WotC Reveal Exodus, a New Video Game from the Decelopers of Mass Effect and Neverwinter Nights

[LuisCarlos17f]

Maybe a sci-fi TTRPG will be published by WotC, but this will be generic, and Exodus one of the settings, in the same way Star*Drive was within Alternity RPG.

I would bet Hasbro would rather a generic sci-fi system to allow different licences. That flexibility should be the right marketing strategy.

The design of a new sci-fi d20 system will need a lot of work, playtest and feedback, but we could find unexpected suprises. For examples players in the feedback ask "transhuman technology" like in "Altered Carbone", but then a DM creates a story where the robots in a prison are really innocent, and their memories to be former criminals are wrong, rewritten to be the scape goat, while the true criminals are free. Or somebody using "surrogates" ( remote-control bots) for suicide terrorist attacks, or some of those ideas appeared in Black Mirror. Maybe in an world there was a robot rebellion, but this was a false flag operation, the rebel AI really was controlled by the "club of the inmortals", psycopath members of the elite whose minds were uploaded to a computer (or said with other words, as if Skynet was only a tool used by the evil organitation SPEKTRA).

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Is it though? Is it really becoming apparent?

Because how long has fantasy survived as the main genre of TT RPGs and indeed videogame RPGs? 50 years? Pretty much on the nose. Absolutely no sign that that's changing.

Don't confuse people getting bored with mediocre superhero movies which were never all that with fantasy mystically and mysteriously becoming unpopular as an RPG genre.

Note I say this being very keen on SF RPGs, but let's be real - most of them have not exactly set the world on fire in terms of popularity.

Fantasy has managed to stay somewhat current by continuously changing. The fantasy genre of 2023 looks very different to the fantasy genre of 1974.

But if you look at the historical record of popular fiction, you can see various genres passing in and out of fashion. That is just something that happens.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Maybe a sci-fi TTRPG will be published by WotC, but this will be generic, and Exodus one of the settings, in the same way Star*Drive was within Alternity RPG.

A full-on generic SF TT RPG would be a bad idea, frankly.

SF is a genre with a lot of really distinct sub-genres. Even space SF has a ton of highly distinct subgenres, which do have some crossover, but not as much as one might like. With a generic SF TT RPG you have to either target a subgenre, at which point you might as well have made a specific RPG, or you need to try and account for multiple subgenres, in which case you inevitably end up with either an incoherent mess of systems, or a game that is actually designed for a specific subgenre, but is masquerading as one that isn't. Alternity was the latter. The design of the rules leant towards a sort of fairly serious not-very-action-y exploration SF, whether planet-bound or on a ship. It was pretty terrible for space opera, military SF, or anything dynamic or action-heavy.

WotC would be much better off which a tightly-designed RPG with a specific vibe, which focused on being actually fun to play and think about. Which surprisingly, very few space SF RPGs have ever actually attempted (Mothership is kind of like that, for space horror, but historically it's rarely been the case that gameplay was even a major concern - I haven't played the Firefly RPG though, maybe that did it). That doesn't mean it necessarily has to be limited to a single setting, nor that it should have no levers or dials to tweak, but I'd suggest have have some strong opinions about what the system is for and how it should play is a good thing.

I'd also suggest that whatever default setting it uses, it's something modern, energetic, and carefully designed, like Mass Effect was, not something that's basically mindless nostalgia with a "who cares" attitude towards how appealing that setting actually is to a modern audience, and not something dour or delighted with it's own complexity.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Fantasy has managed to stay somewhat current by continuously changing. The fantasy genre of 2023 looks very different to the fantasy genre of 1974.

But if you look at the historical record of popular fiction, you can see various genres passing in and out of fashion. That is just something that happens.

I don't see any reason to believe fantasy is going anyway in the next 10-20 years, to be honest. Beyond that, obviously, things could change, but it's more likely, fantasy, as a highly adaptive and acquisitive genre, which casually steals from any number of other genres, particularly science-fiction, as and when it wants to, will still be around. I agree that it continually changes, but that's why it's so hard to kill.

And it's space SF that's dwindled in popularity over the last few decades, and I think Star Wars and Star Trek fandoms are partially responsible for that, in that instead of people being fans of space SF, they pick one (or both) of those two and become fans of that instead (and both of those kind of border more on fantasy than harder SF, notably). Non-space-SF has continued to be very strong. Cyberpunk dwindled in the 1990s, post-cyberpunk never got that popular, though was incredibly influential in a quiet way, and then whatever we're calling this modern retro cyberpunk came in, heralded by Altered Carbon both in novels and TV (pity the author lost his damn mind, brainworms are a hell of a drug). Space SF is a little more popular now than it was, but it's still a pretty minor cultural force if it's expressed in any form but Star Trek or Star Wars (or Guardians of the Galaxy, I guess, if you count that). The Expanse, faux-hard-SF, got some traction, but mostly with a certain kind of male nerd not the general audience - and particularly not the broad audience GoT/HotD have, despite it essentially being GoT In Space (a charmless/gormless lead might be partially blamed). The death of Iain M Banks and concomitant failure to adapt any of his SF works has also been a major blow, though writers clearly inspired by him have since emerged and are getting pretty good (Ann Leckie, for example).

