#crpg dev

[lidsel]

I posted a silly sketch of this guy almost a year ago. My obsession with him has not waned since. Truly, I am a sucker for a grumpy man with a tragic backstory.

Here with his one true love - books - properly supported to avoid damaging the spine (many thanks to the librarians who suggested a book cradle!). Also yes, he's blond and not actually old (was going for just-been-through-absolute-hell look in that previous sketch and might've overdone it).

He's part of a cRPG project I've been working on. The setting is historically-grounded low fantasy, largely inspired by 17th century south/eastern Europe.

[eitherorcollective]

GIVE UP THE GHOST - a new mystery roleplaying game is now LIVE On KICKSTARTER!!

GIVE UP THE GHOST is a dialogue-based roleplaying game set in a strange city at the center of the world. Assume the role of Overseer Alhart, a one-eyed wanderer tasked to investigate a grim and prophetic fire. You’ll explore the weird, haunted corridors of the city Forde, and in your search for answers -- you will come to know the heart of the city as well as your own. 

Your character, the Overseer, was born in this city… but you have never returned until now. Upon your arrival, the tide of history comes flooding back, and you’ll have to stake your share of the waters. Choose how to immerse yourself in this place, this city at the center of the world -- do you remain forever a stranger? Or will you reclaim your name? 

Taking inspiration from legendary narrative games like Planescape: Torment and Disco Elysium, GIVE UP THE GHOST is about choosing how to live at the end of all things. You’ll confront the city’s pain, and work to uncover the traces of beauty still there. 

If you’re into narrative roleplaying games about cities, liminal spaces, history, alienation, worldbuilding, apocalypse, and esoterica…. This is the game for you! 

Consider supporting us on KICKSTARTER, following us here, or sharing this post with anyone you think might be interested! Thank you for reading!!

[ghoulsteak]

design work for a small crpg project. hopefully should be finished by the end of next month

[godkillerbrigade]

The Steam page for THE LAST DAYS OF FRIENDSHIP VALLEY has new screenshots 👀

THE LAST DAYS OF FRIENDSHIP VALLEY is a deckbuilding combatless RPG about conflict negotiation, goats, and impending doom. Make your own goat character, navigate arguments with cards, uncover an ancient mystery, and try to save the world.

Check it out now!!

[maevesweirdart]

hello everyone, my secondary art blog (@maevesnormalart) was deleted for absolutely no reason.

it’s not healthy to hold onto my anger, though, so instead of stewing in my rage, i’m using this opportunity to replace my now-deleted art blog with a new official promotional blog for my in-development indie CRPG, Bestia3D. (i am still stewing tho.)

my new blog is @bestia3D !!

(they better not delete this one too >:/ )

[kunosoura]

reverse hot take emoji baldurs gate three

If I were the creative lead of the game, I would have cut the Tav option (and maybe also playing as the other origin characters) because the extent to which the game's narrative starts to really come together and be compelling on a Durge playthrough is wild. You have a lot more interesting hooks and a meatier narrative in the otherwise sort of lean act 2; you're forced out of that Median cRPG Player Character comfort zone that people fall into where they play this sort of bland character with a bit of sarcasm but a good heart differentiated only by like, their hairstyle, by virtue of the fact that you are playing a fucking freak who, at least in the early part of the game where the characters are getting established, frequently faces choices where every option is insane; and there's actually a hook to the dynamic your player character has with the party members other than "you are kind of the only normal one" - the PC's friendship with Jaheira which, even on a Tav run was a sleeper contender for most enjoyable part of the game's writing, really shines.

[broadsiderenegade]

Is this a weird RPG opinion?

In big RPGs, cRPGS, jRPGs, action adventure RPGs, I kind of love the parts where your just exploring, surviving and questing. I love the little stories and encounters, party banter and aimlessness of a good Act 1. BG3 comes to mind first, but across the board, I loathe when you reach the big city. My excitement wanes when you get "locked in" to where I assume most people get excited, when the main plot starts to overtake all the rest, and kicks into gear. I could probably play an endless amount of "lets check out that cave" and "that farms on fire from a bandit attack!" But I've left some games unfinished that I initially became obsessed with as somehow finding the deus ex machina and saving the world just doesn't compel me the same way as being nobodies surviving and trying to do a little good along the way. Obviously from a design perspective it makes sense without a Star Citizen budget that games must end, but I do wonder if there will ever be something that could meet that need longterm (without the kind of monetization that plagues the average live service, as that is what it would probably end up being).

