To Us RPG Fans: It'll Be OK

Dragon Age Origins Blog itllbeok An Optimists View on Dragon Age 2 and RPGs in General

Change is inherently scary. Change creates uncertainty and most humans (at least almost all that I’ve met) would prefer not to be blind-sided by something they didn’t expect. Human nature also often dictates that when change is on the horizon, fear is a natural response because the brain calculates the possibility of negative results and amplifies those more than potential positive results. Suffice to say, I’m not suprised at the early reactions of many Dragon Age fans who are already prognosticating the doom of the Dragon Age brand and of BioWare’s RPGs. RPGs as a genre are in some trouble, I’d say. But allow me to try to allay your fears and reassure you that although Dragon Age and the RPG genre as a whole may be changing, it’ll all be OK.

First, let me put this out there: we hardcore RPG fans, myself included, we’re awesome. But because we’re awesome, we suck.

Let’s face it friends, us RPG fans, we’re elitists, whether we want to admit it or not. We’ve played games for years that are equivalent to interactive books, with characters and plotlines that pull at our heart strings and pull us deep into a living world while others have gone around shooting each other in the face. We’ve made choices that affect lives and live with the consequences of those actions, unlike thugs who go around jacking cars and beating hookers to death with baseball bats. We’ve spent hundreds, thousands more like, of hours saving kingdoms and defeating evil over and over again while others have spent  it playing hundreds and thousands of games of football and created virtual dynasties. And we think we’re better because of it. If you can honestly say you’ve never belittled someone else’s video games because they’re NOT playing hardcore RPGs, then you are some hybrid being of the genre that I envy.

And we’re a fearful bunch because our beloved RPGs in their pure form are dying. We’ve seen MMOs ravage the genre as developers move away from traditional single player experiences to cash-cow online worlds. We’ve witnessed “RPG elements” being whored out to just about every genre. We’ve weathered the storm as customization and control moves away from our hands toward a more built in form. And we take it quite personally. I understand. I do too.

It’s happened across every RPG sub-set as the genre becomes more and more fragmented and it seems no one can even completely define what the term RPG means any more. But from Dragon Quest to Final Fantasy to Ultima through Baldur’s Gate and Elder Scrolls and Dragon Age and many others, every RPG series is seeming to lose a little bit of its former identity and become more “mainstream.”

And one of these days we’re all going to have to accept a couple facts that we like to ignore.

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