I guess I don’t get much out of “emotional attachment”, and I loathe the “boyfriend side quest”, but I do enjoy digging in to a coherent and expansive fantasy world.
For that reason, I hate the “ZOMG WORLD IS GONNA BE BLOWD UP” RPG*. If “save the town from kobalds to earn some drinking money” isn’t fun, then neither will that be.
“Consequential decisions” always seem to boil down to “in order to complete the quest you have to be a dick”.
* Unless it’s, like, part IV of the series, but still, unnecessary.
You should try the Mass Effect Series, if you’re looking to see the consequences of your actions. While part 1 and 2 are certainly worth the effort, they managed to screw up the ending in part 3, leaving you only 3 choices. The problem is the potential number of endings based on your choices throughout the series becomes too large to adequately try to cover, (plus I think they were under severe pressure from corporate to “finish the damn thing”).
Anyway, one of my favorite RPGs.
I mean, there are a lot more emotional attachments than wanting to get down to business with an NPC. Both a “romance an NPC” and “the world will end” stories fail in video games because you have no reason to care whatsoever, but if you do care about a character even hack plots become important to you.
You mean like Planescape Torment or Fallout 1 and 2? Sure, you lose some XP for going the pacifist route but it’s relatively trivial and you definitely don’t need to have those XP in order to finish the game.
There’s a flipside to that as well, well they overcompensated for the flaws in DA2 with Inquisition. I suspect a lot of Inquisition was deliberately trying to be more like Skyrim as well. The world became utterly massive in breadth, but most of the quests… I’d say they look like MMO quests, but Bioware’s The Old Republic quests have more dialog and story to them than a lot of Inquisition’s did. The companion quests got reduced down from the expansive ones in Mass Effect and Dragon Age 2 to the very brief style seen in earlier Bioware games, and the dialog wheels on characters weren’t even handled in consistent ways (Dorian, in particular, had a much better dialog wheel, where you could go back to a higher level set of menu options after completing a branch of his dialog. For most others you had to exit the dialog and start it again to explore different branches).
Yes, I enjoyed that exploit to no end. As I recall it was “only” regular plate mail and a +1 two-handed sword, but still entirely worth taking off the “Hero” (a level 3 fighter? level 4?) to replace the crappy equipment you could afford at the beginning of the game.
Also there are a couple of fights against the “good guys” in the game that are meant to be almost impossible and can be repeated indefinitely - against the town guards, the temple clerics, etc. Once you’ve got a sufficiently powerful party (a magic user with Fireball helps) you can do these repeatedly for XP and loot. You can train up some 6/6/6 fighter/magic-user/clerics that would be painful to start the game with.
I think the Bard’s Tale being discussed in the article is the 1980s game (basically a copy of Wizardry with slightly better graphics) rather than the 21st century game of the same name that has little to do with the original (which your video is from).
Story and writing . At its heart a good RPG is a novel with some Choose Your Own Adventure elements.
I don’t know how many times that I have been frustrated by games where the focus has been all about the graphics and gameplay, and a story put together by someone who barely understands the basic elements of what a story even is.
That’s really describing what an adventure game is more than an RPG. An RPG by itself may or may not need any story whatsoever, and many good 1980s games like the original Wizardry had only the barest features of a story; the excitement was to explore the dungeons, fight new monsters, and level up your party. Many modern RPGs are actually more adventure games with some RPG elements added on.
I confess. You get just the one short getting to know you scene, and I know it’s just a game, but no matter what, I cannot bring myself to sacrifice The Chargers. Can’t do it. I am far too attached to those crazy weirdos.
So you’re absolutely right, it doesn’t need to be a romance plot. Sometimes it’s just about hard choices when NPCs have been fleshed out even just enough to think of them as people.
Ultima IV took this series to the next level by having you build your party by inviting NPC’s to join up – except for the mage, who’s virtue was honesty. I will never forget the schadenfreud of losing an eighth when, by accident, I paid a single gold piece to the blind shopkeeper for a gross of reagents while on a quest to build 99 of each spell available.
I also loved Ultima III, but I know in Ultima I, if you could get to the merchant’s chests behind their counters, you could steal from them. Also, I don’t recall how many of the Ultima games kept the “space” theme intermixed, but I know the first one had both space and fantasy. I should dig it out and try playing it again. I have the whole series on GOG, I just don’t seem to have time.
