EA Labels President Frank Gibeau Looks Back In Time
And the view he sees, as the Wing Commander CIC explains, could potentially be a very good thing for fans of…oh, I don’t know…one or two old Origin Systems series:
“We do have a couple of old franchises that we’re looking at right now… reimagining them and bringing them back,” he said.
“We’ve got 25 years of good IPs and I’ve worked on a few of them in my career like Road Rash and the Strike series. So I have a strong affinity for a lot of the things we’ve done in the past.
“We kind of have a rule which is you’ve got to have a really good reason to bring something back — What can you do to it that makes it fresh and brings something new to the equation of the franchise?”
I’m pretty sure you’re all already thinking to yourselves “hey, what about that secret Mythic project? And didn’t Chris Roberts just do an interview about his interest in returning to Wing Commander and game development?” And if you’re not thinking those things…well, you probably should be. Or you’re new to the site; that’s always possible.
All that’s old is new again. Apparently the game industry is no different than kids these days wearing tie die shirts and bushy hair cuts.
If they’re going to do a Wing Commander game, I just hope they come up with something original, if not shockingly visceral. Space is a dangerous place. Don’t make it Top Gun, make it Alien.
I still think the gaming industry has a better appreciation for the distinction between a rote reboot of a franchise and an earnest effort to tap something old for bits of as-yet-unexploited new potential. And at least from what I’ve seen, EA’s interest tends to be in doing the latter.
I’m with you on the space game, though. Heck, even another balls-out story-driven space flight sim in the vein of Chris Roberts’ classics would be great to see.
I hope so. I have a personal tale to tell which REALLY pissed me off. I was attending a developer conference (forget which one, GDC or something?) in Atlanta and the guy who headed the American studio that did Metroid Prime was giving a talk about his team’s experience. A kid asked how they felt about the potential negative fan reaction in taking Metroid from a 2D platformer to a 3D FPS. The pompous ass looked at him with a mix of dismissiveness and condescension, replying tersely that it wasn’t something they’d considered and quickly moved to the next question. There was even a bit of anger in his voice, which I suppose was the icing on the cake.
That sort of disrespect and apparent disgust for those who loved the original marked me. My blood pressure shot up and I realized that outright contempt is actually felt for a lot of what we love about older games.
I just hope that a new incarnation of an old game is born from real love for the original and a conscious effort to recreate what made the old game great. Games haven’t changed; technology has, so don’t shit on what we loved, just amp it up and take it to a new yet familiar level.
And yes, even if they just remade the originals with a new engine I’d be beyond happy. Wing Commander, like Ultima, still has a lot of potential however and it would be great to see it extended.
It’s been a long time coming:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/112502-BioWare-Co-Founder-RPGs-Are-Becoming-Less-Relevant
To be fair, Zeschuk’s comments seem to be made from a market-focused point of view, and in that context he’s not wrong in articulating the view expressed in the (somewhat sensationalized, which is surprising for The Escapist) headline.
RPGs account for about 40% of the total PC gaming market, if I can correctly recall the last stats I looked at (the report I’m thinking of was mentioned in an Open Thread a while back, but I can’t remember which one just now). On the console side, though, RPGs account for less than 10% of the market, and I’m sure the same is true on the mobile side of things.
So, “globally”, that means RPGs — including MMOs — account for probably not more than 20% of the market, if not less. If memory serves, shooters capture a larger share of the pie, on console at least. Which, really, is probably the largest part of the gaming market right now, as much as I hate to say so.
So again: in context, Zeschuk isn’t wrong. And his analysis of the path forward for companies that have risen up as RPG developers is, I think, also correct: future RPGs, if they are to have good market penetration, will need to deliver a hybrid experience that balances between RPG elements and elements from other game types.
We’ve seen BioWare moving in that direction over their last few titles, and even they will admit that they have yet to find a perfect balance. We can see it in 38 Studios & Big Huge Game’s upcoming RPG, Reckoning…which might actually strike that same balance. And we’ll probably see some compromises of this sort in Skyrim as well, though to what degree I cannot say and will not speculate.
In a way, it’s a bit of sad news, since it does mean that the day of the “pure RPG” (but what is a pure RPG?) is over, more or less. But by the same token, it’s not the horrible news that the (surprisingly, again) sensationalist headline makes it out to be, since Zeschuk’s ultimate view seems to be a desire to find a way to retain RPG elements in his company’s games, while still producing top-tier, competitive titles.
It’s not ideal, but it’s not exactly a travesty either.
I think the problem arises first from being able to define what an RPG is. I read all the comments on that post and you can see there’s a lot of disagreement. In the 8 and 16-bit days it was obvious, but with modern hardware and graphics the genres have largely started to blend.
One aspect I can think of that to a large degree both old and new RPGs share and most non-RPGs don’t have is non-linear gameplay. Even in Dragon Quest (the original) you can just go outside and walk pretty much wherever you want. You can do missions/quests in different orders, and a strong focus is placed on exploration and interactivity.
Things like turn-based movement or combat, stat-driven gameplay, top-down perspective, engaging story, etc., have become irrelevant to the term RPG because those elements infiltrate many games that obviously aren’t RPGs.
