Interesting games coming in 2019

There are a couple of games of interest to me coming up in 2019, or at least expected in 2019 with one affirmed for it.  They are both retro-future types of games, meaning that while they have a high-tech feel to them, they both look like games that are styled on past works.

The first is from Obsidian which has been purchased or at least co-opted by Microsoft, but the game they are bringing out is via Take Two, a division of Rockstar Games: The Outer Worlds.  This game has much of the creative talent from the original Fallout games and Fallout: New Vegas who are bringing that early 20th century vibe to the new frontier at the edge of the galaxy where colony ships can go missing and terraforming planets sometimes just doesn't work out as expected.  From what has been seen from the trailer and early game play the entire situation has that Fallout style vibe to it, but is its own creature that is not Open World but, instead, a staged world that opens up as missions are completed and the story progresses.  In gaming parlance this is a AA title that will concentrate more on story and less on wandering around in a vast and relatively empty world.  There will be stats, skills and perk equivalents along with specialized drawbacks that will also offer a new perk opportunity, so if you take on a few vulnerabilities then some of the other things your Player Character does have a chance at a slight boost.  This is very much like the concept of traits implemented in earlier versions of Fallout, and give a chance to craft your character the way you want them to be.

The other game expected in 2019 is Cyberpunk 2077 from CD Projekt Red, the makers of The Witcher game franchise.  In development, off and on, since 2013 this game will feature a relatively Open World setting that has the player create some thumbnail backstory for their character and then decide how to play on their own from that.  It does have a male and female voiced protagonist, so dialogue may be a bit on the thin side (save for massive cut scenes), although the promise is to make all dialogue meaningful and not just black and white decisions.  What the player decides to do and how they do it is something they can decide on their own, and while there are arch-type character 'classes' the player is not stuck with any single 'class' but can pick and choose skills and enhancements to suit how they would like to play the game.  It is expected that the loving craft applied to The Witcher 3 will be applied to Cyberpunk 2077 so that it has a 'polished' feel to it.  CDPR hit far above their weight class with The Witcher 3 and has bulked up its staff since then, which can be a good and a bad thing.  Bethesda Game Studios has a far, far larger staff than it had for Fallout 4 which, itself, was a larger staff than used for Skyrim, and that was larger than the staff for Fallout 3...and so on all the way back to the early days of The Elder Scrolls Arena.  Larger staff allows for a lot to be done, yes, but without a good and tight game design plus amble QA, the general feel of the games is that they lack the focus of their earlier products with tiny design teams.  The job of CDPR is to harness that focus demonstrated in The Witcher 3 and apply it to Cyberpunk 2077 and keep the game quality high even when they are working their staff for ridiculous hours for months or even years.  It is easy to criticize the work practices, but much harder to denigrate the final product which is a game that sticks to its vision and attempts to give a well rounded feel to the entire game world.

As with all games from design studios, the proof is in the final product and past work is no indicator of future game quality.  The Outer Worlds may turn out to be a one-off if it doesn't do well or if Microsoft decides that style of game just doesn't fit what it wants from its console line-up.  Obsidian didn't have the vast resources of Microsoft at the start of the project, and is being completed before changes to their workforce are fully in place, so The Outer Worlds will rely heavily on the game designers and the narrative they are giving to players plus the innovations that their artists can give to the world to bring it alive.

Other items of note are mods to prior games in the Fallout franchise.

Fallout: New California is out for download now and uses the Fallout: New Vegas game engine to present its contents.  This is 100% newly made content by fans and volunteers who have been at this since circa 2013.  Unlike CDPR these people did not create a new game engine, but utilized what was available to fans of the series.  What is given then is a true expansion mod that is the size of some DLCs, and has multiple branches to its story to tell about what was going on in New California before Fallout: New Vegas.  Expect rough edges based on the long in the tooth game engine, plus the voice acting may not be up to professional standards.  This is a labor of love with a central vision for a story that will drive the narrative forward.  Yet these are gamers and so they will also have to take into account the fact that most Fallout players will just turn off their quest log and freelance their travels.

Fallout Miami is expected any day now and promises a whole new area to explore with new factions, Vaults and the look at the beachfront wasteland.  All the trailers look very enticing.  Again this is fan made and created content so the rough edges will be expected.  Yet if there is a good focus on narrative and giving the player agency to do what they want, then they will have dealt far more than what Bethesda can gin up to their games.  You won't be chasing after a family member, but given the chance to explore, interact and figure out just what is going on in the Miami area.

Fallout: Frontier.  This is done on the Fallout: New Vegas game engine and features a plot revolving around the areas north of the NCR and heading into the Portland and Seattle area.  There will be vehicles that the player can drive, large battles that should (hopefully) not crash the game (though this is FNV, after all), plus bring back Caesar's Legion which is trying to hone in on this area to cut off the NCR to the north.  The concentration seems to be about what happened in the region and what the aim of the various factions are.  As trailers included space stations and vehicles flying out from them, the expectations for this mod are very, very high.  This team also started circa 2013 and appear to have no coordination with the New California group (at least for narrative), but only time will tell if that is actually the case.  In the snowy lands featuring fortified sites and volcanoes, this promises to be a stark difference to other Fallout mod entries.

Fallout 4: New Vegas will be remaking all of New Vegas in the Fallout 4 game engine, bring back the old skill, stats and perk system, and use a similar system that A Tale of Two Wastelands uses to move content from a legitimate copy of Fallout: New Vegas to their mod.  Since FNV is dirt cheap these days, there is no excuse not to have a copy.  They should be able to improve on some aspects of the original game, but only for things like storage of materials and such.  This should not become a base building sim or spend much time on that sort of crafting (at least for base game content...post-game, who knows?).  Fallout: New Vegas remastered in the Fallout 4 game engine promises fewer crashes, better rendering and, hopefully, fewer invisible walls and terrain glitches.  Please?  In any event this will hopefully drop in 2019.

Other large scale DLC sized mods that might drop are:

- Fallout Cascadia built on the Fallout 4 game engine as a new land.  It will re-introduce the old skill, stat and perk system that the FO4NV team is working on.  Not much is known about their level of cooperation with Fallout: Frontier, so expect it to not jibe with that mod and offer its own take on the region.

- Fallout Hell is set to take place in Philadelphia, and not much has been seen beyond a few trailers for it, and some of the work being done on armor and weapons.  Not really expected for 2019, but one can hope.

