Confusing Gear to Play as Learn to Play

One thing you will often hear in the world of MMOs in general and gaming at large is the term, learn to play. Now this can often be abbreviated many ways and many of you have probably seen the various ways it can be spelled, abbreviated and other ways such as L2P, lrn2ply, learn2play and quite possibly many more out there that I don’t know or have tuned out not to even bother remembering them. In a previous blog, I stated in the context of the phrase, learn to play, it is generally used as an insult by some people to denote how much better they are than some people. But in the reality that the actual phrase falls in, learning to play like those players denote, generally doesn’t mean what they think that phrase means.

Let me clarify a bit; in past games, your actual skill and ability determined a lot of your playing power in various games long ago. However, in this day and age your skills and abilities have relatively been replaced by automated systems, assistance programs or even the lowest of the low, what is known as pay2win type deals that actually give a significant boost to your character’s actual growth or abilities. In these type of systems there is really no learning curve so the term Learn to Play doesn’t even remotely apply. This is what is not as well-known as a term called Gear to Play.

Now gearing to play takes many forms in games these days, the most common of which is obviously in the title of the description; getting gear for your character to increase their relative power or give them more damage in their attacks or more useful abilities. This is an obvious point of that statement but there is an additional layer to this, one that is becoming more prevalent in games in general but has been a staple of MMOs for a long time, which is the leveling up system which provides increases to the characters relative power in itself, but when these two types of systems are combined the general concept of learning to play as many would present it is completely thrown out the window.

Now in gear based progression systems, gear is very powerful. In many cases they make up a huge chunk of the character development. The level based progression generally uses levels as a sort of small benchmark for this, with increasing power on a relative curve system, with the curve generally spiking higher the higher level a character goes. But even in games where levels just only unlock things like new combos or new guns, levels are still important because access to those new types of gear are important to the overall growth of the character, and in many cases some of the powers, combinations or gear items are so powerful that progression through the game otherwise would be monumentally difficult at best, to near impossible at worst.

While “learning to play” does have a small part in these types of systems, over all in the longevity of the game, they play a very small part and at the end of the day what determines your overall ability will be your level and your gear/abilities you are given to that character. This presents the issue that skill is less important to the overall play experience and more emphasis on your time investment to find items.

Now is this solely the fault of developers with these types of systems in play? Not really, again this stems back to the whiney, self-entitled lot that we gamers actually are. Gamers are highly competitive, no matter what they claim, and many out there can’t handle the fact that someone could actually be better than they are by default, so they’ve demanded that developers put in overt handicaps into the system at large to give a leg up for players that either refuse to or just can’t improve themselves to get better. Is it a bad system? No, not in the least, but sometimes things just go too far.

Now, of course, when you take a step back and look at everything as a whole, you realize the entire system blew up in the faces of the whining mass of gamers, because instead of it being a learning system where you utilize placement, timing and such to their fullest, now it’s a time based system of investment and those that have more time will be ahead of those that don’t. The end result, the playing field is now even wider a part as the skilled players now has the handicaps on top of their own skills to give them an even greater boost. The result, gamers inadvertently, through our own petulant demands (and we were rude about it on many occasions, which makes me wonder how devs could stand it) have created the gaming world at large where it isn’t a matter of just learning the system anymore it’s also a matter of putting in the time to get the gear to play.

In short, gamers and developers need to take a large step back. Learning curves have been replaced by easy hand outs and gearing systems that try to replace the need of skill with either easy lock on targeting, insane power boosting systems, or just giving out insane weapons that completely replace any need for relative skill anymore. In short, learn to play practically doesn’t even exist anymore especially in most MMOs. It’s gear to play or go home. Skill hasn’t really been a part of such systems for a long time as gear progression systems continuously replace the need of learning skills and abilities to actually improve yourself.

The Qualities of a Sandbox MMO

Hello out there, I know it has been a while since I’ve written anything and for all the readers I might have, I do apologize. Had mostly family things come up, namely dealing with the fact my father getting sick and passing away, which I think many could understand would have an impact on anything I could write about. It’s been tough the past few weeks, and I miss him terribly, but I should at least look at things to try and keep my mind busy.

Anyways, not trying to bring anyone down and certainly don’t want to make this some sort of depressing rag about my life, so I decided to work on a topic I touch on a lot but I guess I never really describe at heart; what defines a sandbox game. This is something I feel that has been lost in the past few years, as the lines, for whatever reason, have become murky and ill defined, mostly because of preconceived notions created thanks mostly in part to World of Warcraft pretty much becoming the definitive MMO in the mindset of everyone out there. For an insight into where I am aiming at in this blog, I suggest watching MrBtongue’s YouTube episode (Un-Ruining the MMO) on this very subject. It’s definitely entertaining but hits all the right notes on exactly what I am discussing.

Needless to say, what defines a sandbox game, something MMOs were before, as MrBtongue would say, WoW ruined everything, is actually fairly easy to define. The problem is that people believe, falsely, that these elements exist in the modern MMO, but they don’t. The parlor trick of the modern MMO is cleverly, or not so cleverly, designed to forcefully direct players on a set path. Some developers go that extra mile by providing a secondary path towards to disguise the convergence, but the end result is the same. You are destined to go from point A to point B along this road and deviation from this path is not only frowned upon, it is highly discouraged, and in some instances, illegal to the point attempting to change your course could even result in penalties against your account.

Now, let me try and define what makes a sandbox game;

Number One: Freedom. This doesn’t just relate to freedom to create the character you want, though in reality, people have actually been tricked into believing that the carefully structured character classes in the modern MMO is freedom to build the character they want. This is both a lie and false advertising on many levels. But more on that later. Freedom implies that once I log in, get my bearings and figure out what in the hell is going on in this game world, I can sod off and do whatever I want. The modern MMO frowns upon this heavily doing everything it can from allowing us this freedom, such as, but not limited to, level gating content, restricting access to areas, and dead-ending experience gain from critters and other objectives so much that we are almost forcefully compelled to do the quests that the developers have created for us.

While people will make up excuses that this isn’t true, and pointing out outlying instances of people doing such and such to reach max level in a game (namely WoW) this is again, an outlying instance and proves the point excrutiatingly well. It was possible, but the player in question not only was inefficient about level gaining, but the time it took them to reach max level was many times longer than anyone just doing the set path. In past MMOs, a player was not required to do the quests, they were fun little activities as an aside and even gave a micro goal into the normal set of grinding, but players were free to choose whether they wanted that goal to kill wolves, or if they just wanted to kill wolves on their own without some NPC telling them to do it.

However, now the attempt to kill wolves without a quest is so highly frowned upon that the experience to advance your character required is dramatically lower. Developers do everything in their power to make sure that players follow the set path, even putting artificial barriers that the player doesn’t perceive consciously, but their subconscious can see. This gating even extends to exploring, though people may not realize it as the terrain is carefully constructed to guide players on the set path. In fact, it’s well known that if players find ways off the path, though developers will jokingly claim they love it when players do that, many actually do not and such methods tend to get fixed or altered so it’s not possible to do anymore. In short, if developers loved when players find things like these, they would not be so quick to alter them so players could not do them anymore.

