs paragon’s kill them later. Like the Krogan on Mordin’s mission that rants for like 2 or 3 minutes if you dont renegade interrupt him lmao
Yeah it's my favorite series ever but it's clear they made alot of choices based on the idea that they think players are dumb and have no attention span.
My first thought was of Fallout New Vegas, which is praised for its story, but had trailers consisting almost entirely of shooting lots of guns to the song "Big Iron."
It's easier to sell a game with action
Yeah but gunplay in that game is horrible
@rusi6219it's fine it's just not run and gun
I love rpgs where killing isn't your main source of exp. I was just thinking about you, I just started playing Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines. HOLY HELL this game rips! On my first playthrough, I'm a Malkavian. I love this games, I cannot wait to play every clan. Thank you.
Noclip thru the sewers lil dawg, save the trouble
@stinkystink9830 Who is Noclip? Is he an ally?
@@DumpsterTurkey The cheat code to fly and go through walls. Basically, the Hollywood Sewers are one of the worst levels in the game, due to being labyrinthine, boring to look at, and full of enemies that you can't stealth past
It's a shame the sequel is going to be combat centric and probably suck.
@grindcoreninja6527 for me it's the lack of Malkavian that might do it in for me.
Combat is just really fun, mostly. Its also very straightforward and easier to understand and develop as a core gameplay loop than puzzles and social systems, which require a much higher level of variety in solutions to keep feeling fresh throughout the course of a game. I love reading dialog too, but sometimes after a long day of navigating social situations I find just letting loose and pressing some buttons in combat to ironically be the MORE relaxing option.
Though, I think games like Undertale and Deltarune definitely show there's still a lot of unexplored potential for non-combat "combat" systems, especially in turn-based games
In an overly polite society, where you can get cancelled for saying or not saying things, the power fantasy is absolutely a legitimate way to decompress. People are overthinking violence in video games. Better in the digital world than the real world.
Undertale/Deltarune works because even if you're not fighting, you still get to engage with the game mechanics. Whether you talk or fight, you still have to dodge when it's the enemy's turn. You don't feel cheated out of the fun part of the game just because you resolved things peacefully.
I think the main problem is that games have perfected combat systems to be engaging to play. Skipping combat with a simple diplomacy check is just not as engaging. That would be as if the whole combat system was simplified to a simple attack role. Right?
You would need to create engaging and fun non-violent systems to compete with combat as a way to win encounters.
.. and how would you simulate that on screen in a way that is diegetic? You could do a mini-game of some sort, but it'll be worse than combat and won't have any relation to how we perceive diplomacy to work in the real world
Skipping a combat section accidentally in BG3 usually (unless I personally want the NPC to live) leads me to reloading. Even worse, if I start noticing too many such opts outs, if it starts feeling universally available, then it breaks the power fantasy immersion and ruins the entire game for me. There is no reason to find great items, level, or flesh out builds if you know you can skip everything. Even if you don’t use the option at all, the knowledge itself ruins it.
@paulie-g I would say, pretty difficult. Alpha Protocol had good dialogue challenges. But even there, it was supplementing combat, not replacing it.
And I think having talking as a way to just skip combat is not a good approach. Diplomacy should have its own rewards that should not be obtainable through combat. Just like combat should be the only way to get some loot from some enemies each approach should be uniquely rewarding. Both in what you get in the end and how fun it is to perform.
@@player1_fanatic So what I'm trying to get at, is what the mechanic(s) for diplomacy would be that would be 'fun to perform' on the same order of magnitude as well-implemented combat. It's one thing to say 'ought to', as in 'we ought to live without burning anything for fuel and harming animals or the wild places' and another to actually come up with the "here's how".
ive seen something else irk people, where their character will drink alcohol without any choice in the matter, because some people dont drink anymore/at all and wanna roleplay their character that way, and when a game starts in a bar with everyone drinking they have to roll their eyes and pretend that its apple juice, it sucks!
Highly relevant GTMK video " Can We Make Talking as Much Fun as Shooting? " is a really good follow on to this video. the challenge is how can designers make talking more fun than just Speech [100/100] compared to shooting?
Or at the very least find a suitable, repeatable replacement. It's harder than it sounds: shooting guns in video games is really, really fun and has a subtle, engaging complexity to it. You've got weapons that deal different amounts of damage at different speeds, reloading, equipment management, accuracy, and satisfying feedback. Trying to find something with a similar degree of utility is a real challenge.
I've tinkering on idea where game has strong emphasis on communication. Like, all game characters communicate and information is passed that way.
Current iteration is "minilanguage", like ok, oops, what, ping/pong, danger... and small vocabulary to describe things like one, many, big, little. Idea is that game characters are passing messages to others and that can be transpiled more verbose natural language.
Given the number of TTRPGs that have developed mechanics for resolving ‘social combat,’ I feel like it should be possible to do so and make it visually and viscerally engaging. Even the way that you make skill checks in Baldur’s Gate 3-with attribute, skill, tool and spell buffs, advantage/disadvantage, and Inspiration re-rolls-seems like it leans in this direction. I would LOVE to see a console RPG in the Dragon Age/Mass Effect style that focused entirely on social and skill dynamics, with no combat at all. I suppose that would be very much like some of the more mechanically-complex visual novels, but with active, moving characters rather than limited animation sprites.
Every time you press the fire button you shoot words out of your mouth and if they’re the right words it does more damage to NPCs
Fencing in Monkey Island was brilliant.
My friend has 6 characters he made as superhero-ish comic book characters as a kid, and to this day in pretty much every game, he makes those 6 characters in the games he plays. They are quite diverse, one of them being a near brainless plant-matter being (before Groot was even an idea), another a true psychopath, and one the epitome of "lawful good" to a fault. I've always told him any game I make he needs to playtest it with those characters, since each plays in a very different way.
Groot is far older than you. Do a quick google
Groot is from the 1960s iirc.
@@boccobadz Yeah, and my friend came up with his idea before then
@@derekskelton4187 Do you often make assumptions without context? You are correct, groot is older than I am. He is not older than my friend, who created his idea before groot was published in Tales to Astonish #13, November 1960. Older people exist despite popular belief.
@@PretendCoding nonsense, everyone popped into the world between 1 January 1980 and 31 December 1999, and time has not advanced since somewhere in early spring 2020, which is somehow only a few years after 2007.
Thank you for this insightful video. A couple of thoughts expanding on it:
1. Might help to view violence and action as different axes of a plot. Can have a non-violent action game (farming games with day-timer and physical skill minigames, sports games, etc.), or violent non-action game (card games, turn based combat games, etc.).
- Action is player's method of interaction with the game - fast-paced progress, making decisions quickly, relying on player's physical skills like reactions, hand-eye coordination.
- Violence is player character's method of interaction with the game world - punch, shoot, use destructive powers to beat enemies.
2. There are additional benefits to adding/keeping niche gameplay options:
- Increases replayability/playtime of the game (influencers play it more, players talk about it more)
- Increases engagement on social media (players share their interesting experiences that arise from niche gameplay).
Both of these lead to more sales, just indirectly.
8:25 - this is something I appreciated about Deus Ex: Human Revolution - I was able to get through the game with minimal violence, just knocking people out (the boss battles don't count). It still felt like an action game in spite of there being minimal actual combat in my run.
I wanted to write about Human Revolution as well. I was playing for the first time, trying to not kill anyone at all. But then game threw a curve ball at me: if I would continue being non-violent then a friendly NPC will die. It was cruel. I've never got that non-violent achievement but I was okay with this 🙂
well, non-lethal violence is still violence
"The boss battles dont count" Deranged comment
@@proydoha8730 the pilot chick?
@dotanuki3371 yep
RPGs that feature stealth, stealing and investigation/detective, mechanics, that can be REALLY cool, often features them in a so boring, fast done way that you often just wanna get back to combat because the combat bechanics are much better done, you can see they spent much more time on them
Like Elder Scrolls Online. You can steal, but it's not really fun and the context in which it is done is kinda lame. The quests all resemble each other and the dialogue options don't really matter. That leaves grinding the newest dungeon for the newest unbalanced gear, that will be nerfed shortly before the release of the next DLC and its featured gear or PvP. PvP is laggy and nigh unplayable. I've basically reduced my activity on ESO to getting login rewards and debate uninstalling but I've got 15 toons and the sunk cost fallacy, as I've been playing since launch, is very real.
My take:
Most ppl want adventure, action and that usually eqauls to some fantastic feats of combat.