Some individual modders have attempted to start a salvage project of various parts of Fallout 4, but those are scatter-shot and based on time available to the individual modder.  What they can do is bonus off the work done for FO4NV if there is a desire to bring back the old skill system and, possibly, even the old Hardcore Mode which is leaps and bounds far better than the 'survival' system Bethesda made.  Obsidian made that for a storycentric game that wasn't a base building sim, so it is better suited to that.  Hopefully that system can be fully implemented in the FO4 game engine and then used for other mods.  I do like Horizon mod for Fallout 4, mind you, and gives a good feel to some of what the PC would have to do to survive not being savvy to the wasteland but having a good pre-war technical background required for the protagonist.  Now if only something about the main story could be done to make the world reasonable.

Beyond those projects there will assuredly be new content for Paradox games like Crusader Kings 2 and Stellaris.  They seem to have the ability to build upon what they have put out and then put a new spin on the game that changes everything, yet leaves the basic game mechanics intact.  A few other game development studios could take a hint from that, but that means not looking to the immediate big bucks but for a continued revenue stream that isn't about chiseling money out of players for cosmetic items and 'game play enhancements' that only offer to cut down the grind that was originally put in to dissuade people from going through it so they would buy the grind reduction packages.  Maybe concentrating on good game design and mechanics and offering new, innovative and even game changing offerings might be examined as a possibility in the future.  You know: put some work into game design and get a bit away from next month's bottom line?

One can hope, of course. Hope is many things, but it is not a strategy.

Buy wisely.  Support projects that you want to see come to fruition.  If you have any skills and expertise to offer and the time to do so, then go for it.  The future of gaming is slipping away from the big AAA companies that are learning to abuse their customers and then wondering why their new offerings aren't doing so well.  Your time and love for games will matter, even if it is just to offer constructive criticism or insight to those doing hard work.  Don't just tell of the problem, but see if you can offer a different way that things might be done.  Getting info on the problem out is necessary, but if you want better games then offering valuable insight is required.  The large studios seem to want to implode and won't listen to outsiders about how to not do that.  Don't waste your time and energy on them, but do spend it wisely for those doing projects that you want to see come to fruition.  Your time is actually more valuable than money.  Spend that wisely, as well.  The future of games and gaming is in your hands, not that of the big companies that seem determined to find new paths to fail.  How about supporting those seeking new paths to succeed, instead?

Alternate History in games

Games like Bioshock: Infinite and the Fallout series present alternate histories (alt-history) in a context of a playable game space.  A city like Rapture would be difficult if not impossible to achieve with modern science and engineering, and the floating city of Columbia using quantum forces also fits that bill, and the ability of mankind to make such things in that series points to a very early divergence in the scientific realm from our history.  While Bioshock: Infinite misses the point of quantum changes yielding an extremely large number of time frames that make up many divergent time lines, it at least gets a good setting in place in which to stage the game.  Results do matter in game play, and if the premise of Infinite realities is to be upheld, then a set and single ending in a single reality can only be seen as 'a' outcome not 'the' outcome.

The Fallout franchise takes place in an alt-history setting in which the post-WWII world differed dramatically from our own.  The transistor was invented much later, atomic power was researched and utilized far differently than in our history, and the culture of the US (if not the world) became one enamored with the 1950's to the point where that era's outlook didn't end.  The dividing point or point of divergence between that history and our own has been one that community members have approached multiple times.  The music heard in the games since Fallout 3 is often used as a divergence pointer that would indicate when, exactly, the Fallout series diverged from our own.  Unlike the Bioshock series that just takes the super-science and setting for granted, the Fallout franchise has an expanded setting from its early days at Black Isle and Interplay when it moved to Bethesda Game Studios (under Bethesda Softworks, the publisher, and Zenimax the holding company for Bethesda Softworks and other concerns).  One thing of note is the lack of Martin Luther King as a historical figure, or even a mention of racial discrimination in the post-WWII America as a problem.  Lack of evidence isn't much to go by, of course, yet in the post-war era there has been no discrimination showing up (as such, though bigotry against sentient ghouls and peaceful super mutants does happen and is real in that timeline).  Part of this is to appeal to a wider gaming audience, so that no one feels that there is a virtue or hurdle to playing any type of protagonist via racial stereotyping.

As a non-problem this can be seen as a pointer to when some major changes happened in the US, and that means that the era of Progressive racial division and bigotry that was inculcated in the federal government by Woodrow Wilson didn't happen.  To get to that point requires a different formulation of post-Civil War America, and how that happened is something that is difficult to imagine.  Was Abraham Lincoln assassinated?  If so did it happen as it did in our timeline or due to other causes, or did he even die a natural death in or out of office?  A different reconstruction era would yield changes to the social landscape of the post-Civil War America, and a more cohesive and less bigoted society that finally comes to terms with racial differences would allow for much of the way the post-apocalypse doesn't use this very base way of determining a society.  Even among those Raider groups that are dysfunctional mentally due to lack of education or chem addiction do not resort to this (by and large) and are far more inclusive than typical prison gangs of the modern age.

With that said a change that is only seen by what is lacking is difficult to sustain as a premise.  Something that is seen or stated in the games is worth looking into, and that moves over to the realm of cross-fictional events, settings and characters.  The original Fallout and Fallout 2 were not concerned that much with what Easter Eggs (events, items or settings from other genres or 4th wall breaking indications) would mean for the series: they wanted players to have some fun and smile at nods to cultural events.  This has only expanded with Bethesda's time of ownership.  Thus the works of HP Lovecraft are incorporated, as well as Zetans the space aliens, plus a police public call box that dematerializes, and even a large lizard-like footprint in the desert indicates that Godzilla may be roaming around.  Of these the most solid evidence is for Lovecraftian mythos and Zetans, and of the two the one with the greatest impact are the concepts promulgated by H.P. Lovecraft.

In our universe (or collection of interlinked time frames) H.P. Lovecraft wrote fiction that includes beings outside the normal realm of the 'natural', then expands the 'natural' to include them and a much wider conception of universes.  Beings that have great power and actually don't care about humanity all that much and do things in their own way and time scale are fictional in our history, but a real thing in the Fallout franchise.  Thus the very first and most decided change for that franchise is the inclusion of Lovecraftian style beings which must incorporate the greater universal changes necessary for these beings to exist in the first place.  By inclusion the first deviation is not in the 1940's or 1960's or even the 1860's, but at the very start of the universe: the Fallout franchise features a universe that parallels our own, but is not based on our own history or a derivative from it.

