The State of the Western RPG

Calling it a genre that managed to be “consistently important through every era of home video gaming” like no other, Joystiq’s writer has written a fairly short editorial on the state of Western RPGs today, and it looks to be the first of a series of weekly columns. Here’s on the dichotomy between Bethesda and BioWare, and how Obsidian fits into the picture:

It’s the BioWare-Bethesda styles of RPGs that fans and critics love to discuss. Both are incredibly popular, with their games receiving as much acclaim as any in this generation. And there seems to be a clear dichotomy: BioWare games are story-based, Bethesda games are system-based. BioWare games are built around embedded narratives, where your party members all have their histories, ethical choices are clearly delineated, and there are cut-scenes galore. In Bethesda games, you’re going to explore, choose to go where you want when you want, and largely not care about the story. This is an old division, going back to the days of Ultima’s innovation in world-building and storytelling compared to Wizardry’s tweaks in character creation and class switching.

It’s also a false dichotomy, like so many. While it’s easy shorthand to have BioWare and Bethesda dueling for the hearts and minds of single-player western RPG fans with incompatible game styles, a third player, related to both, has consistently demonstrated that it’s possible to do both. Obsidian Entertainment, and its members before they joined that company, has worked with both BioWare and Bethesda, refining the design of each.

Baldur’s Gate was a great technical achievement, but it was about as generic as fantasy worlds get. Chris Avellone’s Planescape: Torment took that core engine and applied it to one of the most dazzling, fascinating fantasy worlds in video game history. It goes on with BioWare games: Knights Of The Old Republic’s reliance on simplistic Star Wars ethics was muddied by its more nuanced, Obsidian-developed sequel. And recently, Obsidian moved on from adapting BioWare technology and stories, switching instead to do the same for Bethesda. The lonely wasteland of Fallout III, driven by exploration and not much else, was succeeded by the much denser New Vegas.

Of course, to describe all that is to make Obsidian look like the kings of RPGs, but most of its games have a completely different problem: bugs. As much as I may love many of Obsidian’s ideas and games (eventually), it’s hard to hold them up as a model of how to do RPGs correctly. I bring this all up to indicate that while I can look for general trends, it’s almost impossible to delineate them with certainty. The story of western RPGs right now is not a battle between BioWare and Bethesda, but a more complex set of interactions.

While there have been much worse editorials on the subject, and it’s clearly meant to only be an introduction, I feel that with such a wide scope of coverage a more orderly and less directionless approach to the subject would have helped.