A CRPG Wish List

[Note: All images were removed from this entry five days after the initial posting because something was hosing the RSS feeds. Sorry about the all-text format.]

One of these days, I'm going to sit down and conceptualize my idea of the perfect CRPG. Until then, here's a list of things that I rarely or never see in CRPGs (keeping in mind that I haven't played them all; feel free to comment on games I've overlooked) that I would love to see developers include in the future.

1. Adaptive end games based on how long the player takes. In Baldur's Gate II, you end one chapter emerging from the Underdark, hot on the trail of Irenicus. After resting up, you head immediately to Suldanessellar to save it from the mad elf's rampages. Or not. Instead, you can head back to Athkatla and do some more quests. Or just wander around. Or explore Watcher's Keep. You can let literally years of game time pass before going to Suldanessellar. And when you get there, Irenicus and his minions are always in the same exact stage of their invasion.

How much cooler would it be if every day that passed, you had to face more enemies, and more powerful enemies, when you finally deigned to visit the elf city? What if, enough time having passed, monstrosities started making their way out of Irenicus's now-conquered city and into the surrounding countryside? Yes, it would require more programming, and some modifications of the quests in Suldanessellar, but not as much as you might think. You just have to move your encounters with key characters from houses and outdoor areas to dungeons and modify a little dialogue.

Essentially, I want games to punish me for dithering.

Oblivion almost gets there with this, by having Oblivion gates open up around the countryside, but their appearance is based on quest stages and not on the overall passage of time (this strikes me as something that someone ought to be able to mod). Also, Mehrunes Dagon doesn't realize it, but he has the laziest minions in the history of the pantheon. He sends them through the Oblivion gates, and having reached fresh air and grass, they promptly...well, hang around the gate until some adventurer shows up and kills them. If the creators really wanted to ramp up the sense of urgency and danger, they'd have these hellspawn wander into nearby towns and start killing guards.

2. Integrated use of character names. Honestly, why have me go through all the trouble of naming a character if everyone in the game is just going to call me "The Warden" the entire time? The ham-handed ways that games find to ignore your chosen name border on laughable. In Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, it turns out that whatever name you use, you're actually an amnesiac ex-Jedi with a curiously androgynous name, which everyone uses after it's revealed. In Jade Empire and Oblivion, the arena masters insist that your real name isn't memorable and have you pick something like "Flaming Dragon" that, coincidentally, they have sound files of the announcers using. In Fable, you buy a title like "Pie Master" or "Chicken Chaser." There are times in Baldur's Gate in which NPCs use the third person plural pronoun to refer to you ("Don't annoy the child of Bhaal! They are our only hope!") because the creators were too lazy to vary the text based on sex.

Yes, I know that the main issue here is spoken dialogue. No one wants to play a game in which cinematic-quality voice acting is interrupted by something that sounds like a drunk Stephen Hawking trying to speech-recognize whatever weird combination of vowels and consonants you've given yourself. But here's a secret I don't think most modern game developers realize: Not every bit of dialogue needs to be spoken! Though I picked on them above, the Baldur's Gate games actually strike a good balance. People refer to you by name in the text dialogue, and when the spoken dialogue reaches that point, it just throws in a substitute or stops entirely. I can live with that.

3. Tactical use of the environment. I want to be able to block entryways with bodies, toss rocks and chairs at enemies, shove foes down flights of stairs and over balcony railings, splinter doors with an axe, and pin enemies to the wall with the well-placed shove of a table.

Again, Oblivion almost gets there. The developers spent a lot of time on realistic game physics--you can even move individual limbs of dead foes--to almost no purpose. Although you can pick up and throw things, there isn't a single place in the game where it's important to do so. And bigger objects, you can't move at all.

There are non-CRPGs that handle this well. Half-Life 2 comes to mind. It's been a while since I played, but I remember the delight of using the gravity gun to embed paint cans in the skulls of enemy soldiers, or blocking a stairway with a bed while I tossed grenades into the room below.