Bioshock: Infinite tried to do quantum mechanics and decision making and failed in understanding the nature of quantum mechanics.  Simply put it is impossible for an observer to know the position and speed of a given particle at any one point of observation: you can know one or the other, but not both.  From that the actual position of something like an electron cannot be known and is represented by a cloud of possible positions around an atom.  Also included in this is that the outcomes of decisions are not preset, but depend on making a decision out of all possible decisions that can be made at any given instant.  That instant is in Planck second, the smallest possible unit of measurable time in the universe. There are 10^42 Planck seconds in a second and each of those ticks features decisions made not just locally by an individual but universally (though varying based on local conditions that change the rate of passage of time, like the singularity in a black hole).  Each of those has all possible decisions by everything happening at that one instance.  If one attempts to travel back in time, that traveler will have knowledge of all of that on a macro-scale, and such knowledge of outcomes is not allowed by quantum mechanics.  What happens then is interesting: the universe changes to ensure that your future knowledge and experience of the past will not be valid.

To take care of Booker in the past requires knowledge of it, and the moment any attempt to reach that version of the past is attempted, that past changes upon arrival to remove our future certainty.  Time is not a stream and quantum mechanics eliminates paradoxes as the very basis for prior knowledge of events that one wishes to change are removed upon arrival in an instance or frame of time that may have a number of similarities to what is expected but will have substantial deviation to ensure that the events the arrival knows about as a certainty are changed or removed entirely.  At the point of existing in that new frame of reference the universe then continues on normally from there, and there is no possible way that it can reach the future the traveler knew as quantum mechanics prevents that at the smallest possible scale.  Changes need not be radical, but they do need to be sufficient to prevent the universe the traveler came from then coming into being from the point of entry: future certainty must be removed by this new formulation of the universe.  Not only is the journey into the past one-way, but there is no way to get back to the future the traveler left.  By taking Booker into the past, the entire future where the game of Bioshock: Infinite started was automatically shunted off into a possible set of time frames that existed before the attempt to change its past.  The past that universe had can't be changed, and going back in time creates a brand new set of frames where changes happen along a separate, alternate history. Any event that is being changed will not take place in that prior history as the outcomes are known and fixed by knowledge of those events happening and what the outcomes were.

For all of the fun game play of Bioshock: Infinite, the story and plot which attempt to do a death-redemption falls flat on its face due to the misunderstanding of quantum mechanics and time itself.  The Fallout franchise has no such problems (although the Police Call Box might be one) as the stories continue into a future that is not predetermined.  And while some beings of chaos may have some way to interact with time in ways that we don't understand, they have not attempted to perform such feats in game play.  Treading forward is safe and letting the player re-play each game to get variant outcomes shows some respect to the power of player agency and player decisions: they are not futile and do make an impact on the future course of events.  The past memory of another history is left undisturbed as it is in a different time sequence of frames, and it is a sequence that cannot be reached from the moment the game starts.  What can be done is to make different decisions and see how they play out.

It should go without saying that any game that puts forward a historical framework to play in, that is a representation of past history and events, is alt-history every time it is played.  A game like Crusader Kings I and II will yield different results, different events and add some randomness into the game, all of which guarantee that it is impossible to get to our current setting.  That is much the point of such games: understanding the era they represent and having fun with the dynamics that the game developer has put into play.  In fact any game that features Earth-based humans is representing an alternate history as the actions of the player will change the course of events.

Time as presented here is not what we think it is and does not behave in a manner that is one that leads to paradoxes.  As no state of the universe we live in has a bias to outcomes (although the overwhelming presence of matter to anti-matter is one that is hard to explain) when there are probabilistic outcomes to any event then all event outcomes are possible and valid.  Once time exists with quantum mechanics at the heart of how energy works, then all possible outcomes are valid.  We do not like this way of thinking as it seemingly invalidates choices we have made in the past as other versions of ourselves made them differently, had a different life in which those questions never arose or, and this is the great and vast majority of alternatives, did not even exist at all.  It is to be remembered that effect of the observer changes quantum potential states to a probabilistic real state. 

That is the point of The Schroedinger's Cat Experiment with the 50/50 chance of the cat being alive or dead based on a probabilistic outcome: it is in both states before the box is opened.  Unfortunately for us the cat is also an observer, but the concept of having an event that has an equal probability for outcomes has those outcomes superpositioned on each other until the observer takes in the results: reality is formed by the experiment and then viewing its results.  The coin toss ends in heads or tails, with the extremely rare instance of landing in such a way as to balance on its edge also included.  The coin can also roll away, get snatched up by someone or something else in mid-air, or not be a coin at all but some other artifact that has equal event outcomes as part of its nature or not even take place at all.This is happening not just on the local scale but across the universe that has sets of clocks ticking at different rates due to the effects of gravity, distance and there being no universal clock. This is only captured at the lowest possible time division to create nested frame events that go from the sub-atomic scale all the way up to the interactive and interlinked set of universal frames that all go at different rates of time.  The universe is damned strange to say the least.

The role of alt-history in storytelling and gaming is to recognize the desires of man via human nature and posit the variety of things that we do as individuals and then shift from a known setting to a variant one.  This is done by posing a historical happening that is contrary to the known events in our history.  How well this is done depends on the strength of the creative process and the given story involved.  When historically drawn fictions are created they are a casting of 'what if...?' to yield the setting, individuals and story involved.  In the novel War and Peace we recognize that all the individuals are fictional, but they are so well drawn and respond so well to their setting that they seem to be a natural part of it.  When a writer decides to alter events and toss in time travel, the common expectation is that as time as a stream with paradoxes, which requires careful plotting and a high level of craftsmanship.  This is, perhaps, drawing the circle for alt-history too large, yet it demonstrates the point that fiction that inserts individuals who are ahistorical into a historical setting is an act of defining a set of outcomes to tell a story.  As readers we can and do applaud this, even if we recognize the concept it uses as false that does not detract from the skill and workmanship involved in the actual art, itself.

