Are the days of barricading yourself in your teenage room for weeks on end, playing your favourite new game, gone forever?
Have unnecessary distractions such as work, friends, family or sport crept into your everyday life in recent years and increasingly outstripped gaming?
How annoying. It happened to us, too.
We often just don't have the time to really immerse ourselves in the big, epic stories of the big game studios. How nice it would be if there were compact RPGs with a gripping plot and gameplay that wasn't overly complex ... hang on, is that what The Ebbing is?
Well, yes! Yes it is :)
Developed by people with the same problems as you, Inspector Schmidt - The Ebbing can easily be split over several evenings. Our quests are structured so that our Inspector Schmidt questions one suspicious person after another in order to solve the case.
Always the same drill ... Where are nuances?
Of course, we didn't approach the development of The Ebbing with this in mind. But at some point we realised that we had all developed a bit of CRPG fatigue (CPRG = Complex Role Playing Game), partly because the games take up so much time. Compact, story-driven RPGs like Disco Elysium are few and far between.
Another aspect is that most RPGs always tell the same epic story: Good versus evil, David versus Goliath, world-changing conflicts that ONLY YOU can solve. Stories that deal more with the shades of grey between black and white are apparently rarely suitable for the masses and are therefore often not told by the big game studios.
An RPG with a complex story is no walk in the park for indie devs
However, writing a story game as an indie developer is almost impossible without an absolutely heroic effort from the storywriters and narrative designers: Narrating interpersonal conflicts is not easy. Writing quests that contain no logical flaws and work in any order is almost the final boss of the art of writing.
No wonder there aren't many of them. Why we do it - good question. We just love it too much ;)
What has been your favourite RPG in recent years?