I really love your games and i respect your attitude towards making different outcomes possible and viable and equal to the player. Hell I play bard in BG3 and LOVE that character where I ALWAYS have ALL the dialogue options,
Still it takes a special kind of writers and actors to make dialogue as FUN as combat. Combat has its own mechanic its rewardiung. Writers need to put A LOT creative power and work with great actors to achieve the same thing IMHO.
This is an unfortunate fact. In Skyrim Thieves Guild they preach no killing, but tell you its okay to kill the honey farmer in the first mission.
This is why Oblivion's Thieves Guild was the best implementation of all-time for a Thieves Guild.
They get progressively more cringe as the story progresses. The only reason to complete that questline is mechanical tbf. It's one of the worst stories in the game.
@@omlo9093 No it's not, because it wasn't.
And in Star Trek, nearly every time they encountered a new civ, they violated the "prime directive".
@@konberner170That is easily explained by the fact you can safely assume the episodes are the 1% of encounters they face, as the remaining 99% they encounter are too mundane for an episode.
I always liked that Metro gave you the bad ending if you used violence to resolve every single problem in the game.
Undertale😡😡
Combat is the most overt metaphor/manifestation for conflict. Combat-as-default is low-hanging fruit. Besides, gamification--talent trees, rewards based on skillful play, etc--work very well with combat and is hard to replicate with non-violent conflict-resolution. Doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be done, but it is easier, lower risk (for the developers), and more popular.
Specifically regarding your point about ads getting shorter (but usually more numerous): I wouldn't call that a failure of people's attention spans. People have always hated advertising interrupting something they're watching and interested in. Shorter ads both mean less money spent actually putting together each ad, and that psychological trick of "at least it's short and taking up less of my time" even if the total ad break is just as long.
Correct. Universities are having issues with students reading books to completion.
@@jfkst1 That's also partly because people aren't taught how to read anything longer than short excerpts. The practice of giving students a book to read over some time has mostly disappeared.
@@AnotherDuck
Right but it all feeds into shorter attention spans and less time people can hold their attention without new stimulus being introduced.
Would you be able to cite where you found that universities are having trouble getting students to read books to completion? It was my understanding the concept of attention spans is flawed, and what we consider an attention span has more to do with expected timing of dopamine releases from specific stimulus. That being one could easily ready a 300 page book if they find it stimulating but my struggle to get though a 10 page article that’s dry. I assume the shorter ads, if they have anything to do with “attention spans”, are just because it feels better to watch a shorter ad and therefore the audience doesn’t feel as negatively towards the product
@ I'd have to search for it, which means I'm not in a much better place than you for finding where I read it. I do know I've seen it both in one or two articles, and in at least one UA-cam video.
I loved the game Arcanum and I always appreciated that being an intelligent and smooth talking type of character can actually be the best way to get a happy ending for the different towns, cities and npcs you meet.
12:28 to be fair Tim, how would I know if the other paths are there or not? Marketing will never say what a game DOESN'T have, then we will need to wait for more than review, but in-depth reviews, and these are never there at launch, and don't game companies want games to sell at launch?
It's a weird stance to have towards customers when the decision to include or remove those paths was made long before any customer ever sees an ad or review, so it boils down to three outcomes
- Don't buy a game that you know only has 95% of what you liked from the prequel and hope that it still does okay for a sequel, but not well enough that the developer doesn't ask where a good chunk of their customers went
- Buy it in spite of that missing 5% and the developer takes it as people didn't want that missing 5% and they can continue to cut "unnecessary" features off with no drawbacks.
- Buy it without looking up in-depth reviews, because you trust the devs previous efforts and expect they'd expand upon what they'd done in the prequel and be annoyed (at best) when your favourite 5% of the previous game is completely absent.
One thing i think is a really interesting part of this discussion that isn’t often discussed is the idea that violence is inherently pleasurable in fiction. The thought process behind that generally seems to be that people react strongly to that type of audio-visual stimuli because people feel inherently disempowered to act out violence in their daily lives in a civilized society. This isn’t a “video games make people violent” discussion either, because I, like most people, find that to be bunk. I do think that a lot of the devs who come up with alternative approaches to interacting with the world with the option for violence vs nonviolence generally make better *art*, if not better games overall. I like games like fnv, bg3, and cyberpunk (as well as many of tim’s games) that allow people to act out a fiction of the depth of reality in this world-space. By that i mean, those games have to account for civilian life, militarism, and everything in between. Through that process of mechanical cohesion with the world and its occupants, it allows any player feel truly immersed in the experience in time.
I would take a game that’s as deep as an ocean any day, no matter how many of my niche character builds and poor choices lead me to restarting again and again. That friction against the world really gives a feeling of survival and proper achievement when actually progressing your way, as opposed to a flat, scalable experience.
Great video tim!
It's funny Tim, I'm 40, I played Fallout with my Dad back when I was about 13 or so (when it first released), I've never played a low int character and now I really want to! I also have a few other games you've worked on, Arcainum, Temple, Tyranny ect, I think it's time to go through and play those a bit different now. Thanks for the video!
This is such a great question and response, so apologies in advance as I have many thoughts. For starters, I think violence was always an option in tabletop, particularly since you were often questing against an inherent "evil" that you needed to vanquish. While that doesn't overtly state you will need to use violence to do it, I think in a party format you're likely to have some. I absolutely think any game developer (particularly RPG open world) needs to account for the likelihood that some who play the game will employ that technique whether due to their preference or their roleplaying.
That said, looking at many of the AAA releases and their focus on weapons and skins should indicate clearly that while I agree it is based on what the customer wants, it's also that you're not giving them another option with equal benefit. If I am rewarded with XP every time I kill something in the world, wouldn't that be the easiest way to generate XP? Or wouldn't it at least appear that way? Weighting these elements in favor (or at least making it equal) to other techniques or approaches would "coach" the player into perhaps rethinking how they want to approach some situations.
Last but not least, I played many adventure games back in the day where doing something would render the game unfinishable. I had zero issue with it then and feel the same way now. It is okay to test the limits and find that there are some things that will result in game over. As you said Tim, everyone's biggest vote is with their wallets and eyeballs, but major game companies have an opportunity to use creativity and game design to reshape the way we as players think about the game. Idealistic, maybe, but isn't that why we're here?
My thoughts about this:
You need conflict for an engaging story, and action for engaging gameplay. Combat combines both, so it's likely to engage the most people.
Another way to combine conflict and action is competition - like racing and sports games. But the variety of stories, worlds and characters you can create with those is much more limited.
So I still remember how blown away I was the first time I played Fallout (mostly by shooting things but with a lot of stealth and other skill checks... dam everything really does devolve into a stealth archer) but I had read all the stuff just because I was enjoying the world building and extra story stuff. Then I failed to sneak past the master and he started talking before the fight, when I just talked him into killing himself and blowing up his base because the super mutants were sterile... it blew my mind that I didn't have to fight the final boss, that he was written enough like a person with actual goals that learning it was all for nothing and that he was dooming rather than saving humanity was enough to just make him give up, it blew my mind. I mean sure I was 16 it didn't take a hell of a lot to blow my mind, but it still did.
Kinda Sorta Related
Recently Just playwd KOTOR2 for the first time and was surprised there was a quest that didn't have a non violent option. I ended up looking it up to see if I could complete it without killing a set of guards and it just wasn't an option. Which did slightly upset me since not only did it feel like I was more or less breaking character because there was only a violent option to complete that quest.
It was probaly an oversight,especialy if it was the only one that you found.
You can't use Mind Trick or stealth?
Was it on Nar Shaddaa?
Kotor2 is notoriously unfinished
I'm pretty sure Kotor2 is the poster child for "cut content", so no surprise there
Non-violence in RPGs is very strange to me. The genre is so focused on player agency, so it feels like it should almost always be an option (even if it's a bad decision in the context). But games could do a better job at responding to player violence and enabling richer non-combat oriented progression.
Combat is objectively the most 'fun' path in an RPG (evidenced by what people buy/rave or complain about). If you nerf the fun by introducing negative consequences for too much of the combat just to force people to engage with other mechanics, you're not going to make the game more fun for most players, you're guaranteed to make it *less* fun overall. And I'm someone who would dearly love to see a solution to this problem, this just isn't it. What would that 'richer' non-comabt progression look like? Can you make it meaty and engaging enough to rival combat or at least get in the same ballpark?
I like more immersion to game world through exploration, and RPG elements gives more depth that I like.
So if the game succeeds in that immersion well, combat can be then "shit happens" encounter with something you want to avoid, because it can ruin your health and cost critical supplies. But also it is not so obvious you can easily avoid unpleasant encounters if game story drives player to more dangerous areas.
