How Torment, Tyranny, Divinity Original Sin 2 & Others Are Reviving the CRPG Genre
Oct. 8, 2016How Torment, Tyranny, Divinity Original Sin 2 & Others Are Reviving the CRPG Genre
The CRPG is experiencing a resurgence. Presently, games likeTorment: Tides of Numenerafrom inXile Entertainment and Larian Studios’Divinity Original Sin 2are generating buzz in early access, while others like Obsidian’sTyrannyand inXile’s Wasteland 3 are eagerly anticipated. In addition to the rich worlds they explore, all of these games share a common core of branching storytelling, isometric perspective, deep customization choices and thoughtful combat that uniquely defines this branch of the RPG tree that goes back to Baldur’s Gate, the first Fallout games and others. Building off of the recent success of titles like Pillars of Eternity and Wasteland 2, this resurgence of the classic genre has tapped into the authentic role playing experience that a vocal group of gamers crave. What’s behind the strengths and revival of the genre? Let’s take a closer look at where these games intersect and how they’ve relaunched back into the collective gaming consciousness.
These games all share a storytelling approach that involves presenting some higher narrative concepts. It’s not just a save the world from the big bad villain. They delve into philosophical musings on life and death, spirituality, war, the dark side of culture and society and the fabric of reality. It is precisely these topics which make them risks for traditional publishers aiming for broad appeal, while also generating ravenous interest for gamers interested in exploring deeper and perhaps darker themes. In Tyranny, evil has won, in Torment, a god walks among us, and in Divinity all of existence is threatened. The stakes are high, the outcomes are murky and the plots are memorable ponderings on the dreams and fears that haunt us all.
The element of collaborative storytelling with the developers and players is very similar to the tabletop genre. There are many branches woven in, encouraging the players to explore, but steering clear of right and wrong type choices and dialogue options, which results in quests that go beyond the fetch this, kill that conventions. Shades of grey abound and the games all have dramatically different outcomes based on how players approach it. This not only personalizes the experience, but creates a replayability element for players who want to see every possible permutation of choice. You can see a great developer panel on story and choices with members of the Tyranny team below. These are games, but the developers are serious about the choices they give to the players and they are taking advantage of the increased capacity of modern gaming to pack in the layers of content.
Worldbuilding has become a primary focus for these development studios, creating living breathing worlds with cosmologies and creation stories, as well as fleshed out demographics and histories. Whether it’s an original world like in Divinity or it builds off a rich tabletop setting like Torment does with the tabletop game Numenera, the concept of a dynamic lived in world with millions of stories to tell has allowed these developers to unleash their inner Tolkiens. This taps into the zeitgeist of big world properties like Game of Thrones and wikis can now cradle these creations and make their locations, quests, people and bestiary easy to reference at a moment’s notice.
The freedom to be who you want rather than a fixed protagonist changes the way people play, often allowing them to commit to choices in the game they may otherwise not make if they were following someone else’s mold. Having a game dynamically react to your person creates surprises and puts players in situations they could not anticipate, challenging the role play and refining it in a way that we haven’t seen before.
Mechanically, many of these games represent a return to the tabletop elements of games like Dungeons & Dragons. Skill checks abound and create a feeling of chance and hope as well as shocking failure, which all makes the game feel alive. As mentioned before, the collaborative storytelling that changes based on the player’s choices is a re-imagining of the tabletop session, where the campaign takes twists and turns all prompted by player improvisation. While no game system can recreate the pure improv of the tabletop setting, the multitude of branching paths help to create a sense of adaptive storytelling from the developers.
The combat and top-down perspectives also reinforce the tabletop cores. Turn based or pause and play that employs abilities with either cooldowns or points to spend encourages thoughtful combat rather than fast twitch reflexes. With the rise of esports and competitive multiplayer that focus more and more on speed and reactivity this more pensive approach to gameplay is a refreshing deviation, even it does slow things down some.
Choosing the skills to equip, the order to use them in and which to combine with others adds an extra strategic layer to gameplay along with responsive enemies that demand adjustment. This combines with deep progression systems that positively reinforce equipment, abilities, stats and more. The isometric view allows for environmental strategies that you can’t always achieve in first or third person settings. All of this approximates the tabletop feel in a way that capitalizes on the renewed modern interest in the tabletop genre, with board games and campaign rulebooks setting sales records. Keen on this, we are seeing experimentation with Dungeon Master modes for their games, such as inSword Coast Legendsor in Divinity Original Sin 2’s upcoming Game Master mode, which has been teased during their kickstart campaign as well as in more recent updates. People are looking to be absorbed and transported by their games but also want the flexibility to define their experience, and that fine line is where these new games are thriving.
But all of these elements have always been around in some form, haven’t they? After all, their progenitors like Baldur’s Gate and Fallout are nearly 20 years old. So why the wane and wax? As we see per major concept, each developer has managed to modernize the conventions taking advantage of new technology and ideas. This modernization of the genre has been parlayed into a re-imagining of how to bring a game to the masses while retaining creative control, specifically through crowd funding and self management.
