Why are there basically no simulation heavy RPGs?
It's Mount&Blade, Starsector and if you stretch it you can include Kenshi, X series
These games are all beloved yet no one else is even trying to make games like these. I'm specifically talking about games that have a simulated world, no story and you're just let lose to interact with that world in the ways you chose
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Because those games need to be constantly updated and patched compared to a game they can work on for 2-3 years, make money off it, and then making a new game instead.
>Because those games need to be constantly updated and patched
Mount and Blade and Kenshi were only "constantly updated and patched" because they were in "early access" for nearly a decade each. The original Mount and Blade did it long before Steam was even a thing, for that matter.
Why do you think a simulation RPG needs to be some kind of live service?
>Mount & Blade
>Early Access
You literally have no idea what you're talking about. Having closed testing is different from having to buy a game in early access
Please explain how "closed testing" where you can go online and pay money to download and play an in-development videogame with regular updates and patches differs from early access.
>Having closed testing
You went on their website and bought access to the game pre 1.0. The only difference between this and early access is... wait, there is no difference.
Fricking moron.
Why?
Even though they are easy games, they easily overwhelm normalgays because they are low IQ. AAA shit gives severe brainrot from too much handholding, they literally don't know what to do when you just drop them in the game.
You need to have some autism(?) I guess.
It's usually for the type of people that play well by themselves in a sandbox or something.
Idk if the demographic really overlaps with rpg players? Idk
I am not autistic, you take that back you prostituteson.
>simrpg early game is thrilling and adventurous
>simrpg midgame is strategic and rewarding
>simrpg endgame is a slow, unbalanced, buggy nightmare slog that makes you abandon the save and start with a NEW build where THINGS will be DIFFERENT this time!!
And I like it that way.
Best endgame is when you stay in early game forever, then the map around is a complete clusterfrick with most lords exiled, the map divided into Rhodoks and Nords with Graveth and Ragnar running around with four digit armies and everyone else having two digit basic recruits, who get eaten up by bandits.
If you can't repel 948 men nordic sieges then you're a casual
Those games are only for high testosterone men. That's enough of a filter.
Videogames are low testosterone by default.
Video games don't have any testosterone, moron.
That's only true if you aren't competing against people going truly tryhard mode.
It's the difference between watching TV or watching a live stream versus pulling up an obscure video to watch by yourself. The social aspect in having a shared experience that deviates slightly for some is a big part of it. There's also the fact that a prepackaged story will have more attention given to conventional story beats, plot twists, writing in general, but at the expense of flexibility and freedom.
If I could choose where I want to take my party out of 5 different areas that's almost always better than having 20 areas to choose from that are really just 10 level appropriate areas, only 2 having unique interactions etc. Consistency is key, and for the overwhelming majority of developers it's hard keeping things consistent in a premade RPG let alone one that could go all over the place (while also retaining some semblance of unique emergent story telling etc).
I think you've missed the point entirely. premade RPGs are completely different than interactive simulation RPGs like the ones listed. In the former you experience a story the way the developers intended and in the latter you make your own story however you want. Any story you create for yourself will always feel more impactful because its your story, you did that, whereas when you experience the developers story it's someone elses work
The social aspect could be fixed if any of them offered mp or co-op in their main modes, it might change the design direction a little but its not impossible to include if you really want it. But as said there is no one pinning to create games like these so we're stuck with the few we have
I fail to see how that post missed the point entirely given you basically reiterated it until the co-op part. And co-op is definitely not what the shared social experience is referring to, reread it. It's knowing that other players, no matter what choices they make, will still probably interact with x party member or y merchant or z villain, and that's where your choices could potentially matter "more" in a sense that the choice is more valuable when more people are presented with it. Simulation RPGs, or whatever you want to call them, have the same exact structure in place whether you like it or not, they just obscure those choices behind the illusion of complete freedom. But you're still going to run into unique handmade elements that only exist to preserve that aspect of a shared experience.
So you're still conquering Calradia at the end of the day. You can't just frick off and say I want to go to a different island now and fight dragons (unless you download at least 12 different mods). It's just that they deliberately suspend the intended goal of the game above a diluted set of arbitrary actions and sub goals you can achieve at your leisure.
