Spoiler alert: Hollywood’s remakes don’t yield better films
A recent conversation sparked fresh annoyance with the seemingly unchallenged Hollywood propaganda success for the idea that film is somehow the best medium for the realization of any idea. It’s not. Whether a scene in a comic-book-based movie is good or not is entirely beside the point. To me, if filmmakers can put together good scenes, their abilities would be put to much better use in the pursuit of original works.
Because of Hollywood’s thoroughgoing dearth of talent and ideas, films are often remade or rebooted, which is, historically, almost always a bad idea. Watching the trailer for the “new” Magnificent Seven, I consider that this remake of a remake is in no way needed. I’d much prefer to go back and watch Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant original.
But at least this is an attempted redux within the medium (except that everything about the context is different). And makes some sense from the point of view that at least theoretically the art and science of filmmaking have advanced. However, it’s more about putting box-office bankable actors together with a vehicle that is ostensibly risk averse, since it already has proven successful; there’s not a lot of money to be made on the extant Seven Samurai (「七人の侍」 Shichinin no Samurai).
As to adaptations from other media, there’s some nonsense about how movies “bring X to life”, but I fully disagree. Les Misérables is alive to me in a way that no film adaptation of a musical theater adaptation could ever come close to touching, and what is more, I don’t want my version to be reduced, homogenized, and commoditized according to the way a group of Hollywood hacks decides I should think about it. The assumption being made is that these showbiz folk are not only smarter than me and you, they are also smarter than Victor Hugo.
Well I beg to differ. In reality, as William Goldman observed,
No one in Hollywood knows anything.
In fact, if a work is excellent in its native medium, this tends to make it a worse candidate for a good realization in another. The language it uses to conjure scenes might be what make a work succeed as a book, whereas in a film, those scenes are typically achieved by making literal images of them—no words are involved.
I’d argue this is true for every medium—there are elements inherent in each that uniquely suit it to specific ways of conveying meaning. Effective creators understand and master those elements in order to realize excellent works. So good books, comics, games, and everything else should be allowed to just be those things—they don’t need to be boffo at the BO to matter. In fact, if you really care about a work, you should root against Hollywood coopting something special and subcultural into an almost necessarily mediocre mass-market “success”.
The narrow premise that turned into a universal rule (Wish Fulfilment, Part 1)
I believe the ideas of fantasy and wish fulfilment in game design have been greatly misunderstood and overapplied.
Ideally, each game is a new experience, although certainly there are clones and reskins. Given this, the player does not necessarily have an idea going into a new game about what they want from it. Even within a genre, games should be striving to better the art and science involved so in a way, if you’re concerned with fulfilling backward-looking fantasies about horse-riding, this “logic” would lead you to not invent the automobile.
Where did this idea come from? In Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design, Scott Rogers says:
Tim Shafer, designer of Brütal Legend, says that all good games provide wish fulfilment. Playing as characters they wish they could be gives players a chance to be something they aren’t in the real world. I think the same is true about games in general. Regardless of the game genre, games should make players feel something that they aren’t in the real world: powerful, smart, sneaky, skillful, successful, rich, bad, or heroic.
This is, frankly, nonsense.
Using the example of chess, as is commonly done in thought experiments about games, what can players possibly be feeling that is different from the real world? Being smart? It’s pretty hard to win at chess without being smart in the real world; same with sneaky. Powerful then? Both players have exactly the same pieces; you only become more powerful by eliminating their pieces from the board, which gets back to smart and sneaky. Successful? You feel successful if you win, which is a possibility in every game, but again has requirements of its own.
I’d actually argue that a player cannot be made to feel something they have not in the real world, and it’s arrogant to pretend that a game could do that. If my real world experience is that I’m stupid, can you really make me feel smart? Probably not. This is the problem I, and, I venture many others had when we studied Romeo and Juliet as high school Freshmen: It’s generally agreed to be one of the masterpieces of English Literature, but by and large, we had no experiences to connect with it—instead, we just wondered what these two were blathering about (and generally gravitated instead to Mercutio’s wit and bravado). The player brings their own set of experiences into the game; those are what you have to work with.
Even in the specific context to which wish fulfilment seems to belong, role-playing games, I’d argue that someone playing an assassin in a D&D game has to already have a devious side to their personality in order to enjoy it. Therefore, I’d say instead that games are heightened experiences. Chess is an arena in which someone already smart and sneaky can harness those traits and master the strategy and tactics of the game in order to become powerful and ultimately successful within that context.