Shortly, survival elements can greatly enhance immersion and progression can also happen through critical supplies.
This reminded me about my ideal game that I want to make. Think about Night City in Cyberpunk 2077. Instead of being a merc and follow the storyline, we're just a part of the city and have no storyline to follow. You can work as a small vendor employee to earn a chump change or become part of the violence to earn the high risk high reward. There could be many things like career path and personal connections or even start a business or gang.
The problem would be it's required so much work compared to focus on the combat to be "fun" and have narrated storyline so you wouldn't have so much variables.
Not to mention if you're not the AAA studios but just a small team or even solo, you can forget about the narrated storyline and just focus on the "fun".
Maybe one day I can make such a game in smaller scale to present my ideas. Hope we're all stay healthy for long enough for me to work on such a lofty ideal game.
But you're welcome to use this idea. My goal is to have such a game to play, not trying to monopolize or gain capital.
I just wish there are more "fun" games to play.
i remember when it came out i didn't know cyberpunk 2077 would be so combat focused i thought it was going to be like an immersive sim or open world rpg or smth with a cyberpunk setting, when i realized what it was i refunded right away. i dont mind combat at all but i hate how its done. if you start out super poor and have to work for hours to afford your first gun, you die in one shot etc that would be amazing. instead its just a call of duty campaign
@@redblue5140 I actually wish for something similar, starting from somewhere low and climb up the society. The outcome of being a "movie game" is rather disappointing. But I think overall it's still good enough as another game of the same price. I'm not that picky cuz there's always something I could learn from games made by others.
@@dreamingacacia its not an action game but id recommend cyberpunkdreams if you want to play a game like that, really unique vibe
I just finished reading "A Theory of Fun" (which came out >20 years ago) and in it the author laments that games are stuck in a rut of having the same mechanics used over and over just with different set dressing.
There are some successful games that have overcome the violence trap - Return of the Obra Din, Outer Wilds, Journey, and any recent "Simulator" game come to mind as games that successfully have great mechanics that aren't outright focused on the player performing violence. But, as you point out, we're unlikely to see less violence in AAA because there's so much money on the line that they have to basically be guaranteed success. It's a lot easier in the indie space where there's less money involved.
I also think this is a big reason that you hear the common refrain of "games are so boring now!" from people. They play a new game for long enough to see that the mechanics are all the same as every other AAA game they've played recently (shoot this, upgrade this, discover this, collect this) but just with different set dressing. You only have fun when you're learning new things and in the back of their head, they know that there's not really going to be anything new to learn. Of course, the average consumer just gets confused about this and stops playing games completely when what they really need to do is seek out games that teach them something new.
On releated note, this is also why full voice over sells. People do like good, movie quality, engaging dialog. But getting this to have depth is much more expensive than creating a good combat system.
I feel like it kind of took away from the experience in fallout 4. That wasn't really a problem with voiceovers specifically though, and more so that they chose to limit their dialogue options to make recording easier
The world wasn't ready for Troika, perhaps it never will be.
I saw a GDC talk while ago about this topic. The presenter mentioned iirc that combat is in our genes and thus something that is instinctive and appealing (even small kids know how to wield sticks as toy weapons). Also, even animals will play-fight, etc (my dog loves it). It is also the ultimate drama: death is one of the outcomes. Hell, I rember as kid a motorcycle racing game had a option to hit the oponent and it was fun. So games tap into the play-fight instincts, perhaps?
Road Rash?
Combat is in our genes. We learned it when we were still hunting mammoths. It was practically a highlight of everyday life back then. For this reason, the first-person shooter genre is one of the most popular.
Absolutely. It's also why breaking rocks and collecting herbs (etc.) can be satisfying mechanics just on their own. Goes back to ancient DNA memories.
"you're a hero, and you have to leave"
the vault dweller:
yeah, keep crawling overseer
1:32 "I realise my answer some people aren't going to like"
I love when I find your answers disagreeable. I can already come up with explanations I like on my own at a drop of a hat.
I took a few weeks to creep my way through Dishonored taking in every nook and cranny.
My roommate beat it in one--maybe two--nights, dashing through the entire game and killing EVERYONE.
He's fine with the mainstream :)
Well, in my opinion violence is why we should go to videogames.
If it wasn't for it, I wouldn't be here.
I’ve always wanted to see an open world RPG, focused on a different basic mechanic instead of violence. Particularly for me, the idea of a game where you play as a press photographer, would be really interesting, bc in many ways it uses the medium very well as an inherently visual medium. You still have “gunplay” in the sense of equipment customisation and modification, and you recycle a lot of the usual movement, camera, etc. mechanics, but the objective is to get good photos. You could use machine learning, and other code to “judge” the photo in terms of trying to capture the “newsworthiness” of the images created, and there’d be a lot of fun open world, stealth, exploration mechanics, if you do the setting as a city particularly set in the 20th century or something like that. Even add risk of getting shot if you’re in an active crime scene or w/e. But the entire game hinges on a nonviolent creative act, while still offering interest, intrigue, and novel mechanics.
Especially if you set it in the early 20th century with film cameras, and so on.
There's actually been a couple of games like that. Tchia's focus is on possessing items/animals to solve puzzles, not combat. Infiniti Nikki recently came out, and although it has basic combat, the focus is on just exploring the world, doing puzzles, collecting clothes, etc.
Plenty (relative to the number of ppl who are interested) of games like that. One involves exploring, which gives you inspiration, which then allows you to paint oil paintings or somesuch. It's just not an RPG and there's no way you'd get people who want to play an RPG to play it instead.
This is exactly how Undertale was born.
Honestly surprised Tim hasn’t talked about Toby Fox and his games.
Thank you, came here to say this!
undertale wasn't the first game to go by this design, nothing toby fox has made is original
Wdym in that game you only kill monsters?
Undertale is pretentious dogshite however. It's bullethell system is fun but severely undercooked and the interactions you get from the npcs are far and few between.
I often treat combat as the fail-forward option. If I could talk or sneak, why are we being violent. The flip side is, that sometimes one just want the the catharsis of some fun combat or satisfying tactics. I think Rogue Trader (so far) have been able to provide me with both. I recall Fallout doing the same thing, and I really should pick up Outer Worlds one of these days (incidentally the combat in the trailer made me go "nah, not in the mood right now"
I love that blue Flannel shirt! looks cozy and soft with a nice collar.
I really appreciate games like Portal. In fact one of the reasons I like Fallout so much is because it gives you the choice to not go in and shoot every thing.
It’s a choice yeah, but it’s either extremely horrible, or extremely broken; no inbetween.
Does it? I don't remember any combat in those games. It's just a first person puzzle.
@@JewTube001 That's what I mean; it's a great game and an example of what you can do besides the default shoot everything.
Portal, really? You do remember that you kill (ostensibly sentient) turrets in that game and it's played as a joke, not to mention what you do to the final boss. Doesn't really embody non-violence imo.
So glad I found this channel.
Hmm, I'm not sure I entirely agree. I think it's less about the potential of making money, and more about consistency and high-level executives being notoriously unwilling to challenge industry standards.
If you look the indie- and double A scene, you will see that games like Undertale or Disco Elysium can actually achieve amazing sales. Of course, if you compare these games to actual triple A games, their sales won't look as impressive - but that's because they're not triple A games. It's an unfair comparison. But there really is no fair comparison, either. I mean, think about it. When's the last time a major triple A studio released an original game not centered around combat, outside of Nintendo? Portal, maybe? That's one of the most beloved and successful PC games of all time. Personally I think a triple A RPG not centered around combat or violence could actually sell amazingly well - it would just be amazingly risky in turn, and that's a risk no one seems to be willing to take.
But I think this might actually change soon. With the rise of "cozy", non-violent games, that trend is bound to creep into other genres. And even if you look at mainstream triple A RPGs lately, the combat actually seems to be one of the *least* celebrated aspects. Maybe we've just gotten used to it, or shooters and soulslikes do it flashier amd better. But when people talk about why they love Baldur's Gate 3, or the Witcher, or Cyberpunk, or even Fallout... do you really hear them mentioning combat all that often? Or even leveling up and developing their characters, which has long been a defining characteristic for what an RPG even is.
No, I think RPGs have developed into a different direction. One where story, immersion, and worldbuilding are the primary methods of engagement. That's not to say the combat serves no purpose in these games, or that they would be better without it. But it means that it might not actually take as much as you may think to push the genre just a bit further and get rid of combat, or relegate it to a minor feature. The indie and double A world showed the way, the triple A scene will follow at some point.
