The Rampant Games Blog reports on the death of long-awaited indie RPG The Broken Hourglass.

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Eric Scwarz has posted an opinion piece on Gamasutra arguing that RPGs are not about story or decision-making so much as they are about rulesets:

As narrative elements began to creep into RPGs, as players began to get attached to the characters they played as and the universes they inhabited, RPGs began to become associated with storytelling in addition to those mechanics.  While the name, role-playing game, reflected the inclusion of narrative, it still originally, and in my opinion, more accurately, reflected the fact that players had to cooperate within a predefined ruleset to solve problems, effectively serving functional roles within a setting whose narrative concepts only existed as a vehicle to structure the experience.

The analysis here is a little shaky. All games operate based on sets of rules, even the action games that Mr. Schwarz derides. That is the nature of programming: it is impossible to tell a computer what to do without explicitly setting forth the rules by which it does that thing.

Mr. Schwarz’s ultimate point seems to be that for a game to be an RPG, storytelling should arise through the player’s actions as he or she interacts with the world through the use of consistent in-game mechanics. This isn’t really adequate as a definition, however: that just makes “RPG” synonymous with “non-narrative game where you navigate the world,” effectively making the early entries in the Grand Theft Auto series RPGs, along with borderline cases like the first and third Legend of Zelda games. We would have to award the title “RPG” to nonlinear physics platformers before we could award it to games like Planescape Torment. Something about that strikes me as a little perverse.

No offense to Mr. Schwarz, but I think I’m going to stick with my own definition.

Russian CRPG website Core-RPG.ru writes in with word of an exclusive interview they landed with Vince D. Weller. It’s posted on a forum: you’ll need to click the little plus symbol to expand and read it.

Aldorlea Games writes in to announce the release of Millennium 4: Beyond Sunset (so…nighttime, yes?), the latest RPG Maker jRPG in the Millennium series.

Aldorlea Games describes the game like so:

Marine and her friends have six days to find the four remaining warriors and make it to the showdown!
With such tight schedule and dramatic events piling up, Marine’s nerves are all over the place.
But Jeanne the tiny fairy is back! And this alone helps even the balance!

Millennium 4 is the most suspenseful, thrilling and emotional Millennium installment so far!

15+ character
25+ secret rooms!
25+ quests!
20+ hours of gameplay!
Battle superb monsters including 9 Animal Kings!
Awesome production values

Below are some screenshots, presumably representative of the aforementioned awesome production values. The game sells for $13.99, but in case you need more convincing, you can download a demo right here.

Omorote Hideoshi writes to tell us of the release of Lost Hero, a free RPG that runs in-browser. The game appears to use HTML, as most actions are followed by a pause where images load onscreen. From what I can tell, this game is rigidly linear, at least to start. Additionally, all of the game’s combat auto-resolves, making for an extremely lightweight play experience. This is a bit what I imagine a Zynga RPG would be like.

Still, the game is free, so you might as well give it a try. Below are some screenies showing what it looks like.

Indie tactical RPG Telepath RPG: Servants of God has gotten a major update. The biggest change is that the game now uses AIR, meaning that it now runs in Windows, Mac and Linux. However, other new features (such as drug use addiction and withdrawal) have been added to the game as well.

Here’s the blurb from the developer’s website:

This build features a ton of improvements to the game–so many that I can’t get into them all here–but here are a few:

The Crypt of the Poet King is now finished, and boy is it ever a nasty one.

My favorite new feature is that your character can now use drugs and (depending on your luck) get addicted, suffering prolonged withdrawal effects if he goes too long without a hit. (Don’t do drugs, kids!)

You can now swap out orbs between battles.

There’s new music in the game that plays during the battle preparation screen.

There are a ton of bug fixes.

The game engine now officially supports voiced dialog.

Did I mention that Mac and Linux owners can now play the game off their hard drives? Because they can. And it’s awesome.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Telepath RPG: Servants of God, here’s a trailer showing off the game. It’s scheduled for release at the end of this year.

Streum on Studio announced today that E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy, the studio’s first-person shooter/cyberpunk RPG built in the Source engine, has been released on Steam. The game looks pretty cool, despite a borderline-nonsensical plot summary:

After an unending war with the metastreumonic Force, the powerful organization Secreta Secretorum you belong to is finally ready to undermine the head-strong federation, despite an intense struggle for power.

All righty then. But wait! Look how pretty:

There’s a definite Deus Ex vibe going on here, though most of the E.Y.E.’s media have so far focused almost exclusively on the FPS aspect of the game. For my part, I’m curious to see just how much RPG this thing contains.

E.Y.E. costs $17.99 for the remainder of the week ($19.99 thereafter), so if you’re curious and you have the money to spare, drop by Steam, pick it up, and let me know what you thought of it.

EDIT: It appears that Jim Rossignol of RPS has had a chance to play E.Y.E. a bit and offer some thoughts on it. However, he states: “I’ve not really uncovered how deeply the RPG elements run just yet.” I remain curious.

Remember that remake of the original Avernum that Jeff Vogel talked about doing in my interview with him last month? Spiderweb Games has now sent out a press release today officially announcing the remake to everyone who hadn’t already read about it in the interview. It reads:

Avernum: Escape From the Pit is an epic fantasy role-playing adventure in a unique and deadly world. Fight to complete up to three game-winning quests. Explore a massive nation of tunnels and caverns, seeking out eighty towns and dungeons. Master over 50 spells and battle disciplines and hunt for hundreds of magical artifacts. Avernum: Escape From the Pit is a total, ground-up rewrite of the last century’s Indie hit Avernum. It will be ready for adventurers in Q4, 2011.

Hit the jump for more info about the plot and some screenshots showing off the game’s newly spiffied-up graphics.

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I received an email a couple of weeks ago about a new “Choice Of” game release, Choice of Intrigues. It begins:

Dear Craig,

Have you ever wished to be the heroine of a romance novel? Think you could have run Anne Boleyn’s life better than she did? Want to walk a mile in Princess Kate’s gorgeous shoes?

Uhhhhhhhhhh…so, I think that’s pretty clearly a big “no” right across the board–but that said, I’m equally sure that there will be some readers to whom those things sound delightful. So here I am, posting about it.

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Developer Roman Zeitl of Dynamic Games writes in to let us know about the development of a new RPG by the name of Warlock – Tower of Fentrax. ToF is modeled in large part on Ultima IV and V, with a big emphasis on wilderness survival:

Tower of Fentrax will be a roleplaying game that focuses on the dangers of the world in which it takes place. But where the main threats in other RPGs are your foes ToF pays more attention to natural dangers. What if you get sick on your journey through the world? What if the forced march of the last few days has destroyed your boots? Or even simpler: What if you are hungry and have nothing to eat? What if you are tired and far away from home? These (and many other) questions, just like the consequences of your response to them will play a major role in ToF.

The official announcement is here. I’d post a screenshot, but the screenie on their website is apparently “pre-alpha” and not representative of what the game will look like. For now, I suppose we’ll just have to imagine Ultima IV, still tile-based, but prettier.