The self determined approach to bring a game directly to fans for financial backing has bucked the trend of AAA titles with big budgets and small risks. While not featuring the operating budgets of aSkyrim, they have been able to raise millions dollars via crowd funding, with Torment specifically raising over 4 million USD. This may not buy the bells and whistles or the latest in visual effects and graphical fidelity, but what it is buying them is the freedom to create passion projects that would not be possible with traditional publishing arrangements. Moreover, the prevalence of digital distribution has made it possible for these studios to take on a digital only distribution of their titles if they opt not to go with a publisher.
What Kickstarter does is let us make a game that is absolutely reminiscent of those great games, since trying to get that funded through a traditional publisher would be next to impossible.
Feargus Urquhart, CEO Obsidian Entertainment
These kickstarter projects are not just fundraisers, they are great ways to create 1 on 1 connections with fans as well as give them access to the development process with updates on the game’s progress. Furthermore, the types of rewards offered to backers are unique digital and physical products that are collectible connections to the game and its world. Through early access rewards, players are given a chance to shape development. This creates value and bonds to the studio and game, which results in loyalty. When you feel invested you are going to feel patient during the development process. When the games do come out in early access and in full retail, all of these rewards and investments makes the launch memorable. It takes away the feeling of being a consumer and makes gamers feel like they’re part of the process.
These connections are more evident at gaming conventions like E3 and Gamescom, where the creators themselves are the ones leading the walkthrough rather than representatives from the publisher. This results in a more personalized presentation, with many more insights to be gleaned. Furthermore their presence on social media and developer blogs put the fans directly in touch with the creators, making the game that much more accessible.
Despite the different themes these games explore, they share a rich experience that players anticipate when launching the game. Technology continues to pull gaming in all sorts of different directions, but the CRPG will always have a common core that attracts a dedicated slice of the gaming world. Their commitment to modernizing storytelling with meaningful choices, extensive customization and tabletop like elements has resonated in the new frontiers of crowd funding and digital distribution allowing these concepts to thrive precisely when they seemed most in danger of leaving us forever. In a genre that prides itself on heady musings, total creative annihilation is one existential concept best left unexplored.
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Editor at Fextralife. I look for the substantial in gaming and I try to connect video games to the emotions and stories they elicit. I love all things culture and history and have an odd fondness for the planet Jupiter. I think my dogs are pretty awesome too.
Of course, you’re absolutely right, these are only a few of the games coming out for the genre. They’re the forerunners of the genre’s consciousness which is why I focused on them but that’s not to say there aren’t many more on the way. The concepts I laid out are ones that many other games are also focusing on.
Even if these studios evolve their formulas over time, their visibility will help gamers take chances on the lesser known titles of the same genre that they may come across on Steam. Similar to the success of the Soulsborne series, it took only 1 franchise to get all the attention for a previously niche genre of gaming to get people to start seeking out and taking chances on other Soulslike games. Some have been great, some have not, but I’d argue that without the mainstream attention and success of Dark Souls those other smaller indie games would have gone largely ignored.
I think given the success of the games I mentioned, people will start paying attention to a genre they either have ignored or are simply to young to have experienced the classic nature that made them beloved 20 years ago. But I do think you’re correct in reminding people to seek out the other games in the genre that can use the love and attention because for the movement to sustain, more will have to thrive.
Excellent article, but of course it only a few of the biggest / most well known “CRPG” projects. This is somewhat understandable, but I’d argue there’s a lot of smaller indie developers that have actually been producing much better examples of the CRPG genre. Iron Tower Studio (Age of Decadence), Whalenought Studios (Serpent in the Staglands, Copper Dreams), Logic Artists (Expeditions: Conquistador, Viking), Dreamlords Digital (Graywalkers: Purgatory), DoubleBear (Dead State) are some of the lesser known indie studios that are making great CRPGs. They may not have raised millions on Kickstarter but in my opinion they seem to be doing a better job of reviving the genre than inXile, Obsidian, or Larian*… It’s unfortunate that the bigger more established companies seem to get more attention because 3 companies is not enough to maintain CRPG revival. Moreover, with their increased focused on multiplayer / console releases, inXIle and Larian in particular seem to be making more mainstream RPGs with CRPG elements (not necessarily a bad thing but this is all the more reason why they shouldn’t get all of the attention in discussion of CRPGs). Indies that actually need funding to complete their games often struggle to raise even a few thousand dollars on Kickstarter because they don’t already have well known developers or beloved IPs (it is like a vicious cycle that makes it difficult for the number of CRPG developers to grow). If this CRPG renaissance is going to be more than a short-lived nostalgia trip the people that support the likes of Wasteland 3 also need to be willing to take a chance on the little up-and-coming indie developers.
*There’s also HBS (Shadowrun, Battletech) as a studio that’s probably somewhere in the small indies and the AA ones. And TSI games (veterans of SSI) are apparently still working on Seven Dragon Saga, despite failing to meet their Kickstarter goal
You assume that someone would publish a game that can’t manage to get crowdfunded. Considering the specific types of games that get crowdfunded are the types of games nobody wanted to publish in the first place, I find that assumption to be flawed, to put it kindly.