In the actual world we live in, the classic experiment of shining a single light source through two narrow slits and then observing the resulting pattern on a screen behind the slits demonstrates that light is not a particle but a wave function.  The interference pattern is hazy, not hard and well defined, and this is due to the function of a wave front impinging on both slits and having a probabilistic outcome on the screen beyond it.  If light was made of particles then there would be solid bars with no haziness around them to show where photons interfered with each other.  Waves do not offer such a clean solution and create a fuzzy pattern indicating that the interference comes from a wave function in which the energy of the photon is distributed across the entire wave front, thus the pattern is not smooth for interference as it is determined by probability.  Yet it is still possible to treat photons as particles in many circumstances for ease of calculation, but it is always to be remembered that when not tightly observed the nature of light is that of a wave.  It was not expected that probability at the quantum level would have real world effects, yet that is just the case.  When positing a change to history the knowledge of how events come out remove probability, which is something that goes against the working system of the universe which requires quantum uncertainty.  If there was certainty we would have bars of interference that were clean and crisp, and yet we do not: by knowing an outcome it is that exact outcome which cannot come about and the universe can and will change to remove it.

In game worlds with a history behind them, that is to say Lore, there is a common consensus among gamers that Lore is a necessary building block and foundation for future stories.  Lore is the history of a game world and when game developers vary from Lore and retroactively change the continuity (retcon) gamers are left asking: why was this done?  And, more to the point, expecting the game developers to offer in-game reasons and rationale for the change.  It is possible to do a retcon smoothly, which is to say that it is streamlined into game play with an appropriate reason given by in-game play.

In Bioshock: Infinite the protagonist, Booker, had participated in a known atrocity and was seeking a path to redeem himself: the atrocity did take place historically, but Booker was not a part of it in our history as our history does not feature the use of quantum mechanics to lift entire structures into the sky in the late 19th century.  Thus the event is historical, but the outcomes fictional and the event is used to show what can drive an individual to extreme activities even when adhering to a strict cultural code.  It is smoothly used and a good back-story for the character, although the player is unaware of it which is withholding information to further the game experience, but not necessarily a good thing to do.

In The Elder Scrolls universe there are various reasons given as to why we don't know the exact outcomes of prior instances of the franchise in later games that are built upon that history.  There are multiple ways this is covered, like the concept of a 'Dragon Break' that happens when an Elder Scroll is involved which causes a discontinuity in time itself.  All outcomes that the player may have gone through in a prior game are valid, yet the history of the effects are known.  In fact there can be multiple different histories covering that time period and all are valid and, even stranger, all are true to the person writing them.  Changes after those periods can be explained by what happened in the period of discontinuity of history.  When all descriptions of a time period are true there is no need for a retcon, though it can lead to some arguments about just what is and what is not canonical to the game universe

History, then, is a building foundation for any game that presents a setting that is social or has social background, even if it is just whimsical, nonsensical or never stated beyond the environment.  Alt-history for games means taking the known history that we exist with and then offering a change at some point in the past to examine future outcomes.  Games set in the future based off our history will deviate from our history the moment the game is finalized as our history will change not in the way expected by the game developers or makers.  There can still be some very interesting events that mirror our own history after the fact and we can be bewildered by them: the developers and makers were only projecting or using conjecture, they did not have foreknowledge of events in any exacting way.

As a game developer knows what an outcome of a series of events will be, it is easy to put in a character that can 'see' the future, and yet that detracts from player discovery and removes player agency.  Such characters are a slap in the face to the player, in effect telling the player that the game developer feels the need to hand-hold them in case they ever get stuck.  Characters that are vague, only see generalities and basically only see an uncertain future are perfectly fine, however, and can be used as set dressing.  Giving cryptic hints and having background dice rolling going on to give out meaningless or known information helps to increase uncertainty and requires that the player actually examine the information for themselves to determine if it is useful or not. Mysticism or other means of seeing the future should be used sparingly in RPGs or any game unless it is one centered around time travel with wide-ranging outcomes that can easily invalidate such knowledge of the future.  A set of courses are predetermined by the game designer, obviously, but that does not mean that predestinationism should be featured in game play as that treats the player as not being up to the challenge of the game, itself, which is not a good way to treat gamers.

Throughout this examination I use the concept of quantum time and the utility of having all outcomes as being valid along different paths of decision making.  While this may or may not be a valid approach it is one that removes the concept of the time travel 'paradox' by shifting to a different set of frames from the known historical route.  This means that time does not 'flow' in a given direction to a given set of ends, but branches continuously so that all ends are available, even those that make no sense at all.  In utilizing this framework it is also necessary to do a close-out on return to the quantum time frame the time traveler left as that is an intentional activity, a decision, and any attempt to return to it will not yield that point but a different set of frames where their knowledge about that world is invalidated in whole or in large part as they know too much about where they came from.  Using this mechanic there is no such thing as 'broken time' or having to 'fix events' because there is no predetermined set of ends.  Quantum observation of past time sequences will apparently 'work' though they will be ones that are variants of the actual sequences as the observer is utilizing energy of some sort to do the observation and this must be received at the other end to do the observation: the simple act of exchanging energy then requires a set of time frames where that took place and those are variants of the actual historical frame set.  No matter how close the events are to those that are known, that observed set of frames will not be the exact, same events as happened in the historical sequence: the act of observing removes uncertainty but also impinges upon the action and actors involved.

From this every single choice that can be made exists in a probabilistic state where it is not actualized for the reality you experience.  These do not go away, however, as they are equally valid states of being that require an observer to make into an actual set of contiguous time frames that create a new history.  Games that have multiple outcomes that are disparate to each other are showing how this works: the game path chosen on any particular run-through of the game is not set in stone and all of them are valid. 

For better or worse this is what Bethesda Game Studios embraced with The Elder Scrolls franchise, though it then continues on with events after a prior game to demonstrate what the generalized outcome would be given the meta-state of all possible endings.  The world is, in general, saved though how and who did it can be very much obscured due to historical overlays and probabilistic states.  It creates for some nasty lore, however, as no subset of events in any given game are canon: only the generalized ending is canon and what is written about other events is both true and false at the same time.  An actual Elder Scroll allows for seeing into the past and future, but that is different for every single viewer of each Elder Scroll.  Time changes based on the observer, just as it should, and nothing is assured.  Yet each of the Elder Scrolls and their content is valid, even those that have become 'lost' as these are artifacts of the universe not written by any hand.  While this approach may leave some players a bit unsatisfied on the actual meaning of what they accomplish, it does validate that what they do could have happened and did happen even when the wash of events is highly variant in any single instance of the game.  And the best part is that going back to replay any prior instance of a game in this universe it is still just as 'true' as all those that were done before the new game instance was released.