Just reducing the number of enemies to something realistic would be a very good start. Take your country’s most violent criminal’s most violent month. How many people did they kill? Not that many. Probably 20 or less. A game with 20 combat encounters would be very different from the current paradigm. No faceless goons, but instead enemies presented as realistic people.
The thing is, what works (or can work) for indie and even AA, doesn't work for AAA. It's the same as asking 'why do VCs with 1bil+ under management not invest small amounts in promising teams with a pathway to profitability'. It's not because they're stupid, it's because they need to deploy 1bil. Same with AAA, they need to make games at scale with mass-market appeal, which a priori shuts out a) niche genres, b) weird mechanics, c) things that are not familiar enough to a wide audience, and d) things that are hard to market. It doesn't mean small-scale games can't exist, be a profitable business etc, but it does mean it's a *different* business with different rules.
A short note on size of addressable market: AAAs want to reach *all* the players, this means console in addition to PC (which also happens to have lower piracy rates). So often mechanics that can't be practically encoded as controller inputs are off the table (cf the Mass Effect patented wheel of dialogue). This is a limitation on innovation in the space of mechanics (as are the tastes and expectations of the console audience).
You're also hitting survivorship bias. Yes, Undertale and Disco Elysium exist. We know they exist because they succeeded. We don't know about hundreds and thousands of RPGMaker and narrative games that failed, because they failed to get any attention regardless of their quality. I just saw a beautifully drawn Disco Elysium style narrative game set in a steampunk Victorian London with fantasy creatures: interesting setting that hits lots of people'(niche) preferences, pacifist run possible, good story, the whole lot. They even got promoted by the Fallen London/Sunless Sea people. Just over 200 reviews (quite positive) on Steam, meaning they got at best 6-7k in sales. This is below break even even for a solo dev with freelance support. So, Disco Elysium, as successful as it was, is not a repeatable model. I don't even get Undertale, so can't comment on that in depth, but also obviously not repeatable. Both are also not scalable to the level of AAA.
As for cozy games, note that they usually replace combat with a bunch of mechanics that, while they may not be very complex individually, form a complex whole. In other words, there's a lot of stuff to do in them. Same goes for city builders and the like, or life sims, or sim/management/business games, or automation games. In other words, what they offer instead of combat isn't fat-free, gluten-free, soy milk thin nonsense, but fat, meaty, engaging gameplay (often with plenty of dopamine hits via juice). They can do this because their genre allows them to offer those mechanics - they're diegetic. The question is how do we make 'persuade NPC' naturally have full-fat, engaging mechanics on par with combat, in a way that is diegetic, makes sense, isn't contrived/immersion-breaking/obviously-artifically-gamified. This is the real question and I have absolutely no idea how to do that, nor does anyone else as far as I can tell.
Finally a good comment, the times are changing indeed🙏🏻🙏🏻
I don't really think a big budget version of Disco Elysium would be terribly successful tbh. I think Indies and AAA are just made for very different demographics. Indies almost always try to appeal to a very specific, niche, audience. AAAs get most of their revenues from the many ppl that buy maybe one or two games a year. I think that's also the real reason why there is so little willingness for AAAs to try something new. They essentially have to sell their game to an audience who doesn't know that many games.
Btw, Death Stranding is a non-violent AAA game that's not from Nintendo and not a Valve sideproject. Wasn't a very big success tho.
I hate to be the semantic guy, but i think saying violence sells isnt as accurate as saying combat sells.
Violence has its apeal for sure, but many games with combat are less or more violent than others.
You could say games like Doom and mortal kombat use violence to drum up sales, but those games dont blow away other FPS, and fighting games out of the water based on violence alone.
Combat systems are fun, and complex. There is so much variety as well. Whether the combat is grotesquely violent like mortal kombat, or cartoonish and light like Kingdom Hearts.
Not many would use the word Violent to describe Kingdom Hearts, even though the main gameplay is fighting monsters. Some of the bosses are even people, but it isnt portrayed "violently".
My point is you are correct in your assessment, but calling it violence muddies the discussion a bit due to how most people use the word violent in media discussion. We clearly draw some line between solving conflict with combat, and solving conflict with violence.
I've been playing video games since the late 1970s, and one of my biggest complaints over the decades is that so many games are built around killing things. For me, that aspect of gaming got old a long time ago, but I still play plenty of games that feature combat because they have other elements that hold my interest. In RPGs, this typically includes exploration and narratives. An RPG that is entirely combat focused and isn't strong in these other areas will rapidly bore me to tears. In the early years, I gravitated to Ultima rather than Wizardry because Ultima is stronger in exploration, while Wizardry is a long, combat-focused slog through dungeons. Additionally, I've never liked challenging action games. I'm an old nerd who doesn't have reflexes, and I find these games frustrating. Naturally, if combat is present (and it usually is) I prefer turn based or real time with pause games. Sometimes, I even enjoy turn based combat, as it is a tactical puzzle that is interesting to solve if it is unusually well designed. The one advantage to action-oriented games is that I can get the combat over with very quickly, as long as there is a super-easy mode. The best example I've seen recently is Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Combat can be nerfed so thoroughly as to render it irrelevant, which is just how I like it.
Non-violent and low violence games have always been present, but through most of gaming history, they have been niche products. The text adventures and text-and-graphics adventures of the 1970s and 1980s are usually low to no violence, as is the case with their more recent descendants, the walking simulators. Simulation and management games can also be devoid of violence. When SimCity came out, I was overjoyed. Finally, there was a game with a great deal of interactivity and endless replay value that didn't constantly want me to kill something. Nowadays, city builders and related simulation-type games account for the majority of my gaming time. Of course, some of these have raid mechanics, but there is often a peaceful mode that allows for a more relaxing, raid-free experience.
As for RPGs, it should be possible, albeit challenging, to create a non-violent or low violence RPG by expanding upon other systems, but I can't think of many examples. Disco Elysium is the only one that immediately comes to mind. Considering how successful it was, there must be a market for this sort of game. However, I have to agree with Tim here - such games are bound to be difficult to market, and those of us who are looking for less violence in our games seem to be in the minority.
I'm seeing a missed opportunity here. Video games, as an art form, are capable of so much more than combat. If that game mechanic were removed, it would encourage developers to get more creative about other aspects of games, as they would sink or swim based on other game mechanics that are often seen as afterthoughts. Though the audience for these games is likely smaller than the audience for combat-oriented action games, this audience is currently under served, and a non-violent RPG that gets everything right has the potential to be commercially successful. Furthermore, improvements to non-combat systems could make combat-oriented games better.
I feel very same. I'm not against of violence as I like horror games and shooters for example, but it is just boring if everything is based on killing.
Late 80s and early 90s was golden era of point and click adventures. I love those so much that I still play them. Next in my list is to replay Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places). From that era, Sid Meier's Pirates had RPG elements, and violence, but violence was low.
There are low violence indie titles that I like. Example "The Vanishing of Ethan Carter", "The Witness" and it is important that we have games that are not based on some weapons and killing.
There is one important reason also why I like games with low violence: We also play games together with wife or friends, puzzle based games are then way better. While I like RPG games, they are like turn based strategy games. Works better when played alone. Shooters are also games that works better when played alone.
This is my first video I’ve come across from you, and I really appreciate your insight and thoughts for things such as gaming.
One of the things I loved about Shadowrun Dragonfall and Hong Kong is that you got karma (experience) for finishing the mission, not for combat. So you could choose how you did the mission and get the same or maybe more karma for nonviolence then for just going hard.
And in those games, violence is often the last resort. Often necessary, but the games are built around trying to avoid it.
Some of my favorite games are non-violent e.g. Subnautica, Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic, Anno series, Sims 3, Oxygen Not Included. But it is true that all of my favorite games have violence as a main theme, and Fallout is certainly in that category. It is a very violent world and companions are specced for violence even if you aren't. In any case, I do tend to prefer my violence to be against other-than-humans in games. This is why 7 Days to Die is among my favorites. Baldur's Gate and such are also mostly monsters or very bad guys. But if the game is good enough, like Cyberpunk, even if it is mostly human opponents and heavy violence, it can still be a top game for me.
I'm those persons who actually enjoy violence in games but simultaneously, there is so much violence in the games and games that depend on violence that it starts to get boring.
