And again with the list.

EvE Online (60).  This could be a 3 month conversation about what defines RPG in the MMO space.  One of the few games where your in-game role is incredibly linked to your out-of game role.  Of very important note, nearly 80% of the playerbase only does PvE while that 20% is what the game is truly selling to the masses.

Freedom Force (58).  Now this is an RPG!  Tactical RPG combat, with a 3d isometric view, thrown in some comedy elements.  This is the Marvel Superheroes ARPG games 10 years before they came out.  Nearly every game since then has followed this formula.  The graphics don’t stand up to well, but everything else does.

Mass Effect 2 (57).  I kind of expected IGN to put this in their top 10.  It dumbed down the original and went for a more action vibe.  If you look at the parts, they are average or below while the whole somehow comes together well.  Except for the last 15 minutes.  Oh, and that stupid planet harvesting.

JRPGS (55-46).  I don’t have a particular comment on the games themselves, only that as a whole, the JRPG field is definitely middle-of-the-pack.

Disgaea (45).  A grind-fest if there ever was one.  You could complete the basic game with minimal grinding, though a fair amount of tactical challenge.  If you wanted to kill the hardest boss (level 100 in i-world), expect a solid 100 hours of grinding.  This game changed the way I viewed RPGs so that it was purely math by the end.

So there weren’t a whole lot of games in here that I played, namely because of the JRPG vibe and not having access to most of them where I lived.  As stated above, most are average and a few brought some cool innovation to the genre.  That being said, many of them you could simply swap the characters from one game to the next without any impact.

Continuing on IGN’s list.  My take on those that I have had the chance to play.

Dungeon Master (80).  The foundation for all real-time dungeon crawlers.  I found this tough but fun.

Icewind Dale 2 (79).  The 3rd best game on the Infinity engine and one that adapted quite decently to the 3.5 ruleset.  The story was pretty hokum but the gameplay was astounding.  Awesome fun.  Get it on GoG.

Illusion of Gaia (76).  A different take on the Zelda format with some RPG elements.  One of the better RPGs of the SNES era.  Stands up well to time.

Final Fantasy (73).  The one that started it all.  I have played the remastered one recently and with the added dungeons and controls, it’s much better than the original release.  This is one of those games where even just 1 level of experience can make or break you.

Kingdom Hearts 2 (68).  Everything in this sequel was expanded.  Combat, story, control, worlds.  The 2nd best RPG for the PS2 in my books.  It also changed the way that we now play action RPGs.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced (67).  Grid based combat with FF roles.  It brought a western feeling to the genre but is certainly the weaker of the popular series.

Final Fantasy X (64).  The first game with voice acting and the first on the PS2.  I’ve played this through and through dozens of times.  Extremely well balanced for the main portion, with some quality challenges at the end.  The weakness is in the plot.  And Bliztball.

The World Ends With You (62).  Dual screen RPG action.  I rather enjoyed it for the control aspect.  I didn’t like the story but the setting was cool.  One of the more innovative RPGs in a time when innovation wasn’t cool.

Chrono Cross (61).  You could amass nearly 50 playable character through multiple playthroughs.  Each decision point had an impact on the rest of the game.  It closed out the Chrono Trigger rather well too.  Combat was wonky though and took a solid 20 levels before being appreciable.

A few less games here that I played but most of them are in the 90s timeframe.   The actual order of the games is less important than simply their inclusion, other than perhaps in blocks of 25 games.  I could argue that Kingdom Hearts is a worse game than Icewind Dale 2, but both should be played nonetheless.

IGN is starting their list of the top 100 RPGs.  Given that this is my favorite gaming genre, I am going to guess I’ve played most of them.  Let’s take a look at the ones I’ve tried in the 100-81 listing.

Shadow Hearts – Covenant (98).  I think this was better than 98 if only for the coo game innovations it brought.  The judgment wheel brought an “action” feel to the RPG.  The story was kooky yet quality.  Once of the best PS2 RPGs.

Final Fantasy VIII (97).  The story was pretty cool, futuristic and all.  The combat was atrocious.  The worst of the FF games, by far.  Perhaps this was linked to 7’s extremely high bar and 9’s return to RPG roots.  Still, most people remember Squall, even if they didn’t play the game.  Sword guns are cool.

Phantasy Star (96).  Lots of groundbreaking done in this game, especially for the console.  It has aged poorly but then again, most groundbreaking things do.