Take for example Divinity 2, you have way more actionable choices in that than anything you can do in vanilla warband because the latter limits you by design through its generic set of actions (generic here referring to the nature of the action) where you basically end up writing the game yourself. Take CK2 as another example, completely different type of game, same principle. You can only extract so much emergent gameplay from a set of fixed mechanics without relying fully on your imagination, but you dilute your experience away if it's completely alien to other players so there will always be a set of fixed elements to help players relate to one another. Most of that freedom is illusory, placebo, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Doesn't make one game's design or emergent gameplay inherently better.
This thread is moronic because, as usual, rpg players don't understand the genre distinctions which together make up the hybrid genre, rpg. So instead of OP and replies talking about rpgs specifically, everyone's reinventing the wheel of how narrative adventure could possibly have more broad appeal than autistic simulation!
Another example is the martial arts sim rpg Tale of Wuxia (originally, Legend of Wulin Heroes). It has crpg rather than open world / sandbox design, though. It's also ruined by the training sections being a bunch of mindless action mini-games, wonder if they have ever been modded out? Unfortunately the modding community was in Chinese, and was later disrupted by the devs.
Another obvious game is Sid Meier's Pirates! sim, which is the main inspiration for Mount & Blade. Freeman: Guerrilla Warfare is an FPS which in turn copied Mount and Blade, though I'm not sure if it includes the sim rpg parts.
>if you stretch it you can include Kenshi
What? Kenshi is primarily post-apoc squad simulation, with RPG flavour. It's way more sim RPG than Mount & Blade, which only has sim rpg in the civilian/strategy layer, with the actual meat of the game being tactical action battles.
It's a bit goofy but it's good.
Harder to implement anon.
Less useful as propaganda.
Modern dev teams are Larry Fink and Goldstein's propaganda. A movie more autocratically lectures the audience than a simulation in which the audience becomes participant = player.
A series of movie files playing and in-engine scripted events might be something poos and women can manage. Programmatic simulations of complex systems with emergent gameplay? That's what white men made when white men made games.
go play Command: Modern Operations, no cinematics and no simple gameplay. And you kill commies in it.
Stop anon, it is literally ilegal to be this based anc correct!
because individual experience outweighs immersiveness. people would rather play the hero than on the same playing field as a computer. guaranteed any campaign you've put serious hours into has atleast 50% attack damage and -50% player damage on. meanwhile any scrolls game gives you a giant advantage over any npc in the game. Everybody wants to be the hero.
>guaranteed any campaign you've put serious hours into has atleast 50% attack damage and -50% player damage
That's because the AI gets to generate its troops from thin air, gets to promote them instantly, and doesn't have to pay wages, for food, or for training. I deserve a leg up if they get to cheat the system. Either give me better stats, much easier recruitment, or always make my guys go unconscious instead of dying.
The player advantages too.
First of all, any human with an average intellect will easily trash the AI on both the campaign and battlefield. Also you are forgetting that only the player can make armies made of different kingdoms, only you can go around each faction's weakness.
Difficulty has absolutely nothing to with OP or distinguishing these subgenres. Bizarre tangent.
>I think most RPG players kind of expect a relevant story in their game
Bethesda games offer simulation and story. Shame the action sucks.
>I think you should try Solo ttrpg like ironsworn or starforged.
Looks too much like daydreaming.
Once VTTs get more accessible and automated, people will switch from crpg/sims.
I think most RPG players kind of expect a relevant story in their game. I do agree there should be more games that are just giant sandboxes that let you do whatever you want though, Kenshi is kino.
>Freeman: Guerrilla Warfare
I liked the singleplayer campaign of ARMA 1. You could command your squad mates to go to designated positions to scout ahead, enter vehicles, etc. Felt like Mount & Blade's tactical battles to me. Very immersive,
Unfortunately, the singleplayer campaign is overtuned and was aggravating at times. You can only save once per mission. If you die before you save, you have to restart the whole mission. So the game can become extremely frustrating. I distinctly remember one mission where you have to do a convoy escort, and there are a lot of snipers hiding in bushes 200 feet off to the side of the road. You have only like a dozen soldiers. so you either have to 1. sacrifice soldiers to determine where the snipers are (at a certain point you probably won't have enough guys left to complete the mission), or 2. you have to use yourself as bait to find out where they are and basically restart the mission over and over until you learn all of their positions
and then you have to find the right place to drop your save point. And then there was a very, very hard part where you had to get the convoy past a line of tanks without said tanks one shotting your trucks. So, so many retries. A mission should've been done in 20 minutes but wound up taking a whole weekend afternoon.
