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Oh my GOD this was one of the most enraging games I ever played. Every fight was the same: spectral spear-throwers who out-ranged anything you had, picking off your units. You move towards them and and they just skitter away, still attacking – repeat until you’re defeated, or more likely, have uninstalled the game and burned the CD. I had to show it to my friends just to witness their looks of disbelief. We were astounded that such a hateful, unrewarding waste of code had ever been produced. After ’98 real-time strategy really went to hell. Games like Myth, Deadlock and Ascendency were what killed the genre, NOT lack of interest! We got our hopes up with Supreme Commander, the “spiritual successor” to Total Annihilation. False hope to say the least, with uninspired 2D maps, none of the promised modding tools..and the sequel? Ye Gods. We’re already seeing a minor renaissance in RPGs thanks to Bethesda’s dedication. Space sims, real-time and turn-based strategy are really due for revivals as well. You could say the same of about any game that really only works on a PC (although a new Wing Commander could probably be dandy on the coming generation of consoles). Its really the publishers who’ve become the enemies of genre innovation and rennovation..all they want to see are rapidly thrown together clones of whatever the last big hit was. (I fully expect a spate of crappy RPGs because of Skyrim’s success.) Indie efforts like Sol: Exodus do give me hope, however. I’m becoming more convinced by the day that the next Master of Orion or Simcity will come from an unknown studio rather than an established outfit.

Psycros, we’ve been seeing crappy RPGs and barely-qualifies-as-RPGs ever since Baldur’s Gate. Let’s face it… practically everything Bioware’s put out since BG2 has been more like an FPS with role-playing elements tacked onto it. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy them, I’m just saying they barely even qualify as RPG’s, IMO.

Also, you’re wrong about Myth (also IMO) because it isn’t an RTS. It’s an RTT. (Real-Time Tactical game.) The main difference is that in an RTT, you don’t get to build new units… whatever you start the mission with, you’ve got to finish it with (with the occasional exception of scripted reinforcements).

The best way to defeat the spectral spear throwers? If they’re on open ground, rush them with berserkers, who are faster. If they’re up a hill (which gives them a range advantage), distract them by moving a melee unit in first, then juking to distract them while your archers pelt them (they won’t change targets until their original target is dead). Obviously you didn’t spend enough time with the game to bother developing a strategy for dealing with such things… which is fine. “Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks” and all that. You didn’t like it, and that’s okay by me.

Deadlock and Ascendancy don’t count either, because both of them (or all three, if you count Deadlock II) were turn-based, not an RTS. Though I do agree there were some really crappy RTS games in that time period… “Dark Planet: Battle for Natrolis” was absolutely pathetic and “Dominion: Storm Over Gift3″ was mediocre at best.

The way I see it is that RPG’s fall into two schools. Lets call them West coast and East coast.

On the hardcore West coast, we see RPG’s that are all about system optimization. It’s about building a party, fiddling with stats, finding optimal builds, and equipping the right items. This is the stuff that’s often call “RPG elements”. Many classic games (especially Wizardry)are built all around these, almost to the exclusion of anything else.

The East coast is a bit more laid back. To them, story and characters are the focus. Stats are cool and levels are fun, but they shouldn’t hold the story back. In other words, you should be able to see the conclusion to a well-written story without having power-leveled your triple-classed party.

As you can tell, Bioware falls squarely into the East coast category. You can go into what a “role-playing game” means, but this is the genre as its evolved. You can complain that the gameplay isn’t as deep or strategic enough for you, but you can’t complain about their stories. Even Dragon Age 2, with its initial poor pacing, it s pretty cracking tale.

Myth is on my list of all-time favorite games. The spectral spear throwers you talk about are really easy to kill — like Marcus said, if you send melee types after them, they run from them, try to throw a spear one in awhile, but give up and run helplessly away, only to be killed. Or, if you have archers on a hill, you out-range them. And they usually miss you from a distance anyways, and don’t do much damage. I still remember the fun of archers shooting the bloated guys that explode when killed. I remember buying Myth near Halloween the year it was released. The wife and I read the instructions at a Red Lobster on the way home… so we did the same thing next year when I bought Myth II. The music and voice acting, and physics were all top notch. Also fun to replay a level and watch the interesting battles in slow motion. Was a rare game, and nothing has come out like it since.

