Dragon Age preview

Nice story. At the very least, its ambitious.

I guess tend to be a "skin" at heart, as I tend to more enjoy the RPGs in which there are set characters with a central story to be told.

Maybe its neurosis, but I less enjoy games with 6000 different possibilities. Look at a game like Chrono Trigger with its 13 or 14 different endings. The completeionist in me wants to see all 14, but I don't want to have to go through all 14 senarios. It takes away from the great story the game built.

For a game like Final Fantasy I or III which was basically has no story and says "go get 'em," I'm more willing to see how the game plays by the various decisions. Nonethless, I'll sit there and wonder what would have been if I had made X move. Maybe it makes me a shallow RPGer. I don't know.

Its interesting to see the modern RPG struggle with just relying on a core story. I guess you need to have a great story to rely on, which doesn't come around too often.

I remember looking forward to Dragon Age about when I played Kotor ...which was what, five years ago?

I become irritated to a certain extent at choose your own adventure game endings, unless the "choosing" happens near the end of the game, such that I can easily see how the other endings might have gone. For the love of God, if you have twenty endings that are meaningfully different, offer them as easter eggs for completing the game...or something.

If a game was perfect in its decision-making process...i.e., I could do exactly what I wanted with every situation, I probably wouldn't mind a customized ending.

The Final Fantasy games have become increasingly irritating to me, precisely because of the control exerted by the developers. If I'm going to play a game, I want to be involved. Watching a very long movie in which I only run the fights seems pretty pointless to me. That's not roleplaying. Hell, even if losing a fight sent you on a different story branch, that would be something. But you just keep trying until you win, and then it's back to the movie.

I think developers need to give some control back to the gamers. This is why I love Bioware's work so much. They understand the balance between immersive story and and immersive gameplay. It's also why I was so excited that the 360 required all games to use the customizable soundtrack feature. It partially allows the gamer to decide the kind of experience he wants to have with the game.

We're getting to the point where there are far too many game designers who are frustrated screenwriters, and trying to have it both ways. Game design and filmmaking are two very different things, and they're intersecting a little more than I'd like.

I think for the games like Final Fantasy to work you need a great story and many the stories of the PS2 era have not been the best.

While FF X worked for me, the storyline has poor moments and was not something that added to the game, but it didn't take away too much from it either.

Now take a game I'm replaying right now, Final Fantasy VI, I think that's a great example how a developer in the past was able to have these elements co-exist.

I had no idea you were knowledgeable about the Final Fantasy series. I assume you find Final Fantasy VII to be the best of the bunch, right? As I understand it, most people hate Final Fantasy IV and love that sequel to "X".

Do you think Cloud should have been even higher on that "best video game character" list that was bandied about earlier? He's clearly the greatest Final Fantasy character.

THANK YOU FOR SAYING THAT!!!!!!!
All my friends who love the Final Fantasy games these days all wonder why I hate them and you just put it better then I've ever been able to explain.
The modern Final Fantasy games aren't games. They're animated movies with some interludes where the player gets to hit some buttons somtimes.

I'm looking forward to seeing Dragon Age, but since I have a Mac I'm sad that I may never get to play it.

Is there any word at all as to when/if a new Baldur's Gate game may be getting developed?

And for the rest of us... there's OBLIVION!

Amen.

Just started a new game of that myself.

Well played, well played.

Agreed- Oblivion's a good game, but it can be a bit big and bland sometimes.

Yeah, but too many RPGs feel like they're on rails. I'd much rather have that freeform gameplay. There has to be some sort of happy medium - a thoroughly engrossing story (I prefer the Main Quest story in Morrowind to Oblivion's Main Quest - on that one you really feel like you changed the world) that feels more open-ended.

I think that's the direction most (not all by any means) are headed these days.

ETA: I think that's the more trendy decision these days.

I'm curious as to what you think of Daggerfall...or the original TES: Arena, for that matter. Now those were static, immense worlds that basically offered zero structure to the player-character. Morrowind and Oblivion by comparison are the equivalent of Half-Life 2. I'm convinced that Daggerfall's world map is larger than those of all other modern RPG games combined.

Morrowind and Oblivion offered tons of various plot-theads...it's just not as urgent or compelling as what we find from other genres (Morrowind's main plot line was more interesting, but you had to deal with cliff racers.....so there was that trade-off). After playing Oblivion for a while, I did wish that the game offered more "urgency" in terms of certain tasks. For example, if you wait too long to try a mission, you get scolded/your assistants are dead and left a note/the task is harder as the enemies have been lifting weights and practicing their swordsmanship.

We haven't reached that mecca in which RPGS offer an adaptive world, over-arching plot, and open-endedness, but Morrowind and Oblivion have struck a pretty good balance IMHO.

*I'm really looking forward to Shivering Isles. The Razor and Knights of the Nine expansions gave me hope that future installments of Oblivion will have more detailed plotting.

That was one of my favorite quests. If they add more back-story and plotting, great, but Oblivion was just about at the limit of how small of an overworld I could tolerate.

That's exactly why I loved the first KOTOR so much. It had a story that gave the game some overarching tension (stop them before they finish the Star Forge!), NPC's with backstories and personalities, and an honest-to-god plot twist. Sure, there may not have been a ton of freedom within the story, but it was involving as hell.

Oblivion/Morrowind are games where you got out of it as much as you put in. The Dark Brotherhood quests were awesome if you actually bought into the concepts and precepts bandied around by the cult, and the characters involved were some of the liveliest and most loveable characters in the entire game. The Plot itself wasn't particularly great (The Thieves Guild quests had the best plot out of all of Oblivions missions) but the games were never meant to be plot based, they were always about experience. About chasing after a deer and running into a herd of Minotaurs and a REALLY pissed off Unicorn and barely living to tell the tale.

Daggerfall is just hideously large, the gameworld is reputedly the size of England and it is ALL random content.

Quoted for truth.

I've never heard that before, but I believe it. I could walk across the Arena overmap ....eventually....and Morrowind was far more manageable (Oblivion was a bit too manageable, IMHO...the size seemed approximately the same as Morrowind, but there weren't enough impassable features to break up your travel routes). Daggerfall, on the other hand, was beyond brutal. I remember hiking and fighting for several hours, only to discover that I'd moved perhaps 10% of the distance I wanted to cover. And that distance wasn't anywhere close to being the entire length or breadth of the overworld.

**okay, I just pulled this from Wiki re: Daggerfall: