Developers' Choice RPG of the Decade

Brother None

Brother None

This ghoul has seen it all
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RPGCodex looks back on a decade of RPGs and asks a bunch of developers (mostly indies) what their favourite RPG of the decade was. Amongst the list is Fallout lead designer Chris Taylor, who agrees with us curmudgeonly types that it wasn't that good a decade.<blockquote>I’ll be honest. I haven’t played that many CRPGs this last decade. Started some, and finished very, very few. Call it burn-out, call it ennui, but for whatever reason, the ‘90s were a much more appealing decade to me for CRPGs. Still, one game stands out for the sole reason is that I actually enjoyed double-clicking on the game icon and playing for half an hour or four hours straight: Torchlight. It has simple mechanics, feather-weight story, limited character interaction -- but all that doesn’t matter, since it is hella-fun. Graphics fit the game perfectly. I grumbled about the interface at times, especially trying to target an enemy from a distance and instead running into battle mindlessly, but I didn’t care. I was having too much of a good time splattering my foes, looting their stuff and sending my dog back to down with a full backpack. Torchlight awoke that little 10 year old in me that fell in love with CRPGs to begin with.</blockquote>And Fallout producer Tim Cain, whose answer will shock many.<blockquote>There were so many good RPG’s released in the last decade that it is hard to choose the “RPG of the Decade”. I am embarrassed to say that I haven’t played some of them, and I only want to nominate a game that I have played. And that list is still large: Baldur’s Gate 2, Icewind Dale 2, Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age (Bioware is on a roll in my list, you can see), Fable, Deus Ex, Fallout 3, Geneforge. So I am going with a game that captured my imagination and that I played for many many hours, and that I think about when designing my own games. And that game is…</blockquote>Read on to see what it is!
 
Much like his biblical namesake, Mr. Cain just put a knife through my heart.


... Or tossed a boulder at my head, whatever.

At any rate, I tend to agree with that one dev who said Neverwinter Nights: Despite being absolute shit in all aspects (story, graphics, interface...), it was an absolutely stellar multiplayer platform. For the single player experience, though, Arcanum is king of this decade without a doubt.

I'd say Deus Ex was better than Arcanum, but I'm not sure it qualifies as a "CRPG"....
 
TOEE is the game of the decade, pfft. The best and only PnP emulator out there.

As for NWN, the single player expansion packs were really good, actually. It's just the original game that sucked.
 
*shrugs* The best RPG is Arcanum. The best aRPG is Gothic II Gold.

NWN and ToEE filled their own niches as hack'n'slashy PnP emulators. Good for what they are.
 
NWN a good PnP emulator? Oh, spare me. Not compared to TOEE anyway.

Frankly, IMO a good PnP emulator = good RPG. What's your criteria? Writing? Cause Arcanum had that, but the battle system was a nightmare.

As far as aRPGs/roguelikes go, I found Gothic series in general to be a drag, hated the battle system. I liked Arx Fatalis a lot for its spell system. Sacred (a great spiritual successor for Diablo) and Kult (a roguelike that's actually not boring and has a decent story) also deserve a mention. Of course, if I had to choose my own, I'd vote for Ys: Oath in Felghana for most fun, and Xanadu NEXT (despite what wiki says it's actually a PC game) for most original (both FALCOM games), but naturally they're not even on their list cause it only includes Western games.

Also, how Knights of the Temple made it on the list is completely beyond me. It's like putting Devil May Cry 3 on that list.
 
Brian Mitsoda said:
To be blunt, I haven’t really enjoyed an RPG made in the last decade as much as I have my favorite games of all time. It feels like, for many games and not just RPGs, the very same concepts and systems we’ve had for years but in hi-def and with less features. Not to say there haven’t been some laughs, but it’s an old joke told with a self-aware delivery. Too often I think the problem stems from people basing every role-playing game on either ancient pen and paper systems or 8-bit interpretations of pen and paper games instead of actually designing systems and gameplay from the ground-up for modern machines. Okay, that’s part of it. There’s also the settings and stories, which for the most part tend to not engage me as both a thirty-something individual and also as a person who got over all their adolescent power fantasies around the time I started caring about the price of health insurance. To clarify, I’m not looking for a game that allows me to roleplay an accounts manager, but I did cease being thirteen an awful long time ago, so I actually grasp concepts beyond good and evil. Then again, looking at the political sphere of the last ten years, perhaps that’s just games reflecting society.
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If i ever write a dictionary i'll put Mitsoda's picture next to the definition of awesome.
 
strange ... I always thought Oblivion wasnt a RPG. *shrugs* well everyone has a different taste I guess.
 
