The Future of the Western Role-playing Game
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 1861
Here's a couple of snippets:
Single-Player RPGs
The last few years should have finally put to the rest the idea that RPGs are an old, dying genre. The success of Bethesda and BioWare at the top, as well as a surprising amount of attention to games like The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, Torchlight 2 and Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning indicate that the genre is, if anything, on the upswing.
The wildly successful Kickstarters of Project Eternity and Wasteland 2, as well as the re-releases of Baldur's Gate with potential for a sequel, also indicate that even some of the styles of RPG which have gone out of fashion, primarily party-based, may be making a comeback, in addition to adding more games at a lower price point. In a business sense, this looks to me like the healthiest the genre has been in nearly two decades.
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Hybridization
Although the popularity of Mass Effect and a few other games has led some to speculate that we're entering a new age of genre hybridization, I'm less convinced. RPGs through history have been used for hybrids, from Panzer General to Deus Ex to The Binding Of Isaac. So it's not a difficult prediction to suggest that we will continue seeing RPG hybrids with other genres, and that some of them will be some of the best games of their era.