And what’s to stop a company inflating the cost it will take when they eliminate stretch goals and then treating above 2/3rds of what they asked as profit? Nothing, as long as they deliver the game nobody will notice or care. You’re arguing against the appearance of exploitation, not exploitation itself, and that policy would accomplish absolutely nothing.
I don’t have an entirely altruistic definition of publishing and I would argue their institutional value is only for physical distribution of properties which is increasingly less imperative for success. Clearly in the studios’ respective views this is a way to ensure complete control over every part of the development process. I disagree with publisher’s sensitivity to the development process and in my conversations with many studios, the specter of the neck breaking publisher contract looms over everyone in the industry. That’s not saying there aren’t good ones of course, but it seems more rare than common to find worthwhile publishing partners.
I would also say compared to the operating budgets of fully funded by a publisher games, the single digit millions these crowd funded games receive are meager sums compared to the hundreds of millions operating budgets of the bigger AAA titles. Asking them to return excess funds received would probably cripple their future plans as they themselves are effectively morphing into hybrid publisher studios the way Bethesda is. Why could they not be permitted to expand their business model appropriately while mega publishers are allowed to inflate their values to astronomical proportions, often swallowing up smaller entities in the process?
There is a big reputation hit to not deliver on a crowd sourced game that self corrects the market. People have chosen to invest in Wasteland 3 because Wasteland 2 and Torment delivered under the same model, so there is reason to trust. If another dev doesn’t, then a future crowd fund won’t go well.
The claim wrt Wasteland 2 was that it needed to be crowdfunded because, while there was indeed a big enough to justify the development costs, inXile could not get any publishers to believe this was true and fund the project. This seems like a reasonable claim to me and by most accounts Wasteland 2 turned out to be a fairly good game (though I’ve yet to go for it because it seems far more complicated and wordy than the original Wasteland).
Fast forward a few years and now that they’ve shown that there is enough demand so they are….going back to crowdfunding. There is a value to publishers (indeed the market doesn’t generally create institutions without value) in that they actually understand the development process. They have a good idea when a prospective developer is feeding them B.S. about how much a game will cost to develop (such as DoubleFine’s unbelievably underestimated costs for their crowdfunded “adventure game” ). They can also get a good sense of when a game isn’t going to work out and can prevent good money from following after bad. Because they don’t participate in inanities like “stretch goals” and expect the developers to actually spend their money developing they don’t end up with situations where their investment is treated like profit as so many crowdfunding projects seem to treat any extra money they get (which is why I advocate proportionately refunding amounts collected above the “goal”)
There have been some great crowdfunded games, but if you look at the share of crowdfunded games that never make it to market it’s amazingly high, and certainly way above the share of games funded by publishers that never make it.
Accordingly Torment is content complete at this point and they have a sizable portion of designers with free time, hence the launch for Wasteland 3. I don’t really think there is any reason to believe they’re in over their heads. Going the route of crowd funding allows them to not have to deal with these publishers who would mandate what they do with their time as well as make modification to the game in order to appeal to a consumer demographic. These games are already profitable, what a publisher would attempt to do is make them extremely profitable, which in this genre, would necessitate huge changes.
I do think there are bad uses of crowd funding, and so they all have to be approached case by case, but looking at the campaigns for the games covered in the article showed me they planned to deliver a content complete game, and the stretch goals were chances to develop nice to haves and some of the dream big stuff. In my mind it’s better to get the stretch goals met and have them bundled into the full game released rather than have them omitted and then released as paid DLC later.
inXile is taking on more than I think it can handle. It is trying to finish up Torment, has already finished fundraising and is working on Bard’s Tale 4 and is about to start a fundraiser for Wasteland 3. One approach to development is that you take the proceeds from one game and use some of them to pay to develop the next. Of course there’s also publishers who would cover development costs for a cut if they believed the games could be profitable.
So much of the stuff going through Kickstarter seems to trade off nostalgia. The one project I participated in was so my wife didn’t return from the afterlife and kick my ass: Bring Back MST3K, a show which featured in many of my favorite moments with her.
To be honest the actual underlying way Kickstarters are done bothers me. The stretch goals seem like stretched out versions of microtransactions, often breaking off key components to the game. To my thinking there should be a goal and once reached any additional money should be used to reduce the price of stuff for everybody. If you earn twice your goal then (not counting costs like shipping) you should refund half the amount people put out. Instead the extra money goes to additional “features” that can actually serve to justify delaying a game till they’re implemented (see Mighty No. 9 as an example) .
The article came together really well. I look forward to more! ~~ no pressure
Thanks for the kind words. I was really interested in the phenomena of recent successes on kickstarter and wanted to see further and understand what it is about the games that make them such popular draws in the first place for fans.
Wow E, what a fantastic read! I know we discuss these often and we are in the same page but you have a way with words and can turn our ramblings into such wonderful thoughts! I am really enjoying the Kickstarter rpg wave, and I hope it’s here to stay.
