There is a secret known only to RPG developers, a gleaming nugget of knowledge unearthed anew through long struggle by each succeeding generation of would-be Richard Garriotts and Shouzou Kagas. It is, simply: making RPGs is kind of a pain in the ass. I love making RPGs, but it’s true. The…
Read More »When Wasteland 2 reached full funding on Kickstarter, a discussion began to brew in the RPG community about ways to improve on the original game. Among the many subjects of debate was whether (and if so, how) to improve on the skill-based character creation system employed by Wasteland (and due…
Read More »Last week we had a double-barreled shotgun blast of opinion pieces advocating for RPGs to hide or drop some of their core conventions and abstractions. Tom Bissell, writing about Dead Island, complained about pop-up damage numbers in a real-world zombie RPG and landed a glancing blow against leveling and statistics-based…
Read More »A recent Gamasutra interview with Matt Findley has caused a firestorm of debate to erupt across the internet concerning the continued vitality of turn-based RPGs. Findley is an alum of the now-defunct development studio Black Isle, which produced legitimately brilliant turn-based RPGs like Fallout. So you can understand why an…
Read More »The human brain is a categorization machine. Cognition as we know it is made possible only because of this fact. By putting things into categories, we understand that those things share certain exclusive qualities. This is as true with games as it is with anything else. Game genres are categories…
Read More »