Also note that there is zero authorial intent in chess to foster any of those feelings or traits. Although we can’t ask the game designer what they intended, it seems a clear abstraction of warfare, with movement limitations and therefore strategic value placed on the various pieces reflecting the subject matter. The gameplay arises from this ruleset’s application to controlling territory, defending units, attacking your opponent, and so forth.
Let’s dig deeper into where wish fulfilment came from. Shafer took up the thread again in an interview with Game Studies:
I still think it’s useful with any character you make up to think “How is this a wish fulfillment? Why would anybody want to be this character?” Like they say in screenwriting class, are you writing a character that an actor would fight to play?
This is a terrible way of looking at designing characters. To begin with, actors and gameplayers are fundamentally different roles, where the first is part of the work and the second is the audience of the work. Ideally a screenwriter is thinking about conveying meaning to their audience rather than appealing to their co-creators (obvious Hollywood realities aside). Plain and simple this is pandering. There have been many attacks on the gaming medium’s puerility, and this certainly seems like a possible cause of that. But more importantly it places artificial limits on the kinds of games that can be made, keeping creators too, in a state of arrested adolescence.
Papers Please provides an excellent counterexample. The role of immigration officer is one few players would aspire to, but it is vital to the experience of the moral choices and emotions that accompany them that this game deals in. And the game’s no exception in this regard: This War of Mine, Abe’s Oddysee, and Life Is Strange are just a few excellent games that are far from wish fulfilment.
I think the error here, as has been said of comics, is that a medium has been mistaken for a genre. Every game does not need to be the equivalent of an action movie. Certainly designers need to know what they are choosing and why, but our medium is a rich one, and I think it’s capable of representing a much broader spectrum of experiences than this “rule” would dictate.
Another possible source for the fantasy idea is Raph Koster, who says in his blog post, Game Grammar:
Ask things like “What is the player’s goal? What is their fantasy?” for every verb.
At the risk of putting words in his mouth, I believe he is referring to fantasy in a very different way than how I often see it interpreted in game development: his verb roughly means an action a game allows a player to perform, and the game designer here is being asked to consider the things allowing that action implies.
So goals of course—games revolve around the achievement of goals, and it’s important that the player understand how a verb can help them achieve those goals. On the fantasy side, this means thinking about player expectations of what a verb might let them do. And to the designer this also might imply some of the limitations they need to place on a verb: allowing players to battle NPCs definitely creates the fantasy that they can kill Lord British.
Even in the relatively narrow context of a game that involves the player taking on the role of a character, the idea of this character being a wish fulfilment is one I’d approach fairly cautiously—which of these provides a more interesting character arc: a character who starts out awesome and keeps being awesome, or one that changes over the course of the work?
In my twenties I turned my back on much of what I had been reading to that point. Comic books, Fantasy and SciFi novels, and indeed nearly any sort of fiction started feeling disappointing to me. Instead I pored over topics like history, comparative mythology, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and media theory. I rifled through books that friends and family had left over from esoteric university courses, and searched lonely corners of libraries.
I would still occasionally read fiction, but only if it had been highly recommended; things like Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore), Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy(Divina Commedia), Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad). Foucault’s Pendulum (Il pendolo di Foucault) by Umberto Eco was one of these.
Although some of the other novels I’d read might connect with one or another of my other interests, none did to quite the degree of Eco’s. Moreover, whereas the nonfiction I had been reading typically ran the gamut from somewhat stuffy to challengingly dry, he had managed to weave this same matter into a compelling work of fiction. Still more remarkable, even though it wasn’t at all dumbed down, this thriller was by turns funny, mysterious, sad, suspenseful, and many other things besides. Finally there were numerous pop-culture references placed on an equal footing with all its lofty topics rather than being treated with disdain.
Of unabashedly arcane and dense books such as Foucault’s Pendulum, for which the internet provides annotations and concordances, Eco commented:¹
I was always defined as too erudite and philosophical, too difficult. […] So probably I am writing for masochists. It’s only publishers and some journalists who believe that people want simple things. People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.