Legend of the Dragoon (95).  I played the crap out of this game.  This was more action than RPG and was well ahead of it’s time.  The story and setting were really amazing too.

Diablo 3 (92).  A new-age RPG, with next to no “R” to speak of.  I don’t think I would have put it in the list at all.  Especially not ahead of the rest of the games in this list so far.

Fable 2 (91).  The anti-thesis to Diablo 3, Fable changed the way we looked at RPGs on consoles.  Nearly a sandbox RPG, I put a hundred hours in this game just to see the various outcomes.  Wife and kids, an amazing dog companion, a compelling (but short) story, decent combat.  And the crucible.  Oh the crucible.  My favorite of the series.

Fallout: New Vegas (89).  A more open concept Fallout than the 3.   It started out more like an expansion pack but the deeper you got into it, the more details you found.  Each town had character and story and challenge.  The idea of redemption/revenge is also pretty cool.  The game’s weakness (so much to do), was also its strength.

Final Fantasy 9 (88).  A back-to-roots FF game after the risk of 8.  The game was very simple, probably closer to 6 than any other.  While it took no risks on the gameplay front, it provided an amazing story, until the last 5 minutes.

Lufia 2 (87).  A weird game that was at times easy and hardcore.  The internal systems (IP leveling) was a continuous tradeoff.  Not a big fan.

Breath of Fire 3 (85).  A simple RPG.  I think it’s more popular because it was the first on the PS.  No real weakness to speak of but nothing stands out.

Kingdom Hearts (84).  I had original worries with this game but in typical Japanese RPG fashion the story was lovingly complex.  The mechanics were solid and built a good foundation for one of the best RPG series of all-time.

I did play a few of the other games but none really stand out as worth mention.  That some games are in the 90s and have sold millions while some in the 80s are clearly niche is odd but that’s the nature of these lists.  I was kind of hoping to have more PC rpgs in the list but I guess that’s for later.  After all, that’s where the CRPG started.

This fall is shaping up to have some nice releases.  I have some ideas as to how the big ones, for me at least, will perform.

Borderlands 2 comes out the 18th.  Two sides to this one.  This first was a huge fresh breath on the FPS genre, adding some RPG elements.  The classes were simple enough, the story was pretty good (and the writing), with a huge lottery machine for gear.  The sequel doesn’t seem to be expanding on any particular field, simply refining the various elements. It will certainly sell better than the original, which sold enough, and I plan to play it for quite some time.

Torchlight 2 hits September 20th.  I loved the first one, even though it was short.  I guess you could say it played like a tech demo for some neat ideas – nearly all of which were taken by Blizzard in D3 (yet poorly in most cases).  This version has new classes, a stronger leveling system and a much larger world.  I think the pro-reviewers will give it a lower score yet the player meta-score will be much higher.  This is the game that D2 players have been waiting for.

WoW – Mists of Pandaria hits on the 25th.  There are plenty of new features for the casual player here.  Next to none for the original player.  It’s also one of two subscription themeparks left for NA players.  Rift launches content 5x faster for the same fee.  Still, I see MoP selling a lot out of the gate and then a massive player crash before Christmas – say 2 million.

XCOM Enemy Unknown comes out October 9th.  A remake of the classic game with a few modern features.  Everything I’ve read about the game says the dev’s understand the original game and the videos looks promising.  I will end up playing it like mad, as I always tend to do with these types of games.  Still, I don’t see massive game sales unless there’s a better media push.

Assassin’s Creed 3 hits October 30th.   Will sell  like mad, will be a decent game.  Personally, I have not liked the progression the game has gone through.  AC2 was to me, one of the biggest disappointments in a long time.  AC3 seems very much like it’s following that trend.  The thing about it is that I’m interested in the overall story of it all, sort of like Mass Effect.  I still haven’t played ME3 so there are solid odds I will be missing AC3 baring some magic sale.

Rift – Storm Legion comes out November 13th.  An expansion for the best subscription themepark currently available is a solid bet.  I would normally call this the kitchen sink patch, but this is an expansion.  Housing, new levels, new play modes, new souls and 3x the playing zones.  This is one of those “safe bet” games where the sales will meet expectations.  Whether that is enough to keep the game at a fee, rather than F2P is up for debate.  Personally, I don’t see why.  You get way more value for your subscription than you do any F2P game on the market.

If you’re read this far you’ve noticed a pattern.  Every game is a PC game. Some are on multiple platforms but all of them are on the PC in some form.  Take a look at console releases for the fall and try and find something else.  You’d be surprised at how poor the selection is.

