Were RPG games on Nintendo consoles invented because of hardware limitations?

I heard someone mention this. Genuinely intrigued, so I make a thread about it with the Gamespot folk.

Anyways, what do you say?? He said if tech was as good as it is today, back say in the 80s for example, most games would be action oriented. So his point was there would be no turn based fighting.

No chance. D&D has been a thing for a long time, and its mechanics fits gaming perfectly.

Wow. I agree with @hardwenzen: about something.

Indeed, I also agree here. Although D&D is difficult to translate into a game because players can do almost whatever they want.

In NWN, the rules were made to more suit a video game. Where in a real D&D, you might have 1 random encounter, in a game you have dozens or hundreds, which really messed up characters with limited abilities like spell slots. I think few system wars members don't seem to think D&D isn't popular but it still is to this day.

Turn based RPGs came about because technology *advanced* enough to allow a large amount of text to be stored and included in a game, and for the console to produce spritework detailed enough to represent story and characters.

The move to action based is primarily about reaching a wider audience, a necessity when game budgets are expanding beyond control.

1. RPG's were not "invented" for Nintendo hardware.

2. You can argue virtually all games on every retro platform in existence looked the way they do because of hardware limitations.

@davillain: Yeah, until AI can can respond to nearly any situation the player throws at it, a game won't ever truly recreate the D&D experience. But the point is, turn based games have existed forever, and will continue to get made because people genuinely enjoy them. They would have gone the way of text-based adventure or fmv games otherwise. Heck, people have been plaing Chess and Go for like 1,000 years now. Doesn't get much more timeless than that.

@davillain: In fact, D&D is more popular than ever. 5e was a tremendous success for WotC. They hit a really good balance between complexity and simplicity. None of that 3.5e or 4e, but also more complex than something like 2e. 1e still has a place in my heart though. Loved how brutal it was.

@judaspete: There are already applications to turn ChatGPT into a GM. We are not there quite yet, but it is very promising.

Ignoring all this invented nonse-sense.

Phantasy Star pushed Master System to the limits and looked better than at least 2 of its 16 bit sequels.

Who told you RPGs were invented on Nintendo consoles? It's well-known to RPG fans by now that RPGs began on computers, inspired by D&D.

Either way, your friend has it the wrong way around. The video game industry has been dominated by action games ever since Space Invaders in 1978. Nintendo consoles were also dominated by action games. It wasn't until Dragon Quest in 1986 that RPGs blew up in Japan. Yet even then, RPGs remained very niche in the West. It wasn't until FFVII in 1997 that RPGs blew up in the West.

What this shows is that, as technology progressed, the opposite happened: turn-based RPGs became more popular over time, not less popular. The peak of popularity for turn-based RPGs were the late '90s to early '00s, after which their popularity began declining. But then in 2017, we started seeing turn-based RPGs making a comeback with big hits like Persona 5, Dragon Quest 11 and Divinity 2.

The rise, fall and resurgence of turn-based RPGs has nothing to do with technological limitations, but everything to do with market demand. If the demand is there, then turn-based RPGs will be made. If the demand isn't there, then they won't get made. That's all it comes down to.

I partly agree and partly disagree. While D&D does offer more freedom than video games in various ways, it's also more limited than video games in an obvious way: it can only be turn-based. D&D is turn-based because of technological limitations, due to tabletop games being turn-based by necessity.

If we go back to the roots of D&D, it was spawned from Chainmail, a tabletop turn-based strategy. In turn, tabletop strategy games have roots in Chess and Go from thousands of years ago. D&D began as an attempt to update the age-old turn-based strategy formula with adventure and role-playing elements, resulting in RPGs. So RPGs were turn-based due to the technological limitations of tabletop games.

Regarding the popularity of D&D, that depends where you live. In America, it still has millions of players to this day. But outside America, D&D is niche.

Divinity Original Sin 2

Divinity II is an action RPG

of course not...its a dumb theory period. We have so many types of games, and rpg games are just one part of that.

Honestly, I think it was pokemon that blew up rpgs into the stratosphere. Yes, some games like FF and DQ were huge even in the 90s, but pokemon pushed rpgs to the level of COD in terms of popularity.

@texasgoldrush: Come on, bruh. You know very well I was talking about the 2017 game, not the 2009 game.

I think that person misinterpreted history or explained it in a confusing way. All role playing games are basically descendants of DnD. Early RPG videogames because of technical limitations could not mimic DnD properly, so they focused more on the combat aspect which is basically the dungeon crawler subgenre. This is obviously following the tenants of DnD structure which includes turn based combat.

This video probably explains it better and expands on the subject.

RPGs in general, no. As hardwenzen points out, paper and dice RPG mechanics and design naturally fit with video games.

But, the production values we saw for Japanese RPGs were seemingly more limited and started standing out during 7th gen. But that's attributed more to smaller studios, budgets, and also creative independence afforded to Japanese developers of the time, whereas western AAA publishers offered larger budgets for their games in general, but also played it safe and not taking creative risks.

