Dumbing things down / "streamlining" had been the name of the game ever since the early to mid 2000s, safe for a couple tiny indies (Spiderweb with Jeff Vogel et all). No genre had been as fucked with as RPGs, numerous studios and major publishers closing for good prior. Even Immersive Sims at least had Arkane... The few remaining RPG studios meanwhile did everything they could to hide that they were actually still in the business of still making RPGs. Targeting crowds who'd prior never touched one before.
To be fair... "RPG" is such a nebulous term... Pretty much every game can be categorized as a "Role Playing Game". Even in Pong you're "playing the role" of a table tennis player.
The genre defining features of an "RPG" makes it even worse given that the typical staples of the genre... Have nothing at all to do with role playing. Things like stats and levels and equipment... As opposed to actually relevant RP content like good writing, deep characters, great worldbuilding...
Like, the genre is often defined by the more spreadsheets you need to build a character, the more "Hardcore" it is. While the deeper narrative based games like Life is Strange or Telltale's Walking Dead get sidelined as "Adventure Games"
It's honestly one of my biggest beefs with the genre as a whole. Irregardless of whatever subgenre of RPG it is, CRPG, JRPG, ARPG (The latter being the most egregious in it, where you're lucky if there's even a story in the first place let alone a GOOD one)
They keep using the term "RPG" yet the games focus on everything but actually role playing. Instead just being some form of Leveling/Stats/Loot based adventure game. At this point I'm not sure if the genre will ever actually get around to being about narratives and playing a role within said narrative or if it will continue to be epitomised by spreadsheet simulators and tacked on romances.
Originally Posted by Sven_
I'd love them to target quality over quantity for once. With three huge games in the space of but five years plus countless DLC, they are basically the assembly liners of CRPGs, and it shows in all aspects including quality of content.
I wouldn't hold your breath on that one. They recently put out a survey focused on gauging how people buy and play games and with some focus on popularity of major IP's (Like Star Wars, LotR, Fallout, WH40k etc) suggesting they're looking at getting rights to another major IP to produce another game and seeing how soon they can cash in on it.
