🚀 go-pugleaf

On Friday, January 24, 2014 12:52:35 PM UTC-8, Xocyll wrote:
> Gerry Quinn <ger...@gmail.com> looked up from reading the entrails of
> 
> the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs say:
> 
> >In article <0ic2e9ds94q5kg7sc...@4ax.com>, Xoc...@gmx.com 
> >says...
> 
> >> A shooter maybe could be done by hobbyists, but an RPG would take years
> >> and years for a small unpaid shop and likely would get sidelined as
> >> those hobbyists get jobs in the industry and can't work on it anymore
> >> (seen quite a few freeware projects end up like this - goes strong for a
> 
> >> couple years, then half the crew are gone and it just stops.)
> 
> >
> 
> >It depends - not everyone is so hard to please in terms of graphics etc.
> 
> 
> 
> Yeah, but a fully developed RPG with decent level graphics would still
> take a hobbyist crew 5-10 years to get done, if they ever finished.
> 
> 
> 
> Sure you can do simple 8-bit graphic and make a simple shooter or
> platformer, but a major 3d rpg is far more work.
> 
> Even recreating Daggerfall, with Daggerfall level graphics (1996) on
> Windows would likely take a freeware crew 5 years minimum, and they'd
> probably never finish.
> 
> 
> 
> As I said I watched several of these over the years - ambitious freeware
> rpg projects, and they'd get sometimes to early alpha builds, and then
> nothing as the projects fell apart with the crews being too busy with
> the work that feeds and houses them.
> That or they'd realize that they couldn't actually pull off the job and
> would either have to cancel the project, or scale things back into
> something none of them wanted to play or make.
> 
> 
> 
> Would you want to play an RPG that's as scaled back (in RPG terms) as
> Skyrim, if it only had 8-bit graphics?
> 
> 
> That's the problem with a lot of freeware stuff, old school graphics
> without the old school content that would make those graphics endurable.

I'm not sure about RPGs or shooters, but I've played a number of new indy 8-bit games that were amazing.  Retro Rampage is one, it's a semi-clone of GTA I, and far better, and Rogue Legacy, a platformer with some rogue like inspiration, and some novel ideas, and the JRPG clone Breath of Death.  I'd think a full RPG on the order of Fallout or at least the old gold box game would be possible.

First person - I doubt it, it relies too much on graphics, although there's the raging success of Minecraft to point to, though I don't get it.

It wouldn't surprise me if someone could pull off isometric, something like diablo 2 for instance, although there's been a lot of trying since it came out that mostly failed. There's already PoE as you mentioned, the graphics are pretty reasonable on that, though I still find D3 looks far better.  Torchlight gameplay was pretty good too, which is semi-indy and not 8-bit, although I personally didn't like the graphics as appearing too cartoony.

A lot appears to depend upon how much funding one can get.

- Justisaur