X-Com was and always will be one of my all-time favorite games.  I played it at launch and put in nearly as many hours as I did with Civilization.  At the time, the game was the pinnacle of strategy-rpgs and had some rather amazing replayability built in.

I played the expansions.  Terror from the Deep was basically an expansion pack. Apocalypse was a 3d take but lacked depth.  Everything past that was garbage.  Since then, other games have tried to emulate the feeling.  I would guess the Rainbow6 game series has come the closest.

A few remakes have come and gone but they’ve all missed the feel of the original.  Nostalgia always does this since it was the first game of its kind.  I can forgive the original’s poor-ish graphics as a sign of the time.  I can’t really do that now.  This new take however, seems to be the closest in spirit to the original in a while.

There’s just something special about having an attachment to your in-game players and seeing that a bad decision cost you.  Every situation can be beaten, every situation can end in massive failure.  The determining factor isn’t skill, it’s thought. And boy, is that ever more rewarding for me.

Fingers crossed!

Watching the above video made me think of Time to Kill and it’s relationship with fun.  Is it more fun to kill a dragon in 5 minutes or kill 100 rats in the same period of time?  What if the kills gave you the same rewards?  What if the dragon or rats gave better rewards?

Time to Kill is an old measure used in games to figure out how long it takes for someone to clear an encounter (or simply an enemy). In D&D, TTK could be measured in hours.  In the arcade games of yore, TTK was fractions of a second.  The faster the TTK, the higher the adrenaline rush and sense of power.  The longer the TTK, the more skill is required (typically) and the larger the sense of accomplishment at the end.

In the MMO sphere, WoW has exceedingly low TTK numbers for everything but raid bosses.  Leveling, the TTK should be under 5 seconds for most classes.  Dungeons are about 20s for a pack, 1-3 minutes for a boss.  This is part of Blizzard’s arcade-feel and quite evident in the Diablo series, though much more so in Diablo 3.  TSW has a 1minute TTK for most encounters.  EQ1 was similar.  Rift has a slightly higher TTK than WoW but it’s still pretty close.  EvE’s TTK is measured more like D&D as the strategic elements often outstrip the value of power.

The actual value of TTK is important in the overall feel of the game.  Too short and it the rush feeling of power simply goes away after a while.  It feels like you’re passing a broom.  Those games need meta goals, where the TTK is simply tool used to stretch out time to reach the goals.  Too long and the player doesn’t feel powerful enough, sort of like an eternal mountain climb.  In these games, the rewards between TTK have to be elevated to reward the risk.

The important factor, above all else, is consistent TTK.  If the primary game mode has a consistent TTK with sporadic jumps, that makes those jumps feel special and the rewards should be appropriate.  If for some reason that sporadic jump becomes a plateau and the rewards are based on the lower one, then you have a problem.  D3 is a good example, where the TTK from 1-60 is rewarding.  Level 60’s TTK actually inverts what you had before, extremely long TTKs with short bursts.  However, the reward system is for the former.  When this happens, people complain that they are losing power when compared to before and the game loses it’s fun appeal.  From the Dev Notes for D3, it’s clear they want to address this problem.

In this regard, I think that as a fun metric, we can use TTK consistency.  If the bar is stable with spikes spread out, then you have a nice combination of challenge and power.  If the bar is 100% stable, then it gets repetitive quickly.  If the bar is stable but has drops from time to time, those feel like amazing times.  In all cases, the rewards for a given event should be directly related to the TTK of the event – otherwise people won’t bother.

RPS has a good interview with Ubisoft, who has finally abandoned their ridiculous DRM tool for PC games.  The core of the interview revolves around the fact that there are zero numbers being shared as to how piracy actually affects users.  That number, no matter the value, would provide at least some context to the “war”.

What number did come out is that Ubisoft’s sales on the PC (arguably the 2nd hardest to pirate after XBOX) account for about 10% of all sales.  Let’s be a bit more frank about it, if you pirate on an XBOX you will get caught if you go online at some point, due to the middleware from MS.  This is not always the case with PC games, who often have a direct input into an online game.  Steam, Origin and various other platforms combat this.

I understand pirating.  I used to do it because a) there was no online store sales and b) the game simply wasn’t available locally.  I did it a bit on the 360 when a) my games broke or b) the game simply wasn’t worth 60$.  For me, the main driver was service.  I got a better service from pirating a game than I did buying a game.  Today’s quite a bit different.  An EB is around the corner and all my games on the PC have to be on Steam.  Steam by the way, is amazing on the service front.