Of course, this freedom also extends to how you want to play to. The current MMO thinking is everyone wants to be some heroic knight, or flame wielding wizard type to get anywhere. The truth of the matter is, no, they don’t. Now, I won’t disagree that the heroic knight is probably the first thing many people think of when they start playing this game, but as time goes on, people start gravitating towards what they really like to do. You can’t achieve this is a structured class system, of course. For instance, in my case, I want to craft. I want to make things and be useful that way to the game as a whole. But I can’t do that because most of the modern MMOs not only make crafting fundamentally useless because a crafters gear can’t keep up with loot off of critters, but because I can’t level my crafting unless I become an adventurer anyways, defeating the whole purpose of a crafting system to begin with.

For other people the freedom to explore is what they are after. But like I stated previously, MMOs are being “cleverly” designed (I am using the term loosely) to funnel people in a specific direction. Exploration itself is actually frowned upon by developers if you go outside of their defined parameters. While people, again, will claim this isn’t true you don’t have to look far to see that this isn’t the case. Areas are specifically level gated, you need prerequisite gear and items to compete, and any attempt to jump over that cliff is often met with an invisible barrier that doesn’t allow such things and glitching the terrain to do so can actually get you in trouble.

Even the quests now are being designed that way. While people believe The Old Republic gives you RP freedom, it robs you of that. No matter your choice or desire, the outcome is always the same at the end. There is no real deviation from that course other than a few differences in dialog. This is the furthest from freedom, and this cinematic experience actually kills the whole world within a world aspect of the game. RP itself has been hopelessly destroyed because the very identity of the characters we wanted to create was completely removed and taken out of our hands. You have to follow the set path, by design, and any deviation from that not only penalizes your character, it may even restrict you from unlocking your characters full potential. And nowhere else can you see swift changes to a game because players attempted to deviate from that norm.

Take in stark contrast Skyrim. Now I know for some people that loved their Morrowind, this game is an abomination, for some reason, but let’s be factual; Skyrim is a sandbox game, only one step short of being an MMO. While at the beginning of the game we are given an objective that says go do this, we can basically say sod off and do anything else we feel like from that point onward. In stark contrast, TESO will not allow for this, as it is very purposely being linearly designed. A leveling treadmill is in place and players are expected to follow a set path. Yea, I’ve seen the leaked beta footage, and while graphics and such may get cleaned up, the core gameplay won’t change much from this, and since the emphasis, much like TOR, was on that personal story, you can bet your last dollar TESO is going to be yet another Theme Park in a long list of Theme Parks.

Number Two: Bigger is not Better: Another thing that makes the sandbox different from the theme park MMO is the inherent balance that is already within the system and the fact that people can equalize themselves to match the others within the system. Skill is actually the name of the game, not the gear worn. While gear is useful, and helpful in cases, it is not the end all be all of the gaming experience. This is not true in a theme park game, especially one following the WoW formula, whereas levels get higher, the gear has to progressively get better. The idea is that bigger numbers and bigger stats are always better. The skill of the player, while it can be a factor, is often only a small portion of that result. A very skilled player will more often than not, be beaten by a below average player who is better geared and equipped than they are.

This is also the case based on the class system these games often force down specific paths to. Like it or not, while some people will claim otherwise, there is always going to be a class that is easy mode in these systems for a specific thing. They tend to pump out tons of damage, and strangely enough have tons of defensive measures to boot to make sure they continue to deliver that damage. Nothing about this requires any actual skill to deliver, contrary to what many WoW rogues or TOR snipers might claim, because it is the easiest thing to do and a subpar player can do it without worry or consequence. If it actually required a lot of skill to do, players would not gravitate towards it so much, especially in the PvP environment. This is not to say that a person skilled in the class wouldn’t be deadly, they would be, but the application of skill required is less than that of another class.

In a sandbox game, gear is not a major factor and in fact player skill is the deciding factor in a long run. A player who just mashes buttons will find them increasingly outclassed by people who actually know when the best time to use their moves is and planning accordingly, instead of just blowing their entire wad in the first few seconds of combat. Timing is key, and gear is only a distant second fiddle to this. The same stun locking, button smashing rogue trying that in a game based on skill and tactics would find they are severely outclassed by players that actually understand timing and the fundamental rules of the game, and would turn the tide quickly on the rogue.

But in the end, in this type of system, dungeon loot is de-emphasized and crafted loot becomes the big prize. Though there will be things that dungeons would be required for, they would not be the end all be all of the game, left in the hands of those daring enough to traverse them for the materials for crafters, or explorers who think the risk is worth the reward. In basic, a player economy, and thus a community, is born because of this, and player loyalty is actually rewarded instead of punished.

Number Three: An Open World: This is similar to number one, but basically in a sandbox game, the world is open. It’s explorable, there is no corner you can’t go to to see what is In that nook or cranny, no invisible barrier blocking your progress, no level gating, the only thing determining your fate is your skill and your own wits to survive. Your death is determined either by your own hubris or stupidity. But this open world is not limited to just exploration, nope it also includes PvP.

The modern MMO has done a lot to try and push PvP out of the public eye of players, forcing the PvPers into carefully controlled arenas for their matches or shoving them into specific lake areas. Of course, the reason for this is because player killers (aka PKs) never really had a punishment that fit their crime before in games. But then again, many of the early attempts made the mistake of giving them too much freedom without any reprisals to be had. The worst that would happen is a PK couldn’t get into a town, but that was easily countered by alts or friends.

While it’s been instilled into the head of modern gamers that PvP is somehow evil, the truth of the matter is that it’s not. The same PvP jerks that talk smack are still talking smack in PvE. The difference now is that you’ve given them the power to do so and no one can reprise against them. What’s even funnier, most of the people that claim they hate smack talking in PvP are the people that do the smack talking, and generally acting like an ass most of the time. In short, hypocrites.

All in all, the world of an MMO needs to be open. It needs to be open to exploration, it needs to be open to conflict, because that is what drives RP and story (sorry bar people, it’s true) and it needs to be open to the fact players don’t want to follow your set path.

These are my basic points of a sandbox MMO. Now I know this is only a small list, there is a lot more I know, but this article is already getting long and I feel it’s time to stop padding and start letting people read. I don’t know when I will put up a new blog, as I said I am currently still dealing with my father passing away, but hopefully it won’t be two months again before I do. Until then, take care and I hope people start inspiring developers to make sandbox games.

Please leave a comment below.

Achievements in Gaming

The end of the year is here. So, what type of topic could I really discuss other than achievements in video games. You see, topical (I doubt it).

Achievements are a weird thing lately. Now, I don’t know when achievements really started in video games, but I do know that they started in MMOs with City of Heroes (CoH) and badges. Since that time most games have been including some form of achievements as a part of their game for some really bizarre methods for finishing a certain event. Many of these achievements are rather fun or just tacky thing. They do many things such as exploring the world map as a whole or actually attempting to make yourself better at specific encounters at large. However, there is a dark side to achievements that have crept in lately, and it’s become ever prevalent and rather tacky. This is what I call achievement bloat.

