A LOOK AT ACTION RPGs
What’s going on everyone, Stephen here!
Sorry for the delay in posts. Life has been crazy and as we all know, the holiday season has begun! Things are loosening up around the house and work and while I had the time, I wanted to take kind of a deep dive on a couple different topics so buckle up and hang on because this one might be one heck of a post!
So, let's talk about a game genre that’s pretty close to my heart and that’s Action RPG‘s or ARPGs for short. If you’ve been on our website, you’re more than likely seen a lot of my posts about Diablo, which is one of the more prominent ARPGs, but it’s not the only one I've played in the last few years. I played Diablo 3, Diablo 2 Remastered, Path of Exile 1 and 2, Warhammer Chaosbane, Warhammer 40K Inquisitor-Martyr, Grimm Dawn, Wolcen, Last Epoch, Torchlight, and one that I actually had a lot of fun with when it was in beta, but unfortunately the game died before it could really get any traction, Magic : The Gathering - Legends.
This game took the famous TCG WoTC IP and turned it into an action RPG game. The combat felt pretty good, but what was more interesting than that was the card system that it borrowed from the card game and. Basically you would pick a character, or planeswalker as they're called in the lore, that had a certain set of abilities, and which moves you could use were largely dictated by the cards you draw in your “hand“. This opened up a lot of opportunities to learn all of your kit pretty thoroughly and not rely on a single spell for most of your DPS output. This in my opinion is where most action RPGs lose some people. Your build focuses on basically one or two active abilities and then maxing those along with passives and stats on gear to do as much damage leveraging exponential multiplicative damage as you can with those 1-2 moves. While it’s fun to wipe out screens of enemies, usually what happens at the end of a game or a season you feel so powerful and all you do is press one button that the game kind of becomes bland, so you move on to either a new class, a new character, or a new build. What I thought this game would bring to the table is a method of play where your main character would actually use ALL of the spells in the library dependent on the card you would draw so you couldn’t just build around one of them more than likely however, since the game was never fully developed I guess we’ll never know…
There’s been other action RPG‘s that have tried their own system to shake up the “meta”. I know Path of Exile 2 has done a lot to change the way action RPG‘s are played, but in my gameplay and watching other people‘s gameplay, it still seems to revolve around one skill as usual. I know that high tier gameplay and very hard content requirement min-maxed builds, and that's fine, but I would love to see some kind of shake up in the entire genre to force players to adapt more into play around their class more in terms of more than just one ability, or certain interactions with gear kind of like the Souls series of games do. I don’t want gear to be irrelevant, I do love the feeling of getting a big drop like a super rare or a mythic item in these games, I still want that to feel good, but I don’t want it to feel mandatory for your gametime to not play pretty shitty. I always think your experience in game should be indicative of your skill as a player to overcome obstacles and adapt to challenges and that is elevated by gear, not gatekept by it.
Thinking back on this game and having a lot of fun with it even at early stages it is a shame that this game never took off. Wizards of the Coast and Magic in general have such an insane amount of lore and backstory that they could’ve put into a game like this so it was a shame to see it canceled but I understand the ARPG genre is pretty saturated, even though the genre itself is relatively niche, the games like Diablo, PoE, and even Last Epoch carved out the audience basically for themselves and don’t leave a lot of room for others from what I’ve seen at least in my own personal circles, most players don’t overlap. They pick the game that fits their place style in the way that they can play the best and they play that game alone. I try to play them independently of each other and form my own opinions without being too biased, but I have to admit my time and gaming has gotten a lot harder to come by, so Diablo was the ARPG for me in the last year or two. I have fun with the game but it’s far from perfect..
I guess the main purpose of this article is to kind of see if anyone in our little corner of the internet, the Maze as it were, have any experience with any other action RPGs outside of the big three that exist now. I have to admit, while they’re all great, they all feel like “already explored” to me. I’m looking for that next big thing and that Magic Legends maybe could’ve been something special, it was a familiar mainstream IP that we’re not really used to being in the format and also the card system to shake up the combat system entirely. I did have a lot of fun with Warhammer Chaosbane, which was an action RPG set in the Warhammer old world/fantasy setting of games workshop theme the action of that game so awesome. The graphics were pretty good for their time and it had a good drop in dropout co-op system. That game however wasn’t highly received, so the player base dwindled, and the game died within a couple years.
To bring this article full circle, my last question is what IPs would leverage themselves to an action RPG? I think another Wizards IP is an easy shoe in, you guessed it, Dungeons and Dragons. It would work very well inside of an action RPG because the classes and lore are already very well defined inside of DM and player hand books. Imagine instead of picking some nameless hero in an action RPG, you could roll your own new character like you do in the TTRPG. You could be a paladin, a rogue, a wizard, a barbarian. Leveling up you could subclass like in PoE. Imagine your skills were just like the skills and spells you had in the real DnD game, maybe they could work in dice rolls or some form of Table top RNG that can amplify or hinder your experience like the cards. What better IP is there than DnD to have an action RPG! You run through procedurally generated dungeons to kill monsters like beholders, displacer beasts, goblins, and trolls, the weapons and armor that you can look up in the real world players handbook. Imagine all the different expansions they could have with all the official, and non official Kickstarter campaigns, it’s almost endless. Maybe they could even be a PVP mode where a party of players are running together and then another player gets to play at the “DM” and spawn monsters and traps in and activate dungeon events that simulate a real world, dungeons and dragons tabletop game inside of the fast space action of an ARPG.
To me a game like that seems like a no-brainer, however, I understand that most of the audience that plays action RPG’s are looking for one tap screen clear god builds that don’t really involve any strategy or any actual gameplay other than pressing one button. While I understand the zoomer mentality and clearing high levels of pit and or maps and PoE and Diablo respectively, my mind demands more engagement than that. I would love to have more abilities that maybe interact with the map (like PoE2 is experimenting with) or synergies with my squad/ party. I think a DnD ARPG, or maybe even a LOTR universe game lends itself to more lore rich design but also some really cool mechanics. If anybody stuck around this long to read this, please let me know what you think in the comments below or over in our discord! I always love design and theory whether its in cards, games, TTGs, movies, all kinds of stuff! With that being said, see you soon thanks for everything. Happy Holidays!!
