Why Larian Studios Should Get Your Money: The Current State of RPGs

In a new editorial over at PCGMedia, the author argues that funding Larian Studios’ Divinity: Origin Sin Kickstarter campaign is a wise choice if you’re a fan of classic role-playing games and are disconcerted over the direction that other, higher profile RPGs have taken in recent years. A handful of paragraphs to demonstrate the cause:

The Witcher 2 surpasses its predecessor in almost every way, but to do that, it had to become a much more linear experience. Linearity comes as a detriment to the foundations of the RPG experience. I absolutely adored The Witcher 2 – I played it with great interest from start to finish, and I have nothing but admiration for CD Projekt Red. They created a sublime action RPG but they created an action RPG. This is not the same as an RPG in the classical sense. This isn’t 4Chan, so I won’t go into the ins and outs of this. It’s subjective to an extent, but the overall consensus is that there’s a disparity between action RPG’s and RPG’s proper.

More examples: Divine Divinity or Beyond Divinity, Larian’s own Magnum opus, were startlingly different to their AAA, more modern release of Divinity II. As a result, their die hard fans don’t hold that title in such high regard. This is a very straw man account of the differences and economy of it all, but as I have described above, adding pomp and polish to a game detracts funds from other areas. As a result, Divinity II held aspects that came as a detriment to the potential for the RPG experience, whilst adjusting to a modern, more action oriented style of game play. When I shook Swen Vincke’s hand, I openly admitted that Divinity II is one of my favorite RPG’s of the last decade. We later discussed exactly why, however, the game was only a small percent of what it should, and could, have been given the resources.

Resources is exactly the problem. What are resources in games development? Money? Not just that, but: people, time, work-space, talent, technology, and, to an extent, freedom of creativity. Putting the right resources into the wrong things is a sure fire way to make a bad, or at least compromised, game. Why take my word for it? Take a look at CD Projekt Red talking about porting. Porting a product across three platforms is a huge blow to both manpower, money, and time resources. It necessarily comes with compromise. There’s one example of how to potentially compromise your RPG. Do PC gamers own the soul rights to RPG’s proper? Of course not, but it doesn’t help that so much money is being spent on AAA polish, only having to reduce and reshuffle it entirely to work on other architectures. This is money they could be spent on the game itself, rather than three versions of the exact same game.

As we talked about above, there’s also millions of dollars allocated to photo-realism, which, suspiciously enough, seems to be dedicated to open fields full of basically nothing, or small towns excused by narrative and story rather than the great cities and structures we see and read about in fantasy novels. It’s not the size, it’s how you use it. That’s a beautiful field, but what’s in it? What purpose does it serve? To the credit of BioWare they tried to take Dragon Age 2 out of the country, and into the city, but its cookie cutter characters and, ostensibly, upper-management meddling ultimately made that a fruitless endeavor – although an honorable one. Where are the cities?