Has always reminded me of Diablo. Diablo I/II are not RPGs. They're ARPGs (action role-playing games). They don't have persistent worlds. No fluff. No WORLD. The world is constructed of monsters that you're going to kill one time or another. Everything is scraped away except the combat elements. BUT it's fun as hell. I played both Diablo I/II and it's because I don't think of them as RPGs that I'm able to have fun. Now, if somebody started to cram down my throat that these're RPGs and that this is what RPGs should be... Well that would be different. That would be walking on sacred ground or peeing on a mans kids. That would be putting a slut who fuks every man in town in charge of your marriage. A gnome in barbarians garb. You can do whatever you want but once you're on my ground, game is over. I hold RPGs to a much higher standard than ARPGs. I've played far too many great RPGs to ever think of these action games as anything other than what they're. And the funny thing is that RPGs can go so much further. So much potential to make worlds. I see a day when non-players will have personalities and lives. I see a time when these worlds will rival our own in detail. You don't have to reproduce this world on a computer, you only have to fool a human brain. And that's a whole lot closer and more doable than producing an entire universe on a chip. But, you never know..
What Blizzard did well with Diablo was to get at the addictive elements in RPGs and to sell it to a mass audience. There're far more action game fans than there're RPG fans. The reason is simple. It requires a lot of time to get into RPGs and a lot less to get into an action game. More people have RL jobs and RL commitments than people who can play a game for 4-6 hours. It takes time to absorb a world. And more people are DOers than people who're THINKers. So it's considered a good thing if you can grab an action game and in 5 minutes get things done. That's why twitch gameplay is so important in them. RPGs are different because they have huge sprawling worlds that you must navigate and know before you can effectively play. For an action gamer that's a frustrating obstacle that stops them from getting at the action they want. So they either change the game to be what they want or they move on to something else.
The overwhelming urge is for all companies to increase their income and/or profit margin. So it will always be their inclination to move towards action gamers. So if I had to offer advice I'd say that don't put too much trust in big companies or commercial RPGs. They will almost certainly, one day in the not too distant future, bait and switch in order to get at the cash. It's just the nature of humans. We're always clawing for money and resources. Once we get $5, we want $10. When we get $100, we want $200. When we get $5000, we want $10000. It's never enough when one is so shallow. So long as we're blindly tied to things like that we will consume and consume until nothing is left to consume. But, alas, there's hope in non-profits or donation-based teams. But since it's not human nature to work for a common good without appreciable reward then it'll always be a upstream struggle. BUT it DOES happen sometimes! Altruism is uncommon.
I asked an old man when he was 99 what the biggest problem was on earth. He said greed. He died the year after. So after 99 years the best answer he could generate was cliche. But, maybe he was right. What is greed, anyway? I think it's the belief that more means better. But, more correctly, it's the misguided belief that freedom always produces quality results. No, that's not true. Freedom can both be your savior and your curse. It goes both ways. Freedom can mean liberating one from tyranny. It can also mean a blind herd of animals running off a cliff. Life is never simple. We should always be aware that certainty is, more often than not, illusion. The universe is in a constant state of change. 999 thoughts are stupid. 1 has temporary value.
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