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.
Eh, idk. In terms of bugginess, they could do with developing for a bit longer, but the effort, and dare I say, passion for setting they are using, is definitely there in their games.
But given that cRPGs are very niche, I can imagine their budget might be a bit thin.
So maybe they should pivot to an easier rule system which might capture a larger audience, but other areas of quality like full VO might be a mistake, given that it didn't help Deadfire.
Ofcourse they could just pivot to a different genre, like Obsidian with the Outer Worlds, which has done better than Deadfire.
Well, genre tags like RPG and Adventure games seem to be based on the history of the games and generally what Game designers have all agreed on than what they actually mean in a dictionary or what the game is actually like.
Where RPGs have a history with TTRPGs, where character development/building and combat are the central pillars.
Whereas Adventure games focus on the narrative with little to no combat involved (Unless you add the "Action" prefix).
Atleast going by definitions, like from here:
https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/17547I guess it makes the difference between something like The Witcher 3 and RDR2, where RDR2 is an Action-Adventure game because it doesn't have character building, even though the role playing aspect is almost identical.
(Although, in the end, it's just arguing over semantics, I guess)
The other part I don't see is how RPGs don't have or focus on a narrative of some sort. I personally can't think of any RPGs that don't have one, even ARPGs and I also consider cRPGs to be the best at telling deep interesting stories and characters.
However, yes, the "Role playing" part is fairly limited in most ARPGs, atleast from the ones I can remember.
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.
Tbf, there were also a bunch of smaller IP's in there like Babylon 5, so it looked more like a list of popular IPs at Owlcat that they would be interested to work on based on whats popular in their community than a cash grab.
