I'm just going to say it, Dark Souls and the other From Software souls games (including Bloodborne) feature character questlines that usually involve you finding or freeing them from obscure areas, or going through an esoteric series of actions (kill this thing, but only before this boss, but make sure to go back to this area and talk to them, etc) in order to further their stories.
Very rarely do you have to actually get something for a character (and almost no fetch quests, since nobody will tell you what you need to fetch, outside of vague mysterious hints), and usually it's because they're a merchant who needs a better item to power up the wares they sell to you.
Obligatory "play Disco Elysium"! It's a great non-conventional RPG that tackles some pretty heavy topics and foregoes a lot of the usual RPG tropes. Best way I'd pitch it is it's like Hunter S. Thompson is the DM of a true detective game that takes place in a post-Soviet county. And the Chapo guys voice some of the NPCs which is kind of neat.
Thinking about a time I was in addicting games playing a defend the fort from stick figures games. You could hire gunners to shoot them down. I remember being with a friend who managed to make it so that you didn't have to do any of the clicking yourself and you could open a different tab and still win. I asked him, "what's the point then?" It took us both for a loop.
Also in Old School RuneScape, mobility is a reward for progression. You go from having to run and being exhausted to having limited teleports, to run energy conversation, to many teleports, to generally unlimited run energy, to a central hub of every teleport in unlimited quantity. But by time you get a nexus portal and an enchanted jewelry cabinet in your house, there's not too many places you need to go to do anything.
Progression systems are fickle.
Hades is a neat counterexample, at least in the mainline plot — you're doing your thing for personal, even selfish reasons. It does get recontextualized later on, though, and I think that recontextualization speaks to why games are this way.
Depending on what you want to focus on, a game can only accomplish so much, and RPGs, which are typically focused on the journey of just a few characters, need to make sacrifices to focus on those characters. Aside from the most wild developer fantasies, you can't really simulate a whole living world and tell deeply personal stories and have engaging minute-to-minute gameplay. So with RPGs, where the mechanics are kind of innately focused on just a few characters, the narrative also kind of has to focus on those characers. It just leads to a more developable game, more intertwining between mechanics and narrative. Otherwise you're spending all this time with faceless stat blocks.
In Hades, the core gameplay loop stays pretty much the same, but the reasons you're doing it changes — that allows the developer to fit a whole lot of narrative in the flow of the game while reusing that core gameplay loop. It's the same in GTA: you do the same driving and shooting, but for different reasons. GTA especially does a lot with the quest-giver role, where a slight variation on a street race would be a lot more boring without Brucie's roided-out bellowing, and that sort of benefit is where the quest-giver role shines. The narrative of your characters intertwines with someone else, you get a bunch of (hopefully) good voice acting and writing, you see a new side to your protagonists, and the plot or mechanics can advance.
The quest-giver role is just too powerful a narrative tool for designers to ignore most of the time. It lets you put all these things that a game is made of into one place and make them work together.
Great, another reason to go get Hades. I feel like I need to play Pyre and Transistor before Hades though.
Transistor is fantastic even though I had to try it a few separate times to really get into it.
Pyre has super strong aesthetics, but I never really got into it.
In any case, Hades can definitely stand on its own even if you never play the others. Supergiant is worth supporting, but you don't need to do it in order
I didn't play pyre or transistor either, but I'm really considering going back to play transistor. I trust supergiant's design sensibilities to be engaging even if I've played another of their games with similar mechanical themes.
Hades is in no way an open-world game though, and it's not much of an RPG either.
For the point I'm making, it's functionally the same as an RPG: character-focused with a mostly linear main storyline
Funny, I thought a roleplaying game was a game which involved roleplaying. Disco Elysium doesn't even have a battle system and it's the best RPG I've played in years.