[laurasbailey]

i'm interested to see how larian approaches dlc for bg3 given its popularity because i feel like other games in the genre (pathfinder, divinity, poe, solasta) all follow a similar formula when it comes to their dlc and with this release larian have broadened the crpg audience so much they could really do whatever they wanted with it

[florthier-than-thou]

The spectrum of tumblr quizzes is insane

(Thank you to @sunshinemoonrx and @evelyn-art-05 respectively for your excellent quizzes)

[teethmafia]

A Modern CRPG fallout game that has the multiplayer co-op of baldurs gate 3 would be literal money. I don’t think bethesda will put in the narrative investment to make something akin to bg3 on their own, but I look forward to when a spiritual successor to og fallout gets its own multiplayer crpg gameplay loop and story structure.

[maevesweirdart]

(please reblog 🥺🥺🥺🥺)

finally made an environment that i think ill actually use in my rpg! i modeled it in Crocotile3D and then added the trees and stuff to the render in Krita. i think all the plants and trees and maybe other irregularly shaped objects in my game will be sprites rather than 3D, because i'm having a really hard time making that stuff in Crocotile lmao

anyway enjoy lol

[lidsel]

“Gee, child, I wonder why his handwriting might be so ugly...”

A silly drawing I did of a particular favorite from our cRPG project interacting with a lord’s child. She has no idea what’s in store for her for the next 5 years of having this dude around...

(I have a part 2 in the works - the man must have his revenge... and glorious hair!)

Hoping to be able to post more little things from the visual development for the game, but it’s still early so I’m concerned about oversharing underbaked concepts. The setting is historically-grounded low fantasy, largely inspired by 17th century south/eastern Europe.

[canmom]

It appears that today is the day of ZA/UM successors.

To begin with, we have this article, which mentions three projects by former Disco Elysium devs...

Dark Math - a 20-person team, half of them formerly from the Disco Elysium team, working on a detective RPG called XXX NIGHTSHIFT

Longdue Games - has the "leads" of the cancelled Disco Elysium sequel, now working on an as-yet unnamed RPG with a "psychogeographic" mechanic - it's a bit vague, but they do have funding

Kurvitz and Rostov are rumoured to be working on an unannounced game at a studio called Red Info, backed by chinese company NetEase. if so, we don't know anything about it yet!

Alongside these, we have senior writer Argo Tuulik and a number of other ZA/UMites, who've announced a plan for a new studio called Summer Eternal with a whole-ass manifesto for their company structure...

Lots of radical zeal but they haven't even made the company yet, so unclear if this will get off the ground, but they're also planning on making an RPG of some sort.

I'm very tempted to end with something cynical like 'release/implode, place your bets' but honestly? I really hope they all work out, and we enter a new era of literary CRPGs in which there will be more opportunity to work on arty shit in games. I don't wanna be that doomer about it all.

So best of luck to all involved, let a thousand za/ums bloom... (look, the summer eternal guys twisted mao's 'half the sky' quote to be about 'creatives', just let me have this one ok)

[devsgames]

As a dev who didn't really follow Baldur's Gate 3's development I was incredibly surprised at the number of people who have been making really sweeping and baseless claims about its success: stuff like "the game is made well by people who are passionate", or claim that other devs "just have to make good games", or that it's successful "because it doesn't have microtransactions". It's not that surprising I guess since Gamers tend to say these things about any product they happen to like and agree with, but I guess it was surprising to me how much people were saying it about this game specifically.

I'm sure the devs were passionate and I've sort of been enjoying my time with it, but frankly the success of BG3 absolutely does not feel like a design or development thing to me, but it's an obvious marketing and business one.

Having a good game obviously very much helps, but the fact of the matter is that rhetoric like this intentionally overlooks or downplays the real industry success factors: that BG3 is the third game in an already-popular and established legacy CRPG series that is built on an engine and mechanics by a studio which already made two other (unrelated) financially successful games on of the same genre, with all of it built on a back of a TTRPG franchise that has for the past few years been undergoing a huge resurgence in popularity and in no doubt funded through that partnership and licensing deals. Franchises like safe bets to make a profit, and this feels like the safest of bets. It really isn't successful because the game isn't adopting user-hostile monetization or because it's approach is radically different from any other game's development, it's successful because all these business factors.

To that end, whenever someone implies that other devs should just make games the same way...it's really funny! Like, the stars have aligned to make this product a hit and this doesn't implicitly make it a bastion or model for equitable game development just because it sold well and doesn't adopt hostile monetization schemes.

