WHY (GOD WHY) SO MANY MEDIEVAL FANTASY GAMES AND SO LITTLE OF ANYTHING ELSE?

Wohoo. Cat fight. ;D ::Grabs popcorn.::



Seriously, I'm glad this topic blew up, in a good way. Some responses:

-I don't approve of westerners stealing eastern Asians thunder. I have never stepped my foot in japan, therefore I wont use any Japanese game making techniques, jokes, music, kanji, katakana.. calligraphy, etc. It annoys me when people does that.. not only is it stereotyping a race/ using something that you dont understand. You have -no- idea what you're doing. It's best not to step on someones toes unintentionally than to step on them with love. Got it, loves?-

Sorry, but this is just such bullshit. The prototypical Japanese Videogame RPG is Final Fantasy, which stole EVERYTHING, EVEN ITS BASIC CONCEPT, FROM THE AMERICAN PNP RPG DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS. While admittedly msr. Gygax stole from anything from everything, the Japanese did not invent bolt, potion, or random encounters. Give me a break.

There's many things you can do with medieval settings that you can't do with sci-fi ones. I mean, think about it: one of the major elements of RPGs (at least in my mind) is exploration. Sci-fi almost declares that there be some sort of intergalactic travel -- there's only been one RM* game I've seen do that, and that's The Epic Project: Genesis. Even ABL wasn't pure sci-fi. There were towns of low technology as well dispersed throughout it, not to mention areas that would fit quite well in a medieval setting. With pure medieval fantasy, there's more an element of the unknown in one location, rather than having to rely on creating other locations to let the player explore. Sure, it's easier to do things that way, but we don't all have loads of time to come up with umpteen worlds for the player to explore. (May I also add that I agree with the whole gunfight thing -- one of the reasons I still don't understand Iria and Ricardo in Tales of Innocence .)

You seem to be defining science fiction as something that inherently involves rayguns and spaceships. In fact, science fiction is really just any story with an integral element of scientific speculation that is essential to its existence. It does not need to be space opera, or leave earth, or take place in the future at all. ABL was absolutely pure sci-fi; low-tech areas and swords does not at all mean "not science fiction". Science fiction, remember, also includes all sorts of alternate history genres.

There have been no alternate history games, have there?

Oh, and "magic" is just as difficult to rationalize in sci-fi as it is in fantasy, I might add.

I enjoy rationalizing things that are difficult to rationalize. (In my completed science fantasy/japfaggery novel that I wrote in high school, about Japanese teenage wizards fighting aliens, I rationalized magic as being essentially a parallel evolutionary strain of homosapiens that developed alongside technologically dependent mainstream humanity. Every culture's real-life legends of shamans, wizards, and miracles could be described by an innate ability of humans to alter reality with their minds, now repressed as technology filled these needs. My science fiction novel, still in progress, about Psionics, uses the same rationalization.)

However, in pure fantasy, nothing needs to be rationalized AT ALL. You can do whatever you want, no matter how stupid, without having to be accountable to reality. And this often leads to sloppy world building.

author=Shadowtext link=topic=1866.msg30435#msg30435 date=1220970108
Execution is the only thing that matters, RoseSkye. You can come up with the most original ideas in the world, and they will be no better than the "cliche" ones if your execution isn't better. Same thing with any genre. And let's not pretend like science fiction isn't any more tired a genre than fantasy just because fewer RPG Maker games are made in it.

Overemphasis on the genre, setting, or ideas in a story rather than the character or the storytelling technique is the sign of an amateur or hack writer, and probably one who leans into the autism spectrum. I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with genre fiction (see Ursula K. LeGuin's essays on the subject for thoughts about the merits of genre fiction), but relying on any genre to take care of the work for you is going to make your writing more or less unbearable. And a good writer can work in any genre and make the story worth hearing.

These are all story thoughts, not game thoughts though. Game-wise, setting and genre should serve to justify and support the gameplay, same as story. RPGs fit in with historical fantasy more easily than science fiction most of the time just because it's hard to make certain RPG elements mesh well with modern or futuristic weapons and tech--gun battles tend to be fairly decisive fairly quickly, and it's tough to imagine a gun fight between two people taking more than, say, six seconds.

That said, there's no excuse for the lack of steampunk games.

I agree with most of your points. Even your last one...unless those people are super-human cyborgs/aliens/gun magic users. Oh, by the way, why DON'T more battles in RPGs end quickly and decisively? Fights in my games tend to end in five turns or less. Even in a medieval setting, you know what, a sword fight is usually over in two seconds, especially if it's a Japanese-style sword fight.

Anyway, we're getting off topic here. I'm not saying that fantasy games are bad or sci-fi games are better, I'm just asking why there's such a glut of medieval fantasy and such a dirth (sp?) of anything else.

Of course, as someone pointed out, there's a lack of released indie games period these days. Perhaps because the people who would make them are thin-skinned, and this community is not particularly kind to the thin-skinned.

author=WIP link=topic=1866.msg30484#msg30484 date=1220983189
Shadowtext wins this thread.

I wasn't aware this thread was a competition or a fight. Seriously, I would declare "TEH WINNAR" of this thread as anyone who could answer the title question completely and to my satisfaction. Which may, of course, be impossible. :)

I like "vanilla" fantasy because you can add anything to vanilla. My personal favorite/my general style is to just make everything dark. Even my silly games (Epic Monster Dungeon Explore 2, Versus Xerza, DRESS/Forget-me-nots)* tend to have dark undertones and screentints. The never-ever-completed-ever Arcane Mist is, like, super-twisted fantasy.

I also think more things should be dark. Every game I've ever made was incredibly dark/twisted, with the exception of my current RMVX project, Mage Duel, which is about mages dueling other mages. Speaking of which:

I am not HATING on medieval fantasy! It certainly has its uses. For instance, right now, I am working on a game called MAGE Duel, where you are a MAGE, and you duel other MAGES! (That is the game's entire premise.) I'm just asking why there aren't more indie games in other genres. I want answers to that question more than anything else.