Sorry, I meant to just say “strategy” in regards to everything I mentioned. And yeah, I despise games like Myth because they remind of the campaigns in RTS’s, which I never play. I have no use for limited “missions” in a game like that – doubly so if you can’t build more units. Also, me and my gaming friends tried everything including the archers you mentioned. The spear fiends would just move as a unit as soon as you fired a volley – they were unhittable by anything ranged. Melees might get close enough for single strike before they died, fatally pincushioned well short of their targets. Plus, 90% of the time while you were sending a few units to chase/distract the skirmishers you’d be attacked by their melees and wiped out. My friends, btw, were much better players than me..hard-core RTSers who ate Tiberium and crapped ogre mages. You must have been playing a different game than we were, because they universally declared Myth unwinnable and about as fun as a colon exam.

BTW, I’m seeing Ian Davis’ post about RPGs in this discussion..not sure if its a forum bug or just a mis-post.

ha, that’s crazy… I beat the original Myth — whole thing… and I was at least on “Normal” skill level (I never play lower than that). I’m a good player, but not professional. I dont remember the archers being anything special. I do remember sending in melee types (like 3-4) onto them when the started shooting at me. They’d get a few spears out, but when the melee types get close, they TRY to run, but are too slow to get away, and just get wiped out. They really weren’t that big of a deal.

@psycros: Oh, you meant “strategy” in general. When you put it that way, you’re right. A lot of smaller companies saw the success of games like Warcraft, Starcraft, and Command & Conquer, and decided to jump on the bandwagon with their own RTSs, trying to cash in on the fad. Most of those just flopped, and ended up killing interest in strategy games for a while (for anything that wasn’t Warcraft, Starcraft, or C&C anyway).

It’s happened before and it’ll happen again… a few games in a genre are highly successful and everyone else tries to jump on the bandwagon, and it almost never has the effect they were expecting. As for the ‘campaigns’ in RTSs… this is where you and I are diametrically opposed. I don’t buy RTSs for the online play; I buy them for the campaigns (well, for the story). You buy them for the exact opposite reason.

As for Ian’s post, it’s probably just a mis-post. I made a comment about RPG’s in another thread, and he might have thought he was responding to that.

@psycho

Thankfully, you’re not a developer; or the trend towards easy-mode games as we have sen for the last 5 years would have been even sharper.

Frankly, if you could not figure out tactics in Myth, that’s your failing, not the game. It received glowing reviews and was an excellent game.

You seem the type of person who when you cannot move a wall, you bash your head against it, instead of walking around it. But hey, to each their own. Perhaps you should not play strategy games?

Glowing reviews?? From who, apoligists like youself? The game TANKED, dude, and the reviews I saw were lackluster. Perhaps you should not talk about things you clearly know nothing about, and in all likelihood are fabricating.

It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s pretty hard to deny that it won critical acclaim. It very well might have tanked, but it certainly didn’t get raked over the coals.

@Marcus,

Actually, I think it’s less likely these days that a genre as a whole will perish, mostly because of how publishing and production works now. With maybe 3-4 big developers (EA, Activision, Ubisoft, etc.) and an emphasis on cross-platform development, you have a LOT more centralization in which games get greenlit. If anything, I think that simply means that a given game will slightly change over time, but the underlying elements will remain identical. You get the occasional change of setting (remember when you couldn’t find any “modern” shooters and everything was WWII?), but the core gameplay remains largely the same.

That’s a far cry from the 90s when consoles and PCs had hardly any crossover at all in terms of titles. As consoles have gotten more sophisticated, though, that’s changed (not always for the better).

I think the only thing that changes this kind of centralization and stagnation of genres these days is an “asteroid” game. By that, I mean something that comes out of nowhere and surprises people, or is a whole new genre unto itself. Think Assassin’s Creed. There was NOTHING like that when it first hit. Or think back to BF1942, which fundamentally changed the FPS genre (although it didn’t kill the genre).