He was less sanguine beforehand with some of his essays pondering who his audience was and even whether such readers existed. Regardless, I agree with his more recent sentiments in my own case. His unusual last name, handed down from his foundling grandfather, was apparently so dubbed by an inventive civil servant as an acronym for ex caelis oblatus (L. “offered by the heavens”), which is certainly how the author seemed to me. I read everything by Eco I could get my hands on; novels, nonfiction works, essays, interviews, as well as many of the works he made references to, leading me down still other rabbit holes.
When Umberto Eco died in February of this year, I was pretty broken up about it. As part of my mourning process , I searched my local bookstores for anything of his that wasn’t already in my bookcase, and wishlisted the rest on Amazon—that’s not where I prefer to buy books, but it’s a good reminder of those I’m looking for. In any case, this is how I came upon The Book of Legendary Lands (Storia delle terre e dei luoghi leggendari). This book contains a few disappointments but is amazing in other ways.
It’s important to note that while the book’s title seems to suggest it’s some sort of fantasy roleplaying supplement, it’s anything but. It actually makes up a trilogy with History of Beauty (Storia della bellezza) and On Ugliness (Italian: Storia della bruttezza). These may seem unrelated, but in the original Italian titles you can see they are all “histories”, though beauty and ugliness are certainly a more closely related pair. The Book of Legendary Lands actually is about places that never existed but were nonetheless obsessively searched for by explorers over decades, centuries, and even millennia in the case of Atlantis.
Some of these “legends” relate to limited and misinterpreted information, but quite a few relate to tall-tales, forgeries, and outright lies. Eco explained why such topics intrigue him:²
As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying. A dog doesn’t lie. When it barks, it means there is somebody outside. […] From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history. The most famous and terrible of those forgeries is the Protocols [of the Elders of Zion].
One downside is that there’s not much of Eco’s actual writing in it. Of course, as a fan, I missed it. The book is really an extended bibliography: each chapter covers a grouping of legendary places, which he discusses the history and context of, and the writings that contributed importantly to each legend. Quotes from some of those sources round out the chapter. All of this (at least in my edition) is accompanied by amazing historical illustrations, which unfortunately is another place the book falls down: These really needed to be explained much more than they were in the brief captions they were afforded.
The positives definitely outweigh these issues. In many ways this book acts as a key to Eco’s works—it’s a journey through his source materials, the writings he himself was fascinated by. One encounters The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the sewers of Paris which are central to the plot of The Prague Cemetery (Il cimitero di Praga), The theories of the Antipodes and sympathetic magic of which appear in The Island of the Day Before (L’isola del giorno prima), the false Grail conspiracies on which Foucault’s Pendulum hangs, and many more. On this last point, there is also a thorough debunking of the historicity Dan Brown claims of his idiotic oeuvre on the topic, together with those that the overrated sham artist drew upon (not to say plagiarized wholesale).
Just as a sourcebook, this is an impressive piece. Some of the works Eco references I was aware of, but there are many more that I’ll need to explore after reading this. Basically it’s a list of cool things to go learn about. I’d give fellow enthusiasts of signore professore dottore a solid recommendation, but a more cautious one to those with an interest in the legendary worlds discussed but who have not read Eco unless you’re up for something quite dense and scholarly.
If anyone were to look into my sources, many are traceable to Eco. A notional concordance of Diablo II, for example, would show significant overlap with that of Foucault’s Pendulum.
Notes
Stephen Moss, “Umberto Eco: ‘People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged’”, The Guardian, 2011.
Naming things in games is something I’ve always both placed importance on and enjoyed. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, it is a form of diegesis which, while even more constrained than haiku—generally, three or four words is as many as you get—places world story and flavor unavoidably in the player’s path, as well as presenting it in a way that doesn’t intrude on interaction as other story-delivery methods often do.
And so the names of places, characters, skills, and many other parts of a gameworld receive a great deal of my focus. Items in particular are important, particularly in RPGs, where they are typically a central element of gameplay.
In ChronoBlade an example of an item name that tied into the game’s narrative was Fylkir’s Lacrimator. Filkir the Maleficent was the name of the boss who dropped this item; many of these characters were named after members of the team, as this one was, but rather than using their names directly, I’d render them into an appropriate language and with a meaning that made sense to their role. In this case, the boss was named after level designer extraordinaire, Philip Mallery. The area was a Viking-Age world, so I used the Old Norse word fylkir, meaning “commander”, modifying it with “maleficent” to hearken to his last name as well as to make the boss sound properly menacing. The character was a Cronarch Lout, a ranged type who threw grenades at heroes, so I played on the idea of a common type of grenade: tear gas. This substance is technically termed a lachrymator, but as a weapon it also makes foes cry, so the name ticked all my boxes.