What is achievement bloat you might ask? Put simply, achievement bloat is the idea of just making up ludicrous achievements for no reason other than to have them. These achievements have bizarre, almost out of this world level of requirements to achieve, but strangely enough people just shrug their shoulders at them and think it is ok. How do I mean this? Let’s take kill achievements lately. Now originally you only need a hundred or so to achieve a kill achievement in CoH, with a few oddballs here, up or down. But now, kill achievements have ridiculous numbers attached to them, such as 5,000, and even more insulting is the reward doesn't match the effort required.

There are many other ridiculous achievements out there as well, such as achievements for opening your inventory, taking your first step in the world, hell for just moving the mouse. Achievements have been getting ridiculous lately and some of the stipulations attached to them are just getting worse. I don’t get why developers think this level of busy work is needed for achievements. Achievements should be things that people can possibly attain reasonably, not something designed as busy work in some vain attempt to stave off a looming doom as people get pissed off that you aren't developing content fast enough.

I don’t mind achievements; in fact I love achievements in a game. It gives me a small goal next to the larger ones to go after. What I don’t like is these incessant bloat achievements that shouldn't even be included. Kill achievements fine, a few hundred enemies that’s reasonable. Several thousand, that’s unacceptable. Achievements for exploring the world or reaching hard to reach locations, fine, achievements for walking across the street and clicking a mailbox, that’s stupid.

This level of achievement bloat needs to be stopped and curtailed, and developers need to start making realistic, more manageable achievements. Achievements should be, at most, about killing certain boss mobs in a time limit, or a certain way, or killing a certain number of goons but not 5,000 of them. Hell, when your game doesn't even throw mobs at people that fast, making people kill 5,000 of the same type of critter is just insulting to your players, just like giving them achievements for walking and talking is insulting to them. They want achievements for real accomplishments, not busy work meant to tide them over until the next update comes out.

The End of the World, oh and Story in Games

Sometimes, you can’t help but laugh. For the past few years all we’ve heard is about December 21^st being the end of the world that we need to make our peace now, and so forth. Hell, even the History channel spent every year for the past five years, at least, running apocalyptic doom crap constantly to the point that I am sure most people had the shows memorized. This is what happens when you let a bunch of nutters take an ancient calendar and try to reinterpret it for the modern era. I could only imagine the panic if it was the Julian calendar found that way instead, every year someone would be going the world ends on this date because the Julian calendar said so.

Anyways, enough of me ribbing people who bought into that, let’s talk about something else. I’ve lightly touched on this before but I think I want to actually drive a nail through the forehead for people on this one. This is my thoughts on story for gaming.

Now, before I get into the meaty grind of it all, let me state, I love a good story. Who doesn’t? Well, never mind that, we already know there is some nutter out in the wings about ready to raise his hand and say he hates story. But what really burns me up lately about developers using story is the fact they make the rest of their game suffer for it. It’s almost as if the developers are afraid people might want to play the game and try other things to for a little bit besides stick to the main story. This is starting to get more prevalent in MMOs, but has been happening for a long time in single player titles these days. It is especially, and hilariously insulting to hear it from RPG designers.

Take Final Fantasy 13. I’ve been sitting back watching videos of walkthroughs of course; the first thing that strikes me of the game play is how pathetic it is. A linear corridor and a combat system so simplified it’s only one shot above that flash game that is one button to win type thing. Now I raised an eyebrow at this because normally, Final Fantasy has been about exploring and wandering around, even the fact that I hate 7 and 8 they had these basic elements at least. But to see how far my one time favorite series fell just makes me cringe. That doesn’t even get into how stupid easy the combat system is, basically playing the game with one button now.

To me, story should enhance the game, not completely drive every aspect of it, especially in an RPG. It’s great to tell a story, but don’t sit there and completely ramrod your players into one thing and be afraid to let them explore this beautiful world you’ve created. Players notice the small details as much if not more so than the big overt ones.

And this problem is starting to get more pervasive in the MMO world to. We haven’t hit the point where everywhere is an exact corridor but it’s getting dangerously close. New zones are being locked off until you meet either level or story prerequisites, and you can’t go outside the slowly tightening rails unless the story wants you to. Hell the dungeons are already corridors, in most modern MMOs with you being guided exactly to each boss. At the current rate of design, we are one generation away from a high profile MMO being a corridor game, like Final Fantasy XIII, removing all semblance of control, choice or the ability to explore.

Hell, most of the achievements now have been getting built with the idea in mind of not impossible to get, but the intent people don’t move from a single spot for hours or days at a time killing the exact same critter over and over again. And ludicrous kill numbers at that. It was an achievement to kill 100 of a similar critter, but these days those numbers have been inflated to the thousands range. It is not uncommon for a game to have a kill achievement around the 5,000 mark anymore, which is bizarre in itself since the enemies in most of these games don’t come flooding out of a gate like that.

Again I like a good story for my game, and I highly encourage developers to create a good story, or several stories, but don't make the story the only focus of what you are doing. MMOs, especially, are about vast, open worlds for players to explore, to see, and be apart of. The living, breathing experience for them. It shouldn't be some exercise in how well trained you are to follow a corridor and mash one button. And the complexity of the fights is something that should be paid attention to as well. So, please, keep this is mind when you are developing your next game.

{Edit}
Small Edit. I still want to thank Kaiserin for the wonderful new art piece. I wasn't expecting it, but she created it for me for Christmas, so thanks again to Kaiserin.

She mostly works on pony stuff that she sells here, but you might be able to ask for a commission. Who knows. I know she is also the 2D artist on the fan made MLP:FiM MMO game to. So check her out.

Challenge versus Instant Gratification

I know it’s been quite some time since I last updated this blog, and most in part because I had nothing really to talk about. Well that isn’t the exact truth, it was more of the fact that I was more or less in a slump as far as what I felt like talking about and nothing really cheered me up in that regard. I can’t say I was depressed, but I wasn’t exactly inspired either. Probably has to do with the fact there is very little interesting going on, other than a lot of MMOs just constantly recreating the same mistakes over and over again.

I do want to discuss something that has cropped up in my mind just recently and that’s the concept of earning something and instant gratification. Now there is a very fine line between the two, that much is certain. How can you decide if you've crossed it? It’s a hard thing to measure in the end, but I think I can safely say that in the modern MMO era that instant gratification is the side that they are heavily leaning on. Hell, even the single player games cater to that play style with games having a difficulty setting with the only difference between 1 setting and the next is how hard the monsters might be in the game. In short, they offer everything up the first play through and have nothing to offer for a repeat performance. This, to be blunt, is just terrible game design.

Why do I say that? Because the player is supposed to learn and grow with the experience as much as the game is giving a return investment for putting skills and knowledge to the test. However, when the experience is flat, the game is flat. In fact a lot of games have been foregoing difficulty for the sake of “story” which is a piss poor excuse, honestly.

Let’s take Mass Effect for example. I’ve made my feelings clear on how terrible I feel that game story and play wise was, but let’s look at this more objectively. The first Mass Effect game had a bit of structure and trimmings, nice things here and there to play around with and discover on your own. It needed some trimming, but otherwise it had a great foundation, but was poorly realized for the sake of the story which allowed the player to be able to walk through the game in around the normal time of a single play session. Mass Effect 2, they did more than trim, they started pruning. Entire systems were gutted out for the sake of “streamlining” but in addition for the sake of the “story” causing the difficulty curve to actually go down further from the previous game. Once Mass Effect 3 rolled around, everything about the original game was gone except for the wallpaper. Everything had been gutted for the sake of that story, and the difficulty curve took yet another step down. The entire crafting system was gone and everything was so “streamlined” that any semblance of choice and character building for uniqueness was pretty much gone.