The fact of the matter is there's lots of games that are well-made by passionate devs and don't feature microtransactions or hostile monetization schemes, and they don't implicitly do well because of these design decisions alone; usually it's because they failed at marketing or didn't have the AAA budget to promote themselves like BG3. I'm also willing to bet that like every AAA studio, the devs at Larian likely weren't equitably compensated for this success, since most productions on a game of such a massive scale like this only really turn a profit because they undercut those working on it - huge profit and equitable compensation aren't often compatible concepts in game development. It's not like that would be any different here, so the "other devs should look to this game on how it should be made ethically" is a strange pull to me as well.

Basically this is all to say I think it's incredibly reductive to hold a product up on a pedestal by virtue of sales figures and choosing not to enact hostile monetization schemes. After all, I'm severely doubtful a product like BG3 would have done poorly assuming it had microtransactions in the first place. There's just way too many other factors that guided it alonge.

Do we need big budget games to move away from predatory business models that attempt to exploit the most vulnerable players? Absolutely yes I think we do, but I think people would also value from staying aware of real factors at play that define success in these sorts of situations, and not reduce development to "why don't developers simply make GOOD video games!" which I think is fairly baseless and confirmation-bias-y in its own way.

[catgirlforeskin]

“W-we don’t want to make everyone playersexual, we want to focus on telling strong companion stories 👉👈🥺” but then making every fuckable character available to straight players rings very hollow. Like okay cool, there’s one option for gay dudes, two for lesbians, but all the characters are bi (and really, just playersexual), congrats you’re at the same level as Fire Emblem.

I generally don’t care that much about romance in these types of games, and if the characters aren’t constantly coming onto you like Baldur’s Gate 3 (or Wrath of the Righteous to a much lesser extent) then cool.

But man, when Fallout: New Vegas had a gay man, a lesbian, and a bisexual woman all available as companions (all written very thoughtfully in a game that doesn’t even have romance), it’s hard not to feel like we’ve made very little progress in representation in the last decade. The priority is still to make everything available to straight players first and then allow queer players to share some of the scraps

[felassan]

Some snippets of interest and insight from Mark Darrah, from a Mark Darrah on Games YouTube video where he is livestreaming playing Dragon Age II -

On Dragon Age: Dreadwolf and sort've like, the franchise in general:

A comment in chat asked "What do you think about the recent DA:D leaks?" Mark replied that he doesn't really think that there is much in those leaks.

A comment in chat mentioned the possible 2 companions setup from the leaks. Mark said "honestly, I think the 2 companions is probably better for storytelling than 3, because you're able to have a more consistent banter setup, as opposed to having someone [else] there just hanging on".

Chat asked if he was worried about the quality of writing in DA:D. He replied "I'm not worried about the quality of writing in Dreadwolf at all, no".

Chat asked "What are your thoughts on the Dreadwolf leaks as far as the Dragon Age gameplay moving towards hack'n'slash vs cRPG?" He said that DAII and DA:I are both action RPGs, it's just that what action RPGs are has changed over the last while. He said he thinks DA:D is continuing to try to be an action RPG, and that "I don't think they're trying to be God of War, in spite of what the rumors say. Though if you're making an action RPG these days you have to at least be influenced by God of War. Dragon Age has always had to be, it's always been in this problem of not being able to be itself within EA, so it's always having to change."

Chat asked "Why God of War, and not, say, Dragon's Dogma?" Mark explained that when looking for previous other games as comparison points/inspiration points etc, devs have to be careful not to go too far back into the past (& that Dragon's Dogma is a great game, but from quite a while ago now).

When talking about primer and detonator tactics like grease and fireball, he observed that the series generally has been moving away from this type of tactics. Grease/fireball for instance requires a certain degree of targeting that he thinks is a bit impractical, but things like mana clash are things which could continue to exist.

Red Hawke-style options in terms of metrics are the least picked by players, same as Renegade options in Mass Effect. (while Blue Hawke is likely the most chosen) They're there to simply be there more than they are to be the most-picked choice. There could be an opportunity here for devs to spend less resources in development on evil or mean choices in future, but they still need to be there.

Varric is pretty much the only true non-quantum companion from DA:I. Mark noted that if a character's quantum state isn't dead/not dead but is rather recruited/not recruited, they can always write it such that the character survived. (He also mentioned as an example that Isabela's quantum "collapsed" and was "undone" in DA:I).

He also mentioned that he will probably do livestreams playing DA:D as he has done with DA:O and is doing with DAII, but thinks it's unlikely that he will be done with streaming DA:I by then, so at that point he'll likely set DA:I aside, do DA:D and then come back to DA:I.