After looking this video just check my last game purchases and noticed that I've long time actually bought games avoiding violence, or at least games where player don't get some "points" killing characters. Recently I've enjoyed horror games where is violence but that is found from setting, not by having some gun and shooting characters.
most interesting stories need a conflict, and violence is the most obvious form of that, so i figured its just the nature of narrative in general.
i mean it would be fun to have a political intrigue game in theory, but i tried the red strings club and it just felt like i was missing half the game because i did the dialogue trees “wrong” and i had no idea why or how
its a lot more obvious when you miss your swing of your sword and get pummeled for it haha
Part of the problem is games training people to play one way, you need a game designed to be played in different ways and teach the player all the options. Lot's of games iv played say they have options but in reality they dont, then a lot are just not well balanced. The classic example that comes to mind is instant fail states for forced stealth in games, it's a bad system that's not fun for the player.
Id also point to 4X games like Civ or Stellaris, they have options past just war but they also tend to be harder to learn/win with. Immersive sims like Prey (2017) do a good job, combat/fix tech/stealth as a coffee cup/pick up heavy object to clear path etc.
THANK YOU! havent finished but just by the title i agree. I feel like combat is the only gameplay mechanic there really is anymore in a lot of triple A games.
1. Happy new year, Tim!
2. I'm sure that the n.1 reason why violence is the default path in the vast majority of RPGs is, as you say, money.
3. I wonder, though, if another reason - that of course reinfonces the previos one - is that stealth and dialogs are somewhat undercooked systems compared to combat in almost all RPGs. I mean, in the best case scenario they are supported paths throughout the game, but they are never as delepoled and as fun to play as combat. The only exceptions that come to mind are a couples of immersive sims with very good stealth mechanics/paths, but still undercooked diplomatic options. I can't think of a single RPG where quests, maps and encounters are designed, balanced and tested to be "a fun ride" for all kinds of characters. Nor I'm aware of a single (virtual) ruleset as deep in non-combat options as in combat ones.
Now, I do understand the practical reasons behind that, but I also think that nothing will ever replace combat as the "main" path in RPGs as long as it remains the most delevoled system in those games.
It looks like a self fulfilling prophecy scenario...
Like it's self-fulfilling. If all development time and money goes into combat then yes the combat will be more fleshed out than stealth, dialogue and puzzles.
OK, arguendo, how do you make non-combat as meaty, complex and appealing as combat? In other words, what would those mechanics look like if a studio decided to prioritise them in development? And, this is important, if they were to do that, would they still even need the RPG elements or would those be extraneous fluff in what would otherwise be, for example, an excellent, streamlined and focused stealth game?
Well, arguendo: You copy from the best games out there. You have stealth action games (Metal Gear, Thief, Splinter Cell, etc), stealth games in real time with pause (from Commandos to Shadow Gambit), even turn based ones (Invisible Inc.) to copy from. And someone have already tried with interesting results.
As for dialogues, you probably know that there is this new wave of "narrative RPGs" (Disco Elysium,Vampires: Swan song, Pentiment, etc) which have no combat at all and are experimenting with dialogue systems in interesting ways...
All that being said, I do understand that the game best at everything is a game that won't ever see the light of the shelves.
But, still, I hope for a CRPG good (or at least decent) at everything. A CRPG that supports in equal measure all 3 gameplay pillars, which is an unseen object as we speak.
PS: Don't get me wrong. I love games laser-focused on a single future. I play mostly these kinds of games. But in CRPGs I search for sandbox/open ended experiences. The more GOOD options I get, the better. My character, my story, my play-style. All equally supported. That's my ideal CRPG.
@@Alessandro_Gambino I understand the desire, I just don't think it can work. Every genre mash-up ends up as one of two things: 1) too niche because it requires the player to be a fan of all the constituent genres, or 2) not good enough in one or more of the constituent genres to satisfy fans of that genre.
With the latter, I don't think it's just a matter of execution (eg Space Rangers). You just can't compete with a game that's solely focused on, say, stealth in a mash-up: a focused stealth game can afford intricate mechanics for stealth because it's what the player came there for (and the player doesn't have to learn two more sets of intricate mechanics for RPG and combat) and the level design + story can serve the stealth focus. In a mash-up, you necessarily try to serve many masters and not overload the player with the genre he may not be all that into. There's a reason no RPG combat is as 'good' as Dark Souls or whatever you think has good combat.
Also, from a commercial perspective, if you can make a game with 3 genres done to an excellent level that can compete with the best in those genres, why would you not make 3 games you can sell separately?
@@paulie-g Well, what you say could definitely happen, it has happened many times but it don't necessary HAS TO happen...
Genres that today we recognize as such started out as a mashup of pre-exisiting genres. This is even the case of the soul-borne genre, despite the fact that young people seem convinced that Demon's Soul came out of nowhere.
As a rule of thumb, I'd say that a mesh-up works when it combines elements that enhance each other; doesn't work when it does the opposite. And said mesh-up doesn't need to satisfy the fans of the genres it combines; It needs to find its own public...
A practical example? Many Immersive sims nowadays are a blend of stealth, FPS and RPG elements. They don't excel in any of the things that these genres do best, but they are the best games out there if you are searching for emergent gameplay and freedom in play-style.
RPGs, to me, should be even more focused on the pursuing of this kind of freedom, and even at the cost of being the proverbial jack of all trades and master of none.
It is doable, it has been done with a certain degree of success but there is still room for improvements...
"Peace sells... But who's buying?"
Well, to be fair, DND grew out of TACTICS and WARGAME " Chainmail"
And the first RPGs were players about VIOLENCE
Clearing DUNGEONS by groups of mercenaries with different capabilities
Part of the problem, at least from the side of what players gravitate towards, is that usually the non-combat options just aren't as well developed as the combat ones. Combat gets whole systems and gameplay loops dedicated to it that challenge the player. A lot of the time the dialogue options are just menu choices and stat checks. It's a choice to skip gameplay. I guess if you literally only cared about the narrative, that's fine, but then why are you playing a game? I suppose stealth is sort of non-violent gameplay, but not entirely. You're still doing something against someone who wouldn't want you to be doing that and sometimes the "non-violent" approach still involves doing what amounts to stealth kills that the game just says are incapacitating instead of lethal.
There are also just rarely meaningful consequences to violence. These aren't real people and if the game isn't going to punish you in terms of gameplay or narrative, then the stigma violence carries is kind of irrelevant. If anything in RPGs it's often encouraged because you get stronger through fighting.
I'd really like to see some RPGs which make solving the problem through other means just as core to the experience as fighting. That said, games can't really be good at everything, so maybe it's just not that feasible to essentially design 2-3 full sets of mechanics, gameplay loops, and levels just to accommodate all that.
most of Hogwarts Legacy was killing poachers and goblins, and while i thought the combat was fun, there was a narrative dissonance because i was a 15 year old student
Something I love about the Temple of Elemental Evil quests inside the Temple, is how you can manage to do almost every of them (and ending the game) with almost no killing
Tim, have you played Disco Elysium? There’s only one unavoidable fight and no combat outside of dialogue. The devs cited Fallout 1 - an objectively hyper-violent game - as a major influence.
Disco Elysium has little of Fallout 1 even if it took it as a major influence.
To be fair, Disco is made to be a very simple game and its dialogue mechanics are hardly any different than most cRPGs. It just removes combat outright and the joy of the game (mechanically) is expressing your character and how the main character's thoughts color how he and the player perceive the world. There is no social combat, not really. Combat encounters are just dialogue.
In that sense it is very much like those rules light Tabletop RPGs where the mechanics are very simple, and combat has no special rules. Fighting in those games is the same as talking or exploring. Disco is clearly inspired more by those kinds of TTRPGs than Fallout.
Still amazing though.
Thats really cool. I might have to check that one out!
I would love to watch Tim do a playthrough of Disco Elysium
@@MrtrollgoodThats what the original comment said.
I have similar thoughts on combat pacing in PvP titles- MOBA and MMO in particular being RPG offshoots. Based on general design and balancing trends there are clearly waaay more players (in these genres) interested in winning at all costs, as quickly as possible, with as little effort as possible.
I love winning and I love loot, but a good fight with some interesting back-and-forth is something even more special. I wonder how many developers would otherwise prefer to focus more on combat satisfaction in higher TTK fights vs "pewpew big crits now gimme my deserved loot and ego hit"
I think the core problem is we don't really have a mechanical substitute for violence that feels just as good for the player to engage with. That might be an evolutionary thing at the end of the day it's pretty tough to beat the most basic of instincts which is the fight in fight or flight. I think the best we can do is just always try and put as many non-violent options out there as you can.
That's it, even just for combat it's not balanced in most games.
In Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura Magic is the most fun, magic is over developed then bows are over powered and the rest is under developed. The story and world make the game work, still reality’s of game dev wont let you polish every game.
