What's your game?

It has come to this

This year, I’ve seen three games that actually included well thought out, immersive, entertaining stories. Frighteningly, they’ve all been on consoles. Zelda, Metroid Prime, and Knights of the Old Republic all have deep, rewarding storylines. The interesting thing to me is that although only KotOR is a pure RPG, the others have very RPG-ish elements. These three games all appeared on consoles (although you could argue that KotOR is a PC game that was pre-ported to the Xbox), but I’ve not seen any really compelling story-driven games on the PC in ages.

Sure, some people want to talk about those hardcore RPGs and turn-based games, like the Age of Wonders series, but for those games, the story is usually just as tacked on as it is for a shooter like Doom. What was the last turn-based game that your goal wasn’t to protect the kingdom from some unspeakable evil?

There are a stunning number of excellent multiplayer-based games on the PC these days. Battlefield: 1942, Planetside, Rise of Nations, and the whole host of MMORPG games are flourishing on the PC. The pundits said it years ago, and now I believe them, multiplayer is what the PC is best at.

In many ways, the couple of years I spent playing Everquest ruined my enjoyment of single player games. Even when I started playing, before any expansions were released and the biggest monsters in the game were a pair of level 55 dragons, the game was positively massive. There were at least 10 starting cities, each filled with loads of merchants, quest characters, and guild leaders who will teach you. Unlike normal single player games, there’s a lot of stuff in every city that has absolutely nothing to do with you. Heck, there are even a bunch of people that won’t speak to you at all, or will try to kill you on sight.

Between these cities were MASSIVE tracts of land, filled with giants, lions, skeletons, ghouls, ghosts, and goblins. I had played for a year before I saw 90% of what the old world had to offer. Hell, after three years of playing, there were still a few dungeons I’d never explored in the initial release of the game!

The downsides to a world this massive is that it’s very intimidating for a new player to get into, and has a very steep learning curve. In some cases, there were high level areas a five minute walk from the newbie area in the game, but the depth of gameplay you get from this size game outweighs the other downsides.

Combined with the massive world, the number of other people you meet and group with add another dimension of complexity to the game. If you want to join a massive player army and attack (and hopefully kill) monsters that can kill most players with a single hit, you can. Or you can sit quietly back and nuke the monsters for the team. Hell, you can even just play the game to make cash, and not stop until you make a million platinum. The game, and it’s goals are either completely open-ended and non-linear or non-existant, depending how you look at it.

There aren’t any single player games that can live up to that kind of game. KotOR is definitely a much smaller world, and most every NPC (non-player character) that has a name has something for you to do. However, the breadth of the game, and the complexity of the character interactions and the dialog trees you must explore really affect the outcome of the game.

I realized as I was playing yesterday that if I charge into an inevitable battle before the other side attacks, I move closer to the light side of the force. If I charge, nothing happens at all. Very nifty.

My benchmark run is almost done, so I’d better get back to work, but I’ll have more to talk about KotOR later. I didn’t mean to spend this time talking about what makes massively multiplayer games special instead.