>>12444313
You don't care, you never played Ultima and you're only making this thread to rile up people and get (you)s since it's been popular on youtube lately.

Ultima was the precursor to Betheshit game design
Eight classes and all of them are functionally the same aside from their mana pool and a few gear restrictions

>>12444313
4 ruined the series. it was like, fine, but it was the last playable game in the series. only the original trilogy is actually good, before any of this avatar nonsense came about.

>>12444313
Both are great and depends on other factors such as gameplay.

For example I wouldn't like any of the tes games if every battle was like in Ultima 4's retarded throw shit at each other spam or take 20 minutes walking up one step at a time to the enemy just to hit them bullshit

>>12444350
/thread

The best RPG stories are written by the player. Their unique experiences that stem from party and character building choices are more interesting than anything the writers could come up with

>>12444359
i mean the TES games are outright modeled after Underworld (except worse)

yeah it kinda sucks that classes completely stop mattering after IV but V has an insane amount of detail for an Apple II game.

>>12444350
You know alot about youtube. Maybe you should go back there.

>>12444446
you would know

>>12444350
fpbp

>>12444359
Ultima was the precursor of everything, based retard, because it literally defined the genre. Good lord you're a mental midget.

>>12444313
One of the most unexamined myths in gaming is "we play RPGs for the story". I don't believe this is true. It's the default explanation we settled because it's difficult to articulate just WHY we play them. "Beatemups are about beating, shooters are about shooting, RPGs have words, so... I guess they're about story? Yeah, that seems right.."

RPGs are an experiential genre of game. It's not just about the combat or the dialogue boxes, it's the overall sense of journey that's communicated. The act of spending time together with your party, suffering their pitfalls and sharing in their victories. Choosing whether to brave the wilds and see what's over the next hill, or hover around a safe locale and build up your strength. This slowly infuses the reality of the experience into the mind.

Unlike pickup'n'play games, (good) RPGs encourage a little more investment in the experience, and this becomes its own reward. It creates a uniqueness of experience that is our very own, even when times are tough. For this same reason, I reject "grind" as a complaint. I feel people who say things like "there should be no random encounters" are missing the point. All of those moments slowly layer into the experience. The cynical interpretation that every single unit of time must be met with equal reward, and anything beyond that is unfair "padding" is simply too postmodern and resentful an idea to be worthy of consideration in my mind. I remember the journey, and the allies I made it with, BECAUSE I couldn't complete it in one day. There's value in that. "Grind" CAN be excessive, but it's not as common as people make it out to be.

Conversely, I do tend to lose interest when a game attempts to ramp up the amount of story it contains. A good balance is needed. A game told in the abstract, with just enough text and a few memorable characters and scenes to prod the adventure along, is more than enough to create lasting fulfilling experience in my mind.

>>12447001
Every time the age-old argument, "Are games art?" comes up, I feel they've missed the point. Like overly story-heavy games, the comprehension seems to be that games must model themselves after another medium, like novels or film or painting or photography, and that there's nothing else but to fit in one of these pigeonholes. Longer stories, more complex characters, creative cinematopraphy, endlessly higher-resolution graphics and photorealism.. all of these are missing, deep down at their core, the realization that the experience of a game, while influenced by these components, is not merely the sum of all of them, and can even be entirely independent of them.

Our brains model the world through abstract stories and transmit stories through symbols. They are a natural, efficient, and emotional way for us to communicate ideas, and create avenues to express things that can't or needn't be expressed in only explicit language or simple accurate reproductions of history. Think of a "hero". Do you need to fully model it in your mind, every single physical detail, in order to intellectually judge whether it's appropriately heroic? Or can you immediately FEEL that in the core of your being, that immediate sensation that encompasses heroism? Video games, especially RPGs, fill this niche brilliantly. They're a way to transplant a feeling, ane motional state, across time and space. Part of that certainly CAN be a nice arc of a game story, but there's so much more going on than just that. When a game relies too heavily on text or voice acting, it just feels unbalanced to me, like the author would rather be living out a career as a novelist or animator, and has missed the forest for the trees.

>>12447001
>>12447005
I have always played RPGs to "see numbers go up" AKA see my characters get stronger.

Storyniggers and LARPERS can jump off a bridge.