In real life there is three basics stragies if there is danger: attack, hide, escape.
So I find it boring when games are based on mostly attack.
That is why I enjoy playing currently "Amnesia: Dark descent" because mechanics are based on sanity-hide-run
The core problem is violence appeals to everyone no matter where you land on the bell curve. Whereas diplomacy, persuasion, investigation...no so much.
It also seems easier to shove in a video game.
@@gruntaxeman3740 For me it's hiding I can't stand since at the end of the day hiding is just a delayed escape and if I'm going to have to escape anyway I'd rather skip the waiting and get on with it. I couldn't get into Amnesia but I really enjoyed Still Wakes the Deep since it was mostly escaping with very little hiding and a much heavier focus on story.
Hey Tim Cain
you might be interested in the game Wayward Realms
from Once Lost studio formed by some of the OGs that worked on the early Elder Scroll's games
One of their goals is to provide role playing options that don't necessarily require violence to progress a questline
Ted Peterson and Julian LeFay are heading up the studio
If you have worked with them maybe you guys could coolaborate on a vid/interview together
Ok. Here we go. I'll try to be very short. It's not a new issue, not an issue off video games rpgs, nor rpgs in general or games. It have been a problem about narrative. And it has two folds. One is that violence doesn't require further explanation. There's no "what happens later", because death is definitive. It helps to deliver the audience a final result, in short terms. The second fold is, dramatically speaking, it's far easier to set up a physical conflict than navigate non violent arguments. If you get good movies, there's those with violence and those without it. But bad movies usually appeal to simple and straightforward violent actions, because it doesn't demand much. In the end, yes, there's money involved. But there's also some creative issues.
I don't think this tracks with the observable reality. Most films for the majority of the medium existence were about people talking, with violence, if there even is any, being the climax of the story.
Fighting on screen is ludicrously expensive! You are very constrained in the amount of takes, you need your actors to also be good athletes, learning choreography takes a lot of time and effort, etc
Videogames are basically the only medium where on-screen violence is both cheap to produce and actually engaging.
I can add Skyrim to games with ability to play with less violance. I've made a character in Skyrim who hadn't practically fighting skills, even write a song about it. About story mode. I guess people skip it because most of games give a reason to think that this is not a full game experience, so you didn't have that much fun or even didn't have some loot, missions etc. About money. Software companies and game developers in particullar usually get money from investors not directly from players. To get these money developer needs to show plan of approx. profit for specific game genre. When developer gets its share if sales will be good if not they will find an excuse as well as investors, because they need a reason to tell themselves that we didn't put money into bad project. Then dev will go to ask investors to pay more money for the next game. That's why people didn't feel a money control over AAA development. Because they can do anything, sale broken game, put microtransactions into it, make a obligatory internet connection etc., and when people who paid money say wtf, "oh you don't understand how hard is game development".
Alright, even though The Outer Worlds isnt a AAA product, you still mention it quite a lot in the video (which makes sense, since it's a game you made) so I wanted to talk a bit about it.
The Outer Worlds still has this "violence as the default" feeling THROUGHOUT the game. Especially the DLCs. Sure, you can talk your way out of some situations, but there are still SO MANY trash encounters who aren't really fun considering the two options you're given.
Option 1: Kill them all (Violence as the default)
Option 2: Stealth your way around them. This isn't fun either. Mostly because crouching in bushes isn't exactly the most exciting of gameplay, but also because this doesn't feel like non-violence. You're only given two choices, kill everyone or not kill everyone. Stealthing isn't pacifism if your only other option is to kill them all.
Let's compare this to the first Pillars of Eternity: there are still a significant amount of trash encounters, but there are SO MANY encounters that start with the potential enemy engaging in conversation with you before attacking, and often offering alternatives that aren't violence or stealthing. This can come in the form of a bribe, a persuasion, a threat or even a team-up, but you're often capable of solving potential encounters peacefully, while still admitting that violence of stealth was an option.
What this means is that, in the occasional encounters that you can't (or don't want to) talk down your opponent, violence most often feels like a last resort and self defense rather than "oh look, more health bars for me to deplete", as it often does in TOW.
it's so great that we get to have a channel like this, and for free ❤ love from your local fallout fan gamedesigner hehe
combat is more interesting typically because it involves more user input and interaction with the console/pc via the controller or kb/mouse; it is literally more physical input requirements that make it more interesting. Selecting a dialog option or sneaking past the entire game is incredibly boring, especially in most of the titles Cain has been involved in because by sneak level 50 the effort to sneak by everything in the game is TRIVIAL.
I would love to see more "dominate" spells or proper mind control of NPC; where the npc is aware they are being controlled and verbally opposing the actions they are being forced to make.
Most spells/skills of this nature are underleveled and only interesting in the first 3 hours of the game when you can "calm" a wolf; then the fun is over.
Isn't combat also trivial in a lot of RPGs, once you've unlocked OP abilities or just your level is too high compared to the ennemies ?
If the combat is too easy then that game probably won’t sell well. But for actually good games where the combat is fun and the power earned: for those specific examples even at that point it can plenty entertaining being creative in combat.
I will never forget getting to the end of The Outer Worlds and Vicar Max remarking something like "this will be tough, but I'm confident your silver tongue will get us through it again." And it did. I diplo'd my way through most of that game I realized.
yeah, voting with wallet seems to be working.
if you look at some newers releases Flops like Star Wars outlaw, Veilguard, Concord and Suicide squad, shows that people are getting Tired.
Violence was actually on my mind when worked on my indie game "Encounter" last year, the game is based on a 1983 game where the only way to pass obstacles is to kill the opponents, and I did not really like that to be the only option so I added some non lethal paths, these require much more work but you are rewarded with higher scores (because it makes sense that as a private investigator you are not supposed to kill people, that would probably ends up having you lose your licence and finish in jail).
I agree with you that violence sells, but I'm curious as to why someone might see that as a problem? Violence is a part of life, and a big part of video games and especially RPGs is to reflect life. I suppose one problem might be someone younger playing a violent game and getting weird ideas from it, but that's what the ESRB ratings system is for. Wouldn't a better question be: "Why don't other mediums (books, T.V., Movies, music) get criticized to the same degree that video games do for having the same problems with violence?"
I don't think anyone here is really "criticizing" games for being too violent in a moral panic kind of sense. Some folks would just like more variety.
Movies were criticized a lot for violence a few decades ago, before video games showed up.
Then attention shifted to video games, now nobody cares about violence in movies.
Ive always been a massive Doctor Who fan, so playing a character in an rpg that talks their way into/ out of situations instead of fighting has always been my dream.
I have to partially disagree with Tim here. Every game has a core gameplay loop. It's the thing your players are going to spend most of their time doing. That core gameplay loop is what sets the expectations. A good example are reviews for different games in the same franchise. Case and point a quote from a GoG review of Dragon Age Origins:
"I played for 8 hours I guess, GOG didn't track my playtime, and like a show with bad first episodes, I don't see why I should keep playing it, and I was thinking: why do people even like this ? The combat system is very bland for a CRPG, compared to Divinity: OS2 and Pathfinder: WOTR. Maybe the music ? I could just listen to it on UA-cam. The graphics ? Obviously not. So the story ? Those 8 hours of playtime were of complete boredom, nothing special happens, 8 hours of just "go talk to that person, and now that person makes you talk to three more people about mundane topics about the world." This is a game, I don't care to learn about their fictional religion or politics in a room with nothing happening. 8 hours in and the game doesn't show anything to catch the player's interest, you don't even see the main villain, there's a war happening, you should care but why ? At least Inquistion has nice graphics, better combat, beautiful effects and maps that aren't completely mud."
-NorthStarFist, August 15, 2023
The player wanted combat. Having played Inquisition he expected combat. The most praised thing about Dragon Age Origins is what drove him away. He didn't want a story, he wanted combat. The core gameplay loop of Dragon Age Origins was not something he enjoyed. On the other hand, the ever more pervaisive "story" mode most CRPGs have nowadays is the exact opposite, a game mode made for people who only bought the game for the story and who don't really want to engage with the combat aspect of a game.
