Alphachris said:
Sorry to quote you, its nothing personal, but you have summed up the main points that I hate about W-RPGS and that make them so boring for me. 1) I like charakters and how they interact with each other in certain situation. I somehow try to analyze why certain people are behaving and think about their motives in the main plot. A silent character with countless small decisions only mess up the whole story. 2) That's why I totally come to hate open world games. The non-linearity totally destroys a thrilling scripted story, because the whole story would advance without organisation. Even GTA is not fully non-linear, because you have to do the missions in a certain order and only have minimal choices. 3) I simply hate moral Systems in Games. One point is that the more decisions you make, the more endings a game will get and the more time you have to spend to see everything or the more likely you are to miss something in the game. I would prefer one lenghty playouthrough without missables to having to do multiple playthroughs and getting bored of the game because of its long playtime. That is maybe one habit that has changed. After having finished university I now have a job and I simply do not have as much time as before. So long games now are some sort of bad thing for me. I like games like Heavenly Sword, where you have an intense 10 hour experience and i hesitate to buy any action/adventure that is longer than 20 hours. Only RPGS are fun for 80-100 hours for me nowadays. I started to feel that the story/setting/characters of a game are the most important parts. Final Fantasy XIII, Heavy Rain or Heavenly Sword were among the best games that I have ever played (I started with the NES). Thats why I put my focus on japanese games nowadays, since western games often put very little effort in characters/story/emotions/settings etc. 100 Sidequests, moral/decision systems, online gaming, shooter overload and non-linearity are really bad developments that spoil this generation for me. Sometimes I wish the PS2 would have gone strong for 3-5 further years. Maybe it is time to realize that since I will have my 30th anniversary next year and that I am no longer within the main target group of gaming. I still hope that Japanese Developpers will stop with that insane "Westernizing" and will start to realize that there is a huge difference in taste between US/UK and Continental Europe. Come on Square... "Front Mission Evolved"...what where you thinking turning a story centric strategy rpg in an Online-Action game... How many "reimaginings" will loyal fans have to cope with in the future... |
Not knowing your age, let me give you a little background of how I came to be. I was 12 years old in 1996. Before-hand, since age 5 I grew up on Nintendo. There wasn't a SNES game in the video store that I did not rent and beat at least once, the Lion King game included. I am old enough to remember back when Earthbound, Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy 6, Ogre Battle, and all the JRPG we now consider classic first came and my friends rubbed it in my face the day after Christmas. I played the hell out of all them and in my older teen years, I got more and more into WRPGs starting with Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, Neverwinter Nights, Deus Ex, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and on. My experience playing RPGs harkens back to the golden age of JRPGs in the 1990s. Henceforth, every JRPG coming out today has nothing on Final Fantasy 6, Earthbound or Secret of Mana. The formula of turn-based combat is largely still there, but all the new ones have is better graphics, but not as great as the graphical leap from Final Fantasy 6 to Final Fantasy 7.
My experience is not a criticism or brag; it is background for people to understand where I am coming from. However, looking back, I did have it good coming of age when I did. I couldn't have asked for a better time to have hit my impressionable years than the mid- to late-1990s.
Character and story has become less important to me as I have aged. It seems to be that each RPG (JRPG or WRPG) who has defined protagonists and antagonists with a novel like story is the creation of some developer with Hemingway fantasies. I don't want to play his game, I want him to create the bare essentials for me to create my own adventure in his world.
I want a story and love games with a good story, such as Red Dead Redemption, but story is not everything for me. It is becoming apparent to me the more story driven a game is, like Alan Wake, the more rails they put in the game. By rails, I mean the developer limits the way you can play in order to advance the story.
Sorry, but I take story-driven, rail games the same way a grown man who knows how to swim is encouraged to wear water wings. There is a certain point after you have gained enough confidence and experience where the rails need to go and the entire pool is yours to create your own fun. Same goes for me and video games, if I can't create my own fun, then I don't play it.
If I want a good, epic story I will read a book by an author such as Jonathan Tropper. I don't expect video games to give me such, eventhough they have in the past.