The same can be seen in MMOs as well. Now I can understand that developers and companies want that bottom dollar, but making things easier only causes the exact opposite effect you were going for. People are less inclined to return if they are assured that they can pretty much cheat their way to the top. Grant it you have a few who love that style of game play, but reality is that many do not. If you start handing out your best stuff within the first few hours someone picks up the game, no one is going to want to have a repeat performance if little else actually is left for them to do.

MMOs are about staying power and you have to strike a fine balance on difficulty to earn something (that dreaded grind westerners seem to be afraid of for some reason) and being given stuff on a platter. There have been many people who have talked about this very thing, including celebrity net people like Yahtzee, but I think it bears repeating that making things too easy is suicide in the long run. I think it’s obvious to many players that WoW has crossed that line, for instance, where your investment isn’t worth as much because your return has been devalued by how easy it is to attain.

Crafting is another area in MMOs that make suffer from this and they were honestly the first victims in the MMO genre. In today’s MMO crafting world, you go out, earn a few points in a specific field then buy a recipe from an NPC for a set amount of in game currency. No mystery, no discovery, everyone who follows that path gets the same thing. TSW tried something different using a Minecraft inspired crafting set up, but FunCom failed to understand what made Minecraft work was there was always something new to discover and be added and the recipes actually mattered in the end, and the overall mod community helps grow that games recipe list even further.

It took a Minecraft mod called Thaumcraft 3 for me to realize what MMO crafting needed, and if I were to ever point at one simple method I would say Thaumcraft has done it. The fact that many of the recipes are actually hidden and require player investment and discovery, it feels rewarding to do the research and you want to keep going. It’s very addictive. MMOs don’t do this, they again put everything on a silver platter for people to get with little effort.

Anyways, over all MMOs and games in general, need to stop making games super easy. The challenge isn’t worth the value anymore when developers want $60+ for a game that can be completed in less than a single playing session. MMOs themselves have this problem when the MMO game is supposed to be about staying power, but they give too much away too soon and people get bored very fast. I think this is something developers need to stop doing now.

Classic Gaming: Retrospective on the Final Fantasy Series

So, I am going to do something in this blog I haven’t done before, and it’s not about MMOs, it’s actually a retrospective on one of my former favorite franchises back when I was a young little pup; the Final Fantasy series. Now, I know that some people talk about Final Fantasy, and many remember that abomination on the PlayStation, Final Fantasy 7, as their all-time favorite game. I can’t fault them for that, many of them had never played a Final Fantasy game until that point, and the PlayStation introduced many people to the Final Fantasy series. Hell, I won’t even lie, I bought a PlayStation myself just so I could play Final Fantasy 7, but I am getting way ahead of myself on that point. Needless to say, this is mostly nostalgia talking, and will most likely piss people off as I say it, but I do personally consider any PlayStation era game of Final Fantasy an absolute betrayal (to quote Spoony) of the core franchise most basic fundamentals.

Way back sooner, in ye old NES days (talking 8 bit here) I was reading my Nintendo Power, and there was a blurb about a game called Final Fantasy in it. I was big into the whole Dungeons and Dragons thing, but was wary of actually bothering to get involved, because I had played Dragon Warrior, and promptly thought it sucked hard. But, I decided I would go ahead and give it another go, because generally speaking, Nintendo Power’s reviews were fair and well thought out. Not to mention you could actually pick the classes of your party members. Hell, I even entered a contest for Final Fantasy through that magazine and won a crystal ball from it, that I still have to this day with the classic Final Fantasy logo emblazoned on the bottom of it. It’s a glorified paper weight but I felt so happy.

Needless to say, I went out and bought myself a copy of Final Fantasy. When I got home and plugged it in, the first thing that grabbed me was the music. Primitive by today’s standards in all its 8-bit glory, mind you, but wow, was it good for setting the tone and mood of the game. And most fascinating of all, it had a prologue of text for people to read and actually get a sense of where this game was coming from. In short, a prophecy foretold a coming darkness, and 4 warriors would appear heralding in the light to battle the darkness; The Light Warriors. As clichéd and basic as any type of intro as you could get today, but it was far better than most other RPGs on the NES at the time. And the gameplay, way, way better than that crappy Dragon Warrior game I absolutely despised.

Now, this was back in the day when I was too young and dumb to realize that these games were coming out of Japan and there were actually other games in the franchise. So, it wasn’t until the Super NES came along that I found out about the American Final Fantasy 2. I saw the blurb in the back of Nintendo Power, talking about the coming game articles for next issue, and I really got excited. Because I loved the story of Final Fantasy, even as shallow as one might consider it, but the gameplay, made me love it. Then I got that next issue and I saw the leaps in mechanics the new game would make. Active Time Battle (ATB) was a big thing, as you had to think on the fly. I was hooked just reading the article.

Then I got the game, and wow did the bar get raised for me personally. The sound score, that Final Fantasy prelude I love, got the ante upped and it sounded orchestral and really moving. Then the game opens up with a flyby and you see the prelude to the fall of the main character and begin his quest to rise up to be a better person. The music was top notch and the story was moving at times, and heart wrenching in others. I kept going and going, and even got my characters to such lofty heights that even the toughest normal enemies were nearly being one shotted regularly by me. Then the American Final Fantasy 3 was announced and all bets were off.

This was the first RPG, that I recall, that had ever gotten an actual TV commercial in America. Maybe it was where I lived, but I remember that little moogle on screen interviewing the monsters and such, and that just blew my mind. I was sitting on the edge of my seat, waiting for the launch day. Hell, I just happen to get into a local Wal-Mart and asked if they had a copy of Final Fantasy 3, and low and behold the guy went and got me a copy and there it was, the magnificent purple black box with the moogle on it and the golden logo reminding me of Final Fantasy 2. And I was still enamored by Final Fantasy 2 and its rather epic ending mind you to.

And Final Fantasy 3, to me is the pinnacle of the Final Fantasy series, the absolute best of the best. They took the bar and raised it so high that they’ve literally tried to recopy it in almost every PlayStation Final Fantasy since. They left the fantasy feel in but added in slight variations of a steam punk atmosphere and oppressive regime. It was absolutely brilliant, and the bad guy, Kefka (who is probably the best villain ever in a Final Fantasy game), could probably be the Joker’s brother. He is absolutely bat-shit insane, but his antics make him quite memorable and one of those types of bad guys you just love to hate.

And the main character you start as, unlike the previous Final Fantasy, was not the main focus of Final Fantasy 3. Terra was some strange girl with even stranger powers, and amnesia, but the plot actually didn’t revolve around her. In fact the plot shifts between multiple characters fleshing out their stories in the most beautiful and poignant way. You actually felt what these characters felt, even in the limitations of their 16 bit world. And when you saw the Opera scene when you, as Celes, had to sing the opera song to Oh My Hero, the melody and music was powerful. This was a game that was beautifully designed and orchestrated, and the best part, just when you think it’s the end, it isn’t.