We included vanity equipment in ChronoBlade, a commonly used trope, especially for multiplayer games, as they allow an extra layer of avatar appearance customization. Our vanity equipment fell outside the canon of the gameworld, so I placed cool references at an even greater premium.
Barborum Magister is an example: we had some cowboy hat-and-mustache combos, Tombstone also has those things and the war of words between “Doc” Holliday, portrayed by Val Kilmer, and Johnny Ringo, played by Michael Biehn, is one of the best on film, so I took it as my inspiration. Eventus stultorum magister, “fools learn from outcomes”, was one of the awesome Latin barbs thrown therein. As the item was facial hair, I riffed on the phrase for the name, which means “master of mustaches” The Daisy Drover and The Huckleberry Plainsman rounded out the collection, each coupling a period slang word for something excellent (both of which also appeared in the film in the context of the ongoing Holliday-Ringo rivalry) with the name of a type of cowboy hat.
When we decided that for a group of sports-themed vanities our pugilist, Aurok, got modern boxing gear. I knew right away, I wanted the reference to be to Muhammad Ali. We did this as a set (which was also named), which included all three item types (head, body, and prop).
The set name was The Jungle Rumbler, maybe the most direct reference to Ali as a participant in the Rumble in the Jungle, his match with George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1974.
I stuck with that theme for the body, naming the item Rope-a-Dope Threads. Rope-a-dope was the tactic that won Ali the bout, and “dope threads” is appropriately ’70s slang for stylish clothes, so these ideas joined to form the name.
I called the padded boxing headgear the Unmarked Face-Guard, referring to Ali’s frequent comments on his prettiness, and specifically not having a mark on his face.
Finally, the boxing-glove props were Whale Tusslers; Ali claimed:
I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail; only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick; I’m so mean I make medicine sick.¹
Requiescat in pace, champ.
Notes
1. I’ve since learned from the Eddie Murphy film, Dolemite Is My Name, that this originates in African-American folklore.
The genre’s emergence, elements, and where it’s headed
The Action Role Playing Game (ARPG) has grown into a game genre with its own integrity and uniqueness. Recent conversations with colleagues caused me to contemplate where the category is headed, and in doing so, where it has been.
ARPG Prehistory
P&P RPGs
From my high school years on, I was a huge pen-and-paper (P&P) RPG enthusiast—it was essentially my gateway to becoming a professional game designer. D&D, in particular was a glorious mess with Byzantine system depths to explore, all fueled by imagination and social play. It was arguably the first true RPG and reached an audience of more than 20 million people.
I quickly moved from playing to creating campaigns, worlds, rule mods, and eventually full game systems. I parlayed what I was doing into a job, and then migrated into electronic gaming. It was always somewhere in the back of my head that I wanted to bring these experiences to life in the medium I was now working in.
CRPGs and JRPGs
I was far from the first: D&D remains one of the biggest influences on computer and video games to this day, but in the earlier days, perhaps even more so. Versions of RPGs had begun to appear in electronic form nearly as soon as those platforms came into being, and labeled Computer RPGs (CRPGs). The constraints of the medium were such that these games were very stripped down, and very little of what was awesome in P&Ps could shine through. Turn-based gameplay was one of the many limitations that game creators had to accept.
The idea of mixing action elements into the RPG milieu appeared in Japan on consoles (hence the JRPG or Japanese RPG), where already growingly sophisticated audiences wanted something less static than what had been offered in CRPGs to that point, where mostly text and numbers showed what was happening.
Before, and even more during my early career in electronic gaming, I tried to play everything that came out in the genre, both to enjoy it as a player as well as to learn from it as a creator. Finally in 1991, I was able to work on one—Inindo: Way of the Ninja (「伊忍道〜打倒信長〜」 Inindō Datō Nobunaga).
The Advent of the Modern ARPG
Shortcomings and a Manifesto
Unfortunately, the overall experience of playing all of these games—and especially, in some ways, that of working on one—failed to satisfy. True, there were some bright spots. Wizardry was an early addiction and included some all-night play sessions, and Eye of the Beholder’s imagery, if not its gameplay, was pretty slick.
