Why do RPG games miss the mark? How can they be improved?

The Game Room
61

[QUOTE=Pleonast]
What RPGs need is more role playing.

To me that means more and better inter-character interactions, The Sims level of interaction. I want to be able to develop friendships, romances, enmities. Not only with a few pre-planted NPCs, but with anyone I meet.

And the NPCs should be self-motivated. I don’t want them to only interact with the PC, but to initiate relationships (positive and negative) with each other. Things should happen when I’m not there, but let me talk to my NPC friends (or beat out of my enemies) to find out what happened.

This implies that problems can be solved by more than violence. I should be able to sweet talk or distract or confuse or befriend the antagonists. Depending on how I play, maybe some the roles of some of the antagonists and protagonists switch.
[/QUOTE]

The Sims doesn’t really have a plotline in the sense that an RPG does. You play your cards right, every other sim can befriend your PC. Or not. There is little effect on the overarching world, only your conrner of it. There is no possible way to create a Sims-like version of a coheren’t storyline without it being cost and time prohibitive. Ask any game master of a tabletop RPG how hard enough it is for them to anticipate and react to the weird crap that their players pull, and that’s with a smaller group of people the game master likely has at lest rudimentary knowledge of personality and playing style.

Try to do this with a computer when you can’t really even anticipate what your audience is going to try to do. And the complexity of programming increases exponentially the more options you give characters to actually effect the world they live in.

CRPG’s have rails for many reasons, and it’s something that will never be overcome until computers can actually think for themselves. CRPG’s will always pale in RPG aspects to their tabletop counterparts.

62

I guess plot line isn’t that important to me. The Sims with some swords and sorcery adventure would be perfect for me. I don’t need an over-arching story–the fun comes in the character interaction and facing challenges together. The driving force of game would be what each NPC wanted to do (and maybe need help from the PC or other NPCs) and what I wanted to do with my character.

By the way, that’s one thing that irks me about The Sims–it’s too easy to befriend everyone. And the NPCs don’t take the initiative often enough.

The game world itself needs to be open, but not necessarily large. A few islands or isolated valleys would work well for me. I think it’s technologically doable, but maybe not commercially profitable. If I had the free time, I could probably script what I was looking for in NWN.

63

You’ve just described an MMO.

64

I enjoyed Fable, since you had a good variety of control over your character’s actions. I played that game many, many times over trying out different combinations of choices, and alignments. the issue was that there were only like four endings.

A perfect RPG for me, would allow character customization, and have 20 or more possible endings to reflect the various alignments your character might choose. I don’t care for turn based systems, but would rather go to a sidescrolling fighter for battles, if 3-d stuff is too software intensive. If you MUST use turn based then let me see the numbers and make it easy for me to understand what they mean. Turns ought to be fair. I’ve given up on many games out of frustration from this. I hit the generic monster for 2hp he hits me 2hp, I hit for 2 hp, he hits for 49 hp, I die. I’d sooner go back to animation, then 3d-engines, and spend the time developing the storyline. You ought to be able to end up as the good king, the evil conquerer and everything in between.