This is how the bar was raised in Final Fantasy 3 for me. I had gotten to the point where I was going to the floating island, and we were out to stop the Emperor. Battle was going well, and of course, I thought the end of the game was near, which to me was just baffling because that would make the game the shortest in the series. But, low and behold, Kefka’s douchery rears its ugly head, and he usurps the Emperor and takes command of the ultimate power. Not only did we fail to stop the true threat, the world ends up destroyed in the process. Holy crap, the world is destroyed and forever changed. Talk about raising the bar to maximum at this point, but oh, the game isn’t over.

You wake up as Celes, and now your goal is to go out in the world and find your friends. But you can also screw up just on the waking up part as Cid is also with you (a character that has been in Final Fantasy almost since the beginning) and if you don’t do things just right, Cid could die.

The world itself is an obliterated mess with monsters everywhere and you are left with a sense of what are we going to fight for, until you start finding survivors and townships that have been rebuilding in the aftermath and you see the reason to continue fighting and surviving. The ending is just beautiful with emotional attachments as you finally take down the big bad at the end, brought your companions back from the brink of despair and the end result is the destruction of all magic in the world to save it. In short, at this point there was no higher the game could have gone, but hell, I was still too young to think about that.

Now, before I continue, at this point I was pretty much a Final Fantasy Fanatic. Final Fantasy 3 had left me wanting more, and of course I dug into every morsel I could find. Nintendo Power was talking about the N64 at this time, and I saw a bit that Square was looking to make a 3d version of Final Fantasy on the N64. I was all hyped, but then, nothing more came out about this. I kept wondering asking people if they heard anything, then I heard whispers that the next Final Fantasy would be on the PlayStation.

I found a magazine article about it in a Wal-Mart, and it showed that it was called Final Fantasy 7, and of course, again having not previously personally known about all the other Final Fantasy’s at the time, I kept wondering what happened to 4, 5 and 6. It wasn’t until later that I was informed that Final Fantasy 2 was actually 4 and Final Fantasy 3 was actually 6. So I kept wondering why 2, 3, and 5 were never ported to America, and discovered in another article that they never felt they would have sold well and wasn’t worth the translation at the time. Bah, let me make up my own damn mind please.

Needless to say, as I said before in this blog, Final Fantasy 7 is the whole reason I bought a PlayStation. I was eager and hyped for it. I couldn’t wait to try it. After all, after the balls to the wall storytelling that was done with Final Fantasy 3 (or 6) they couldn’t possibly start slowing down now. I don’t think my anxiety could have been any higher than waiting for that god awful Sony PlayStation load up title screen to pass than I was when loading the Final Fantasy disc into the console at that time.

And then I heard the music and I thought to myself, yes, this is going to be a Final Fantasy. They were using the traditional prelude that always let me know this was a Final Fantasy game. Then, I started playing it. Now admittedly, it took some time for me, but I started catching things early on that this wasn’t actually a Final Fantasy game. First up, of course, was all the heavy techno crap in the game world. Barring crappy polygonal graphics of the time, I couldn’t help but notice that the world felt lifeless, something that even the 8 bit games at least tried to convey back with its limited color palette. And I understood by now that none of the Final Fantasy games were ever really connected to one another, and I expected that most of the character tracks would be gone, but this was the most god awful music I had ever heard in a Final Fantasy. It was making the 8 bit game sound absolutely orchestral.

And then the first slap of the betrayal came at me with a knife; the battle music. Now, to this day, the battle music of Final Fantasy has been pretty much similar, espousing more heroic themes and a feeling of fighting. You were playing heroes in a game, and the music matched that. But in Final Fantasy 7, it didn’t feel heroic as much as bland and this is going to be tedious. It didn’t inspire as much as make me want to turn down my volume, contrary to what I did in the previous titles which was keep myself from actually turning the volume up and upsetting my parents.

And then the slap in the face that really got me the moment I noticed it from the get go; the victory fanfare music. Oh my God, how did you screw that up? That is perhaps one of the most remembered things about the Final Fantasy games for any nerd who has actually been playing the games since the NES days. It went from this sounding heroic courageous thing to sounding bland, and like someone went, oh, yea, you won, here’s crap. Jees, really? And believe me when you actually sit down the entire mood of Final Fantasy 7 was just a cluster of fricken fail after another, I still can’t believe people actually consider this crapfest the pinnacle of Final Fantasy.

The characters themselves were all stock and not very memorable. Hell the only reason people even remember some of the characters even that remotely is that two of them had over sized swords. Then of course comes the ultimate insult, the death of Aeris (Aerith) that every nerdgasming fan boi will sit there and say is the saddest thing evar, and I still scratch my head as to why. Aeris was the blandest, stupidest and most boring character in a Final Fantasy, and there had been previous characters who had been killed off and were way more memorable and had way more impact than that useless air head. And what’s worse, the game tries to convey she was integral to the whole plot line when the game could have moved on and she would never have been missed, not once.

And that’s not even getting into how bad the plot was to begin with, and how much it was an attempt to copy Final Fantasy 3 and fail utterly at it. Basically, you try to stop the end of the world, a common theme mind you, but in this game, you actually fail, like in 3, but unlike there, that is the actual ending. The world is destroyed and the only survivors we are shown is Red XIII and his pups. Yea, they retconned that later on given the fan outcry and such, and I am not raging over the ballsy ending, in fact I applaud it, but what I was disappointed over was the sheer utter destruction of the franchise and the absolute betrayal of what made Final Fantasy. They pushed so hard on the graphics that the plot and storyline and characters were all lame and less than stock. Their most memorable qualities were oversized things from Cloud’s sword, to Cait Sith’s body, to Tifa’s boobs (and you can probably find a lot of fan drawings of Tifa and her giant jugs that are weapons unto themselves).

But, no, the final nail in the coffin for me was Final Fantasy 8. Whereas it took me a while, because I was still a Final Fantasy Fanatic at the time, to realize how shit 7 was, but 8 utterly devastated me. 8 was a middle finger to the fans, and completely removed everything that was Final Fantasy. The prelude song that had been a tradition for 7 games before it, was gone. It was a techno wannabe world with impossible gun blades and S&M teachers who wanted to bone the main character, who was an unrelatable douche bag metrosexually confused character, and tried to cram so many plot points it was just an utter cluster of fail.

And it basically retread all the same grounds as Final Fantasy 3, again, including world destruction and you fighting on after the end of the world. But unlike in 3, this one the world is magically fixed because of time flux or something, and the destruction of the world never happened, and it’s all just a baffling mess. This doesn’t even include the awful, awful gameplay mechanics that required endless hours of grinding, more than usual, using the draw system, and the utter requirement of attuning characters to Guardian spirits or the fact that gear and upgrades were completely removed and required convoluted wannabe crafting system to get working. Final Fantasy 8 destroyed my love of Final Fantasy.

At this point I didn’t care. I bought Final Fantasy 9, and the roots were there, but I was so, utterly and hopelessly spiteful towards the series because of Fianl Fantasy 7 and 8, which I only ever got as far as disc 2 in Final Fantasy 9. I never completed that game, despite how Final Fantasy 9 did return to form, somewhat. And it makes me sad, because from what I heard, 9 was a beautifully done game as far as plot and story are concerned.