But as you point out, fantasy has changed and adapted and space SF has had much more difficulty doing that. Part of it is that space SF has a pretty obnoxious and ultra-conservative (in terms of what they want from space SF, not necessarily political views) Gen X audience, who get incredibly loud if space SF does anything which wouldn't have done in say, the 1980s through mid-late 1990s. That audience can milked for money pretty well if you use the right techniques, as Star Citizen has shown, which has extracted literally hundreds of millions of dollars, mostly from well-paid nerdy men who are now in their 50s or early 60s. But it does that by selling a dream, not an actual product. And particularly by selling imaginary spaceships for real money - many (most?) of which aren't actually implemented in the current skeleton of a game, and which were sold for dozens to hundreds to thousands of dollars when they were nothing but concept art.

I'd love to see WotC have a successful SF RPG, but I'm skeptical that they could target it right, because, especially with space SF, it's a very hard target to strike directly. I think, with their financial resources and ability to do research, they're wildly better positioned than any other company to intentionally create a huge hit space SF RPG, but I think deriving that from Exodus would be 100% putting the cart before the horse. Exodus is a fine idea for a videogame, but that doesn't remotely mean it's the right idea, right setting, right concepts for TT RPG to go big, let alone huge.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I don't see any reason to believe fantasy is going anyway in the next 10-20 years, to be honest.

Good business plans more than 10 years ahead. If you want a fresh franchise for when the current one gets stale, you need to start establishing it well in advance of when it is needed.

Disney's problem is that they didn't predict the inevitable decline in popularity of Marvel and Star Wars and prepare for it in advance..

 

[MarkB]

The time-dilation concept has echoes of Lightyear, but also of Fallout 4. It'll be interesting if the protagonist actually uses the gates during gameplay - jumping the time period ahead by decades doesn't seem like something you can get away with doing too regularly, but I could see it as being something that happens a couple of times, with each arc of the game being set in a different time.

 

[trappedslider]

I wonder if they will have ship building as an aspect of game play.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Good business plans more than 10 years ahead. If you want a fresh franchise for when the current one gets stale, you need to start establishing it well in advance of when it is needed.

Very few media (or games) businesses successfully plan that far ahead. In most cases, despite huge money and expertise, plans go awry.

You give a specific example of this:

Disney's problem is that they didn't predict the inevitable decline in popularity of Marvel and Star Wars and prepare for it in advance.

I don't think it was inevitable. Both declines were a result of a lot of different factors, some predictable, some unpredictable, some questionable. And you're asking WotC to have more expertise in predicting the future of gaming than Disney has in predicting the future of TV/movies, and I don't think that's a reasonable position, to be honest.

Also, given the rate of change of pop culture, and in terms of what people like and so on, the potentially rapid rises and falls of genres, it's very difficult to see what genuine plan WotC could have that's "10 years ahead". WotC could release an SF TT RPG today, which was successful today, but it might well be unpopular or anti-zeitgeist in 10 years. You can't predict that precisely, and frankly no TT RPG company has been wildly successful with space SF RPG, which makes this task even harder. WotC also have a serious "aging white guys" problem, where they're particularly poorly equipped at the decision-making tiers to predict what the "kids today" (meaning anyone under 40) will want from a space SF RPG in 10 years. The chance of WotC steering directly into some kind of cultural landmine with such an RPG are extremely high. A particularly dangerous one with space SF is accidentally making the game pro-colonialism, or pro-imperialism, or weirdly orientalist.

Even if they dodge that, they may just aim at the wrong kind of space SF.

I do think that with proper investment and oversight, WotC is positioned in a way that they could create a space SF setting that did do well, and perhaps became evergreen the way D&D has, but I don't think anyone currently in charge at WotC is the guy to manage that. That includes the people at Archetype.

The time-dilation concept has echoes of Lightyear, but also of Fallout 4. It'll be interesting if the protagonist actually uses the gates during gameplay - jumping the time period ahead by decades doesn't seem like something you can get away with doing too regularly, but I could see it as being something that happens a couple of times, with each arc of the game being set in a different time.

Man Fallout 4 blew that so badly. Awful.

Like, literally, the natural assumption is that a significant period of time has passed after the intro, because you got re-frozen. It's unnatural to assume you were only out for minutes or weeks. But the game hard-forces your character to be a dumbass who can't even ask they questions they'd need to to determine how long they were out, and continually assumes it was like, weeks, and is forced to be aghast when it's decades. It's so senseless and it's such an audience-ignoring kind of writing, that really doesn't work at all well for a game like the Fallout series.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I wonder if they will have ship building as an aspect of game play.

One hopes not. It's always a huge waste of time and effort that about 10% of the playerbase actually engages with, at most, and makes balancing any kind of ship combat nearly impossible. It's a huge distraction from the core gameplay of an RPG. Starfield is a worse game because they spent so much time and effort on ship and base building, which almost no players really do beyond the most cursory stuff, and that effort wasn't spent on other aspects of the game as a result.

 

[trappedslider]

One hopes not. It's always a huge waste of time and effort that about 10% of the playerbase actually engages with, at most, and makes balancing any kind of ship combat nearly impossible. It's a huge distraction from the core gameplay of an RPG. Starfield is a worse game because they spent so much time and effort on ship and base building, which almost no players really do beyond the most cursory stuff, and that effort wasn't spent on other aspects of the game as a result.

Citation please, IME building a spaceship has been a highlight among the player base.