The Rise & Fall of the Cinematic RPG
Early computer RPGs tried to reproduce tabletop games. Player choice and dialogue dominated, while the combat was typically adopted from tabletop games under license. As at many D&D tables, a lighthearted tone prevailed, though the subject matter was often dark. Morrowind, though it has action-based combat, is representative. An awakened dark god infects the populace with his horrific divine disease, turning them into zombies with tentacles protruding from their faces, yet the tone is more comic than tragic. The leader of the Mage's Guild is a laughable political appointee. The slaving wizards of the east coast of Morrowind are amusingly insane. An incompetent mage falls from the sky in the first thirty minutes of the game. I have less experience with other early RPGs, but Baldur's Gate has characters intended almost purely for comic relief, like Minsc and his miniature giant space hamster.
RPG video games grew into serious business and came into their own as a genre. Increasingly convincing graphics made them more Hollywood movie than weekend tabletop game. By the late 00s BioWare's games transitioned from computer RPGs; digitalised versions of D&D campaigns, to cinematic RPGs more akin to interactive versions of the Stars Wars prequels or Lord of the Rings films of the same era, with the player character as hero. The Old Republic started the trend, but it truly arrived with Mass Effect in 2007.
Player choice narrowed from an earlier focus on the total freedom to do anything, something that Bethesda carried on in their games, to making, and playing, one's own hero as he wished. Random NPCs were no longer killable, but in every scenario the player could choose between a scout's honour or the edginess of an antihero. The tone changed to match. The silliness of earlier games faded, the comic relief was restrained and writing played to the newfound emotional weight that the visually convincing cutscenes could convey. Sometimes it fell flat. The Mass Effect trilogy ruined its ending by trying to make a point about the dangers of artificial life, rather than focusing on its already deeper, Tolkienian theme of fighting on in the face of unfathomable odds. But the cinematic RPG was the height of video game seriousness and depth of storytelling. Writers were not afraid to be sincere. They risked failure and embarrassment to lift video games up to the level of art.
BioWare's new style seeped out. Rockstar’s L.A. Noire, though too lacking in player choice to be considered an RPG, broke away from the criminal comedy of Grand Theft Auto to tell a dialogue-heavy story as compelling, and depressing, as Polanski's Chinatown. Skyrim’s darker and more serious tone followed the trend, and Fallout 4 even tried to copy BioWare's dialogue system, albeit unsuccessfully.
If the new Dragon Age trailer is anything to go by, that era is truly dead. Instead of the suspense and call to heroism in the face of seemingly hopeless odds alongside gratuitous bloodshed and sex that characterised Mass Effect and Dragon Age, BioWare treats us to a few minutes of action comedy, Marvel style. I was immediately reminded of the disappointing ending to Baldur's Gate III. While scenes of mass destruction are played up for emotional impact in Mass Effect, the citizens of Baldur's Gate react to the destruction of their city like perfect leftists. They cheer when the destruction ends, then immediately get to work cleaning up the rubble and scattered remains of their fellows, not with great sadness, but eager relief. To paraphrase Sadiq Khan, it is all part and parcel of life in the city.
Baldur's Gate III is in many ways a spectacular game, and several of the companion stories are more evocative, and treated more seriously, than the final battle. But the tone is less serious, less dramatic, than in Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Baldur's Gate III has the visuals of a cinematic RPG, but tonally it steps backwards.
This follows our culture generally. Affected nihilism is the order of the day. None wants to admit that he cares deeply about anything, except that that all ‘decent human beings’ worry about, like ‘trans rights’ or the ‘genocide’ in Palestine. Ironybro socialist podcasters are the prophets of this age of the unthinking, unfeeling herd animal. He is a prisoner to social approval, terrified that he might be thought cringe. True art expresses the one’s inner world in outward form. That kind of self-expression demands an individuality and courage lacking today.
The games journalists will call this the golden age of old school RPGs, but this is premature senility, not a renaissance. A promising new medium regressed from serious storytelling intended for sensitive young men back into nihilistic childish silliness. I hope, but doubt, that a AAA developer will prove me wrong.