McLuhan!

Ta-Nehisi wrote a post recently that asked:

Skyrim comes out today and like most people I’m excited. That said, I have a question–Is the CRPG where you create your own party done? Are there any in the pipeline? Or was Icewind Dale basically the end of it? If so, did these die out for tech reasons? Lack of interest among designers? Among the Audience? Talk to me like I’m stupid…      

(Note: I’ve not yet read the comments to his post yet because I wish this essay to reflect my first thoughts… my first comment, however, will be processing what his comments section discusses.)

I think that there are a lot of different dynamics going on here but there are two that strike me as bubbling up:

1) Graphics Concerns

2) Other People

Going back to games like Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate (and Planescape:Torment and Fallout and Neverwinter Nights), on a graphical level, there is, pretty much, not a whole lot of places left to go. The emphasis being on tactical combat, you’ll want a bird’s eye view of the battlefield so you can see all of your guys, you can see all of the goblins, and you can see who needs a potion, who needs arrows, and who needs their head bashed. What this pretty much means is that the gnarly explosions, the wicked critical hits, and the sweeet spells cast will all look as if you were 30 feet above them. Oh, we could have awesome graphics when it came to cut scenes… but if you’re playing games like this, you’re not buying them for the quality of the cut scenes (and, if you are, you’re going to get bored with the combat very quickly).

The industry is moving to, if not graphical realism, graphical verisimilitude. The boxes brag about the physics engines, the facial expression engines, and so on. None of these things were needed for Icewind Dale. You needed voice actors, sure. You needed writers, of course. You didn’t need Havok. You didn’t need Source.

(Note: This isn’t a complaint on my part. I *LOVED* all of the games I’ve mentioned so far. I’m just saying.)

The most graphically advanced of these games would probably be Neverwinter Nights 2, which does incorporate some minor physics advancements but, still, when you kill a goblin it doesn’t go ragdoll but rather dies with a pre-rendered animation. (Indeed, why would you need them to go ragdoll when you’re very likely zooming in only for the boss fights and spending the rest of your time hovering above your party so you can see all of them at once?)

The big developers and producers are gun-shy for some reason when it comes to creating computer (as opposed to console) games with graphics that they can’t brag about. You’ll want a new card and you’ll need the latest drivers or else you won’t be able to say that this game is the biggest/baddest on the block… which, usually, means First Person Shooters and modified Havok engines and modified Source engines and so on down. The Icewind Dales didn’t need these things. As the limits were reached the genre was pretty much left behind in order to go for the bigger and better. (I just checked wikipedia and, indeed, NWN2 was the last D&D licensed video game released for the PC until, sigh, Daggerdale came out earlier this year).

This isn’t the biggest issue, however. The biggest issue was:

2) Other people. When video games first came out and wanted to mimic the gaming experience… which, to that point, was not one guy sitting at a computer or console by himself, but a group of guys sitting at a table. The graphics were limited (check out the Wizardry archives!) but the basic idea of a D&D video game was that you’d have your party of six. (Two fighters, two clerics, one mage, one thief. The way Ilmater intended.) But… the video game was a game for one player. This pretty much meant that the game was either turn-based *OR* the player could pause at any time to keep track of his six folks.

This is all well and good but the introduction of fast internet meant that you could play with (or against) other people. This had a culmination in Diablo II where you could have your six people and each character was run by a different human player. It’s the tabletop experience all over again!

The idea became one of characters were individuals. You were no longer in charge of more than one character at once. If you wanted six people in your party, you needed five friends. The single player experience became associated with such things as first-person shooters and RPGs in which The Protagonist (that’s you) went through something akin to The Hero’s Journey. Sure, you may have a sidekick… but if you wanted a party of equals that all worked together, you needed an internet connection.

The old six-players to a party kinda games came about because of graphical limitations and the inability to make a six-party dungeon crawl fun for more than one person. When those limitations disappeared, so did the genre.

And it’s a shame. Icewind Dale was awesome.