I’ve never played 10, 11, 12 or 13. I probably never will because just looking at the cover of 10 sickens me, and hearing all the scathing reviews of 13 just makes me laugh. 12 flew under the radar I didn’t even know it was made until 13 was being talked about, and 14 was just bad for an MMO. Needless to say, Final Fantasy was a franchise I started out loving, but when the series reached the PlayStation, and got Sony’s mitts on it, I knew things weren’t going to turn out well from a fan perspective. Sony had an already bad reputation at this time for me, and it makes me sad that my fears were confirmed. I do miss the old series, but like in my MMO blog from last week, it is something I don’t expect to ever return to its true roots because the game was killed off in favor of shiny instead of substance.

Would I ever consider a new Final Fantasy if they tried to return to form? I don't know. I know a lot of fans make me gag because they want Final Fantasy 7 remade, but if I ever had to pick a Final Fantasy to be remade for the common era, I would vote 3 (aka 6) because that game had a true story, substance and was basically the pinnacle of what made Final Fantasy truly a Final Fantasy.

Reviewing Deus Ex: Human Revolution

It's been sometime since I've actually decided to review a single player game. But I think I am due for one, especially a high profile game like this that I am sure many others will be spouting their reviews and personal opinions about. Of course, mine is but one opinion of many, and what I am going to do is try to keep from spoiling things and just boil out the heart itself, the actual game play and how it handles.

Now, let me get the first bit out of the way; I do not care for Squeenix. At all. Like you couldn't even pay me to actually like them anymore. I use to be a fangirl big time, back with the original Final Fantasy games on Nintendo, back when they tried to sell the story and the game as one complete whole instead of isolating them as complete separate entities locked behind a wall of glaringly painful graphics in front of a matte painting backdrop that removed any sense of their actual belonging there.

I loved Final Fantasy 1, 2 and 3 or for those who have to be politically correct 1, 4, and 6 in Japan. The original is extremely dated now, and it's a very basic hack and slash RPG, but Final Fantasy 2(4) and 3(6) introduced not only very powerful game play elements, but an engrossing story that captured the mind and kept wanting you to see more of it. These things orchestrated, in my mind, a company that actually cared and wanted to deliver the best they could despite the limitations of the hardware they were using, you wanted to explore the world, to see what was offered and ask what else is there and even the tiniest things kept you asking, what are they hiding.

But when Squaresoft decided to jump on the Sony Playstation wagon, all that magic and wonder was lost as they got mired in the idea that just selling pretty graphics is enough, the rest of the game isn't as necessary. You can see this philosophy a lot in their latest iterations of Final Fantasy as well as that bombshell of a movie they called The Spirits Within. It's just been awful and it just makes me shake my head how many people think that train wreck of a game, Final Fantasy 7, is the pinnacle of the entire series. How low your bar must be set if you think that dross of a go nowhere, convoluted and no story game is actually remotely as high as the bar set by Final Fantasy 2 and 3.

But that is another story for another time. Instead I am here to talk about Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Again, my mind had already been set that this game wasn't going to bear witness to the fruit that the original game garnered in its fan base. Honestly, I can't say I was ever a fan of the original Deus Ex, not because I didn't like it, but because I never actually had the pleasure of playing it. So I will be looking at this from the point of view of a new comer into the series of games.

I can safely say that hurdle has been overcome because I think, for the first time in a long time, I've actually entered a game I feel immersed into. I get into the spirit of the stealth, I get into the wonderment and curiosity the conspiracy theories invoke, and I certainly feel a bit of a small rush when I did something dumb and I am hiding from all the guards in the area as they do a search for me. The game play is very much a choose your own adventure thing, but on top of that, you are given the freedom to decide how to handle all the situations, from being a gung ho hero to being a Solid Snake style sneak and covert op. I am sure there is a game play style for everyone in this.

Another thing I rather enjoy about the game is that there is a sense that you actually have to pay attention, not just to environment, but to your inventory and your various messages and clues you receive. Though the game does track a lot of things, not everything is, and just randomly pushing buttons can end you in either a situation that can hurt you, or even worse, a quick death and speedy trip back to your last save. And if you aren't a diligent saver, that can be a long ways back for many.

As I said previously, it's been a long time I've ever actually felt this immersed in a game before. I want to get around the next corner, I want to unlock that door and find out what secrets are in it, but do I fly the straight and narrow, or am I the stealthy thief, that robs people blind, or am I the cold blooded killer that shoots first, shoots second, shoots some more, and then when everything is dead I think about the question to ask? These are the things you get a hold of and I am sure I am still not doing it justice.

I haven't finished the game yet, I still take breaks here and there to give me a moment to think my way around a situation I've found myself in currently in the game. Current run through I am playing stealthily and so far I can say other than the tutorial, I haven't killed a soul yet. From what I am told that still negates me from the achievement due to the tutorial, but I will gung ho in another play through. The game has presented itself a challenge to me, it actually encourages me to think, and I love that, something many games lack in this day and age.

But, and there is always a but, I have to say there are things that annoy me about it and they are just petty gripes that I think people can ignore for the most part. My first complaint is the voice acting. Now, I can't say voice acting in the video game industry will win any awards anytime soon. Most of the voice actors sound like they are less enthused than the voice actors for cartoons. But here it's almost whimsical how many of the voice actors say their lines. And I don't even think that they were trying to go that route, but it really doesn't sound like they were on the same page that the line delivered should have been. From Adam Jensen's wannabe Bale Batman gravelly voice sound to Mikal's flippant serious to bubbly voice acting, it's hard to get the idea that it was suppose to be serious. Some though delivered their lines perfectly, but most just sound out of place, but I think that also is because of the second point.

The animations during cut scenes and the like. They are so whimsical and poorly animated that you can't help but be sucked right out of what you were enjoying in the immersion. For me, I almost have to stop watching and either just keep reading the subtitles to ignore it, or turn my head and just listen. The character animations for these tense, talky choice scenes are poor, and that's being nice. The characters animate like marionettes from an amateur in the next room, and in some places, like with augmented people, the actual joints themselves appear to almost break off at points before quickly reattaching themselves to the original body. This and the voice acting can end up yanking someone out of the immersion they might have been experiencing. It's perhaps the biggest complaint I got, and it's a tad petty.

The only other thing that drives me up a wall is the interacting distance. Maybe I got use to other games too much where they were a bit gracious on the distance, but in DX:HR you pretty much have to be standing on top of objects before interacting with them works properly. And in a game where stealth is key that can add a bit more drama to moments. But that is only personal preference and probably from being spoiled by the dross of games over the past few years lately.

So far, I would recommend this to anyone who would be interested and would prefer a game that actually encourages exploration, thinking outside of the box, and above all else, not pretending to be a bullet absorbent badass that has no fear of consequences. Though that option is present, you still have to think tactically if you are to survive.

Oh, and that first boss fight is a pain in the ass. It will definitely piss off the people who play HALO (a POS FPS game that somehow gets hailed as the greatest thing evah) and such expecting to deflect bullets with their chins. If you're going in expecting to take 8 billion bullets before death, well, you probably won't like this game very much. However, if you want to use tactics, play using smarts and actually exploiting weaknesses instead of battles of attrition based on who can fire the most bullets, then this might be the game for you, especially if you love conspiracy theory thrillers.