Back to DRM.  As an idea, DRM is good.  As a practice, it’s usually quite a failure.  Often times it’s incredibly restrictive.  Some games have an always-on DRM (which is what makes D3 an MMO) which is stupid in a world of laptops.  Again, Steam lets you play off-line.  Some DRM will limit the number of times you can install a game.  This is again retarded as only these games are limited.  Don’t have that on the XBOX, PS3, iPhone, CDs, movies or anything.  If the amount of times you can use something is limited, it’s called a rental.  Some DRM reduces that count when you chance hardware components.  Again, rental.

Ubisoft did all of this and more.  When their authentication servers went down (and that happens once a month for a few days), no one can play a game.  If the servers are wonky, no one can save a game.  Ubisoft had 10% PC sales?  I am guessing that will jump up to 25-30% without DRM.

If you need to stop pirates, have them authenticate the game once online with the local PC. And again with every other install.  If the game is registered multiple times in a short period from varying IPs, block it.  Give them the option to play locally – offline.  If the game is online, then have them re-authenticate when logging in.  It’s really quite simple.  Thankfully Ubisoft got the message,

Link to the fun

For those not familiar with the situation, Jay Wilson, the director of Diablo 3, took a nice trip on the creator of the Diablo franchise.  The latter claimed that the soul of the game was gone and that there were some balancing issues that had yet to be overcome.  Quite right by any means.  Jay said “f*** that loser”.  Classy.  So less than a week later, here comes the apology.

Tidbits:

The Auction House can short circuit the natural pace of item drops, making the game feel less rewarding for some players. This is a problem we recognize. At this point we’re not sure of the exact way to fix it, but we’re discussing it constantly, and we believe it’s a problem we can overcome. … If you don’t have that great feeling of a good drop being right around the corner — and the burst of excitement when it finally arrives — then we haven’t done our jobs right.

This exact issue has been my #2 complaint for the game thusfar.  In a game where loot is the be-all, end-all, having a non-binding trade system is ridiculously flawed.  It does make sense from an RMAH position though, which is becoming more and more evident as the primary driver for the AH.

Part of the problem, however, is not just item drops, but the variety of things to do within the game. Many of you have stated that there needs to be more to the game than just the item hunt, and we agree completely. The Paragon system is a step in the right direction, giving meta-progress for your time in the game, but it does little to address the variety of activities you can do while playing. I don’t think there’s a silver-bullet solution to this problem, but I do think we can make this aspect of the game better, and as such we’re planning more than just PvP for the next major patch.

This part I agree with and disagree with.  Sure, Diablo 2 had ladders but the final levels were pretty much horizontal in terms of difficulty.  You killed Baal well before level 99.  Weeks if not months before.  In Diablo 3 you hit 60 well before Inferno.  Then climb a stupid crazy mountain of difficulty to get through Act 4.  If you’re able to even start Act 4 (the first enemy is a boss), then Act 1 and Act 2 are a complete joke and Act 3 is easy enough.  This means that if you are able to clear the game, then <10% of the actual game has any challenge at max level and that challenge is artificial. Not to mention that Act 4 has some of the worst enemies in the game in terms of mechanics.

Later in the development of Diablo II, the ‘players 8’ command — which let people set monster difficulty — was added to address this issue, and we’re considering something similar for the next major Diablo III patch to allow players to make up their own minds about how hard or how easy is right for them.

What?  Later as in 3 years after launch later.  They didn’t turn that feature on for challenge, they turned it on for experience and loot to try to get to 99 on a ladder challenge.  It’s messages like this that make you wonder exactly how such an iconic franchise is being led.

I might sound like an angry gamer but it’s more like a confused one.  I hate to compare anything to TOR but D3 is right up there.  The game up until max level is an interesting one and a decent one.  Review scores show that as I don’t think there’s a single reviewer that even passed Act 1 before sending their score out.  The end game (as in TOR) is: unbalanced, unforgivably challenging (less so after 1.04), lacking rewards (you’re trading to people under you to buy better on the AH) and built on a system of unequal plateaus.

It’s like Blizzard didn’t learn a darn thing from Cataclysm’s massive failure of “moar challengez”.  People played Diablo 1 & 2 because it was an easy to pick up game with shiny rewards you could use.  Not to chain die to a whelp.