But regardless, I think you’ll see far less proliferation of “wannabe” games these days, because the money just isn’t there to develop them, and there’s such a separation between “A-list” titles and everything else that wannabes get FAR less play anymore.

In some ways, though, I see this as having opened up room in the marketplace for other avenues of innovation. The “marketplace” aspects of PS3 and X360 have both been fantastic avenues for smaller developers to really shift things around. Same with Steam and other digital downloading of games. You’ve also got stuff like gog.com promoting a revival of remade classics.

As for the decline of “traditional” RPGs, as Ian mentioned, I think it depends heavily on one’s definition of an RPG. Some folks think “Levels & Loot” is the gold standard for RPGs. If it has anything approaching THAC0, it’s an RPG. If it doesn’t, it might as well be Chutes & Ladders. Other folks take the view that an RPG is trule about playing a role in a game, and therefore any game that allows some form of user-control over the character’s progression, but also places the user in a particular role where their decisions have far more impact than, say, an FPS where there’s only ever one path to the end game, is an RPG.

I tend to fall more into the latter camp, myself. I find much of the “rules” or nuts and bolts of an RPG to be extraneous and to miss the forest for the trees. To my way of thinking, the min/max approach that comes from stats, levels, etc. is really just the vestigial remnants of tabletop games where such abstractions were necessary to create a sense of fair play in a game that was otherwise supposed to be about using your imagination and playing a role. The rules created structure with an element of chance (because of the multi-sided dice), but the rules existed to allow the players to OTHERWISE experience the game world.

With the rise of computing and increases in computing power, there’s less and less reason to have abstract rules acting as a membrane between the gamer and the character they’re controlling. I’ll explain what I mean by that. In an FPS, generally speaking, where you point your gun, how fast you click the fire button, etc. is all determined by YOU, the player. Now, some game-abstraction is involved. The game models how fast rounds travel, maybe penetration values, possibly some conefire or recoil element, but by and large, you the player control your avatar directly.

In a lot of RPGs, that’s not the case. You DIRECT your character, but the interposition of stats makes it so that you can/can’t do XYZ. So, while you, personally, might be able to hit that orc with your bow and arrow if it was an FPS-style game, your character cannot because you didn’t select “Ranged Weapon Proficiency” at character creation.

This can — at least in some modern games — lead to some pretty absurd circumstances, such as two avatars standing toe to toe and missing each other as they swing away. Think of the scenario where my thief sneaks behind the big monster to backstab, but fails to make his to-hit roll, and whiffs. At point-blank range, no less. How the hell does THAT make sense? It doesn’t, outside the context of a tabletop game, and certainly outside the context of a game where you’re controlling your character in a first or over-the-shoulder-third person view.

Which brings us to the other aspect of shifting design paradigms. Remember that bit I mentioned earlier about cross-platform development? Well, it is disinclined to favor mouse control because….consoles don’t use mice. So an isometric control scheme with an 8-PC party is a LOT harder to pull off on a console than, say, a 3-player party with an over-the-shoulder or first-person control scheme. Thus, you see more games like Mass Effect and such being developed.

Personally, I’m all for this. The less “rule abstraction” is apparent, and the more control I the player have over my avatar, the more immersive the game experience becomes for me, and the more I get into the “role” of my character. Thus, to me, the march towards ever more direct control over the avatar and its actions brings us closer to my ideal for a true RPG where the goal is to create an immersive world into which you step, and in which you the player get to “take on a role” and play through the story. This is why I don’t miss the stats and such all that much. I still enjoy those older-style games, but I see them as often containing unnecessary designs in many cases. It all still makes sense in a tabletop setting, of course, where the limitless bounds of the imagination inevitably beat out snazzy graphics, but within the computerized realm, I think you can have an incredibly immersive game that doesn’t make its “rules” obvious and doesn’t impose arbitrary limits on players based on those rules.