Why I am not Fond of Theme Park MMOGs

It's probably been on the minds of a few people that last few times they see me bring up a rather sharp distinction of me saying I don't like theme park MMOs and would rather have sandbox MMOs back on the market. Now for some, this is probably a very confusing statement because the current market, as it stands, there really isn't a sandbox MMO out there, other than EVE, but that is more of a spreadsheet machine with a visual option stapled on, but that's another story entirely. Since I know many would probably want me talk about something else, I am going to talk about why I don't like theme park MMOs anyways.

In my last blog I talked about how I felt games today were getting way too easy, to a point I feel that subconsciously people feel insulted by the actual challenge and reward at the end. I feel this is why people are becoming disgusted faster and faster with the games they spent anywhere between $50 to $60 dollars on give or take the version and whether you bought it digitally or not and all manner of other trivialities that developers and publishers are slapping on to eke out a little extra cash on people. And yet people say they breeze through these games the moment they buy them and pretty much finish them in a couple of hours, challenges includes. That's very much a serious let down because to me if I get a game and just breeze through it that quickly then the reward at the end just feels hollow. It's an empty victory.

This is how I feel about MMOGs now, games meant to be played as a team game, but developers have been increasingly making them more accessible to the masses as a whole. The result is a game that has no lasting appeal or value because you can breeze through to the end already. This is a terrible design choice when it comes to theme park MMOs which rely heavily on their replayability and such.

Now, artificially, MMOGs (most anyways) already have an inherent lengthener to make the game play last longer. This is inherent in most of them, basically the leveling and progression system. Some MMOGs go so far as to add an extra layer on top of that with actual gear progression as well. However, as MMOGs have been going and the dumbing down of the process continues, parts of these equations have either been made drastically "streamlined" (ie time to reach the next tier is ludicrously simple) and the other part is either given on a platter or made so worthless as to not matter at all. This, again, is devastatingly ridiculous design choices for a theme park based MMOG.

But I am on a tangent and this doesn't really answer the "why" I don't like theme park MMOGs, so I will do my best to try and stay focused.

First and foremost I think my number 1 annoyance with theme park based MMOGs, that I have, they like to toss out a word a lot lately and it gets used so much and a big excuse for why they make such terrible decisions in the design process of the MMOG. This word is story. Now don't confuse it with I think injecting stories into an MMOG is a bad idea. The complete opposite really. However, many MMOGs use story as an excuse to actually hinder the overall game play experience with either bone dead stupid easy game play, ridiculous design decisions, and overall no reason to actually provide a long lasting game other than the intro, a somewhat beefy middle (the grinding part of your typical MMOG) and an ending that lasts for several months while developers either rush to try and offer something new or, better yet, make promises and soothing remarks in an attempt to make their player base feel something is actually going on behind the scenes. And honestly, the really bad ones about it are the ones that make it sound like the monumental world, but when it's delivered it's just an impressive mess and disastrously delivered to be more or less insulting to the bulk of the players intelligence.

Story is treated like a crutch in theme park MMOGs a lot of the time. And the bad part of it is, they either constrain and choke the life out of the story for game mechanic purposes, or use the story as an excuse to not even bother offering something decent and entertaining to the players as a whole. This is just bad design philosophy on the whole. A story should be complimenting the game play experience, it should be riding hand in hand actually, but for whatever reason, no one wants to bother. And it hurts the game. This becomes especially true in games that pretend to start with story then just start adopting nothing but childish jokes and internet memes in place, and it is even more insulting if the game provides endgame content, it totally ignores the story completely.

The next part that annoys me is a big one; Theme Park MMOGs, no matter the false sense of openess or the vast take they have on the world in particular are just rail shooters. Invisible rails, but rail shooters none-the-less. You are pre-programmed in an Theme Park MMOG to follow a set course. There is little choice to deviate from this set path. In fact, this path is pre-programmed for you to reach the ending. The bad part, however, is when a game offers nothing at the end for you to do and becomes a monumental fart in the face. There are walls everywhere that prevent you from going certain places, whether they are overt or covert. Most probably never realize it, but they are. It's called the zone level. Yep, critter level is a covert wall to keep you from entering into an area you shouldn't be in. And some MMOGs have actually been putting physical barriers down now. At first they started with an explanation why, now they just say, because you can't. No reason.

Another thing on that part is the community, as big or great as people think they can be, is hollow. It's even more so these days because the MMOG communities are slowly becoming police states controlled by the company that produces them. And I do mean this the community in a theme park based MMOG is rather hollow inside. They sort of go through the motions, as it were, when it comes to talking about their entertainment value, but you just get that feeling that as much passion as they might type they have or it seems like they have in the vocabulary they are typing, you just can't help and shake that feeling that the sincerity isn't really genuine. The only sense of passion seems to be derived from the actual investment in the product, not necessarily the love for the product. This creates a rather bizarre paradox, as it were, where people are just there because of what they put in, but not actually there because they love or enjoy the game. In fact, you can probably spot people who often make posts that they think the forums of a specific game are more fun or they just log in to update things once in a while or something. That's rather passionless.

This leads into the game just doesn't offer a real world. The game is basically the world that time forgot. Even if it has a simulated day and night, everything is scripted and programmed to happen exactly. That quest you did three years ago will still be there. There's no sense of progression, at all, no sense of evolution. The game begins and hangs there. Just imagine watching your favorite TV series, as it were, and all you see is the first season. And that's all you ever see of it. This world only exists in that state. Oh expansions might add things every now and then, but for the most part, outside of total overhauls (that aren't that much of overhauls) the main world is still in season 1. And it's jarring as hell for the experience when you go from one point in say an expansion talking about events as if three years went by, and then you get back to the main world and everyone's talking about that event as if it was still going on now. There is no sense of growth, no sense of progression, nothing at all. It's just there.

It's a single player game, all in all. It might have a few moments that desire you to team up, but some of the latest ones have made that completely optional even. The challenges, if they can be called that, are barely passable to make you even think past a few idiot one shot kill attacks, and many of the ones presented now don't even offer that so making it easy for teams to just power through the damn things. And this problem is exacerbated because many of the theme park MMOGs now are actually telling players from the get go they are the only one that matters in the game world. This is a stupid thing to tell the players honestly, and it removes any sense that teams and allies are even important.

Theme parks get boring. No matter what's done. They don't change, they don't offer any freedom, and they don't ever provide any tools for a real community. Many also hamstring themselves behind a story excuse, and this is just shoddy. A sandbox MMOG can work with story and instead of keeping everything around constantly, let's it grow, change and even evolve.  Theme parks are afraid to do that, for some silly reason. They are afraid if they don't offer the exact same quests a few years down the line that you did on day one of launch, people will magically disappear.

Many also develop tunnel vision, something they try to inflict on their players to, trying to guide and force players down the road towards their endgame. All in all, it's just a silly notion that should stay in the single player park. MMOGs should be sandbox games that offer freedom to the players as a whole, with stories that actually compliment the game play, not hinder it like it's doing now. MMOGs are about vast communities that can be formed, but what is being formed in today's MMOG communities are just empty, hollow people not even really sure they actually mean what they say, and not even wholly believing what they say themselves.