There are, assuredly, many ways to give this sort of accounting for probabilistic events and the universes they exist in.  If a game is created with this in mind it will then challenge the game designers to explore just what it is they are trying to present to their audience.  Bioshock: Infinite has the trappings of being in a quantum probabilistic universe, but comes to a single, set ending that the player arrives at.  All that is said and done in the game comes to a Predestined End that is intended to give a statement from the game designers about their view on human nature.  By eliminating choice they create something akin to a novel that has a directed scheme behind it.  What this does is gives the illusion of Player Agency, but any choice the player makes comes to the same outcome.  Throwing the ball or not throwing it both come to an equivalent end with little end result difference.  When doing something or not doing something is supposed to be a statement of actualized intent is turned into a meaningless choice then the moral statement of the game is one of the player's choice really not mattering all that much.

A good game can be made out of what happens when the player ISN'T the obvious hero or world-saving individual, as in the case of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.   And it even has multiple, meaningful endings for the protagonist based on how they treated the individual who is that world-saving entity.  It is such a good game that players forget that they are only the temporary hero of the day before going on to their next job and that they aren't the actual hero of the game.  It should be noted that the major choices for the protagonist involve personal choices, and that those choices are generally forced on the player.  You can have Yen or Triss or neither, but you can't have both, and you can't just chuck it all and forswear dealing with sorceresses on a romantic level and decide that a few of the regular human women might just be more compatible even with their limited lifespan.  What you can't do is just as telling as what you can do in a game and every choice you can't make is one removed to lower the time to create the game, itself.  No game can offer an infinite set of plots, paths and so on as they are restricted to setting and the amount of time that can be invested in them as games.  With that being said it is possible to put in probabilistic events and activities to simulate these choices, utilizing a set of event chains that can remold the world's social setting on each new instance of playing a game.  When the number of event chains is increased and have side-effects on others, then a game world begins to expand Player Agency and validating choice.  These are also hard games to make, but they do exist, just not in the RPG genre.

Back-end RPG NPC relationship engine

In RPG games one of the major concepts is interacting with Non-Player Characters (NPC) as they hold the information, background and personal viewpoints necessary to flesh out a game world.  As they are vital to RPGs as more than just background but individuals who have things that need to be done (for or to them), the depth of a game hinges on these individuals.  To be sure they are pre-scripted instances of individuals in a game world so that their interactions have a definition to them, be it from the lowly thief you apprehend as a player to a merchant to the most powerful beings in the game world.  At the start of RPGs these were relatively simple and static individuals, and to this day that remains largely true as few people want to find out the backstory and life of the local rug merchant.  Yet that lowly rug merchant, if it is someone that has a script for interacting with the Player Character (PC) is probably important in some way, shape or form as it costs money to script in interactions and then voice the lines for that NPC.  In this way two forms of world design NPC types are described:  static and reactive.

Static NPCs are those that never change and only serve a singular function, like a general store merchant.

Reactive NPCs are the majority of all NPCs in a game world as they react to the player and what they are currently doing.

After gaming moved form a simple dungeon crawl to a larger world setting, the variety of NPCs within those categories proliferated, but the categories remained.  To be sure a number of NPCs started to get a backstory to them, and become fleshed out beyond their current task or role in life.  Yet those NPCs are limited to just that script, and no matter how well and deep the story goes, it will not vary from the internal necessities of the events surrounding that script.  In the Open World RPG genre, that is large and wide-ranging maps and things to do, these types of NPCs started to increase so that the Open World could contain many smaller stories.  As these stories proliferated and a few game designers made events in a very few of them loosely (or tightly) linked, players and reviewers started to get an idea that these were 'living worlds'.  Give an NPC a schedule, a few things to say to other NPCs in a pseudo-conversation, and then add in side-quests: all of that started to bring these worlds 'alive'.  That is the state of the art as it is today, and it is moving in multiple directions with highly branched stories based on what a PC does or doesn't do, so as to yield many different, though definable states and end-states to a game.

In playing a game like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (TW3) and going into any small town or village, there are enough NPCs that the player can interact with through Geralt so as to give the feel of a 'living' world.  Yet these are highly reactive NPCs with only a very few of them gaining triggers to advance their script if the player does something that keys that trigger.  While that is seen as 'proactive' and good game design it is still, at heart, reactive in nature.  It can be very complex, true, with multiple differences due to complexities, but those are all pre-defined for the scenarios they invoke.  What TW3 and a few other RPGs miss out on is the individuals that are ones with limited scripting or no way to interact with at all.  There is nothing worse than a vendor hawking their wares to the PC, going over and finding out that it is impossible to interact with them as merchants (or any equivalent).  So a large city with many NPCs that are wandering around have a very few that the PC is allowed to have a dialogue with: this is hailed as an advancement in world design, instead of just very good set dressing.  As the typical game pointed to as 'a living world', it isn't: it is a reactive NPC world design with a lot of set dressing to make if feel more alive than it actually is.

Instead of aiming for a 'Living World' which may be impossible to do given the state of the art for programming, it should be possible to create a Pseudo-Living Open World by using concepts presented in another genre, entirely, which is the Grand Strategy genre as instanced by Paradox Games.  Of most interest to RPG fans is the blending over of Grand Strategy into RPG as seen in Crusader Kings 2 (CK2) and, to a lesser extent, Stellaris (to name just a couple of games I've played).   By the old tradition of RPGs, a character is required to have stats and their actions have an impact on the game world.  In addition they may have skills, abilities, or other powers that are manifested on their character sheet, that the player can use to advance their cause.  These are all hallmarks of CK2.  Now it isn't a traditional RPG, to be sure, as it gives a map, a control screen and pops up events and dialogues that the character has done outside of the player's control: the player has broad control of their character, but not fine control on everything they do.  Set an amition and aspect, and those play with the skills and traits, along with the culture, religion, and any secret society to yield outcomes. What the player only realizes through game play is that this is done with all of the NPCs in the game in the background, as well.  They pick up rivalries, addictions, change their religions or even take the initiative to go against the ruling regime.  All of these are pre-scripted events, but they require no interaction with the player until the player sees them.  With added background complexity due to the sheer number of pre-scripted events that play out between NPCs, the game world is no longer highly scripted towards outcomes: it is scripted to the outcomes of interaction that are randomized to a degree as no individual is exactly the same in any game start.

