| Alphachris said: Thanks again for your insights. Since you are European too, it makes some things easier (EU release etc). Lets quit talking about GTA 4. I played it long enough to come to the Conclusion, that it was my last Rockstar Game. It was somehow funny, but in the end it was getting repetitive and I totally lost interest. Those friends calling for doing something together were getting a nuisance. My brother asked me to buy RDR, so that we could get the online trophies together, but after some discussion we both found, that it is just not worth the time to play it. We are no big fans of Western (we only like the Bud Spencer and Terence Hill ones^^) and the Sandbox style is not appealing to us. We would probably buy it, if it had almost no sidequests and concentrated on story instead, but that is ok. We are simply not the target group of the game. @ Planescape. I do not know that game and stopped playing PC games over ten years ago. The only exception was FF 11, but it was not worth it in the end. MMORPG suffer from the same issues as sandbox games. I think I was the only one who just wanted to do all missions and was not interested in fighting Notorious monsters, getting the best gear or do any other non-story related stuff. I have played it almost for a year on and off in 2007 but then the PS3 software started to pick up and I lost interest in it. That might also be a reason, why I feel WRPGs lacking. You probably grew up with PC RPGs and are already used to PC style RPGs. You know what to expect from them and know how to play them efficiently. I grew up with console style RPGs, know what to expect (japanese storytelling, deep characters and intense storytelling) and how to play efficiently. I have beaten FFX in less than 200 hours and have seen everything (I only failed at getting Jecht Shot Mark I although I played Blitzball very much. Learning all those abilities necessary is quite luck based, unfortunately). Well, I have to go further into Detail. Time used to be not the problem for me. Since I went to Commercial Collegue and later to university I had enough time left for playing games and money was the constraint. Now that I work 40 hours money is no longer the problem, but leisure time turned out to be a major problem. So I try to play the most time-efficient way, so that I still get to play a wide variety of games per year. So as you already analyzed correctly, pacing and intensity are a big issue for me, since I want to keep the game intense in the first place. I also dislike Ego-Perspective, you are right again. It is almost a dealbreaker for me. The only game/franchise with Ego-Perspective I have enjoyed so far was Resistance. (I know that you could play Oblivion in 3rd Person view). After playing around 30 hours of Oblivion i felt that I did not get any satisfaction out of the game. In Fact I was bored like 29.5 hours and I lost hope that it was getting better. It felt like a big waste of time for me. If time was not the matter for me, and I had put more than 200 hours into the game, maybe than I were able to put all these little pieces together and could see the "immersive world" you are talking about. But after 30 hours, the game felt only lacking, had boring characters, the main quest was nothing special and I did not like the overall game mechanics (level system, fighting, etc). For my it still stands for being the worst RPG that I have ever played. Its maybe a matter of expectations, since it got so many "game of the year awards" and was often called "best Rpg". After Oblivion I played FF 13 and after this disappointment I liked it even more, because I came back to my own style of play. Today I can't say what is my favourite RPG. It used to be FF X, but maybe next year, when I play through FF XIII again, it may take this place over in my heart. @ Freedom. I thought about what you said about freedom in games. I do not feel that JRPGs lack freedom or Sandbox games offer more freedom. Let me explain further. Most JRPGs are built to have an intense story. They do not want to distract you too much from the story, since that is the main point of the game. Sidequest are often offered really close to the end of the game, when the Story is (almost) finished and oyu can't be distracted. You could play through the game first, see the ending sequence and then reload and do the sidequests, after you have seen all of the story. Remember FF7, where all miniquests where on CD 3? Final Fantasy X with the monsterfarm and Dark Aeons? Dragon Quest with the optional Dungeon. Or the whole Concept of New Game ? So you can say story first, then freedom in doing what you want. The battle system give you very much freedom too? Ok, you may not create your own character and often there are no development trees. But the main character is not exactly built to be "yourself in the game". Thats why there are party members that enable you to customize your play style. So you get a good mixture of personalities. You can often choose whether you