Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Diablo, Fable and many more have shrunk down their RPG mechanics and content in order to reach more cutomers and to be more competitive. Others like Bioshock and Dawn of War II have at the contrary use RPG to give a bit more depth to their game.
Is the recent trend of simplified RPG mechanics a give up or a smart move for the genre ? Could it be use with other genre ?
Diablo was one of the first to use only a part of the RPG genre. It takes the most understandable RPG elements -character customization and progression- and melts them with a frenetic action game. Years later a lot of games followed this path.
The Mass Effect success was in part due to his TPS combat system. Using this feature allowed Mass Effect to appeal to a wider audience than the RPG players. In fact RPG as they're known are a scary genre for mass market consumers. Introducing a simple known and understandable gameplay as a TPS combat system give the game a chance to reach TPS customers and then to charm them with RPG mechanics.
Then Mass Effect 2 hit the market and despite its poor equipment system and its new TPS gameplay, it has improved strong RPG systems like dialogs and choices.
Fallout 3 was also mostly marketed as shooter; a bloody one. This politic scared RPG fans but excited the console FPS player base, resulting in 5 millions unit sold. Despite his marketing Fallout 3 is still a strong RPG at heart : character customization, numerous secondary quests, branched dialogs...
More recently there was also a common tendency to put RPG elements -mostly character customization and progression- to new genre.
For example there was Dawn of War II with a squad looking like a typical RPG group, or Bioshock with his character's powers and Dante Inferno with its light equipment system, even Call of Duty Modern Warfare multi-player offered the possibility to gain rank and unlock new classes.
That's a lot of RPG in our modern video-games !
Well, I asked in the first paragraph "Is the recent trend of smaller/simplified RPG a give up or a smart move for the genre ?". I definitely think it's a smart move.
RPG have always struggle to charm the mainstream consumers, in part because of the undeserved bad reputation of his pen and paper counterpart. And mostly due to its complexity.
Take the character creation phase, first thing you do in an RPG, you're asked to choose who and how you want to play whereas you didn't played the game for now !?
Imagine you create Super Mario with 0 in dexterity, Super Mario couldn't jump and the game would be like hell ! Some novice RPG players live that, most won't came back to the genre.
This way I think that simplified RPG or small RPG features in other genre are a good way to accustom players to our beloved RPG. In the meantime it will be easy to drag them into greater RPG experiences.
And I also asked "Could it be use with other genre ?" . Yes it should ! Take small and simplified parts of other genre and melt them together. Do it with caution, prototype smoothly, iterate gently, something great could happen !
What about a bit of real time strategy in my racing game ? Or a bit of tactic in my FPS ? And a bit of music game in my platform game ? Etc ! As I share it with you earlier, Idea are new combinations, don't be shy and try.
So I'll conclude with this article title, taking Fallout 3 as an example :
Sell your soul -make your RPG looks like a shooter to reach customer- to offer your heart -make the rest of the game as RPG as you can to reach your expectation-.
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