Odd that this survey never asked about the more recent giants of the genre: Witcher, Elder Scrolls, Dark Souls. Mass Effect 2 was the only game they asked about that I had actually played. I was a bit dismayed to see them ask about Balder's Gate and PoE, I know a lot of people prefer a return to the 2d isometric, turn-based RPG's out of nostalgia.
But as someone who got into RPG's relatively recently and mostly views more recent AAA 3D real-time entries as the gold-standard I would rather see a more Skyrim/Fallout 4 esque experience.
On the other hand one of the questions involved mod-support, so that's something at least.
There are reasons other than nostalgia for liking turn-based games. Not everybody wants games to be tests of their reflexes. This reminds me of a column I saw over at the CRPG addict:
"In 2003, capitalizing on the success of
The Lord of the Rings film series, The Noble Collection issued an official
The Lord of the Rings Collector's Chess Set, with pieces so detailed that they were personally approved by the actors in the film. Many sites carry it, and none of them offer this review:
The pieces and board are beautiful, but seriously: chess? If you're so old-fashioned that moving pieces in discrete squares is your thing, I guess you might like this game, but it's hardly likely to appeal to modern players, raised on games like pool, where you can use every point on the game's surface. It lacks the raw energy and visceral first-person action of games like laser-tag and football. Nonetheless, if you grew up in Eastern India during the Gupta Empire of the sixth century and want to relive the glory days of your childhood, this is the game for you.
I have deliberately avoided looking up any reviews of
Might & Magic X, so it's entirely possible that I'm setting up a straw man, but I'm willing to bet that the word "retro" appears in the majority of them. I'll bet they talk about its tile-based movement as "old-fashioned" and its turn-based combat as "vintage." I'll bet more than one concludes with the sentiment that the game is likely to appeal mostly to those who grew up playing
Might & Magic IV and
V. It will be nice, if embarrassing, if I'm wrong.
These reviews--real or imaginary--might be well-intentioned, but they offend me. The idea that any way of constructing a game ever becomes passé offends me. Good game architecture does not exist on some kind of fixed ladder, on which developers only retreat to earlier rungs because they lack the money, or nerve, to reach for the next one. As the years pass, more
options become available to them, sure, but a great game doesn't have to use all of those options, any more than Steven Spielberg had to use color in
Schindler's List or Michael Hazanavicius had to use sound in
The Artist. Both films won the Academy Award for best picture, no one said that the films most appeal to those who grew up in the 1920s."
does the word "RPG" changed meaning in the last 15 years?
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