There are so many things about this game that I loved. It was an open sandbox world, where I was free to go where I wanted and act how I wanted, and I had to live with the consequences of my actions. I became a vampire (and got cured later), I joined every guild and reached leadership status in them (and I loved the Dark Brotherhood the most), I did every Daedric shrine quest, and I explored most of the continent. In fact, I ignored the main storyline for most of my playing of this game, and I had more fun with the guild storylines and with trying to get every house in the game. The huge combination of skills, stats, spells and items, and the detailed character customization at the beginning of the game, really made me feel that I could play roleplay anyone I wanted. The game is not without its flaws (the auto-leveling of monsters springs to mind), but overall, this game was everything I wanted in an RPG: open-ended, re-playable, good-looking and downright fun.

.....i think he is on something.... please tell me he was high when he said that...please
 
I'm indifferent, really.

Cool people sometimes have shit opinions, and that's opinionated in itself. And vice-versa of course.
 
The Codex has an interesting list of RPGs, they leave out a lot of games, probably due to them falling into RPG classifications that they don't like (notably JRPGs and MMORPGs).

NWN is the best PnP experience emulator, so it really does do the best of bringing the PnP experience to the computer. It's really all about the custom content and mutliplayer games.

I have yet to delve into ToEE but if what I hear is correct, it's the best mechanical emulation of PnP RPGs.

I was honestly glad to see a couple of developers bring up some JRPGs, I do think that they get an undue amount of snubbing. I also think that they have an untapped ability to do excellent choices and consequences in RPGs, if their visual novels are any indication. Some of them aren't mechanically as different from western RPGs as we'd like to think, Final Fantasy: Tactics comes to mind. I think that part of the problem is that squad based tactics games and TRPGs are basically the same thing these days due to how much "RPG elements" (by which I mean experience) has bled over for the most part.

Annie Carlson and Brian Mitsoda have gotten me interested in their ZRPG project by what they had to say. I'm with Chris Taylor on Torchlight, probably the best RPG to sit down and play for an hour since Diablo 2 (which I was surprised didn't appear more often). The large number of mentions of ToEE are lighting the fire under my ass to play it.

All in all an interesting read and very interesting how much Tim Cain enjoyed Oblivion, a game that was so open and had so little reaction to your actions that I still don't understand the appeal of. It always seemed like a ARPG without any real direction and horrible combat. I think that it's model could be quite cool if it had really good combat and level design, but it doesn't. I honestly think that Gothic does a better job at accomplishing basically the desired goal.

The overview of the last decade at the top of the article was interesting and less jaded than I was expecting. It's nice that they put the observation that (big?) CRPGs are pretty much all coming from Europe in there.

The article brought to mind the question of why companies don't make a solid combat engine and a hack n' slash and then use said engine to make games with choices and consequences (an adaptation of the Spiderweb Games model). If everything I've heard about ToEE is right, it seems a damn shame that a sequel or expansion wasn't made that was heavy on choices and consequences now that they had solid gameplay.

All in all, good read.
 
Did Tim Cain really just pick Oblivious as his favorite RPG of the decade?

/wrist

On a more serious note, gotta agree with Reconite here. Sometimes a cool guy will like garbage.
 
My favorites of the last decade are Baldurs Gate 2, Arcanum, Icewind Dale 2 and NWN1 (for Multiplayer).

Icewind Dale 2 was kinda special for me, because it's more like a hack and slay game with a fantastic atmosphere and music in it.
I enjoyed it a lot, even if it doesn't have much of a good rpg.
 
Ausdoerrt said:
Morbus said:
Lol @ generalissimo. Only now?

My choice is Planescape.
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Key words: "of the decade".
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Planescape is 2000, isn't it?

And if you mean the "real" decade that starts in 2001 and ends in 2010, then it's not over yet. That's also the reason why I think we're talking about the "fake/sucker's" decade, the one that starts in 2000 and ends in 2009. Like the sucker's millenium, the one that ended with the end of 1999.

UncannyGarlic said:
The Codex has an interesting list of RPGs, they leave out a lot of games, probably due to them falling into RPG classifications that they don't like (notably JRPGs and MMORPGs).
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Why would JRPGs be considered RPGs and games like Dawn of War and stuff like that not? From a design point of view, they are very similar.
 
You know, I am pretty sure that Tim Cain was only trying to be funny. Not because Oblivion is so bad that he could never choose it (there is that too, but it isn't what I am basing my reasoning on), but because his description of it (how he explored every corner, did everything to do in the game, etc) seems to be more of a joke than anything. This seems true specially since the interview was made by the Codex.
 
Brother None said:
*shrugs* The best RPG is Arcanum. The best aRPG is Gothic II Gold.

NWN and ToEE filled their own niches as hack'n'slashy PnP emulators. Good for what they are.
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Does Bloodlines count as an aRPG? I'd put that over Gothic II (although I enjoyed Gothic II as well).

NWN was terrible. Even with good (in some cases very good) fan-made modules, the core was rotten so playing it was always unpleasant. The official campaign was atrocious.

I agree about ToEE, although it has the best combat of any cRPG I've played.
 
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