Interactive NPCs are defined by not being solely static or reactive, but have goals set by character traits, skills, associations and backgrounds, with each of those leading to goal-driven ends.  In CK2 the goals of NPCs (and even the general one for the PC) is given by their Ambition, which is a life goal they set for themselves.  For PCs this can start at the lowest level of 'Make a Friend' or 'Acquire a Title' and scale through 'Acquiring a War Chest', become a Duke/Duchess/King/Queen to 'Become a Paragon Among Men'.  Getting Married, Grooming an Heir and all sorts of other goal oriented activities come under this general category (like Renounce Anger or other such things for Eastern cultures) and many NPCs have them as well.  Look up the NPC chart for the entire game and the slot for an Ambition shows who has which Ambition at any given moment.  Once an Ambition is fulfilled then the individual stands to gain Prestige, Piety, or simple Gold, which is part of the reason that the Ambition was started in the first place.

What is even more interesting is that the vast majority of NPCs do NOT have an Ambition.  The character trait 'Content' still allows for Ambitions to be chosen, but they tend to steer away from acquiring power (though not always) and towards other goals that don't involve power directly.  Ambitions set goals for activities, and those activities then drive the pre-scripted event paths.  Someone intent on becoming a renowned duellist will tend to have that activity or training for that activity high on their agenda.  Someone looking to get married may choose a temporary trait known as a Focus which allows a character to gain a temporary stat boost and other perks when on that Focus, and have events be centered around it, as well.  Thus someone looking to get married might choose Carousing or Seduction, while someone looking to become a Paragon Among Men might choose Scholarship or Theology.  Statistics, traits, background, and what other forms of advancement for a character that are available, like Secret Societies, can drive Ambition (and vice-versa for Secret Societies), and that then creates a Focus swap to enable doing the things necessary to achieve that Ambition easier.  Not easy, mind you, but easier: even the simple 'Make a Friend' can be a very, very hard thing to do.

What this sort of character system creates is not just a Pseudo-Living world but something that RPG makers have been trying to create for decades: Emergent Storytelling.  The means to create this is an NPC back-engine that examines the individual traits, position in life and everything else that an NPC has and then creates the opportunity for an Ambition, changing a Focus and then using means to implement that Ambition.  The beauty of such a back-end to RPGs is that it then puts into play a world in which every NPC can have their own pseudo-life that has activities and interactions based on their own, individual character lay-out.  Everyone takes part in this and only when a PC goes into a general vicinity does this get put into a local instance of interactions.  NPCs for that area are put into play given what they have been doing, what they are looking to do, who they know, who they are associated with and what they hope to achieve.  A schedule is thrown around a job along with those functions and then the NPCs are set off the moment the PC comes into the region of activation for those NPCs.  At that point they follow standard scripting for what they are doing and if the PC never interacts with them, then the most the NPC would get is a change in their record if they happened to see or otherwise know about the PC being there.  That knowledge can be passed on, though it is likely to be removed if there is no interest in the PC.  Actual dialogue and active interaction, however, is stored per NPC, and it doesn't have to be detailed, just a set of flagged fields with a timestamp to record what the conversation was about.  From those interactions there is the possibility that what is chosen for that NPC will change, though that is based on the prior Ambitions or goals the NPC had.  Most NPCs will not have much interest in the PC, and just go about their scripted events without ever being influenced directly by the PC.  With that said, the more people the PC interacts with then the greater the possibility for change there will be.

Why is this important?  First it removes the Static NPC and relegates those to vending machines (unless those become actors, as well, then they will record the interactions).  Secondly it can create the next type of NPC.

Proactive NPCs are those NPCs that have either heard about the activities of the PC, had direct interaction with the PC, or otherwise have the PC come to their attention, AND the PC fits an Ambition equivalent for that NPC and may be seen as a way to achieve it.  Thus the scripts are now altered to that of seeking out the PC (either as a major or minor goal) to seek help in achieving that Ambition.  Based on past activities, reputation with various groups, membership in groups, types of work that is done will all serve as building points for a trigger to approach the PC.  With that said this is not limited to just the PC, but happens among NPCs, as well.  All the NPC to NPC interactions generally happen in the background and the player never sees them, and most will be done as calculations during times the PC isn't all that active.

What comes out of this is individuals shifting routines, seeking new jobs, or generally no longer in a pre-scripted rut as the game world is now not just reactive to the PC but shifts in tone and tenor that isn't reflected directly on the PC but in the game world.  This moves beyond the simplistic moral systems of past games and institutes a world that will take notice of the PC if they are doing something worth noticing.  How a player approaches not just their PC's goals (as given by their own agenda of items that start the game) but can then start to see if there are other things to do in the game world that will offer different goals more to their liking.  A larger story-arc can still be fit in this, but it should be noted that following it is no longer a set path.  Indeed any path the player chooses to pursue that story-arc, even ignoring it entirely, is valid and the story is not pushed in the player's face when they aren't doing anything about it.  A good game design would have other goals, objectives and concepts for play in mind so that something that may be a simple 'go for this, do that' mission or side quest can become the main focus of the game as the original story is abandoned.  These types of story require someone competent and capable as a game designer to put in and realize that what they are offering opens a new way of approaching the entire game.

As an example is Fallout 4 (FO4) in which the main mission of finding your infant son is quickly ditched to do a myriad of other things.  These other things tend to be the bulk of the content in the game and much of it is far more polished than the main story.  An example is the Cabot House side-quest, and working for the Cabot family to do a couple of odd jobs and then get put into the position of trying to figure out what to do with Lorenzo Cabot.  The warnings from his son is that Lorenzo has been totally consumed by a form of alien power and that he has become a monster: releasing him into the wasteland will make the world far, far worse off than if he dies.  If you help get him killed you get one of the most unique weapons in the game.  If you help Lorenzo, however, then for his family it is a disaster.  But after that?  No follow-up.  The man acts like a possessed power-hungry individual, but gets all calm and quiet after having his family killed and gives you a dose of powerful anti-radiation meds once a week.  That's it.  Yet everything about the quest says that releasing Lorenzo will start the coming of a new ending for the world, one that it might take the combined forces of everyone in the Commonwealth to stop, if they can pull their collective acts together.  Not delivering on that particular quest ending is not just anti-climactic, but a pure let down for the player seeking to achieve empowering chaos.  While not a bad quest, it is not well integrated into the game and the transformational nature of that one end branch have no carry through.  The reward for actual role playing is denied: the player is cheated of helping what should be someone far worse than The Master by being his second in command for a conquest of the wasteland.