>Not scouting the area ahead before moving the convey
That mission was super easy but I remember it just taking a lot of time.
There's a lot of DOS 80's sim RPG , super boring full of menus with management of your armies and castles and whatever, they were not fun at all though.
>I'm specifically talking about games that have a simulated world, no story and you're just let lose to interact with that world in the ways you chose
I think you should try Solo ttrpg like ironsworn or starforged.
>Why are there basically no simulation heavy RPGs?
>It's Mount&Blade, Starsector and if you stretch it you can include Kenshi, X series
>These games are all beloved yet no one else is even trying to make games like these. I'm specifically talking about games that have a simulated world, no story and you're just let lose to interact with that world in the ways you chose
That, plus crafting mechanics, is/was basically the cursed runes indie game subgenre, and nowadays everyone immediately identifies those games as being crap.
Simulations a dumb.
How would new games of that genre get players?
Basically, I believe it's not cost efficient: if you want to make something new and better you need a bigger budget and that still won't guarantee getting players as that target group is generally speaking fine with junk they have; if you make junk there is no need for those players to jump ship. And new players will be influenced by those players already in the genre. "Have you tried m&b" ensues.
As they all did, by decades continued development and updates. The games are by nature eternal in design, you can pick them up at anytime and they'll still be just as good
Bump. This game is good at filtering linear brainlets.
Its niche yet hard to make, its easier to stick to some formula. I suppose more will get made eventually.
Mount and Blade is one of the best rpgs ever made as well as its copies. Fuk the Witcher. Fuk Skyrim (I liek the sex mods doe), fuk the baldur shit.
Linear rpg games aren't exciting to me. Linearity belongs in shooter games, feel cheap and made for profit. They have fake choices and have an end. Every choice in Warband is gameplay. Sandbox games like Warband, Star Sector etc. all sell the idea of the world actually being alive through the simulation and not som scripted event. Lords or third party actors similar to the player do their own agendas and act without being scripted to do so. I wish there was more of this stuff in other rpgs but the big dog devs seem to avoid it.
Scripted gameplay is easier and cheaper to make I guess. It's also easier for casuals to grasp.
Can you die of old Age on Vanilla M&B Warband?
I never played this game and I was thinking of doing playthouth were I play throughout the entire adult hood and possible old age of my main guy.
Can you have heirs? And maybe control them when you character retire, become senile or die?
>Can you die of old age?
No, most named/special NPC don't die, not even the old lords die as far as I know. You can only "kill" the original faction leaders by usurping their kingdom with a special NPC and quest, and they disappear from the game forever after finishing the quest.
>Can you have heirs?
No
>Can you control heirs when your character retire/die?
No, but I think some mods let you control your surviving army when you are knocked unconscious (basically dying) in the field battle, so you can still see the end of the battle while controlling someone (normally it just auto resolves the battle after you die).
I think you can choose to retire by camping but that's as about as far as role playing goes outside of the gameplay.
Anyways, recommend me some similar games. I played Warband, Space Rangers 2 and Taikou Rissiden V. I know Kenshi and Starsector exist but haven't tried them.
Starsector is good.
If you play long enough, you can get lords that also disapper, because they've been exiled from every kingdom and their standing with every king is so low, that nobody wants them in.
I had a game where I just did tourneys and ignored politics, where the map was basicly King Ragnar and King Graveth ruling over the map, with 8-10 lords total getting exiled back and forth before they even got to build an army.
In the newer Bannerlord you can have heirs, play them and build a dynasty. Development is moving at breakneck speeds, you might even get 1.0 before the next century
But the game is completely functional at this point, mods will probably start rolling out in a couple years
Probably because those games, the good ones anyways, have a 5+ year development period, and are nowhere near as cost effective as shitting out a simple linear RPG.
Take Starsector, it has now been 11 years in development. Only incredibly passionate devs are able to work on a single project for that amount of time, and that is something we are painfully short on these days.
Yeah I'd love more games like Starsector and Mount & Blade, but the high IQ market actually able to appreciate said games is tiny.
That VFX tickles me right in my autismo. Kino.