A bold comment by the makers of Fallout: New Vegas.

At the Reboot Develop conference, Josh Sawyer, the design director of Pillars of Eternity (Obsidian), talked about how he’d like to see the RPGs go through a radical evolution, as the genre shouldn’t be defined by the stats and the combat systems.

„The hardcore RPG audience is very traditional. Fans tend to skew towards the more hardcore cases, and they tend to be fairly resistant to change. I don’t want to paint too broad of a stroke there, but RPGs can be a lot more than we have done with them so far. There’s much more than we can do and it’s much more radical.

I’m also contributing to the problem: Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2 are very traditional role-playing games. But the genre can go in some different directions it’s a matter of framing the project size and things that meet up in the same place.

So many games use RPG elements, stat progression, and characteristics that are defined by those in RPGs. I start to question whether that is the heart and soul of what a role-playing game is about. The way that I work on role-playing games, they tend to be more about playing a character that has a range of personalities and a way of going through a story that changes that story in a very significant way. The amount to which things like statistics or combat systems interact with that really can be much more fluid.”

He named Bethesda (Fallout, The Elder Scrolls) as a company that took the genre towards a new direction: „The traditionalists probably get angry about this stuff, but Bethesda’s RPGs are very different from isometric RPGs. They’re much more action orientated, much more focused on the immersive experience. That shows there’s more room for RPGs to grow than just to be what they were 20 years ago. It’s a matter of finding an audience that matches up with that,” Sawyer said.

We’d like to see him get a free approach to something like Pillars of Eternity 3. How would he create the game?

Source: VG247