Gamelandia

Dante’s Infernya is a mischievous cat simulator the sees you attempting to wreck all your owner’s belongings without getting caught!

10 indies I’m really looking forward to playing:

Minecraft Players:

Like, take Baldur’s Gate. Along with the Fallout series, it basically established the formula that mainstream CRPGs follow to this day; in terms of the genre’s history, it’s kind of a Big Deal.

It game engine is so incredibly limited that it can’t script combat. The only way to have a fight in a cutscene is to literally have a couple of AI characters fight each other and hope the intended party wins.

Normally you can arrange this simply by giving the participants unbalanced stats, but since it’s a real fight, with real (well, virtual) dice rolls, unlikely outcomes are always possible.

The upshot is that during the prologue, when the Big Bad shows up to assassinate the player character’s mentor, there’s a small but non-zero chance that the game will softlock during the ensuing cutscene because your mentor scored a freak crit and killed the baddie before the plot even gets started.

Is there any particular reason why the game engines of WRPG have always been so… well, “buggy”?

Budgets and QA practices are definitely part of it, but I think a great deal of it is basically a case of the old “when all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” problem.

In a nutshell, JRPGs tend to be developed as collections of discrete modes or minigames: you have one mode for navigating the world map, another for interacting with NPCs in town, another for exploring dungeons, and still another for combat. These modes may share features, and certainly there are JRPGs that don’t follow this pattern, but in general the game’s subsystems are separate tools, each built for a particular purpose.

WRPGs, conversely, tend to start with a combat engine, then try to cram absolutely everything into that combat engine, no matter how ill-suited a tool it is for the task at hand. You can see this phenomenon in play as early as the original Fallout games, which oblige you to use the combat engine’s awkward hex-grid-based movement even when you’re just walking around in settlements, but implementing cutscenes as combat scripts is another big culprit, and Baldur’s Gate is by no means the only offender there.

Let’s take Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, for example. There’s a quest partway through the game where a cutscene may softlock based on whether a particular character has their Stealth skill active at the time that you trigger it. Why? Because cutscenes are implemented as combat scripts, and consequently, and if your Awareness skill isn’t high enough to beat the NPC in question’s Stealth check, the cutscene trigger that initiates dialogue with them fails because you can’t see them.

Reach for the sky.

Since someone reposted my art, I guess it’s better to just put them all in one post and share it from the original source with you guys. Thanks for everyone who’s kind enough to tell me about this!

Everyone is here except Mr.Doomfist.