Where RPGs have a history with TTRPGs, where character development/building and combat are the central pillars.
The central pillar of TTRPG's is the playing of a role. That's literally the entire purpose of them. You role play a character within a narratively driven campaign.
The character building and combat are just vehicles to help drive that narrative, by providing interaction with the narrative based on decisions made (Things like "The Rogue unlocks a door" or "The Cleric keeps someone alive by healing them" or "The Bard persuades enemies to be friends")
Originally Posted by Thunderbolt
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.
Simply having a narrative is not the same has having a focus on a narrative. For example, Mario games have the narrative of "Save the princess from Bowser" but that's not a focus on narrative, it's merely a passing setting..
As far as games not having a narrative... I couldn't tell you if Path of Exile had one. Similarly Grim Dawn barely has one (It starts off great with the whole "You were possessed by an Aetherial and were being hanged because of that... But during the hanging the Aetherial leaves and the hanging is thus stopped" then it's just "Bad guys ahead need killing" in various flavours), though ironically Grim Dawn has more emphasis on actually role playing than most ARPG's as you make choices within the world (They're just narratively inconsequential as they're mostly "Which faction do you side with")
There are other games that have less focus on narrative like the Disgaea series where you'll have a central story... Which progresses once every few stages. Then the remaining 70% of the game has nothing to do with it, with post-game stages, bonus stages and the item world... Honestly 100%ing the game would involve 99% of your gameplay being anything but the story (And mostly being leveling your characters to level 9999 a hundred times each)
Same with Monster Hunter games where again much of the content is post-game stuff (Not that the story is ever particularly notable and is normally "Oh noes, a more powerful monster is angery!")
Originally Posted by Thunderbolt
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.
The fact that they're doing a survey to try and gauge interest in IP's rather than making a decision based on what THEY want to make is indicative of being a cash grab. Since even if a "Niche" IP ends up being more popular and they make that, their decision is still being made based around what will be the most profitable rather than what they had a vision to create.