On Dragon Age: Absolution:

Chat asked what he thought about Meredith coming back in the show. "I don't have a problem with Meredith coming back because as revealed, it looks like she's basically almost entirely embedded in red lyrium or maybe is some kind of lyrium ghost, so I think it's certainly beyond plausible."

[source]

He also talked more generally about DAII and the previous games in general. These bits are collected under a cut due to length:

Regarding DAII's overkill, he said that the goal of DAII is to make the game "look like something", as DA:O doesn't really "look like something". The overpowered, Varric-embellished introduction to the game anchors this

Cassandra's hair isn't supposed to seem light-colored during the Varric interrogation sequence, this was probably a lighting issue

He commented that he feels Varric's voice has changed quite a bit from DAII to DA:I

Mages are super overpowered in DA:O in a very D&D way

DA:O is more difficult on PC than on consoles. He doesn't think this is the case for DAII and DA:I though

DA:O was trying to be a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate (at least, that's what was said out loud). But Neverwinter Nights snuck in there a few times as DA:O bounced in and out of Multiplayer. So DA:O has some fingerprints on it which look like NWN. Also, it was originally built using some of its code, which ended up in the engine, Aurora

In the MET, because it's a trilogy and Shepard is the PC in each game, every single choice you made still mattered going forwards, whereas with DA, a lot of the more personal choices can be washed away game to game. That's an advantage in terms of responding to choices (as devs can set aside what they want to set aside, whereas ME3 was really bogged down by the weight of 2 games of previous choices)

On Flemeth's appearance in DAII, as a voice actor Kate was really "chewing the scenery" there and allowed to do so (to chew the scenery means to play a role in a very energetic, emotional or dramatic way); it got too expensive with Orange is the New Black to keep Kate in a big role going fowards

The slave statues at the entrance to Kirkwall are huge and probably magic

He mentioned that he thought Freddie Prinze Jr. was awesome as he was one of the most active voice actors that they had in terms of talking about his experience and how much he loved it

A comment in chat said "I just wish we had black stones in Kirkwall. any reason they made the stone white in this media only? books, animation, and codex say it's a pitch black stone city" and he explained that this is because black is almost incredibly hard to do in this engine, and that pitch black is not a good choice for level art in a video game

Chat asked "Do you feel DAII was too narratively ambitious at the start?" and Mark replied "Yeah probably, the writers have always had some difficulty keeping their ambitions in check"

Chat asked "Was it known since DA:O what Flemeth's story was?" and he replied that he thinks they always knew Flemeth was Mythal, but can't remember for sure

DAII is the most character-focused game, partially because during its development everything else had to get stripped away, but also because it laid the seeds of the devs finally admitting what BioWare are about

Chat asked "Was it ever discussed, bringing a Warden Hawke sibling to Nightmare in DA:I?" He said that he thinks it was discussed but the problem of bringing in the Warden sibling is that only one of them is alive, so they would have been dealing with quantum. They already were dealing with quantum, so they could have brought them, but only a small group of people would have the attachment to each character, because half of people would care about one and half about the other

Chat asked "Was DA:O or DA:I considered more of a success by BioWare?" DA:I sold better and has more awards, but it's hard to be down on DA:O as it was the first game and set up the IP

He feels that in a weird way, DA kind of ends up being in a similar weird place as Star Wars, in that the trilogy a fan likes best is often the one they saw when they were a child. There are people for whom Clone Wars is the pinnacle of SW, and people for whom the prequels are. Similarly, with DA, the one a player got introduced to first is often their favorite one

Mark mentioned that they probably switched to Welsh accents for Dalish elves in DAII because they liked how the accent sounded. The dwarves were always intended to sound American

Were he to remaster DA:I he'd like to push the Power requirements down a bit, so that players can go through the gates to the main storyline pieces quicker

He discussed a bit around remakes vs remasters in the context of things that have aged badly (in terms of what's politically/socially acceptable now and what isn't, compared to back then) and said that if you remake a game, you have to re-address those issue, whereas with a remaster you get away with not doing so

If they were to remake/remaster DAII they would probably only do it because they were remaking/remastering DA:O

A comment in chat said "hear me out, a VR remake of DA:O" and he replied that VR still remains pretty niche, and that making VR work well requires a certain smoothness that is missing from DA:O

(pls note that in places there is a bit of paraphrasing of the info, the best source is always the primary source with full quotes in their original context)

[source]