The problem though, is that when you try to make your game for everybody you are more often than not going to be making your game for nobody. Every difficulty setting takes at least some time to implement and check. It takes time and money. And that's true for AAA as it is for indie studios. Making games that can be enjoyed by everyone is a losing proposition. Especially for AAA game studios. The problem is that most AAA games nowadays cost so much even a game that sells well might be considered a failure. While everybody likes to clown on Concord and accuse Veilguard of being woke and not selling well, a more pertinent example is Mass Effect Andromeda. Despite the bad reception from entrenched fans, and the fact EA considered it a failure for not having sold as many copies as it they wanted. The game made it's money back and was profitable, but that didn't matter because it didn't meet expectation. Why does that matter? because that's the mistake most AAA game studios make. They try to make a game for everyone but they forget that given the opportunity gamers will optimize the fun out of their games. If a game has a violent and a nonviolent option, most people will pick the violent option. Hell, unless you make it absolutely - yellow paint on a ladder - clear that there is a nonviolent option, most gamers will assume violence is the intended solution and will be shocked to find out there is a nonviolent option. This is one of the main reason 0 violence indies like The Witness hit it big every once in a while. People that want nonviolent games will assume the same thing people that want violent games would about any game that has violence - that that's the not only the intended solution, but that it's the only solution.
Violence is a particular form of action a player can engage in. If the player thinks that's the core gameplay loop of your game nonviolent options will be considered undesired deviations from the core gameplay loop. Similarly, adding a gun to a game like The Witness - unless done for comedic effect like in the Looker - would go against the core gameplay loop of that game. Options sound nice until you realize they're contradictory. One AAA example that comes to mind if Warframe and it's New War quest line. That quest is loved by people that mainly play Warframe and despise by other, especially if they play other games. Why? Because Warframe has a fast paced looter shooter core gameplay loop while New War is a AA console game - and I mean that as an insult. Every 15-20 minutes New War changed the gameplay on you. Every 15-20 minutes you get to engage in a completely different type of gameplay. IF you mainly play warframe that's a breath of fresh air. Finally, something different. But if you play other games, Warframe is just doing badly things you've seen in a dozen other games. For some people New War is fantastic because it deviates from the core gameplay loop, while for others it's a quitting point. They want the fast paced violence of the normal gameplay, and the slow paced, sometimes nonviolent gameplay of the New War quest is something they dislike so much they're considering quitting the game. And why? expectation. If people expect violence, and a certain kind of violence, at a certain pace to boot, and you don't deliver they're going to be disapointed. Similarly, if they don't expect violence and you force them to engage in it they might quit playing. AND if violence is an option, most people will always assume that it's both the intended way forward, and that it's the only way forward. Violence sells, AAA games will not become nonviolent any time soon, and while thoughtful game devs like Tim will continue to champion complex games with multiple solutions that have different gameplay loops at their core, the executives in charge of studios will just look at how people interact with their games and go from there. On the bring side, indies are only becoming stronger.
PS. if you read all that have an internet cookie on me.
I feel the exact same way of you gotta draw a line - it may not mean anything to the world but it means the world to me
I used to get into a lot of voluntary street fights as a kid (13 to 19). All stopped as soon as I started playing my first action video games (God of War on PS2). Later, when I got my driving license, I used to drive carelessly and dangerously it turned to a new source for getting the action. All that stopped as soon as I played my first Forza game.
People pretending that all humans born with the same neuro structures with same emotional needs are wishful thinkers. Action games sells because of evolutionary reasons. I am a software engineer coming from five generations of soldiers before me. Of course, the classic God of War is the GOAT game for me. Performing fake/virtual violence is way better than real violence.
I know, the point of this video is to how make violent actions voluntary in your design and make it to be a player's choice. As a solo developer who loves making action puzzle games, I simply can not afford spending that much time for the parts that I don't even like to play them. For AAA games in other hand, sure if you have the budget, go for it.
Nah you just have bad genes lmao
Griftlands is a pretty much the only example I can think of where combat is a large part of the game, but you can play through every story without killing a single person.
Talking to people isn't just a skill check, its a gameplay system just as deep as the battle one. Talking people down is also mechanically safer than killing people, as most people have relations with other characters you'll obviously damage if you kill them.
This video could have just been titled: "Why does AAA SUCK?" And Tim just says "Capitalism." and the video ends.
We have Book of Travels - a phenomenal indie RPG where violence isn't the base focus yet it has playercount so small it isn't even visible on the community page and the dev team on the brink of closure which saddens me greatly because the game is a real gem
Unavoidable combat just for the sake of combat can absolutely feel like filler in a narrative-driven game, and undermine the narrative itself. This is not exclusive to RPGs. I often felt like the narrative of Red Dead Redemption 2 was interrupted by meaningless "shooting gallery" moments that had zero impact to the actual story. Something actually suspenseful and interesting happens, and then suddenly 50 gunmen with no regard for their own lives spawn out of nowhere, and the only way out is pew-pew? And this happens in literally EVERY town in the game. But return to the town later, and it's like nothing happened. Why did the gang run from Blackwater again? The random gunmen had infinite respawns?
Happy New Year! - And thanks Tim, I think that's a great explanation.
Cool question with a great answer. I'd phrase a similar question with romance dialogue/scenes. As I get older romancing npc's doesn't appeal to me when I'm busy trying to save the world or universe. So I wonder if leaving romance options out of rpg's would affect sales one way or the other?
I loved how that marriage affected on Sid Meier's Pirates.
Romance in mainstream RPGs is a very big deal - it gives people permission to engage with that sort of gameplay under the cover of "I'm here for the mainstream RPG" rather than straight up installing a japanese schoolgirl simulator. You would absolutely lose sales and enthusiasm if you cut it, although obviously RPGs without that option (or with a very surface treatment) are plentiful.
Maybe romance could be tied to saving the world? "Diplomatic seduction" 😄
@@pyepye-io4vu That would be the fun ending. lol
Something as a point of contrast.
The reason violent games sell well, is the audience game publishers fostered like violent games.
The target demographic still is like 20-50 year old men who grew up playing violent games.
But when you look at the mobile market which has a much more balanced gender split, non-violent games shine.
Even when you look at console games popular with women, Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, Tetris, etc.
My 70-year-old mother plays the dickens out of Fallout 4.
Hi, Tim! On the comment about how short ads must be as compared to earlier decades: I imagine players nowadays just want to jump into the action immediately, rendering slowburn stories obsolete. Do you feel like this "short attention window" is something that has impacted game design in a harmful way? Do you think there's anything good that has come out of it?
"They don't care or even notice, but I do". Yes. Exactly that. I have to go to bed with myself at the end of every day, not shitheel companies.
I’d love to hear what your opinion on difficulty in video games and how you design around it. Easy, normal, hard, expert.
He's got a good video on that!
ua-cam.com/video/wUI6LZaCKCg/v-deo.html
Hi Tim,
Your content is such a gem - and you’re absolutely right about demand and its relationship to violence in AAA games. Although games like Balatro or Minecraft do break through that pattern, it’s often against a confluence of factors. To me, violence makes for satisfying stories, and that’s part of why this pattern exists. Not that violence *is* satisfying, but rather in the context of creating scenarios with an enticing beginning, gripping midpoint, and definitive ending, a fistfight will accomplish that more easily than a complex discussion of competing philosophies. Narrative is often substituted by action, because action functions as narrative shorthand. Why devote a ton of time and money to crafting twenty branching paths for a cutscene depending on the dialogue chosen when you can just as easily make three where the outcome is a fight won, lost, or stalemate?
I have a question of my own, if you’ll indulge me. I’m curious about whether a game like Fallout or The Outer Wilds, which both carry built-in criticisms of systems like capitalism and imperialism, are capable of conveying that ethos in gameplay? The revolution problem, essentially. If you’ll have to overthrow a violent state with violence, doesn’t that mean a greater amount of violence overall? How can you suborn a system of control and artificial scarcity of resources if you have to first take control of all the resources in order to allocate them more fairly? In a game that allows you to take multiple paths as you mention, like dialogue, or combat, or stealth, how would/could you represent a sophisticated or more granular solution to a problem? Ex. If a town in the New Californian Republic was suffering from caps based inflation (say an NCR guardsman found a bottlecap maker), could the player start attempting to verify which currency is counterfeit? Or somehow manipulate the supply by introducing a different currency system? I don’t know if there’s any solid answer, but I’m curious about your thoughts on this, and perhaps also how complicated gameplay systems can be before they become unwieldy?
Cheers,
Callum
Video Game RPGs are derived from Table Top RPGs.
Table Top RPGs all stem from the basic fundamentals of Dungeons & Dragons.
Dungeons & Dragons is built around the idea of "killing enemies and getting stronger"
Killing is at the very essence of the DNA in any RPG.
Mystery solved / Moving on.