>>12447008
>I don't have serious opinions, I just need /vr/ as a place to vent vitriol and violent fantasies and generally act unhappy
Ok

>>12447013
Seems like a lot of projecting, I just find it dumb you think people are not sure why they play rpgs, I already knew since the moment I played my first one.

>>12447017
>unable to differentiate self from culture
>posts from the amygdala, not the prefrontal cortex
Ok

>>12447020
Nah most people who cares about actual rpg play then for that, saying crap like "only rpgs can have good stories" or "are the only genre capable of making good stories" are just retarded secondaries who don't give a shit about the actual RPG gameplay.

>>12447028
>most people
I don't believe you habitually interact with other people. Your ego-driven behavior and need to shitpost doesn't really suggest it to me.

>>12444313
I like typing stuff up and the NPCs react and talk about it.

>>12447031
Says the retard that thinks people play shooters and beat em ups just because "hurr hurr shooting and beating"
Yeah bro you're so smart for playing rpgs

File: wizardry_proving.jpg (88 KB, 638x982)

88 KB JPG

>>12444313
I plan RPGs for exploration and combat, which is how they started.

>>12447045
Based, this guy gets it

>>12447037
>Says the retard that thinks people play shooters and beat em ups just because "hurr hurr shooting and beating"
That is not what I said at all. I suggest you work on your reading comprehension; I explicitly outlined that as a mistaken example of genre being defined by people who DON'T understand what it was that appeals to them. That is kind of the entire point of the opening statement. The people who say "RPGs are for the story" are precisely the same as the people who say "Beatemups are only for beating", PRECISELY in agreement with your claim. Do you see now the importance of careful reading?

To continue, even by your own admission, you aren't genuinely realizing your own draw to the genre (ironically behaving exactly like the people you point at in you post). If you only care about numbers going up, why RPGs at all? Why not ProgressQuest, or Lone Wolf-style solo paperbacks, or adding columns in a spreadsheet?

There's something about the aesthetic that draws you to the game, the experience of it all, and the way it communicates the abstraction of how those numbers going up influences your party and your relationship to the environment around them. You are, quite honestly, *proving* what I laid out. If you ONLY cared about number going up, there are much better games that streamline that process without the segments where numbers don't go up. There are any number of ways to achieve the satisfaction of mathematics without what you claim is, but know in your heart is not, cruft.

>>12444313
Personally I prefer the kind of story where if it's scripted it doesn't affect the characters personally. I like creating my own characters and imagining what they're feeling and thinking myself. That makes actually playing the game, by exploring, fighting, sleeping at inns, dying, getting hurt etc. feel like part of the characters' personal story. If the game has too much scripted story affecting the characters, then that can interfere with my own made up character stories and can even make the gameplay feel more hollow (unless it's a REALLY fun game system, but that still doesn't remove that dissonance between story and gameplay). Best is when the written story just concerns the world at large, like the threat to the world that my characters have to prevent. Or if there's fleshed out NPCs, that their relationship with my characters remain general enough that it doesn't clash with my view of them.

>>12447064
>the classic if you only like rpgs for the gameplay why not play excel tier shit or auto battlers
Because it's not all the gameplay, what's the point of getting good characters if the battles you're going to use those characters for are fucking awful?

Looking at a stopwatch it's not the same as looking at your characters's get stronger.

>>12446868
>N...n....noo y..ou
>average youtuber

This site was better without third world retards

I like my RPGs where literally every system and mechanic is some sort of unexplained puzzle you have to figure out.

I like both. Depends what I'm in the mood for. Depending on which, it decides how the gameplay and story interaction is done throughout the entirety of it.

>>12444374
Ultima V is literally the best rpg of the 80s.

>>12444313
>Do you prefer your rpgs to be narrative driven or encourage player expression and freedom?
in theory I prefer games that encourage freedom but in practice those games are usually aimless and dont properly account for things a player should be able to do. If my freedom just results in me wandering around different towns talking to every npc (something id be doing anyway) and waiting for something to happen then I would just prefer you give me a compelling narrative that gives me a reason to care.

The Ultima games after IV up to VII inclusively are pretty good about this, no?

>>12444350
Is ultima big on YouTube ?