I think Zeschuk’s comment was sensationalized and in context makes more sense, but maybe he should have said, “The mechanics that have traditionally defined the RPG are becoming less relevant.”
Watch were all waiting for an Ultima or WC reboot, but EA will laugh and turn around and give us remakes of Bards Tale and Legacy Of The Ancients.. 🙂
Well, I did see a tweet from Mythic’s Paul Barnett in which he expressed a desire to do a Bard’s Tale game.
But that’s not what he’s working on.
I think trying to define a “true RPG” is nonsense in any case, because there is in truth as many definitions as there are (C)RPGs gamers.
Whether it is within CRPGs, JRPGs or MMORPGs there are lot of different styles and approach so it’s basically a sterible debate.
There are some people who whom RPGs means before anything the whole “character development aspect and loot” in which case JRPGs, MMOs and even Diablo are RPGs. There are others for whom RPG is mostly about dialogue, offering choices and consequences within them and all the plot variations that goes with it (which is an interesting definiton of the “RPG” but if you follow that logic that means we barely had any RPGs until the ’90s). Then there are also other peoples for whom a RPG is only a RPG if it’s old school with visible stats (almost to the point where you can see the dice thrown on screen) with turn based battle like a “true role playing game”. And there are also people who think the RPGs is mostly about the sandbox aspect with an open world to visit and quests to do.
And there are some for whom this is a mix of all this to various degrees.
So I would say RPGs comes in all forms. They might be very different games, but Ultima III, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy XIII, Ultima IX, Gothic, Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age, Fallout 3, Planescape, Diablo, Deamon’s Soul, Dungeon Master, Pool of Radiance, Arx Fatalis, World of Warcraft, Ultima Online… they’re all RPGs, all true RPGs… just different kind of RPGs.
So basically trying to define a “true RPG” is just intellectual jerking off by so called elitist who often have a narrown definition and refuse to accept things that are not as THEY define them as RPGs.
Oh and I’d love a new Bard’s Tale! I still waiting upon BT4 which we had screens of way wya back 🙁
I like defining games’ genres according to the cognitive challenge they demand of the player.
The more a game demands from a player to stop, think and plan ahead from a static position (ie, while the action of the game is not proceeding around him), the more of an RPG it is.
I think we can all agree that “true RPGs” generally require you to sit and decide which weapons you want to buy, which stats you want to upgrade on your next level-up, which party members you’ll distribute which items to, which quest-line you plan on taking on next, etc. If you don’t do these things, your characters will tend to fail.
An action game requires a different, more dynamic type of cognitive effort. Strategic preparations and planning don’t much factor in.
I can agree about some games demanding more planning than others… but I don’t feel personally it makes a RPG or not. I mean even way way back in old school RPGs, not all of them required a lot or much of strategic planning even without being action-ish.
Games like Thief or Hitman for instance most definitly require careful planning to succeed… but I wouldn’t call them RPGs.
But one thing which I think Zeshuck nails (and I believe this is pretty much the argument he tries to make) is that nowadays basically games genre blends more and and more… you’d generally be able to fit a game more into a category or another, but many of them will bring elements from different genre.
One case in point take a game like GTA or Red Dead Redemption, it’s an open world game, it has a tons of quests to do and things unrelated to the main story to do… in essence it takes a LOT of things from RPGs… except it removes basics RPGs elements like stats and character evolution. I wouldn’t call that a RPG, but it’s a good example of gender blending. (To take a more ancien example, I could have cited Outcast too).
Now I must say I happen to like this approach, I’m thinking a lot of my favorite games from the past decades have basically been games which blend multiple genre, basically because IMO this kind of gender blending tends to enhanced the experience.
That’s the thing, you see. The more the genres become blended and meaningless, the more it becomes necessary to define more accurately just what it is about games that people find enjoyable.
You used to be able to say “well, I’m a cRPG player” and that was enough. It was a sufficient description of what kind of experience you enjoyed. That’s no longer true, and what I suspect is that the videogame companies themselves are no longer sure what kind of experience their audiences want, either.
(I wish I was a neuroscience grad – I’d have researched this gladly!)
I for one would love an Ultima reboot. Especially 1-6, but that’s me.
Wing Commander was a fun IP, but when I replay classics I am not drawn to those games. I would play them if they re-release them, but they woudn’t be my first choice.
Ultima 1-3 (the three ages of Darkness) had mechanical hack/Slash scenarios; anything goes as far as remaking them, althought #2 might be a bit harder to pull off.
I agree. And that makes them extremly cautious as far as inovation goes. Why risk millions on a new mmo-type, when the dominating genre is proven to work ? ( That makes me facepalm… but it is not my millions to spend ).
— Francois424
The innovate/conform calculation is always hard on companies. Do they stick with what the market knows, and risk disappearing into the background noise of the market as just another copycat? Or do they try and deliver something innovative, and risk either not pulling it off or being rejected for being too different from what people know and expect? And if they don’t innovate, what drives the market and the gaming industry — and its technology, its artistry, etc. — forward?
I don’t envy the people who have to make those judgement calls.
I guess Id go for a new Bards Tale as long as it sticks to the RPG series and not that newer one that came out in 2000 something!
I never knew that a BT4 was planned, I had enough trouble with 2 and 3!
Ill have to go google it up and see if I can find those screenshots!