The isometric RPGs remain well loved today, and some think they represented the pinnacle of RPG design, with something missing from modern RPGs. There are 2 main advantages of the view point over the more popular 1st person and 3rd person over-the-shoulder views.
The first benefit is tactical arrangement and control. With a fixed, bird's eye view of the world, it naturally lends itself to tactical gameplay. You can quickly and clearly see your positions how they related to each other and your enemies. Information like are my melee classes between my mages and the enemy are answered with just a cursory glance. More complex information like how many characters will the 30' wide fireball hit, and how many of them are my own characters are also quickly answered when compared to 3D moveable cameras like Neverwinter Nights 2, or Dragon Age Origins, and camera views like Mass Effect basically make it impossible. You'll noticed the importance of area of effect attacks is greatly reduced in Mass Effect and almost nothing causes friendly fire because it would be very difficult to manage.
Shadowrun takes full advantage of this benefit. You control a team of 4 runners, often augmented with drones and summoned monsters for up to 7 or 8 characters under control at any time. There are area of effect attacks, which do friendly fire if you hit your own troops. There are spells where you can create "walls" that deal damage to any enemy that walks through them. Both of these make positioning important. You also have overwatch, where a character will save an action point to shoot at any enemy that gets too close during their turn. This reinforces friendly positioning, and covering paths where enemies would advance through.
Unfortunately, the good ends there. The enemy AI is too stupid to avoid your walls. Overwatch is not a clearly defined in area, so it's hard to tell when a character might take the shot or not. So you can't avoid it as a player. All area of effect spells are the same size. Players familiar with Dungeons and Dragons will know of smaller and larger affected areas, plus spells that come out as cones like a flame thrower. These would have been very nice editions to spell list provided. Another style of spell that's missing compared to DnD is spells that affect movement. There's haste and slow, but DnD has a variety of spells that can affect the battlefield, such as web and entangle. These create new obstacles that characters have to decide to avoid or risk going through. Again, it would have added a lot more interesting tactics with the inclusion.
The second benefit is more esoteric. With an isometric viewpoint, the player experiences the game through sympathetic emotions. He is aware that the character(s) on screen are not him, but characters he is controlling. He feels sympathetic emotions for these characters. This contrasts with 1st person games that try to maximize immersion and make the player think he is the character. Then try to make the player feel the emotions of the events that place directly. Why is this a benefit? Because ultimately the player knows he is not the character. He is never hit with a sword, or blasted with an ice bolt. He knows he is sitting on a chair playing a game. The immersion will always be broken because of this. By bypassing the need for immersion and creating a sympathetic experience much like movies3 or books do, suspension of disbelief will be higher and the player will have a more cohesive experience.
Shadowrun does a good job using this. Between each level there is text describing the situation. These descriptions were some of my favorite parts of the game. They did a great job setting the scene and drawing the player into the world. Such a tool would not work in a more immersive experience, where the player would expect to see with his own eyes the scene and action. You can't break up Skyrim with textual descriptions of the village you're about to visit, you have to show it to the player.
Harebrained Schemes were also able to get away with no voice acting, presenting all dialog as text only.
Besides not having to pay for voice acting, 2D isometric makes producing content much cheaper than modern 3D games. This allowed Harebrained Schemes to make a game for 1/85 the cost of Skyrim. In the 90s, it allowed Bioware to make Baldur's Gate 2, which can take 200 hours to complete. It also let Black Isle make 2 Fallout games where 99% of the content was optional. Modern games are made with the idea that content is so expensive to create you have to make sure players see all of it. This really reduces a lot of what can be done with choices and consequences and reactivity. Shadowrun Returns falls for this trap anyways. The entire game is fully linear with almost no consequences to any choices you make.
The writing itself ranges from cringe-worthy to good. It generally hits above average, with a few moments of bad and good happening. The story starts off nice and low key--a welcome reprieve from every RPG being about saving the world--with film noir elements, but towards the end you still end up in a save the world situation. The characters at the Seamstresses Union (what turns out to be your main base) seem a little too get-along, friendly and helpful. I expect backstabbing, disenfranchisement, tight sealed lips, and cold shoulders from my cyberpunk.
Shadowrun Returns is the first 6 digit kickstarted game to be released. I couldn't write this post and not talk about this. It has a lot of expectations resting on it's shoulders. This game would finally answer some important questions. Is kickstarter a viable funding source for low-to-mid budget games that focus on gameplay and writing instead of graphics and presentation? Is one million dollars enough to make a good game? Is it enough to make a full sized RPG? Is the market interested in these games?
Well it turns out, the 2D isometric, despite being cheaper than 3D, were much more expensive than the top-down graphics Harebrained originally planned4. So it turns out, we don't know the answer to the first question as they ended up focusing on graphics. I would call Shadowrun Returns a good game, but just barely. So a budget around 1.2 million5 is apparently enough to make a good game. The lack of options in the game with regards to choices and consequences makes me think it is not enough to create a full sized RPG. We'll all have to wait to see if market is interested.
- The terrible FPS on Xbox doesn't count as "real Shadowrun"
- Most games that looks isometric are not actually isometric because of the camera angle. They're often cavalier oblique. However, for the purposes of this review, I'm using isometric to mean any birds eye view at an angle.
- For a short breakdown of sympathetic experience vs immersion see this video, he details why 3D sucks for movies and the same principle can be applied to video games trying for the same effect by using 1st person.
- http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-07-16-shadowrun-returns-dev-will-return-to-kickstarter
- The kickstarter raised 1.8 million, but 600k was used by physical rewards. That leaves 1.2 million, but HBS put more money into it from their iOS and Android products and took out a loan. It's hard to say how much that adds up to.