Another example, actually multiples of them, are in TW3, especially with those women looking to get ahead in life.  To a woman warrior you can best who stays alone because there are no worthy men on the small island she lives on, there is no way to invite her to come along with you as you adventure onwards.  Helping her get a real husband that will satisfy her needs is a far, far better ending to the quest than just bedding her for a night and then offering advice to just get off the island.  She has combat training, is a decent fighter, knows local lore pretty well and otherwise would be a good teammate: at the rate Geralt goes through equipment, giving her hand-me-downs would tend to keep her alive in combat and effective for a longer period of time.  Another instance is Shani, the cute doctor from a prior part of the franchise, reprising her role and serving as an army physician because its what is required of her.  By the end of the game Geralt is well enough set-up to offer her a better arrangement in another land in which her medical skills will always be needed by the Knights of the realm.  Beyond that she could even start to figure out the experiments that were done by an individual looking to cure Witchers.  Then there are the various prostitutes that can be hired and a few have interesting ideas for what they want to do in life, and yet Geralt can offer help to NONE OF THEM.

The potential for NPC stories that are generated on the fly are numerous, and all of them fit around an Ambition or goal, with NPCs using a Focus on a certain set of means to achieve it.  And as for the vendors tending their wares in the market?  Hope you can find the one who is willing to actually trade with you, for as much as the others hawk their wares at you, they don't seem to be able to recognize when you want to buy from them.  This does require game designers to be far more open about the potential of non-main stories and their potential to be not only involving but game changing.  Forging ahead with a main story plot with side-branches and alternative endings is imperative for the overall software project goals for a game.  Allowing potential game changing branches to be examined after the majority of work is done on the main story then requires adapting parts or all of the main story to the new branch.  Minor branching for non-impacting stories will still be the vast majority of what Proactive NPCs deliver: they are not involved with the main story directly, though they may get involved in it if the player lets them know what else they are doing via the PC.  This creates a new environment for game play and story telling.

Emergent Storytelling is utilizing the general concept of Emergence, in which many small activities that are isolated from each other are put together to form a system that has more characteristics than all the separate pieces combined.  In gaming terms this requires those writing stories and scripts for games to include stories that can be generated by the activities of NPCs as they interact with each other in the larger game world.  This does not need to be a complex set of stories, however, and the adding of equivalents of Ambitions (goals), Focus (a larger scale methodology), and traits ( characteristics that reflect viable life goals) in a game for NPCs and then giving interactivity with the larger game world setting as a primary game design tool is the means to instantiate such those stories.

A city never sleeps and so it is with a game world that, from the moment the player steps into it, will begin to change and adapt internally to the changes happening in the larger world, itself.  The player via the PC will have some goal or goals to achieve, or some set of cascading goals that do have a set of predetermined outcomes, but the path to actually achieving the desired outcomes is highly variable.  In fact, beyond a few key individuals or necessary information in set locations, there doesn't need to be much in the way of story scripting: the pathways to those individuals or information or end-goal is something that is created by the interactions of all the NPCs in the game world.  Who knows the individual or information or end-goal can have a few individuals with scripts attached to them and a known set of associates so that there is likely to be a few viable paths (unless some of those individuals get killed, but more on that later) at the game start.  The objective of finding those individuals and getting that connection information is then left up to the player who will then utilize the shifting landscape of NPC associations and Friend of a Friend (FOAF) networks to attempt to find viable connections to their objectives.

A game world like this is highly probabilistic in nature as it requires some random and semi-random internals that are not fixed to allow the player to achieve their ends.  Such a world will get rivalries between individuals as well as closer associations, and that means that some interactions will lead to a lethal end for some individuals.  A requirement of such a world is NOT making a character, any character, 'essential' which means undying by any and all means as they are required for the plot of the story to move forward.  This then requires good game design to leave behind information or hints of where to continue even if an individual dies or is killed.

Individuals who are part of larger organizations will have someone put in their place in their organization from the ranks of those within it.  Those individuals most likely have no personal stake in information sought by the player and may yield up what their predecessor had with little or no resistance at all.  Similarly doing forensics, getting to where the deceased NPC lived or contacting their prior friends and associates is also a viable way forward to get vital information.  All of this may boil down to just getting the information via diaries, journals or just talking with individuals who knew the deceased so as to continue the main story.  In a world in which death stalks everyone, no one is safe, and telling a story in such a game world is a decided challenge to the game developer and makers: their talents, skills and abilities are crucial in creating such a dynamic world and telling a story in it.

What this does for the RPG genre is move it from the deeply scripted story telling of the past and creates a new venue for stories to be told that are not set in stone and in constant flux.  That can be so overwhelming in story creation for Proactive NPCs that the main point of game design may shift from just the player's story and to those smaller stories that are created by the NPCs.  With that said the lesson from CK2 is to be remembered: the vast majority of individuals in the game have no larger life goals and have already found a comfortable place for themselves.

One artifact of such a world comes into play, and that is replacement NPCs for those who have perished.  This requires that a new character be spawned into the world to fit some vital game world function.  In CK2 these are Courtiers, members of PC and NPC Courts, which translates into the larger power and association systems in other games.  Companies are always getting new talent as individuals advance up the company tree.  Religions and other organizations are always seeking new recruits or faithful.  It doesn't mean that such individuals will always be found and in game design terms there needs to be some critical threshold for spawning in replacement NPCs that is determined for all the higher level organization structures that are part of the core game mechanics of running the Emergent Storytelling system.

Replacement NPCs can be targeted for when they arrive, of course, as it is 'behind the scenes' work for the game engine, although a place for that NPC to 'fit in' must also be determined so that such individuals have a place to stay and start processing what their individual goals are beyond the immediate reason they were spawned in.  NPC loyalty to any individual or organization is a simple record that has adjustments to it based on their internal traits, goals and interactions with other NPCs: the new NPC spawned in will have to start trying to fit into the world, unless they are chronically shy or not having much in the way of outward interests.  As it is all the NPCs that a player cannot interact with fall into this last category in standard game design, and this is what Emergent Storytelling is removing as a primary goal.

