Josh Sawyer on the RPG Genre Evolution

Personally, I’ve never been able to find a lot of merit in Josh Sawyer’s game design ideas and philosophies. His desire to eradicate degenerate gameplay and create a balanced experience in the process is antithetical to my idea of a fun and engaging game. And according to this VG247 article, the man also considers the genre’s over-reliance on stats and rulesets to be a thing of the past and thinks that moving forward, branching storylines and immersion should be considered the true heart and soul of RPGs.

Here are a few select quotes and you can take it from there and decide for yourself what to think about all this:

Stats and combat systems shouldn’t define the role-playing game, said Sawyer, although he admitted he has been complicit in creating games that stick to an accepted template.

“The hardcore RPG audience is very traditional,” said Sawyer at Reboot Develop this week, discussing the evolution of genres.

“Fans tend to skew towards the more hardcore cases and they tend to be fairly resistant to change. I don’t want to paint too broad of a stroke there but RPGs can be a lot more than we have done with them so far. There’s much more than we can do and its much more radical.