genre: rpg / strategy / fantasy
Since when does tactics/tactical equal strategy/strategic? Is there some strategy aspect to this game that I don't know about? (If there is maybe I would have to reevaluate the game -- I didn't see any strategy component in the video I linked though.) GOG does have a "tactical" tag they use for games (see
here), so if there's no strategy component in the game then the use of the "strategy" tag rather than the "tactical" tag would seem to be just confusing.
That doesn't tell you much (since e.g. as far as I can remember Darklands may have only had 2 unique "battlemaps" for random encounters, yet Darklands was an open world RPG without an immersion-breaking artificially small battle areas, so the above could just mean "just like Darklands but with 90 times more environmental variety for random encounters", and I wouldn't complain about that).
"Blackguards, a new turn-based strategy RPG"
Apparently some people now put the words "strategy" and "RPG" together to mean something that contains neither strategy nor an RPG. Even so, the gamecard has "rpg / strategy / fantasy", not "strategy rpg / fantasy", and those two would appear to mean two different things. (It's not even "strategy / rpg / fantasy" which would at least put the words in the same order as "strategy RPG".) Plus, the more accurate (though still potentially wrong) term for this would appear to be
Tactical RPG -- at least "tactical RPG"s actually include tactics, even if the RPG part may or may not be lacking.
real.geizterfahr: They're not advertising this as a RPG.
From the GOG announcement:
"And this time--it's an RPG." (I don't really even want to hear what contorted explanation you might come up with on how that is
not advertising it as an RPG.)
real.geizterfahr: A turn based strategy RPG (as it is clearly stated everywhere)
Eek -- if you consider the take-away from all of the above snippets to be clear...
Also, your previous post said "turn based tactical combat games" (not "strategy RPG" or even "tactical RPG"), and
that's what I said Blackguards wasn't being advertised as. I said it was being advertised as an RPG, but now you seem to be saying it's a "strategy RPG",
not an "RPG", but then:
real.geizterfahr: but character creation, stat-developmentg, dice rolling, skill tree, experience points...
All this makes this game a RPG Would you make up your mind!? So now you claim it
is an RPG, but they (and by "they" I just mean the GOG crew) are
not advertising it as an RPG, even though they say
"And this time--it's an RPG.", and you claim that it's all perfectly clear!
I think I am now speechless...
For the sake of my own sanity, I may have to decline going any deeper into this particular abyss you have created.
real.geizterfahr: But you have to realize two things.... First: It is a game.
I already realized the purpose of the treasure chest behavior and noted that in
my original post when I said
"I understand it as a game mechanic, but that does nothing to reduce its immersion-destructive nature." It's a perfectly good game mechanic for a not-supposed-to-be-believable-anyways puzzle game. It's total trash in an RPG (as in
"an actual role-playing game allowing for actual role-playing") where immersion (which includes not getting frequently smacked upside the head by non-sensical game-world behavior) is an important component.
real.geizterfahr: Second: It is a turn based srategy game.
What? Now it's a turn based strategy game?
So is it like Age of Wonders, Warlords or Imperialism (which I like) or Eador (which I don't care for)? :-P
(Hey, I told you I would "decline going any deeper into this particular abyss", so humor is my chosen refuge here. When so many words are used so haphazardly, as if they have no real meaning, it's just impossible to have a fruitful discussion. And of course, whether or not Blackguards had been advertised as a "tactical combat game" or equivalent rather than an RPG, your
original post still doesn't make sense because as already stated, I never suggested removing tactical combat from the game.)
The words you are (or at least should be) looking for are "puzzle game element". Let me explain:
In an RPG, everything should make sense in terms of the fictional world the game defines -- the game is a simulation of that fictional world (or at least some part of it). I'm not aware of any game developers that have pulled that off yet, though (at least for reasonably complex game worlds), so we settle for lesser game creations that try to provide the illusion of that. In a non-abstract strategy game ("non-abstract" here meaning "set in some real or fictional world" as opposed to a purely abstract game like "go"), again everything should make sense -- the whole land/map should be a simulation. Many games (ignoring some glitches like bad path-finding AI) have pulled that off -- it's not actually that hard to do since it's just combat (and perhaps some building, resources, and production), though it should be noted that such simulations, though not purely abstract,
are abstracted to a significant degree -- they are not simulating battles at a quantum physics or atomic level, but rather at a much higher and more abstract level (such as using simple scalar hit-points, to-hit and damage stats for units). Tactical is like strategy, but on a smaller scale and with a "closer to the ground" (details) perspective.
Then there's puzzle games (and purely abstract strategy games). These games don't need to make sense. The up-side of that is that the rules can be completely arbitrary. The arbitrary rules allow for a greater variety to be achieved more easily because you don't have to rationalize the rules, just spell them out (or for some puzzle games, leave the player to figure them out for themselves). The down-side is that such games do not provide the player the experience of "being there and doing that" -- there is no "there" or "that" (without which, there can be no role-playing, which is why there is no such thing as a "purely abstract RPG").
What Daedalic has done here (with the treasure chest "feature") is inject what is essentially a puzzle game element into an RPG. Now, "puzzle game element injected into RPG" is not automatically bad, but if you're going to do that the puzzle has to appear
as a puzzle in the RPG.
For example, in an RPG your character(s) may discover some artifact a wizard has left behind and believe it can provide entrance to the wizard's vault, but the artifact has multiple pieces that have to be arranged "just so" before the vault will open. Now because this artifact is presented as a puzzle in the game world, the rules of that particular puzzle can be pretty much anything and it will not break immersion because the rules of the puzzle are not directly tied to the rules of the game world. (The only thing that needs to be plausible here is that a wizard in this game world could have constructed or acquired such a device, the means of which need not even be specified.)
The way the treasure chest puzzle game element has been injected in Blackguards, though, is not as a puzzle within the game, but as the behavior of a common game-world item. That is, in order for this to not be immersion-breaking, the game's definition of the game world would have to explain how/why treasure chests just vanish or otherwise become inaccessible, which to my knowledge it does not.
I could imagine setting up such an explanation, but it would involve something like pocket universes and your opponents being magically linked to the pocket universe they are in so as soon as you kill them the pocket universe ceases to exist and ejects you (as foreigners not linked to the pocket) and everything you are holding, while everything else is uncreated along with the pocket universe itself. But that only raises more questions. For example, why is every set of opponents you encounter so linked? The game world would have to allow for a plausible explanation for that and other questions, and then any additional questions
those explanations raised, etc. (Trying to do a post-facto rationalization of puzzle game elements injected in the game is likely to be difficult and/or lead to some game-world definition that itself strains credulity -- it's generally going to be better to lay the game-world rules down first and then build the game within that space. This difficulty in post-facto rationalization is also a reason not to expect the player to just handle it -- they won't, it's too damn hard to do just to play a game.)
Now, if you don't care about immersion or actually being able to role-play in your role-playing games, rather you play RPGs as "just games" to be solved/finished/powered-through/whatever, then the fact that this treasure chest "feature" is frequent, prominent and immersion-breaking won't matter to you. Hopefully you can see that if, on the other hand, one is trying to suspend-disbelief and role-play in this world, such a constant reminder that it's "just a game" could be problematic.
