Skyrim was the highlight, but the role-playing scene in 2011 was about a lot more than dragon shouts and bucket-based thievery. Role-playing games offer up vast, detailed and complicated worlds, meant to be explored for tens, sometimes hundreds of hours. The emphasis on story and dialogue allows for rounded personalities, more believable virtual worlds and a greater personal investment in the play experience. 2011 turned out to be a milestone year for the genre, filled with some of the most memorable role-playing games of all-time, but it started with disappointment.
Dragon Age II was a huge letdown. My complaints have little to do with the mechanics. The combat system was actually better than Dragon Age: Origins. Many times throughout my playthrough I halted all progress to pore over the talent trees, reading descriptions and plotting out exactly how to build my party, my decisions made more difficult because of how many paths seemed worthwhile. It looked great, the voice acting was superb, the writing strong, but few role-playing games have frustrated me so intensely.
BioWare's legacy had something to do with it. Baldur's Gate II is one of my favorite all-time games, and that definitely influenced my expectations. Before Dragon Age II was released, I thought of the franchise as a return to the fantasy role-playing style of old with a few modern conveniences. That meant a long journey full of unexpected discoveries and strange new worlds, where I'm free to follow along with the main plot or go off on my own and uncover unexpected treasures. Dragon Age II cut most of this out, focusing on a painfully limited set of recycled dungeons and explorable areas, forcing me to talk to the same people so many times that many interactions felt as mundane as waiting in line for a morning cup of coffee. By the game's end all sense of wonder and discovery was completely wrecked by Dragon Age II's limited scope, which felt like an origin story from the first game puffed up into a 40 hour experience.
Only in the game's final moments did the conflict tease what could have been. Dragon Age II was an intermediate step for the franchise, and lacked the clear focus and ambition normally found in BioWare games like Mass Effect. BioWare's science-fiction series, especially 2, stripped down the formula to its basics. Item acquisition and ability unlocks were present, but served as ancillary elements, which was just fine. I wasn't playing Mass Effect to grind levels and acquire gear. The parts I remember about Mass Effect were related to the thrill of exploration, the plot twists and the personalities. Who lived and who died? Who did you sleep with? What do you think Tali's face looks like? BioWare knew precisely the type of game it wanted to make, and did so with brilliant precision.
Dragon Age II shared a lot of similarities, but didn't endure the transition to a streamlined gameplay style nearly as well. BioWare offered heaps of items but simultaneously deemphasized Item acquisition by locking out the ability to equip armor on your party outside of preset upgrades, and in the process destroyed the thrill of item discovery. It was like trying to pick something to wear to a wedding out of a closet with three nice suits and thousands of ragged t-shirts. Eventually the entire game felt like one long backtracking mission. There was plenty of decision points and a handful of memorable moments, but those couldn't allay my fear that Dragon Age II was a sign that big budget role-playing was becoming too diluted and concerned with mass appeal for its own good. I was even more concerned after playing the PC version of Fable III, a game too terrified of confusing players to do anything interesting. Then the Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings came out, and I felt stupid for worrying.
CD Projekt RED's sequel reaffirmed the power of everything I loved about role-playing games. Choice felt like it truly mattered, at one point changing the entire progression of the main plot, locking out large chunks of content for another playthrough. Most quests were designed to lead to a significant decision point, which felt as though it had a major impact on the progression instead of sending out minor ripples. Once a character's true motivations are discovered, you're often given the opportunity to take action. Leave your love rotting in a dungeon to pursue your nemesis? Sure, why not?
Nothing felt stagnant, there was a direction to the journey. A clear adversary was made obvious from the start, but discovering his true motivations and identity was only a small part of what drew me from beginning to end. The Witcher 2 felt like a complete adventure, and one that wasn't watered down for the purposes of mass consumption. It was uncompromising, from the occasionally frustrating density of its fiction to the lack of proper tutorial system at launch, which certainly didn't help ease anyone in. In other games this might be a bigger deal, but in The Witcher 2, it made and odd kind of sense in context, and added a level of realism to the experience where not everything was ponderously spelled out. Want to succeed? Well, figure it out. Put in some effort. Earn the rewards.
The Witcher 2 was part of a movement directly opposed to where games like Dragon Age II and Final Fantasy XIII before it were headed. 2011 was about the resurgence of big, complex, decision-driven worlds filled with open-ended qualities that all instilled a powerful sense of reward through exploration. Deus Ex resurfaced courtesy of Eidos Montreal, and was a stellar return to form for the franchise many grew frustrated with after Invisible War. Though marred by a few thematically incongruent boss fights that emphasized straightforward combat instead of allowing for diverse solutions to the same problem, the rest was a sublime role-playing experience that could be played as a first-person shooter just as easily as it could a stealth game.
Bethesda delivered the best version of The Elder Scrolls yet, clearing away the cobwebs of its old design elements not simply to make it mass market friendly, but so it actually made sense. The idea of hopping around in Morrowind or Oblivion to level acrobatics seems completely insane now given how Bethesda readjusted the skill system. Taking out character statistics, certainly a risky move, again worked to the game's benefit. Instead of being forced to make large number of important decisions about character limitations right at the beginning of a 100+ role-playing game, I'm free to learn as I go. Maybe I wanted to specialize in two-handed axes when I started, but after testing out the magic system, I couldn't resist building a pure spellcaster. Skyrim makes it easier than ever before to slide between build roles, with the added bonus of making all approaches to combat feel equally viable, without sacrificing the core elements of what makes the franchise great.