I remember playing this free indie game called Emily is away. Basically you’re an early 2000’s high schooler talking to your crush over aol. The dialogue options had a range from insipid to genuinely impactful, but it was hard to tell until you made the choice and got a response. Despite the melodramatic tone I think it’s a good demonstration of how you can create a lot of tension and consequence with the absolute minimum. RPG’s should take one’s personal kindness, humor, etc into account when doing renown systems, otherwise they just become another experience bar you advance by killing the right things. The issue is just that it’s easier to make a dozen enemies and copy paste them than write thousands of dialogue options and consequent responses. I think that llm dialogue following doctored guidelines could help fill the gap.
That said there’s plenty of other examples of rpg where dialogue and charisma are more important or as practical as violence, like fallout 1 and 2
I see the main problem with violence in AAA games in a completely different aspect: writing. Or rather, a lack of everything else in sufficient quality to be on par with violence.
Over time, I'm becoming more and more convinced that a game as an art form is - is what it truly is - an art form. An art is made by artists. If you want to industrialize it, to turn all that craft, passion and self-expression into that huge thing that prints a lot of money - you inevitably lose the art component. The problem is that is works. Hollywood printed out movies after movies like a well-adjusted print press, with no real consideration for cinematography. Mr.Beast's videos are about the same, the lowest form of entertainment in an easily consumable format. AAA industry did the exact same thing with games. In the 90s and, to some extent, in 00s, it was carried by enthusiasts like yourself as well as technological advancements of the era. We had a good amount of mindless slop as usual, but some of those games came above of all their competitors and are still remembered today, even if the initial intent wasn't that of making pure art for the sake of it (like, for example, Hong Kong 97...), but to make it work as a business -- because, well, you do need money to make games.
Somewhere around 2007-2012 the technological advancements slowed down and the novelty wore off, the public interest in video games has increased to the point that AAA has become its own Hollywood. Big money, big budgets, a lot of repetitive work that could now carry the product that those budgets could still be converted to (like graphics, 3d models, environments, etc.). Big games now take 5-8 years to make instead of just 2. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a good example of this -- it was massively carried by just its big budget -- lots of environment/level design work, lots of minor systems that just take time to implement instead of talent, etc. It worked for another 10 years, but ultimately, the industry has hit a wall here as well. Once the standard is set, you cannot release Battlefield 2042 that had less minor systems and polish compared to Battlefield 1. The systems became the content. Yes, the way your character opens a door while sprinting IS the content that players now pay their 150$ of the Ultimate Deluxe Early Access edition for, however stupid that may sound. The focus of the industry has turned to quantity instead of quality because it is an infinitely more reliable metric, and businesses don't like risks -- it's natural.
The writing. As Hollywood cannot come up with a good script for a movie, AAA games cannot come up with a good script for a game. In an industry driven by corporate values, there is no place for an individual vision. It's not even about money, as the industry was doing fine just 25 years ago while still focusing on making money first. The talent is gone and replaced by DEI, the responsibility is spread throughout the middle management, the vision is replaced by a perpetual collective misunderstanding of the game they're making, and dictated by a local societal norms that tend to be very detached from the world outside of the company.
So if no highs are possible, you need to take all your lows and pick something that will make money. If a game cannot grab you with its plot and characters, it still needs to provide at least some entertainment with action and violence. You may call it an Action RPG, but the point is, if the RPG aspect doesn't work (and it never will in these curcumstances), the Action aspect should, else it wouldn't sell. I don't care much for movies, but there's a reason we have many more successful manga/novel adaptations instead of original anime, because, on average, a single person making art will compromise less and won't allow external factors to dictate what goes into the work, than a company making product. So as a company, when all you have is compromises and safe content, you really have no choice but to make something that worked in the past, hence violence.
I see no solution to this, and frankly, I don't see a problem to solve. I've stopped buying games I don't care about a long time ago, but there is still an audience that can be exploited and it's not going away. Someone will always buy a 70$ horse, a season pass, a battle pass, and a 250$ supporter edition with extra skins, and the industry will still produce games where you need 8 headshots after a stealth takedown to kill a single PvE enemy because you didn't buy a premium experience booster from the cash shop for 7.99$ and your level is too low. It's not going to change, but we as individuals are not required to continue buying AAA games. There is no point in playing a bad game (because everyone else plays it and you're not/the marketing departament tries really hard/it's the best thing since sliced bread) and then thinking that you're old/don't like games anymore/modern games bad/etc. The fight for your time and money is in your own head. I am disappointed that so many people don't understand this.
By the way, people talk about a crisis in AAA industry, but I don't believe it's true. All I see is multiple AAA companies shooting themselves in the head with dumbest possible decisions. Companies that don't do stupid desicions are completely unaffected by the Western AAA being idiots, and still sell tons of copies and get tons of players (like Wukong, Palworld, Baldur's Gate 3, Marvel Rivals, PoE2, etc.).
Yup thats the big "uff", especially when it comes to RPG's. Most of them were aimed at "hardcore gamers" from the beginning.
But with increasing complexity became drastically more expensive.Thus had to cater to the mainstream as well, to even enable developers to implement such complex systems.
And now we are in a situation where the mainstream dictates where these games are going, even believing that they always were how they are today, which oftentimes is an oxymoron.
Ending in the unfortunate reality that the mainstream oftentimes rejects attempts to steer complex RPG's back to their roots.
And sadly, only very few studios can handle the very delicate balance of catering towards the mainstream, while at the same time tackling complex moral,
social and political topics or extremely complex rule systems like D&D and alike. Things that for the most part, still only hardcore gamers are interested in.
But that is how most of them used to be.
Unfortunately today, in the current climate, that is barely possible with the next shitstorm right around the corner. Almost tragic...
@@The_ViciousOne I don't believe in "hardcore" vs "mass casual" audience. What matters is how accessible your game is. Some of my friends are "casual" FFXIV players who played the game strictly as a visual novel and a Barbie simulator but for some inexplicable reason ended up completing hardcore bossfights with high dps output on their main class. Baldur's Gate 3 brought a massive "casual" audience despite being a niche game for Divinity fans. Path of Exile 2 even had corpo vtubers playing it - people who are the complete opposite of a hardcore gamer as they can't spend too much time on one game and have to make their streams entertaining instead of nerding about the game's systems.
Yes, it's very hard to go the "classic" way for a text-heavy RPG - with finding a publisher, funding, etc. but there is still a way of going indie/small and then gradually scaling your games up to the desired size. BG3 basically started from Divinity/Original Sin or even before that, PoE 2 had 10 years of fans making their own Diablo 3 (in a form of PoE1), Miyazaki had 5 clones of Demon's Souls before shipping Elden Ring, etc. Then there's Disco Elysium.
I want to believe that the industry has learned that games for everyone usually turn into games for no one, and we will be seeing more projects for specific audiences instead of just "mainstream" slop, with more limited, healthier and more sustainable budgets and development times - 8 years for a single game is detrimental for the quality of the game because of key staff changes, morale, etc. - and it will also limit complexity. Deus Ex 1 did not need a horse pooping mechanic but turned out to be one of the best games in history. I think that this balance will be achieved from the indie developers and small studios growing bigger over time, while already big corporations will continue to lose money on DEI and Concords and close their offices, there is no saving them but there are alternatives. And they don't dictate the mainstream anymore. There has been no mainstream for quite some time anyway, at least since E3 has closed, the niches are strong and more populated than before, and occassionally slip into the mainstream.
The future is bright.
I buy almost only AA games instead of AAA. And movies... I don't watch that much Hollywood movies anymore because they are garbage today where some guy flies through an apartment building with the camera rolling around. They are just not good as they were in past.
I just use google and find interesting filmmakers what other stuff they have made or talk to people from different countries what good stuff is made there. Type of movies I found interesting are war movies made in Europe. They have gritty feeling that works for me.
Jimmy McGee type speech style, with the nonchalant and cold attitude as well wtf😭😭 ua-cam.com/video/1X6D39Cd34k/v-deo.html
@@theultimateevil3430 "lose money on DEI" Yeah you sure sound smart, its the minorities who are the problem and not the stock exchange😂😂
Yeah, it's interesting how violence is so common to see in fictional media, despite being one of the worst and most unacceptable things in real life.
So, maybe instead, we need more games where OTHER societal taboos are the default, such as public streaking, yelling at random people, disrupting the workplace, disobeying your teacher or parents, etc. This may in turn actually help people to feel better since they'll be able to do more things fictionally instead of doing it in real life with real consequences.
i think the appeal of violence in all media comes from it being smth most ppl arent allowed or able to do irl anymore
Saying stuff like this makes you sound unhinged