I am a fan of RPG games and one of the reasons for it is because I have been playing RPG games for a LOOOONG time. And that is something that makes me want to talk about RPG games, how they used to be back in the days compared to how the developers have changed them and I am not even talking about the little changes but they have completely changed the whole feel of the game.
I have spent thousands of hours playing RPG games since I was a kid and RPG games were ruling the universe of gaming and quite rightly so. They developers used to spend all their time trying to make a game that provides the classical RPG gaming experience to the players, there used to be forums where the RPG communities used to talk about different aspects of the game, what the players wanted, what the developers are trying to go for and basically everything that happens in the game.
But I don’t really see any of that in the modern RPGs, except for a few games and there are many reasons for it. But my question here is, why modern RPGs aren’t as good as the old ones? Here is what I think.
Target Audience
One of the things that most of the developers worry about the most right now is reaching their target audience and since we are now living in 2021, where most of the gamers don’t know how the classic RPGs used to be, a world where most of the new gamers are interested in spending their hard earned cash on catchy CSGO skins, where short term thrill is way more important than long term reward and in times when players are flooded with options to choose from.
It has become so hard to get your game out there and just wait for the players to play your game, no matter how great it is, no matter how depth it holds. And even if you manage to get players to play your game, the first few hours or even minutes will decide if the players will stick to your game. And that is the reason why many modern RPGs are making it easy for the players to get into the game, the quests aren’t so difficult or as in-depth as they used to be, the whole experience feels like “hand-holdy” because the new players don’t want to spend hours trying to understand how the game works, instead they expect the game to make them understand how it works within the first few hours or minutes of gameplay.
And you can’t really blame the developers for that, they can’t make games if the data suggests that they won’t be getting as much attention for an in-depth classical RPG experience as they would for a game that grabs “new players” attention. And that is the reason why popular RPG games such as World of Warcraft have two versions, so that players who want the classical MMORPG experience can just head into WoW Classic. For faster progression players can buy TBC Gold and accelerate their experience. Otherwise, there’s another version that is World of Warcraft which is less popular but players are still heavily involved.