Similar to Skyrim's dramatic statistic and skill system overhaul, several of the best role-playing games released in 2011 emphasized showing the impact of character development decisions during gameplay instead of forcing you to min-max to see results. CD Projekt RED switched to a far more fluid, enjoyable combat system in The Witcher 2, ditching the overly artificial sword combat of the first while still offering plenty of tactical options and diverse ways to fight. A level one shout of Unrelenting Force in Skyrim will stagger a character, but a level three will knock them clear off a mountainside. I don't have to consult a stat sheet to confirm the higher level version is more effective in combat. They're the same ideas that were at work in past games like Liquid Entertainment's misguided Rise of the Argonauts, but now given a lot more room to breathe in bigger, more intricate, and ultimately better games.
Conversation systems were adjusted to feel less like information bombs. Unlike Oblivion, time no longer inexplicably paused when you started a conversation in Skyrim. You could look around, you weren't forced to interact with an interface that screams "You're having a conversation!" Instead the text was minimal and unobtrusive, making Skyrim's interactions the most natural of The Elder Scrolls series. Dragon Age II did the right thing in this case and axed the legacy conversation system where you chose entire sentences as responses. Instead you chose short phrases representative of general attitudes, so the ensuring fully-voiced response was a surprise, making conversations more exciting by adding an element of unpredictability.
Bastion took the idea of conversation a step further. Its story was told primarily through an omniscient voice over that commented on your actions in real-time, a creative twist on what was otherwise genre-standard story delivery mechanic. Instead of feeling like I was following a bread crumb trail between objectives, a slave to the artificialities of quest goals, Bastion made me feel like I was creating the story as I played. Though largely linear, it never felt confining. It's a good thing Bastion was released in 2011, because otherwise the action-RPG genre sputtered. I was supposed to be playing Diablo III and Torchlight II already, but both titles were pushed into 2012. Instead, I was left with Obsidian's pretty but uneven Dungeon Siege III and Maxis' forgettable Darkspore.
Though often talked about for its brutal level of difficult and reliance on death as a learning tool, From Software's Dark Souls was actually one of the most memorable fictional worlds of the year, a distinction it achieved with a bare minimum of traditional story content. Its paucity of dialogue served as a strength, strangely enough. NPCs offered only meager morsels of cryptic speech, barely explaining anything about what they're doing or why they're casually staring at the sun only a short distance away from the instant-death fire of a ferocious dragon. Yet their bizarre cameos and inexplicable motivations only added to the atmosphere of the world, and interactions with them served a brief respite from the hellish repetition that awaited in the dungeons surrounding them. Though the fiction overload and creative tales told within Skyrim are still impressive, I have to admire From Software's ability to achieve a desired tone with a words, a stark contrast to other games that spend upwards of ten minutes struggling to get the point across in conversations.
As role-playing mechanics within the genre continue to evolve in exciting directions, so do they continue to bleed across genre borders. Level up mechanics within online shooters are continue to be refined through in franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield, as well as Homefront and Resistance 3. Killing enemies in Batman: Arkham City is even more rewarding because the upgrades it eventually unlocks. Even Nintendo's Legend of Zelda series was affected. A loot drop system was added into Skyward Sword, and with spoils in hand Link could return to shops and upgrade shield, slingshot, beetle and more. It's yet more proof that everyone's looking at the role-playing genre to figure out how to elegantly transplant the same sense of reward and progression.
The MMO scene wasn't quite as exciting in 2011. Rift and Dragon Nest were great, DC Universe Online not so much. Possibly the biggest story, aside from just about every MMO you've heard of transitioning to a free-to-play model, was World of Warcraft apparently hit its subscriber ceiling. Blizzard reported falling subscriber numbers in 2011, indicating a major shift could be underway. Though the Mists of Pandaria expansion announced at BlizzCon 2011 might have a significant effect on WoW's trajectory, all eyes right now are on BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic, currently in its early access phase of deployment ahead of the official launch on December 20. Between TOR, Guild Wars 2, Tera, The Secret World and the possible release of Mists of Pandaria, it seems like 2012 is going to be a far more eventful year for MMOs.
For me, 2011 reaffirmed that complexity and challenge still has a place in the genre, and that not every big budget role-playing game needs to be excessively shaved and smoothed to be palatable to a wide audience. I know many enjoyed games like Dragon Age II and Fable III, but to me, when I'm invited to inhabit these virtual worlds for so many hours and become emotionally attached to their personalities, what I perceive to be compromises in design and quality become all the more off-putting. Role-playing games clearly make a lot of money – the BioWare label is enormous at EA, and Skyrim's sales are significant – but the best of the genre in 2011 don't feel like their development was driven by profits, even if to some degree it was. They feel like rare, wondrous creations driven by intelligent design, and continue to drive new ideas within the industry as well as serve as the most captivating entertainment experiences in the world.