Naturally systems like DS/3DS were places these games would appear on, not just limited hardware but also due to the popularity for the devices in Japan. Japanese RPGs weren't limited to just Nintendo hardware, non-Nintendo hardware also had its fair share of RPGs that weren't exactly pushing higher production value games either.

There's also a growing appreciation for the retro aesthetic in gaming and there too RPGs maintain a somewhat dated by stylish appearance.

No doubt though because of the Switch's significant install base, multiplatform developers will want to include it in the platforms they support, which will limit its design potentially, but that's not something I lament.

@glez13:

I agree with the video that RPGs are defined by their D&D roots. It's a misnomer to say RPGs are just about role-playing. By that logic, Super Mario Bros is a role-playing game. That's not what defines RPGs. What defines RPGs are the mechanics that have roots in D&D. The genre began as D&D clones in the '70s, before they eventually settled on calling them RPGs. The genre then spun off into various different subgenres in the '80s, while maintaining certain key mechanics from D&D.

If we go back far enough, then you also find RPGs have common ancestors with strategy games. Like I said above, D&D was itself spawned from a turn-based strategy wargame called Chainmail. And in turn, turn-based strategy wargames ultimately have roots in Chess, which dates back to 7th century India and Persia. So both strategy games and RPGs have a common ancestor in Chess.

We could say the same for every genre. There's always that genre defining common ancestor that every subsequent game in a genre is descended from. For action games, it's Space Invaders. For sports games, it's Pong. For platformers, it's Donkey Kong. For fighting games, it's Karate Champ. For FPS, it's Doom. And so on. There's a general template that popularized certain key mechanics, which later developers than expanded into a whole genre.

However, I disagree with the video's claim that narrative adventure games are a subgenre of RPGs. Adventure games are their own thing with their own distinct roots. While there is certainly some D&D influence in Colossal Cave Adventure, that doesn't make it RPG. That's like saying RPGs are strategy games just because D&D was influenced by strategy games. He didn't categorize visual novels under RPGs despite VNs having adventure game roots, yet lumped adventure games under RPGs. Adventure games ultimately have roots in gamebooks (a.k.a. "choose your own adventure" books), which have origins predating D&D.

Eh, not a great argument in my opinion.

I'd sooner argue the first video game developers were probably playing pen-and-paper RPG's and wanted to translate it into digital format.

Yup. D&D is arguably as popular as it has ever been.

COVID sure made a lot of new players, and with various crossover stuff (movies, podcasts, Magic, etc) it's in the mainstream.

As for D&D and video games, it is difficult. I DM a campaign right now and the "rule of cool" (that is, if it works, and is fun, it's allowed) is really hard to incorporate into a very finite video game engine. You can't just make stuff up, you can only hope the developers incorporated it.

Baldur's Gate 3 has done a really, really, really good job of incorporating a lot of options for people to do but even then it's somewhat limited by dialogue options, game engine limitations, and what has been programmed into it.

It's also a reason I'm actually kind of excited for AI. Being able to have a freeform dialogue with an AI-driven script in real-time that is mostly believable (not trying to pass the Turing Test or whatever, but just something passable) would be kind of neat.

This reminds me of something that Yuji Horii (Dragon Quest creator) said back when he was creating the 1983 adventure game Portopia Serial Murder Case:

Horii wanted to expand on the adventure game genre with his own ideas. One such concept was to create "a program in which the story would develop through entering a command and by receiving an answer to it." His idea was for "a game that progresses through conversations between a human and a computer." He "started to get more ambitious," and thought he "could make the computer converse" if enough data is entered, attempting to create an artificial intelligence language algorithm. However, he realized this was not possible on computers at the time, so he created "dialogue for the computer beforehand" where the player "could type in some words, and the computer would reply back with some reaction." Another concept was that, in contrast to other "very linear" stories in adventure games at the time, his idea was for branching, non-linear storytelling, where "the main scenario should only take up about 20% of the game's content, and the remaining 80% should be in response to the various actions of the player." However, due to PC memory limitations, he was only able to create several short branching scenarios, which he still found more interesting than one long linear scenario.

This was a few years before Yuji Horii went on to strike gold with Dragon Quest. After that, he abandoned these ambitions and played it safe with Dragon Quest. The technology just wasn't there back in the '80s, but with AI tech, it might be possible today.

I agree with this, early RPGs like Phantasy star on the sega master system pushed hardware to their limits, it was only technological advances from the arcade era (the late 70s and early 80s) that made RPGs possible. So it's all the reverse of what you are suggesting.

RPGs on Nintendo consoles were limited until the SNES, when many new developers like Quintet or Neverland made RPGs specifically for Nintendo consoles because the technology was there for save data and all the things needed for an RPG.

Action games like Mario didn't need the battery for save data (like NES Zelda) or other advancements needed in the technology for RPGs to really work, for example.

Most games are made around the hardware limitations.