My Views on Role-Playing in Modern Games

It often fascinates me what people designate as role-play and what isn't role-play in their gaming genre. Needless to say, I use to be one of those aforementioned role-player types mostly because I rather enjoyed it and felt if I am going to immerse myself in some make believe world, I might as well go all the way and do it. However, as the MMOG industry evolved (definition in terms since it's been de-evolving from my point of view) that fanciful role-playing term has become less involved in the actual process and more of a second thought, or even third or fourth thought in many cases.

The wild thing about this is, what most people consider to be role-playing elements just really aren't. Somewhere along the line when the actual PnP model was evolving from just basic dice rolling to actually trying to put yourself in the role of your character, that translation was lost, badly, upon the computer interpretation. Unfortunately, when developers actually try to "include" these so called RP elements, they generally are just in the form of multiple choice options that really aren't much different from a very well constrained choose your own adventure book.

This is further compounded that this illusion of choice is often presented to starved people who actually think this is even remotely role-play. It really isn't, but as the gaming has not really evolved and more or less de-evolved in the past decade alone. In the name of making games accessible to everyone, they've pretty much made the games so stupidly simple in the process that anyone that has two functioning limbs and at least a 2nd Grade education should more than be able to complete these yawn fests that focus on graphics instead of actual game play. And that's the sad part, especially in games that claim to be role-playing games, that substitute the actual role-playing element with pretty graphics and trick your brain with false choices to give you a sense of choices that have no bearing our outcome on the story as it stands. The final result is just a strict corridor shooter that gives you little more than a big beefy middle that has no real bearing on your character other than extra padding to get from the visual exploding beginning to the ridiculous ending that makes very little sense in the entire paradigm of the game as it stood.

In MMOGs, role-play is actually treated like a dirty word there, and I can't blame the people that do treat it with a bit of disdain. MMOG role-players tend to be exceptionally cliquish, boring, prejudice, boring, closed to any new ideas, boring, unwilling to accept anything outside of their god-mode paradigm and boring. I'm sorry people, I've been a role-player for a long time, and quite frankly, today's MMOG RP consists of hanging around in single little locations that have no action and coming up with pointless melodrama with as little conflict that either sounds like the emo poetry of some goth punk from a coffee shop near college, or some slash fiction of Twilight failtard writing in history. You are unwilling to go anywhere, unwilling to do anything, and unwilling to actually inject excitement and adventure into your "story" (using the term loosely to define most of them) that you guys tend to repeat like clockwork every few weeks.

And of course, like it or not, most RPers god-mode in today's RP climate as well. Their characters are perfect in every way and can't be defeated or harmed by anyone. And sorry people that think you are RPers that do this, you aren't. A perfect character is boring in every which way you can imagine. And the worse character is the perfect one that emos about life and saying nothing is worth living for. In fact, one of the things I do readily is avoid any location that is basically a bar, pub, or any such area that these people infest because of that attitude, and of course the even darker side, the ERPer that breed well out of the above mentioned people.

That is probably another point on this as well. I don't care about people that ERP. That's there thing and they are welcomed to do whatever they want. But these people do everything to make it obvious and more public to people who don't want to even hear about it. And this isn't limited to any single MMO. It's out there in many though some will claim it doesn't happen as often, they are lying out their asses if they claim that.

But before I get off on a tangent (too late) the overall point is that in the modern MMOG climate, role-play is practically dead. Many will try to say it's not but again, they are being deluded. It's as dead as disco and the people saying RP is strong are just like the average disco person saying disco is alive and strong just because them and a couple of friends listen to it. The reason RP is dead; no tools to actually do any realistic RP in any MMOG and most of today's RPers are too afraid of conflicts that might actually shatter their false belief their character is unbeatable god.

It will take a lot to give tools to the players to actually be able to truly RP again. Realistically, it probably won't happen right now while BioWare is busy trumpeting the Blizzard banner that only games that copy WoW exactly will ever succeed in this market. Basically, RP has little place in theme park games where the games middle serves no purpose other than getting to the games end. This leaves very little room for any actual RP.

Another thing that kills RP, whether the people want to believe this or not, is the fact the games allow people to constantly alt all the time. That's a piss poor idea, and basically making new characters over and over that fight for your attention results in RP being killed that way as well. The more characters created the more of your attention has to be diverted to fill the gaps for these games. This results in less actual RP and more or less being treated around by a schizophrenic with multi-personality disorder who can't settle on the fact they aren't RPing by constantly shifting characters around. Like it or not it kills the mood and just makes any desire to continue irrelevant on constantly shifting characters.

Then finally, one of the biggest hurdles and most obvious nails in the RP coffin are the players themselves. Like it or not, the RP community is the majority of the problem with RP. You guys are insular and treat anyone that might have an interest like a potential enemy instead of someone who might actually be genuinely interested. You ignore anyone who doesn't follow your asininely strict rules of RP and shun anyone who doesn't immediately acknowledge you as the center piece of your little snore-fest Twilight revamp story. It's a sickening problem, and the funny part is, these are the same people that claim they are grown up and mature, but are the first to throw insults at people who don't play their way and such. The hypocrisy is just so many levels of ironic.

Personally, I would want to get back into the RP field, but honestly the average RPer lately makes my desire low. It's just a plain fact, it isn't even really what I would call RP anymore, especially considering that most of the time I am generally getting walked up to by the "tall dark guy in the big black coat with a waggle in his eye" as he tries to order me a drink and be suave expecting me to fall for his epic charms just because he thinks he is suave like James Bond. And the sad part is, just like real life, guys don't exactly take a hint very well since they are thinking with their second head where no means yes and get lost means take me I am yours.

Of course I think the RP that really pisses me off the most is the one that every single action and environmental effect is RP'd out. Extra explanation has never really bothered me, but you are not a novelist and you aren't RPing just because you sit there and describe how the icy glass is covered in perspiration after sitting there for a couple of minutes. It doesn't heighten the mood either guys, so stop trying it. In fact, unless the situation calls for a bit more explanation, explaining every little detail of every moment is just failing at storytelling and bores your audience, but considering most seem to enjoy Twilight novels, then boring dialog with little point seems to be what most want.

The final bit of RP that I hate is people that tell me I need to do things a certain way and god-moding. I am putting these two together because they are basically one in the same. Someone tells you that you have to talk a certain way and play a certain way, and of course people that either are immortal or basically try to tell you how your character should play and act. No consensus, not even asking, just flat out telling you after coming up to you. Sorry people, that's insulting the player, and it's rude. Not everyone plays by your style and no one ever likes having their character taken out of their hands and run around roughshod such as their back story and explanation being completely ruined because you don't like it. And no one really likes playing with people who are perfect and are unbeatable. It's a basic keep away warning light. If your character is capable of doing everything, you failed at RP. If you are trying to tell someone how their characters back story is suppose to work, you failed at RP. If you are trying to tell someone that their style of RP is not RP, you failed at RP.

It's such an ironic thing that long ago role-players use to be the most open and tolerant people on the planet, and now they've just turned into a bunch of crying, sniveling children lately who get upset just because the dial is slightly different on the wall from what they like. But that boils back on self-entitlement I guess and people reading smut like Twilight and such and thinking that is good storytelling to.