all right welcome back to uh the last lecture for this week we're gonna be talking about rpgs and i don't mean rocket propelled grenades so different kind of rpg uh so in this case i am talking about role-playing games and so in a role-playing game you're primarily the acronym kind of describes what it is that it is which is a tautology anyway uh you have a role that you carry with you through the game and your these games tend to be highly developed highly focused on developing the one particular role or one particular character and progressing them into either through a leveling up process or through equipment or bonuses or abilities improvements or whatever progressing them into something that is more powerful than what you started with and so unlike an engine building game where there's kind of a system that is progressing in this case you are progressing a a person or a character typically through this process and so you start with very little and then you acquire you acquire more so uh a short list of what could be considered essential elements for this type of game yeah i guess to varying and we could argue about them um but so i already mentioned the ability to improve a character over the course of the game either through statistics or levels most of the time there's some sort of menu-based combat system so that you can do more than one thing so you can choose between a variety of skills or weapons uh or armor or something like that you're not limited to just a slash okay or all right i've got to attack i've just got to punch you that's all i can do now there's either different types of attacks or different types of weapons usually there's a narrative theme or quest that runs through the game as a as a general storyline with optional side quests kind of like this course you're in the middle of a role playing game course sort of uh loose loosely tied together with tropes from role-playing games that might be more appropriate way of describing it um you can interact with elements of the environment so this yeah it lists here some of the things you can kind of do lock picking disarming communication so on and so forth and then there are other kinds of characters there are non-player characters a lot of the time that you don't control and there are other kinds of abilities that you can inhabit or that help to define you so you see classes would be a the kind of thing like a wizard a thief a warrior that they mentioned here on the previous slide i showed i think a demon hunter class from diablo which i'll talk about in a second so the classic example this would be dungeons and dragons where you create a character on a character sheet like the one shown here um there are rules for how you can go about creating a character uh you can buy uh dungeons and dragons the player handbook for the fifth edition and it will tell you all about it basically will guide you through this process of how do you create a character that then you can use in the world of dungeons and dragons for role-playing game and so that doesn't exist in real life there's no you can certainly create your own miniature to represent this thing but it's basically just in your head and on the sheet of paper essentially and so this is kind of the classic version of role-playing games when most people think about it this is what they think of um and it's you need well we'll talk a little bit more about the dm i think uh later but you you need someone who's really good at directing a dungeons and dragons game uh kind of helping the story along and so that can be hard to find it's hard to find a group a lot of times these take a long time too an individual gaming session could be four hours or more and so it takes a lot of commitment and it usually is not just one sessions usually over a long time period of time so um recently very successful would be the game gloomhaven which is a board game costs about a hundred dollars it's ginormous as you can see here yes that is a small dog but that is also a very big box for this board game the box weighs 22 pounds uh and it is massive so uh here's the setup for what might be the very first mission of the game it's that's crazy there's too much stuff there's a huge amount of stuff gloomhaven is basically a dnad game in a box and it's got a lot of stuff because the um the game itself has to be the dungeon master or the game master or the the one who's controlling kind of the various enemies and storylines and things that you're fighting against so playing gloomhaven you don't need a dm you don't need someone who's super skilled at that because the the game is designed to do that for you it's pretty complicated um and there are other ways if you're if you're interested in this kind of thing and seeing what it's like i would recommend maybe starting with uh gloomhaven jaws of the lion which is a simpler version of this um but it gives you a good sense for what dungeons and dragons it really is uh and what's going on behind the scenes with it and what do you mean that there's this role or that check or this kind of thing or you know um yeah there's a lot of freedom there as well there's a lot there is some role playing gloomhaven tends to be a bit more heavy on the dungeon crawling side of it that is just beating up monsters and less on the roll side of it uh which is kind of a shame but that's the hardest part to do honestly but since then uh there are tons of video games that are could be considered kind of role playing games and at this point in the course we are going to start training we saw it even in the last lecture we're going to start transitioning over into the video game side of things and there's there's quite a bit of crossover but we'll spend a lot of a lot of time next week particularly talking about video games so i'm going to start talking about them now a lot of these games have role-playing game aspects to them i already mentioned diablo but i'm sure i'm missing some here elder scrolls skyrim that kind of thing the witcher series dark souls star wars even has their own version um knights of the old republic one and two which was uh it's actually really good i i've enjoyed it lots of good role playing um potential there in terms of very narrow title lots of conversation lots of decisions yes it's it's it's somewhat structured but yeah path of exile is a free game if your graphics card can handle it uh very similar to diablo in some respects it's this um action rpg so it's very very point and click heavy yeah click on that bad guy click on that bad guy um