No.29332
I used to hate the idea of major game studios simplifying their IPS to appeal to new players but coming back to those games and older titles. He’ll even older RPGs makes me understand why these decisions were made. I feel it’s because on the developer end, game designers can do a lot more with less systems ingame because having less systems and mechanics to constantly account for is far easier to manage than a game with many.
Take wow for example. If you tried explaining how the game works to someone that’s never played it, it take you hours or even days before they fully understood the base aspects of the game; coincidentally if you told someone that played it in the mid 2000s and left they still wouldn’t understand what’s going on ingame after several hours. Simpler games are easier to understand, they’re approachable to a wider audience. They don’t have to be easy by any means, just meaningfully complex in the sense that their mechanics are understood with a lot of depth for anybody that’s played the game for a reasonable amount of time - typically it’s 10 hours - before going to do other stuff in life they want to do. I guess that’s why I liked oblivion, far cry 2, half life, rain world, tlou2, diablo 1 and 2, fallout 3 and many more simple games so much. They were unique, short, understandable and I didn’t have to do much to see why they were fun compared to heavier titles like S.T.A.L.K.E.R, wow, d3, Poe, warframe, apex. I can understand why some would disagree but those are my reasons for why I think Bethesda had the right idea to simplify their RPGs
No.29334
That's an issue the Pathfinder CRPGs face, the learning curve is pretty steep and you can seriously fuck up your playthrough if you don't know how to build a decent character from the start, but once you know what all the numbers mean it's a lot of fun. As long as people know what they're getting into it's fine (look at Dwarf Fortress or anything by Iron Tower Studio), but with limited budgets and the need for broad appeal to appease shareholders and keep the lights on it's easy to understand why things have broadly gone in the direction they have.
>Take wow for example
WoW's sort of a funny example because it was fairly simple and casual for its time, the devs specifically set out to make Everquest but with broader appeal. Game development in the 90s/early 2000s was very much a learn-as-you-go deal and devs put in a lot of stuff that sounded cool or immersive but didn't really work out in practice. Old school MMOs weren't something you could play for 30 minutes a day, as it would take that long just to find a group, then another 20 minutes for everyone to meet up, then you grind for an hour, plus you spend 10 minutes running back to your corpse every time you die, which also costs xp every time it happens so you need to grind even longer, and on and on. In vanilla WoW you can solo mobs until max and the worst thing that could happen is a couple minute corpse run with some repair expenses. WoW's gotten considerably more complicated with time, though, as they need to introduce new systems and dungeon/raid mechanics with each expansion as a selling point to where it's fairly bloated today even as older mechanics got streamlined or removed.