want to maximize Attack , Defence or Magic. Systems like in FF7, FF 8, FF 10-2 or FF 12 enable you to make any character everything you like. Systems like FF 9, FF 10 or FF 13 give you similar freedom through proper party selection. I still can play like I want and I am no way "taken by the hand and guided through the game". Those systems are easy to use but hard to be mastered. I can also decide to stay in an area as long as I want. Ok, exp will get stale after some time but for example AP gain is not getting stale. FF 13 did not want you to overlevel so progress was capped for every chapter. It was just a stricter form of story first/freedom later after you finished it. So I can claim now, that Sandbox games do not offer more freedom to the gamer, they only offer it far earlier, maybe even from the beginning. So they are more like freedom first, then story whereas japanese games are story first/freedom later. And the moral system and choices in the game are only a different form of storytelling, where you are given the feeling that you have control over the game (in fact you have only limited choices, since the main story is still scripted and can be altered in only a few clearly defined elements). You still can't play like you want, you can only choose which branch of the defined story you can go down. So while I lost interest in Oblivion because i felt bored before I could enjoy the whole depth of the game (I simply believe you that it is actually there and I only haven't found it) I think that many people are quitting games like FF 13 before finishing the story where the game opens up. It is just a matter of how important the pacing of the story is, like you can wait for getting more freedom or you can wait for the story to go on. |
GTA:
Agreed, especially as when I mention GTA I think of the PS2 era games. The recent GTAIV for me was too realistic and I found it wasn't anywhere near as fun. That, and a lot of the features were seemingly removed vs San Andreas which is my personal fave. This is what I meant by the cartoon violence. The more realistic they become, the less mass appeal they have IMO.
Planescape:
It's one of those games that didn't sell particularly well for its time, but looking back the story is probably one of the deepest and most involving in video games. It is a Western PC RPG though so I'm not sure you'd neccessarily like the slower pace. It's also one of the few RPG where combat skills are less important than more subtle skills like conversation. Instead of cutscenes it relies heavily on dialogue and player decisions, and due to its age means a lot of text to read. Its also a more personal story rather than the epics of Final Fantasy. It's heavily focused around the main character.
RPGs:
I actually started with JRPGs (FFVII), but I also game on PC and discovered Bioware and Bethesda made some fantastic RPGs. Took me a while to understand the differences and it can feel like a completely different genre, but the roots are still the same.
And with Oblivion, it is difficult to discover all the details of the immersive world and not just because the game itself is large, but their are also references to other events in the Elder Scrolls saga which are easy enough to miss. I found some of conversations about events in Morrowind which of course was the previous game. You wouldn't have had that extra level of immersion. It's a very different style to JRPGs but your criticisms are valid and areas I think and hope Bethesda will look to improve in the future (especially the animation!). This is the first Elder Scrolls where animation was important as previous iterations relied on text based conversations. Also, I played for 400 hours, so I got pretty immersed into the game world!
Freedom:
I pretty much agree with your assesment. There's different focus in sandbox vs JRPG and good pacing is much easier to acheive with the latter. However, I'd also like to point out a difference is also where the freedom tends to be. In JRPGs they have a lot of freedom in the areas you highlighted, but tend to be limited in character creation and "story details". In a good number (mainly WRPG based) of sandbox titles give freedom in the details of the story (e.g. letting someone live or die, who to have a relationship with etc.), but this in turn can lead to problems because whilst the story is personal to the player, it also means the devs have to prepare each outcome which can sometimes have an adverse effect to pacing.
FFXIII & Oblivion:
I think I'm the polar opposite to you! FFXIII is my biggest dissappointment this gen as I found it lacked the extra elements of previous Final Fantasy games and it didn't have the sense that I was discovering the details of the story through the world like in previous FF convos, towns & shops (e.g. the first time you enter Besaid, or exploring Midgar). That's what I think some of the appeals of Oblivion is (to me at least), the details of the story and lore is told through exploration of the game world.