divinity original sin and balder's gate three so divinity original sin is arguably one of the best role playing games made for pc or for video video role playing game made by larian studios uh one and two it's just incredible depth and breadth to the game and so it's the same same creators who are now working on baldur's gate 3 which i think is still in beta anyway very expensive though i think the game is like 60 or 70 or something like that but ballers gate 3 is is basically dungeons and dragons and they actually show you like that um in some of the demonstrations they did while they were working on the game they've got dice rolls happening behind the scenes basically there's a there's a computer that's rolling dice kind of the way you would roll them in dungeons and dragons and you're doing you know this ability check or that skill check or or something like that um so pretty crazy and then uh world of warcraft world of warcraft is big enough talking about rpgs that i'm going i'm going to return to talk about that at the end of this it deserves its own as its own thing all right so why does this work so harkening back to the last lecture we talked about different kinds of fun right fantasy uh sensation narrative challenge fellowship discovery expressions mission dungeons and dragons is unique in the sense that it fits almost all of these with with arguably submission being the only one that it's it's it does require your attention most of the time it does require your brain power um but it hits all of these categories uh in terms of sensation right it's very a lot of times it's very mini heavy miniature heavy and there are um in the role playing part of the game you can do voice acting so you change your voice to try and be a particular kind of character it's all imaginary if you're all about telling a story there's these massive challenges mixed with puzzles and those kinds of things you're working together as a group lots of fellowship within the group you're uncovering all this stuff the the dungeon master the dm has prepared for you uh is the story is very exploratory and it's never the same thing twice you don't have to worry about replayability tons of express expressivity creativity that's allowed and encouraged in this thing and so this is one of the reasons why i think it's been so attractive to to people and has really seen a resurgence in the last five years or something like that um yeah in fact uh you'll see there's a you can find this on youtube but there's um a group called critical role they they film themselves on youtube um with uh this guy here uh blanking on his name now as the the dm but they basically just record themselves playing dungeons and dragons and you can see what it's about and what it's like and it's they're very involved very good friends uh you know very committed to it very uh very in yeah yeah they take it pretty seriously um and so it's pretty pretty high level d d but you can get a sense for kind of the amount of fun that can be had in in playing this particularly with uh i think his name's matt uh particularly with someone who's uh who's in a very good dm and the difference that that makes and yeah they even with the actions that they teach because they are individual people a lot of times can end up surprising him and so he has to adjust to that so it's fun it's fun for everybody in that group so there's things like this that are out there uh for you if you wanted if you want to look at that all right so let's uh now that i've talked a little bit about i i'm not going to spend a huge amount of time on rpg games because they're so involved that none of you are going to make an rpg board game it's just it's just way way too much work the most you might do is create a character that has some sort of flavor text background story or something like that so but uh when it comes to video games these things like the like the ones i mentioned originate essentially from this this d kind of thing and in rpgs in terms of video games the game master of the dungeon master is played by the ai by the computer script and they're going to it's some sort of ai it's some sort of programming some sort of software in the background that decides how everybody who's not you acts um and so it again most of the time there's some sort of central storyline with uh slight side quests that are connected to but don't necess you can you can take them or leave them it's essential storyline usually so original sin is a good example of this that you you have to in order to move through the game at all you you have to follow through the central storyline but there's other things off to the side where if you don't do them it doesn't really affect gameplay it doesn't really affect anything but that's not necessarily and well that was confusing it's not necessarily a necessary part that's that's nothing a central storyline is not an essential thing is it's shown by some of these newer mmorpgs which i'll i'll talk about in a second what that is all right so when it comes to rpgs there's a variety of different types and so i'm i'm moving progressively here from what i would call less narrative to more narrative so where that's it's not really fair to something like diablo or dark souls where there's a very strong story that that drives the whole thing if you care to pay attention but they're almost exclusively the attacking of the battling part early on and then as we progress through these you'll you'll see that there's much more interaction and talking and decisions that have to be made while you're talking than in something like diablo which is a lot of very fast clicking so diablo 3 is the most recent one and i think they're working on diablo 4 as well so mostly about battling there are some strategy kinds of things and it's live action battling so there's no pausing it so uh more strategy more strategical strategical strategy doesn't matter um so these are not live action these are turn-based strategy games so never winter series x-com or final fantasy um final fantasy has been successful enough that well this one's final fantasy xv so you know it's been around for a while where um you basically decide the game in the middle of the fight the game pauses and then you have an infinite amount of time essentially to decide what your characters are going to do for their next turn then they do it and the enemy responds and then the game you pause and then you decide what it is that your characters want to do so you have a lot of time to think about it thus the strategy part