As for Inindo, both my position as a relative newbie—only my second job in the biz—and Koei’s technical inability to pull off anything trickier—nearly all of their games used essentially the same engine—meant that it was a nearly by-the-book Final Fantasy clone. Our innovation had to focus on making our grand strategy player base feel at home in the game.
As a game designer, this forced me to think about how to do things better. We’re problem solvers, that’s our job: “oh, too bad; that’s how it is” is not how we leave things. So over time, I came to some conclusions about how I felt the genre needed to change:
Direct Action
Many C- and JRPGs had world navigation on one UI, and when there was an “encounter,” would load a different screen where this would take place. Having all the action take place on one screen was how I concluded this should be done, and this idea merged to some extent with the next one.
Character Focus
Many CRPGs had taken to using first-person perspective, one of the effects of which was that your characters were reduced to portraits which actually had nothing to do with who they were, what they were wearing, etc.
The isometric view was the one I thought most likely to be able to work: compromising between the overhead navigation views of JRPGs, and one where the player could see the action as well as having a decent degree of situational awareness, was what I pegged as the right approach. Populous, which had a zoomed-out mode (but kept most of the action in a single POV), was one of my reference points for this approach.
Lose the Party
A single player controlling the whole party seemed to me a slavish following of a P&P form, while completely missing the substance: the party, a source of social interaction and where the actual role-playing took place in P&Ps, became an annoying source of UI management and gameplay friction as implemented in electronic games. In P&Ps, one person typically played one or two characters in a party; playing the whole party meant to me that the ability to identify with your characters—which should be the most compelling aspect of the game—was lost. True there might have been a few standouts where the writing was strong enough to make this work but by and large it was not the case. Parties should only be used in a multiplayer setting, where each player controls one character.
When I walked into Blizzard North in 1996 and they showed me what they were working on, I could see on their screens the things that were in my head and my notebooks, and I knew I was home.
Send in the Clones
Diablo came out at the end of that same year, also picking up the Roguelike trope of the randomized dungeon, which kept the novelty level high. While it was quite successful, and a few clones did appear, it was really the massive success of Diablo II (D2) that ushered in a flood of them. To me, Diablo proved that we could find an audience for this new game type, and D2 let me explore it much more thoroughly. Many clones, at least initially, were quite literal—wholesale adoption of all the elements in D2, with varying degrees of success.
Thus today, “Diablo and its descendants” has come to be what people tend to think of when the category is discussed. Many of the features that people think of as “standard” to the ARPG genre originated with Diablo or D2, so much so that the game type is often referred to as “Diablo clones.”
A few of the common elements are:
Skill-Based Combat
Because the action in these games takes place in real-time, there is some degree of skill involved. There are issues that come into play like timing and distance from the target, selecting which skill to use when, etc. This is sometimes described as hack and slash, but it can be quite sophisticated at times.
Loot
One of the big motivators across this category is the search for new and rare items, generally equipment, but also straying into other categories as well. The risk/reward proposition is often important, with tougher enemies dropping more important items. This also fosters important social elements in the form of showing off your character and trading items with other players.
A notable miss in this regard was the launch version of Diablo III (D3), which instead emphasized its real-money auction house. Certainly, I don’t think the loot aspect needs to be the same in every ARPG; clearly its use as a motivator is strongly needed.
Character Progression
Since “role-playing” in the P&P sense was not present at all in the electronic RPG, progression—in the sense of a character that persists and improves such that its play mechanics change over time—was what really became the defining feature of the category. Nonetheless, there are some elements of progression that were solidified in the Diablo games which have found acceptance and have propagated, not just among ARPGs but also via hybridization into nearly every other gaming genre.
Setting
This is an element where I feel there’s a lot of room for exploration. For quite some time, the ARPG have stayed pretty firmly in the high fantasy world, often sticking specifically to Elf-Dwarf-Orc tropes, which are pretty limiting both in terms of the narratives involved, and the audience. In the Diablo games we understood what our setting was and that many high fantasy elements did not belong there.
Breaking the “Clone” Mold
I’ve been pleased to see lately that some elements have begun to evolve. Stagnant genres tend to die off, so it’s good to see these things happening. The category has also successfully moved to nearly every platform successfully (social, mobile, console), as well as adapting well to different revenue models (free to play, subscription). There are honestly too many games to call them all out, but I’ll try to mention a few here.