The expectation for such a game world with these design concepts is that they will tend to be smaller and not Open World in scale when first implemented.  A 3D RPG with stats, skills, traits, and goals for every individual will be hard to craft even with a small set of NPC goals, objectives and means to achieve such.  Failsafe story design requires much thought and work by game designers and not just for the PC's story but for Emergent stories with NPCs.  The overwhelming majority of those stories, in fact perhaps 95% or more will never be encountered by via the PC and that is not the goal.  The goal is to achieve a world that has depth and a vibrant feel to it, and to shift the main story pathways away from highly deterministic design.  What this requires is that storytellers let go of some vital assets at the lower tier of stories, which are the characters who introduce the story and hold key information to continue on a predetermined path to the story conclusion.

Generalized Game Design is the instantiation of Emergent Storytelling environments, in which the challenge is to design a good game world with many smaller stories in it, that then has a naturally fitting larger story within it that is then told via game play.  Seeding a world with a few individuals who have key information is necessary, yet the game designers must also attend to the game world creating new ways to get information to the player that is outside of those seeded individuals as they are mortal.  The old adage rings true in this sort of game design: it isn't what you know but who you know that is important.  Therefore story imperative NPCs will have a coterie of friends and associates who have some reason to know them, although the rest of their lives can be as detailed as the game designer wishes.  Once all the wheels are in place, however, what any single NPC (be they story imperative or not) will do is something that can only be sketched in via an adaptive schedule.  That sort of schedule should have a master template (or calendar) that is then given important change data for each NPC.  It is possible for NPCs to change their master template and then have to adjust the change data for future events to it: master templates are, themselves, unchanged, but can be swapped out and adapted by NPC use for their own purposes.  Thus while a 'merchant schedule' will tend to have the same considerations, some individuals using it will do a time shift for a different shift, and that change is recorded personally.  Other individuals will have less highly scripted schedules and may have ones that are determined on a temporary basis on just a daily waking/sleeping schedule so that their goals and skills fill in the blanks during the day.

Information Discovery on the part of the player via the PC will not, of necessity, follow any pre-made script as that is part of the point of Emergent Storytelling.  There may be a few failsafe pathways put in at the start of the game, yes, but that is no insurance that those individuals will actually be in the world when the player discovers that they were a key link.  Game designers will then need to ask themselves if a given individual they are fond of, that they may have taken time to handcraft, is really all that important to the overall story?  Not every game nor every life ends in a triumphant climax of success, and being successful may often be anti-climactic in nature if one of the key movers for the original story has perished.  This can be artificially shifted, of course, via many game world appropriate means such as resurrecting the dead, making the antagonist non-human, or putting a small organization together that is undying (an incorporated 'individual' as opposed to a corporeal one) that can change out individuals at the top but the goal always remains the same.

The tools of the player via the PC will need to be appropriate to multiple ways of discovery, so that there are more than enough ways to go forward that require no single set of skills or abilities to complete.  A player must be able to augment their lacks either via equipment, social engineering or perseverance  of research.  Not every thug on the street will know what you need to find out, but if the player widely canvasses the game world they will, finally, find someone with such information.  Similarly searching through records archives is tedious, but will yield results either through deductive or inductive logic.  Going from social gathering to social gathering via the FOAF network will similarly yield results, but it may take a long time.  In the more 'brute force' approaches the player also builds up their own storehouse of information and contacts, even if it is outlining the FOAF networks of other individuals.  This is what is known as Role Playing.

Games in the past would use very well scripted and plotted paths so as to present a seemingly endless number of choices.  Each choice leads to a pathway and each pathway must be plotted out via connecting the results to the next logical event.  This will go on in an Emergent Story environment, as well, as the necessary dialogue for correct and incorrect choices for every NPC that can be involved in the main story must be available.  There are, however, no 'correct' paths as players with a few good skills or abilities may be able to pinball between pathways if they find a coherent arrangement of circumstances that allows for either inductive or deductive logic to demonstrate to themselves that seemingly unconnected people and events are connect.

Tracking down suppositions, going down dead-ends or re-opening a dead end with new information from a different source is part of what Detective Games should offer (and often don't) and are an explicit part of Role Playing Games as that is not only a viable Role but a necessary part of the player's own mental toolkit for approaching problems.  Presenting inductive or deductive evidence to an NPC requires the game designers to put in much forethought on the story they wish to tell, especially when it happens in a non-linear Emergent Storytelling world with Proactive NPCs.  This does not require tools for attempting to storyboard such ideas in the game, itself, though it might be handy.

The sheer amount of information that has to be gathered, sorted and then put together for the player may be a daunting task, and the game world will be forthcoming with a vast amount of non-story important data (though may have important information for other stories, social settings or other groups in the world).  Getting anything done in such a game world is a daunting task for the game designer and player, both, as it requires a good knowledge of the fundamentals of the setting and individuals involved in the game world.  Tools for tracking, sorting and otherwise giving a level to such information on its reliability would be a good thing for such a world, though just letting the player figure it out may be preferred to remove hand-holding: anyone taking up such a game will either have an adaptable mental capability for such worlds or not, with the latter being left confused by the non-traditional gaming structure.  This is what happens when RPGs move from scripted, set stories in a reactive or static environment and move to a proactive environment with emergence for stories.

The end result is that on a larger scale in the game world there will be non-scripted changes of power, factions rise and fall, groups come together and disband, though this will take months or even years to happen.  The PC will get to interact and change some events and may even alter the larger course of the game world.  Once the main story is done, however, the emergent stories within the world will continue if the player so chooses to do so.  A second play-through, even with the exact, same starting character will yield different results once the few easy to get to paths are started: the activities of NPCs ensure this.  Thus people who had been met mid-game in a prior instance of the game will have slightly altered viewpoints, may be doing something else in their life, or may not even be available to the PC as they dropped out of FOAF networks the PC uses, or even got a different job somewhere else.  Groups will tend to shift only a little, though individuals in it may be highly variable in any given run of the game.  This will require a player to re-examine their methodology, shift immediate goals and tactics, and then begin exploring other parts of the game world to move forward.  A good deal of Role Playing will come to the forefront as players utilize their PCs abilities, stats, skills and equipment to move forward on an alternate course as the prior instance of the game world is not this new instance and the world does change each time.

Those are my thoughts on what happens when something like the background NPC interaction system of CK2 is merged to become an NPC back-end in an RPG game.  Do note this type of game never presents a truly 'living' world with AI.  Instead it utilizes emergent design to create the game environment, which is something that should be welcomed as a new venue in RPGs.  Older style RPGs will never go away, however, as there are many good and tightly told stories that are extremely compelling that can only be presented in such a manner.  They will always have an audience, if only the gaming industry would understand that.