What even is an RPG these days
Image credit: Remedy Entertainment
Remedy’s Control 2 will be an “action RPG“, the developers have announced, and while I have already caved and written it up, I’m not sure this is really news. Wasn’t the first game an action-RPG? True, it was a third-person shooter, but it also had a progression system with unlockable abilities and boosts. Besides, isn’t every action game an action-RPG these days? Levelling-up has become an industry-wide syndrome. Go on, name an action game that doesn’t have RPG-style elements. No wait, don’t actually do that. I was being rhetorical. Read the rest of this post first.
The news comes care of Remedy’s latest investor presentation, from which the studio have helpfully lifted a few titbits and posted them on social media. Amongst other things, we learn that Control will receive a free update next year, unlocking some previously released stuff (is it too much to hope that they’ll give away one of the paid DLC packs?) and that Alan Wake 2 has now sold 1.8 million units, bless him. There’s some discussion in the Twitter thread as to whether Control 2 being an action-RPG is really such a highlight – the developers insist on calling it “brand new information” in a reply.
That sour electric aroma you can smell is the collective anxiety-stench of games journalists trying to decide whether it’s worth sitting through the full investor presentation in the hopes of discovering some proper context for these pitiful morsels – perhaps even a unique angle which none of those other hacks have discovered, the feckless layabouts. It’s two hours of people preaching about ROI, though, and there’s the terrible suspicion that you might get to the end and realise that it was all for naught, and that you are two hours closer to death with no headline quote to show for it. Damn you, Roi, why do you mock me so?
Such are the burdens of games journalists, the hardest-working people on Earth. I’m still on the fence, myself – perhaps I’ll try to watch the full presentation in the bath. In the meantime, I invite further discussion as to whether Control was an action-RPG, and what Remedy emphasising the label for Control 2 suggests about its design.