r/gaming • u/Asianboiforwhitedad • 10h ago

Kingdom Come Deliverance studio co-founder says a lot of RPGs are 'still games for teenagers,' and that he's 'tired of all the RPGs where you are this chosen one'

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/kingdom-come-deliverance-studio-co-founder-says-a-lot-of-rpgs-are-still-games-for-teenagers-and-that-hes-tired-of-all-the-rpgs-where-you-are-this-chosen-one/
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u/PowerSamurai 9h ago

I think you are misunderstanding the issue. The issue is not that you are the main character in the story since that is always the case. It is that it restricts role play, who your character is and in game it is a tired trope.

It is interesting to explore fantasy worlds through several lenses and especially in an rpg to define yourself within the world through your decisions.

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u/kueso 9h ago

Yea, I think there’s a difference between “you’re born to save the world” à la Legend of Zelda types of stories and the “you’re put in a situation where you get challenged and have to make the best of it”. I think both tell hero stories but one has more moral quandaries and leaves room for difficult decisions.

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u/FarrMixture 8h ago

Yeah, that distinction makes a lot of sense. Being thrown into a situation and rising to it feels way more satisfying than being destined for it from the start

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u/Korashy 52m ago

Kinda depends.

Destiny can be a bitch.

Kratos tries so hard and still can't escape fate.

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u/VruKatai1972 8h ago

Or, you get a game like BG3 that was so well written, the player can take any moral path they want and the story allows for those choices.

As others have said, this isn't actually a gameplay issue as we're always the player. It's really a writing issue in the stories told and that's where player=savior is the real implication of any trope. Some of the best stories that games get built around have really ambiguous endings and journeys to those endings.

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u/EremiticFerret 7h ago

It isn't *only* a writing issue, it is a development issue as well. You need the time and resources to develop all those side paths and different approaches to the problem.

It is far, far easier and faster to develop the game so you can't avoid the Druid Grove, then the Druids are invulnerable so you can't be evil and wipe them out and the forced into the "find Halsin" quest. Arguably the writing is the easiest part going from that to what we got.

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u/FlailToMace 6h ago

Or, you get a game like BG3 that was so well written, the player can take any moral path they want and the story allows for those choices.

That has yet to be anywhere close to done. BG3 is a great game, but the writing doesn't take into account that healers are a thing. It is like how DBZ tries to pretend there are stakes, when multiple forms of dragon balls are a thing. Only in reverse.

Divine magic that can bring people back from the dead is a thing. I quite specifically created a character that can do such a thing. They even have a scroll of true rez in their backpack. It can bring someone back to life even if there isn't a body.

Someone got hit with an arrow however so nothing can be done. They shouldn't have been an NPC.

BG3 might be the least railroaded campaign in any D&D video game, but it is still a railroad with a pretty simple track. An option to bottom for a bear doesn't change that.

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u/s0ck 6h ago

That magic exists, and as per the rules, typically comes at heavy cost, far beyond what your average adventurer could afford.

GMs typically waive that part away, but the rules as written define the setting and world. Hence, getting hit by an arrow and dying isn't unusual. It's still the expected outcome for the overwhelming majority of characters in the setting.

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u/FlailToMace 4h ago

That magic exists, and as per the rules, typically comes at heavy cost, far beyond what your average adventurer could afford.

... unless a cleric PC who is super into healing just happens to be twenty feet from you.

BG3 is expansive. You can kill anyone, talk to anyone, flirt with anyone, and even engage in acts of pseudo bestiality. It is however on rails that disallow basic interactions. Such as using the ability you have specifically to stop the thing that that is happening in front of you from happening.

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u/Normal-Cellist205 3h ago

A player character of sufficient level can pretty easily heal or even resurrect people. Yes, in lore healing magic is rare and expensive and difficult to learn, but that doesn’t translate to the actual mechanics of D&D, where a PC can learn that magic on level-up and use it all the time. 

By extension, BG3 has the same problem, only it’s worse obvious because it’s a video game. A sufficiently quick-thinking dungeon master can change the story or circumstances so that a key NPC being revived does not break the story. A game can’t change on the fly, so when you try to revive an NPC whose revival would break the story, the game just says "nuh uh, you can’t use that magic this time" without elaboration.

It’s an unavoidable problem but I can 100% understand why it might be frustrating or immersion-breaking.

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u/Deaffin 5h ago

Or, you get a game like BG3 that was so well written, the player can take any moral path they want and the story allows for those choices.

Granted, I only played an hour or so of that one, but that's absolutely definitely not true. I'd be hearing...things, about it. Pseudo-bestiality is certainly a choice, but it's far from encompassing the full spectrum of moral dubiosity.

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u/ash_ninetyone 7h ago

Unless somehow someone manages to make a story work where you're just some guy that happens to save the world whilst the actual hero takes the credit.

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u/Magnusg 3h ago

There's a legitimately mediocre isekai that covers roughly how I feel about this.

It's called something very similar to: I can believe I'm trapped in this stupid otome game

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u/urixl 8h ago

I think Gothic does a really good balance between tropes.

Nameless Hero knows he's just nobody, a convict thrown in the colony, where's no return from.

He mocks this trope every time, yet agrees to do the quests.

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u/Chowder110 3h ago

And then there are games like fable

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u/Demiurge_1205 8h ago

Exactly. Cyberpunk 2077, to name a mainstream recent example, does give you a legendary macguffin that everyone wants. But you get it thru sheer dumb luck, and all that you ammount to is to make some sense of your current condition by the endgame. Yes, some world changing events do occur, but mostly because you are a cog in a larger machine that moves accordingly.

I also remember Zombi U, which functioned a bit like a soulslike: whenever you died, you character was dead for good, but a new character would appear to pick the slack and your leftover gear.