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How long until an indie tries to make a first person "simulation" RPG?

R

RedSwirl

Junior Member
Y'know, those games DocSeuss keeps going on about like the original Deux Ex, the first two Theif games, the System Shock games, etc.

Between games like Grimrock, Project Eternity, Torment Tides of Numeria, Wasteland 2, the new Divnity game, Chaos Chronicles, and others, it seems to me like the indie (kickstarter) space is seriously trying to bring back old school-style CRPGs. The first person "simulated environment" action RPG seems to be the only style of CRPG not really attempted by an indie studio yet. It's resurfaced in the big budget space in the form of BioShock, Deus Ex Human Revolution, and Dishonored, but these games are all simplified to a certain degree compared to their predecessors. A lot of the indie scene has been about going back to the old ways.

From what I can understand there are maybe a few reasons why this hasn't happened yet:

1)Waiting to see how the four big Kickstarter RPGs do. The new Divinity, Torment, Wasteland, and Eternity haven't come out yet to meet public reception, so nobody really knows how viable these old school-style CRPGs from small developers really are. If one or all of them are really successful I imagine someone would be more likely to give the first person game a shot.

2)Development talent. The indie RPGs I mentioned above seem to have been mostly (or completely) made by professional developers, in some cases the same guys wo worked on these games' predecessors. From what I can see (I don't know a whole lot about the people behind CRPGs), most of the big talent behind games like System Shock, Thief, or Deus Ex are already in the big retail space.

3)Expectations for visuals. Even today, if you make an isometric zoomed-out RPG it mostly just means more detailed and higher resolution 2D art assets. Even games with a 3D engine like Wasteland 2 or the new Divinity can afford to look less detailed than Mass Effect because you're looking at everything from so far away. A first person game would probably need much more detailed visuals in this day and age. The only exception is Grimrock which had deliberately sparse environments. I guess if they had the money someone could work it out on the Unreal Development Kit.
 
It's too much work and money involved for it to be anything but a kickstarter game, and I'm not sure it's something most indies want to do. New indies seem happy making shallow, arcade experiences and a lot of the older guys who made the games in the OP we love so much are either "retired" (like warren spector) or still in the AAA industry doing something else like Levine or Harvey Smith. There's not enough interest from people in position for massive kickstarter campaigns like Fargo and Obsidian were.
 
There was a single house or room demo shown on rock paper shotgun but I cannot remember the name.

The three reasons in the OP are all intertwined factors. The business case needs to exist to launch this which is going to have tradeoffs between the niche market, talent, and level of project. You could already look at reality and say that Going deeper doesn't seem to be viable at AAA so when does going full simulation work?

A small team cannot do the game at Skyrim or DX:HR levels of graphics so how far down does it need to scale to fit into a realistic indie budget? The game could probably be done by a small team, and be profitable if the graphics were scaled all the way back to quadraleteral cowboy style.
 
I guess one way to cut down would be to be extremely economic in regards to characters and world density. When you think about it Demon's Souls actually only has maybe a dozen or so unique characters, and each one only has a handful of lines of dialogue. They're just spaced and positioned very smartly throughout the game.
 
To be honest they could give me a game that graphically looked like Deus Ex 1 today and I wouldn't care all that much if they could match its level design and creativeness. Because I feel like that game still hasn't been surpassed in those areas after all of these years.
 
Miasmata takes a lot of old school survival/sim elements almost to a degree that it works against itself. It's not pretty, there's quite a bit of jank, but they attempted something with it that any AAA studio would consider financial suicide.
 
AdrianWerner said:
They already did, that's how we got DarkMod and E.Y.E, so it definitely is doable.
Click to expand...

E.Y.E was too obtuse and batshit insane in it's story/mythos for me. Give me a grounded, nearly familiar setting (Deus Ex does this greatly) with a thought-out story that's not jerking it's own dick with bullshit.
 
"Sir, you are being hunted" is on Early Access, so it has began already. Also the games you listed are murder or ghost simulators which got the genre stuck in their ways. I actually want indie devs to improve and change the formula instead of going back to same old. Eldritch is a step in the right direction but it still is a murder simulator with some quirks. At least it changes gameplay with some cool stuff instead of doing the same but with better graphics and scope.
 
Because indies are trying to bring back old school pc game styles that are dead. Isometric RPGs, turn-based CRPGs, Space Simulators, point and click adventure games, etc. Any Thief/Deus Ex/System Shock wannabe is guaranteed to be compared to BioShock/Human Revolution/Dishonored, a comparison which is unlikely to look good for the games with a much lower budget.
 
I think the main "issue" is that most of the games in the genre were born during the golden age of modding, which means they still have lots of content being made for them (Thief in particular has a pretty huge modding community, and while Deus Ex releases are rare they tend to be very large and ambitious). As a result many people with the skill and talent to make a revival are making content for the older games anyway. Combined with the modern attempts at the genre that have already been mentioned there's much less urgency to create entirely new entries compared to other stuff that has been kickstarted (although it would be nice).
 
It'll probably be randomly generated if that's the case, think Daggerfall but with the graphics bumped up. From what I've read Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox seems to be the sorta thing you mentioned but it's currently in development funded by Kickstarter money.
 
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