PoVs
Some would narrowly define this genre to isometric view, but many games have successfully deviated from that camera, such that now 2D sidescrollers and 3D open world games alike still fit in the genre. Neverwinter Online and Black Desert are strong contenders for what new ARPGs can look like in a different format.
Variety in Combat Styles
Many different combat styles fall into the ARPG category these days as well. At a high level, I think the idea of player skill in terms of movement, use of abilities, etc. seems to remain what binds these all together. Variety in combat styles is actually going to be a super interesting conversation going forward in RPGs.
Some games like Spirit Lords (I’m guessing due to tech limitations) experimented with limiting the odds in battles rather than the hordes of enemies typically faced, which resulted in some loss of the ARPG game-feel—based on this, I’d posit that hordes of enemies are important to the genre.
Custom Builds
There are simply ways players like to play, and these systems allow that. The skill trees of D2 have grown, changed, and migrated—some even enabled via equipment.
D&D let you effectively hang yourself by making choices that were dead ends, and D2 let us optimize for effectiveness; that feeling of mastery over the systems is a huge plus for players, and it’ll be a balancing act to create that sense of mastery without creating choice paralysis or a negative experience for intermediate players.
Item Progression
This aspect of crafting is one that I really like. The items in D2 are essentially static: sure, you can boost them a bit by socketing some gems, but after a few levels, you need a new one, ’cause you’ve outleveled it. What item progression does is to extend the usefulness of each item. This system is generally an aspect of crafting. There are some collisions with loot however, as dropping too many good items can effectively act as a disincentive to upgrade items if you’re not careful.
Additionally, there are some items that fall outside of progression, like vanity items which change your character’s appearance with only a minor change to stats (or none at all). These came from MMOs and are now ubiquitous, especially in free-to-play games. Pets are a combination of D2 mercenaries and vanity items with progression. Torchlight added them to good effect, and others have since followed suit.
Untiered items are another interesting development that Realm of the Mad God and others have employed. Basically, these require item’s abilities to remain always relevant, or to be based on character level or stats, so that they are effectively never outleveled. There’s some tricky balancing to be done with these, but it’s a very cool evolution of D2’s unique items.
Housing
Some games have added player housing, which can act as yet another progression store. Path of Exile lets you level up hideouts and gain better crafting options with Masters, while the Van Helsing games have a hideout that you build out and that you can even play a little tower defense game with. There is potential for a system like this to feel like it’s diverging too far from the ARPG core, but tying it back to other core systems (as Path of Exile does, in that it improves loot) is an important factor to consider.
Backsliding
Sadly, it’s not all upwards and onwards. Some things have regressed; here are some examples:
Multi-Classing and Specializations
These are all a return to cruft—the great thing about the treed skill system of D2 is that the player can stick to one part of the tree or another or create a huge variety of hybrids. Multi-classing in Neverwinter Nights was an annoying exercise in theorycrafting and decisionmaking at every level up. Specializations also force the player to give something up by choosing. Certainly “respec-ability” is now common, which is good—playstyle preference evolves in any player who sticks with a game for a while.
Multiplayer
One of the dangers even in the Diablo games was that they could often begin to feel single player, and this seems to have continued into much of the current crop of ARPGs as well. Even playing in a party has become meaningless in some games. In D3, for example, I often felt as though I was simply racing my “party” to the end of each level rather than playing cooperatively. I think it’s important to drive real multiplayer engagement in these games, and real incentives are the best way to do it.
There are some positive examples I’d like to point to, including Dark Souls, where multiplayer goals all relate directly to helping or hurting other players, and Dragon’s Dogma, which effectively used asynchronous coop through borrowing friends’ companions, and sending rewards back to players. I think there are many possibilities here that have yet to be explored.
Where I Think it’s Headed
I think there’s even more room to explore the specific elements that fit within the broad definition I’ve proposed for this genre.
Random Quests?
This was an idea I had back in the D2 days, but the palette I had to work with was pretty limited, especially if they are to be meaningful and interesting rather than “fetch me a rake.”
Autocustomization?
What if customization responded to what you actually do as the player, instead of being explicitly chosen (something like a more responsive version of the Beasts in Black & White)?
Keep it Friendly
One of the reasons I feel the Diablo games broke out was how approachable they were. It’s easy to get into a self-referential RPG bubble, but it’s important to remember that some of your players might not have played any RPGs at all. If you’re lucky, your game could be their gateway!
Deru Kugi 