4. Crippling, disabling, and amputating in 3D CRPGs. I include the last bit because these types of injuries have been possible in some isometric CRPGs going back to Wizard's Crown. But they'd be so much more satisfying in modern 3-D games with better graphics. Why does a sword slash always lead to a little blood loss but never a severed arm or leg? Mind you, I'm not keen on these things happening to me, but the thought of slicing wings off cliff racers excites me in ways I don't fully understand.

5. Temptation to evil. A lot of games let you be evil, some even providing alternate main quests and endings for this choice. But not enough games truly tempt you to evil. You generally end up with the same advantages and disadvantages, the same power and level, no matter which path you choose. In Neverwinter Nights, you can bully people into giving you more money for quests, for instance, but money loses most of its value about 1/4 of the way through the game. Being a thief in Morrowind grants you virtually no advantage since so much stuff is lying around anyway (and there's no karma meter, so evil choices have no real effect). For God's sake, you can spend the entire game of Oblivion as a vampire, and never kill anyone! In a good CRPG, being evil wouldn't be a "choice" you make to vary the gameplay, but rather just as it is in real life: a temptation to measurably greater wealth and power.

6. Fire. This is partly related to #3, but I would really like--and please don't infer anything about my psychology based on this--to be able to set things on fire. Like, permanently. I want to hurl one of my torches into a pile of straw and watch the whole barn go up in flames. After all, the Daedra destroyed Kvatch--why can't I do the same to some annoying farmhouse?

7. Graffiti. Swords of Glass remains the only game I know where you can make permanent marks on dungeon walls, and even there you only get an "X." The ability to tag doorways and dungeon walls would help immeasurably with mapping, or even just determining what dungeons you've already explored. I shouldn't have to drop arrows to mark paths already taken.

8. A true split party. I think the first game I played that allowed me to send party members in different directions was Ultima VI. I still remember how awesome it seemed at the time. The Infinity engine games were famous for this, and I used to role-play it a bit, pretending my ranger PC just needed to get away by himself for a while. I'd see how much of a map I could clear before having to call my other party members for aid. In one memorable bit in Icewind Dale II, you can have a thief plundering items from a house while your paladin simultaneously apologizes to the owner.

But why can't I split my party across multiple maps? Why can't I send Jaheira and her annoying husband to return the cloak to some guy in the Friendly Arm Inn while the rest of the party continues through Cloakwoood? I know the answer, of course: programming limitations. But those should be a thing of the past in 2012. If I have five active quests, I want to be able to send five different PCs off to accomplish them.

9. A modern setting. Look, I like high fantasy and sci-fi as much as anyone, but are there any good, honest-to-god CRPGs set in the real world? I don't want to play a dental hygienist, of course, but why can't you CRPG a police officer? Or a Navy SEAL? A spy? I'm sure you'll all tell me about games in which you can do this, but you have to admit: they're few and far between.

10. Weapon familiarity bonuses. You begin the CRPG with a sword--a treasured family heirloom passed down through the generations and given to you, in a tearful episode, by your dying father. What do you do with it? Slay a few rats and then sell it as soon as you find a long sword +1. Honestly, CRPG characters have no sentimentality. They're happy to discard any weapon or bit of armor as soon as something better comes along.

I finished playing Dragon Age: Origins a few weeks ago, and I loved how you got bonuses for wearing different pieces of armor of the same style. It makes sense if solely from a fashion standpoint: my Morrowind character looks pretty silly with a leather cuirass, ebony boots, chain greaves, a glass pauldron on one shoulder, and a steel pauldron on the other. Now it's time for weapon familiarity bonuses: the longer you wield a particular weapon, the greater its power. Your original bronze short sword might be a short sword +9 of dragon slaying by the end of the game. This would make you think carefully before discarding one weapon in favor of the latest and greatest.

What other desirable features do you almost never see in CRPGs? Discuss while I ease myself back in to active playing.

P.S.: Just got that in under the wire, didn't I?