That's a definition of RPG that hasn't really fit strictly in years. Even if it did, the aspect of RPGs that OP is discussing isn't actually that part, and isn't super inherent to open-world games or RPGs anyway. Hades serves as interesting contrast to the dynamic OP is talking about
And narrative FPS games are usually the protagonist leading things (often alone). There's probably a technical reason for this. Making a compelling RPG would require lots of effort and money. Capitalism ruins the day again.
Unfortunately for me, I guess, the few DND pen and paper games I played were a bit too similar to CRPGs except I had to do the math myself and they were combat heavy games. If I could get a computer to do the things that a computer does well but leave the rest for human creativity, I might play pen and paper (and computer stat sheet/combat roll calculator) again.
I tried to think of counterexamples, and all I'm coming up is stuff like Minecraft or Stardew Valley, and survival games in general where you're building stuff for yourself out of locally gathered resources.
I've realized this about skyrim. It makes it harder to do any kind of roleplay character outside of "champion of the people". At a bare minimum, you have to help 3-5 people to gain a house so you can store all your loot.
I'm hoping that since they have had nine years to get feedback, the latest skyrim is going to be a lot more immersive and rounded out.
True, but your speech had to be insanely high to even get that perk. You would need a house long before that
In fairness "Doing stuff for other people" is pretty damn broad lol.
I know I never shut up about Kenshi, but this time it's appropriate. It's the only game I've played that actually makes fun of you for trying to play it like Skyrim, and there's no Chosen One bullshit: You start off weak as hell, broke, starving, and with every other faction bullying you. There is no goal, no questline, and no central story, just a brutal open world sandbox that fucking hates you and defies you to change it. I"m currently waging a bloody people's war against the Slavers and the corrupt Trader's Guild that finances them. By now the whole empire has heard what happened at Eyesocket Slave Market: A group of insane criminals freed all the prisoners, then held a trial where every slaver was found guilty and executed via crossbow firing squad. Some of the newly freed slaves even decided to join up with my group.
As crossbowmen:sicko-yes:
That is the standard for RPGs, and it is really annoying. It feels like games have to go really out of their way to avert that.
Like, in Mass Effect 1, you effectively are just working for the Council and Anderson, but the game goes really far out of its way with the dialog to make it seem like they're not GIVING you a quest, they're giving you intelligence and it's up to you to apply it. Like, especially as you're leaving the Citadel for the first time, they're really quick to back off if you seem like you're taking their word as law, there's a lot of hedging and "no, it's up to you Shepard, do what you think is best".
Does Zelda count here? Going back to even the NES games, you had these secondary quests on the overworld that rewarded you with cool stuff. The first game had you find a letter in a cave and you have to bring it to an old woman to buy potions. Every Zelda game has secondary quests (or fetch quests if you want to call them that) like the heart pieces and certain items that become valuable later on (Ocarina of Time and most games after that had the whole 'trade sequence' to get a powerful weapon, Link to the Past has the ice rod you have to locate on your own and later use in a boss fight).
The Zelda series might have even started this trend come to think of it. The first Zelda game had several heart containers spread out across the map. What made it so fun back in the day was exploring the overworld and finding hidden stuff. You burn a bush and find a staircase leading underground, or bomb a wall and find a cave. This made you want to try searching every screen of the map.
One thing I miss from the older GTAs was you had the hidden packages which were something of a fetch quest, but you got rewarded with weapons for it. San Andreas took this out and replaced it with the graffiti tags, photo ops and horseshoes, and while it rewarded you weapons, it wasn't the same. GTA 4 and 5 had fetch quests too but you didn't get rewarded with weapons.
Interesting, I feel the opposite. I love just exploring in open world games in the first place, but BOTW is absolutely the best for that for me. I love being able to just walk anywhere and find something reasonably interesting. Even if it's just a Korok Seed, I feel like I'm finding it through my own effort and curiosity.
If BOTW is the only one you've played, you're really missing out if you like retro games. Link to the Past is on GOAT lists of games for a reason, it's truly aged superbly.
