Here are some of my more recent random musings on single-player RPG video games.
It’s an absolutely simple and elegant design for many RPG or adventure games… you need a piece of the MacGuffin. Someone you encounter has this piece. This person is willing to trade it for a favor. Or, of course, you could shoot them and take it. Or you can pickpocket them. At the end of whatever course you take, you have the first little bit of the thing you need… and then you have to go to another situation where, at the end, you’ll end up with the next piece. And, no matter what, you will beat the game by assembling however many pieces you needed and taking on the Big Bad… but the way to get there has so very many different possibilities.
Bioware has pretty much mastered the RPG. They made Knights of the Old Republic (I think that this is one of the best games of all time, myself), Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. If you’re more into the computing rather than the console side, you probably remember Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights.
My bias is this: RPGs are my favorite types of video games. I love the idea of having a character at level 1 who is essentially a blank slate and playing through a game and having the option of making him (or her, but usually him) a skilled mage, or sniper, or brawler, or merchant, or whathaveyou.
When RPGs first came out, it was pretty much limited to character management but , in the 90’s, the concept of different ways to make one’s mark on the universe showed up. An example: The first town you encounter in the game Fallout is a little dinky place called “Shady Sands”. The mayor’s daughter has been kidnapped! By a biker gang! In older RPGs you would have had the mission to rescue the daughter… and, indeed, the mayor charged you with rescuing the daughter (“and then I will tell you where to get the MacGuffin”). But when you got to the biker gang, you had the option of teaming up with the gang and invading Shady Sands (“and we’ll get the mayor to tell you where the MacGuffin is”). Wait, what? I actually have options above and beyond putting a point in Strength or putting it in Dexterity? This blew me away. Not only was the character something I could mold and pat, but the very game world was.
I want to say that Fallout was the game that introduced different types of footprints to games… after you beat the game, you saw a little movie that told you that Shady Sands turned into a thriving metropolis where rule of law was upheld or that it turned into a pit of debauchery before imploding into chaos… So not only do you get two (or, more recently, three or four!) ways to get the MacGuffin, you get to see what happens what happens when you pick this way over that one. When I watch television or a movie (or read any but a very small genre of books), there is never that degree of interactivity and reward.
Now I am PINING for Jade Empire. God that was good. PINE PINE.
I always enjoyed a good dungeon crawler, starting way back with Wizardry I: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. And while mostly it’s a “go get these three whatsits and bring them back here” sort of thing, if there is enough story and atmosphere surrounding it, it’ll do just fine.
But my mind was blown from a character management perspective by a now-obscure hack-n-slasher called Arcanum. This was the first time I had seen classless characters — you picked the skill sets completely open-endedly. The late-Victorian steampunk setting was also a lot of fun.
I think the form hit its peak (so far) with Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion which combined the open-endedness you praise from Fallout, the character management that has always been so much fun, and the first-person open-endedness of Grand Theft Auto. When, when, when will we see Elder Scrolls V?
I played Arcanum but found it *WAY* intimidating. It felt like every character build option had *NO* slack whatsoever. Put a point in the wrong thing and *WHAM*. You’ve just wasted 14 hours. It got too stressful for me.
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is due to release in November. The trailer is epic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSRtYpNRoN0&feature=feedlik
And I too enjoyed Arcanum, it had some fo the best lines: “Why do madmen do anying? Because they’re bloody madmen, that’s why!” and “Gar no like green tea! Good for foreigner, not gentleman!”
I found Morrowind: Elder Scrolls series to be really interesting on that score (I bought Oblivion, but never had time to really play it). It wasn’t as elegant as I would have liked, and there were REALLY BAD decisions made with the UI that made me grit my teeth whenever I had to do large inventory operations, but I really enjoyed the “you can completely mess up the main quest, and still figure out a way to win at the end” factor. Having consequences to certain decisions was fun, too… it’s really hard to actually max out all your guild memberships without getting kicked out of another guild.
The problem with single-player RPGs, of course, is that the Easter Eggs are all known immediately. You can’t really play those games while attached to a community of players, without spoiler alerts. Now, when somebody figures out a modular enough backstory that your McGuffins can be spread around randomly on a per-player basis… that will be a fun game.
“I can’t get past Maudon Keep.”
“You don’t need to go there, you know. You can just go around”
“Yeah, but it’s bugging the hell out of me, I hate that guy at the gate and I want to get through there just to spite him.”
“You need to find the Axe of the Aegis to get through the postern door – no other weapon will let you break it down and there’s no way to get through the main gate without the Dragon that you don’t get until almost the end.”
“Okay, so where’s the Axe?”
“It’s in a different place for each player.”
“…Wha? You’ve got to be KIDDING me!”
What I loved about Morrowind was the character creation… it gave you a quiz and built your character from there. Kinda reminded me of Ultima V, in that…
Dungeon Keeper II was one of my favorite games of all time along with the Civs but Fallout was almost #1. The ambiance of that game was incredible!
Fallout 3 recaptured the Fallout experience, if you ask me.
It *FELT* like Fallout. (I didn’t think that Fallout 2 felt like Fallout, mind.)
This seems like the best place for this, so here it is:
Have you read this lecture from the 2011 GDC by Brian Moriarty?
http://www.ludix.com/moriarty/apology.html
Not until this moment! (Additionally, any post with the name of one of the days of the week ought be considered an open thread. Heck, it’s not like any given post can’t be considered an open thread.)
Actually, now that I dig through it, I have read it (or, at the very least, read a number of essays that made similar points).
This all ties back to aesthetics. We like to think that we can tell the difference between a good song and a bad song. We like to think that we can tell the difference between a song that is a “work of art” and a song that is little more than an earworm. Right?
When it comes to games as art, there are soooo very many different things that we could mean…
But I’ll instead write tonight’s essay about it.