as opposed to something like diablo where you have to react it's about it's about reaction uh so from there you move to this more story based thing where the kinds of you can you can make different decisions in terms of the people that you talk to and that affects the gameplay and so it's not just okay i'm going to watch this cut scene this little video clip that's describing what's happened and then i'm going to go and fight the next bad guy now you're actually going to have a conversation with this person and it's going to give you options this person says here have this apple and then you have four options you say wow that's really great or i'm gonna punch you in the face and take this apple or you know let me give you some money please or to in exchange for this apple or you know you give you options and then depending on what you do it's going to affect how the game plays like so if you punch this person in the face when you're offering your apple they might attack you you know whereas if you say well thank you i'm going to pay you money well now you may have increased they say well that's really generous of you and so now when you see them again later on they're much more friendly to you which might mean that if you have to buy something from them they'll offer you a better price for it because you were kind to them earlier right you see so you start to see how these decisions can have an impact down the line and so fable is that way and the divinity series is that way as well which brings me to the mmorpgs with world of warcraft worldwide world of warcraft being the the predominant one so mmorpg stands for massive multiplayer online role playing game so it's an rpg so it's a role-playing game where you have a character but you exist in a world with tons of other people like real people from the world who also have their characters and so you can be interacting with you know so like let's say i've got this little dwarf guy i create my character on the the character creation screen and i create this little dwarf guy and he's running around and i can run into you know uh night elf or something that another person in france has created and this is their version of the the character they've created and we can interact now it's actually unlikely because where servers are located and so if you're in north america you'll probably be playing on the north american server so most of the people you interact with will be you know in north america or something like that but the idea is the same right it's multiplayer and it's online and so there's actually other people there that you that who are playing in the real world that you can be interacting with uh and so part of the game is interaction and so there's people who with world of warcraft and the stories are crazy there's people who met while playing their two characters like their dwarf from the night elf met in world of warcraft they started talking to each other they became friends and then they find out that they're like guy and girl and they like each other and they get married in like real life um so and that's that's actually happened he has been around for a long time i think the um the initial launch was like 2004 or something like that and it's still going so that's that's an incredible that's an impressive amount of longevity for a game like this so if you're interested uh you can play the first 20 levels for free i think uh through blizzard through their website through the classic version it demands because it is so um open world like you can go anywhere you can you can roam all over the place it takes up a ginormous amount of computer space and processing and so uh yeah so the first 20 levels are free but if you want to go beyond that you have to buy the base game and then you have to pay a monthly subscription fee for it as well which i think is like 15 a month or something like that but just to give you a sense of it there are there are roughly six million people who play this game per month with more than 500 000 playing it per day and every time a new expansion comes out or something like that it's it's somewhere around three and a half million copies of these expansions that sell in the first 24 hours so people are pretty heavily invested into it you can spend a lot there's almost nothing you never really run out of stuff to do you can spend a long long time on it so just to give you a sense of it all right because it's been around for so long it's it's come a long way so here you can see a screen from the alpha launch of world of warcraft and you can compare that to a more modern day version the graphics are a bit snappier a bit more detailed everything runs a bit smoother they now transition things to a more widescreen set shadows render a little bit better you know those kinds of things so it's definitely improved and come a long way in the time that's been around so it's kind of like the name in mmorpgs is world of warcraft there are other things that are out there i mentioned i think guild wars on the previous one but it's it's because it requires so much time and energy and money to set up something like this in the first place it's pretty hard at this point to compete with world of warcraft it's like well if you're gonna if you're gonna go after an audience who are you gonna go after well you're probably gonna try and steal away people who are already playing world of warcraft and why are they going to come to your thing when they already have world of warcraft and spend a ton of time on it and world of warcraft has now invested so much money i mean they were making they're making over 150 million in subscription fees per month for some of this stuff right and so they can turn that use that take that money and just put it right back into the game so at this point it's pretty hard i think to have anything to find the success of world of warcraft in terms of mmorpgs so i imagine it will keep going for for quite some time maybe something that someday will come wrong come along that will uh have a different set of characteristics that can uniquely compete with it but anyway that's the idea of the rpg um generally speaking and what's going on with that i think it's important to know about because there are aspects of it that can be really useful in board games some some of those kinds of things but uh in case you're curious about it or want to know what that's all about you can delve into all this stuff on the internet to your heart's content as well but hopefully that's enough to get you going at least