Thursday, February 19, 2009

It's too big!

The big thing with videogames now is the term 'open world'. It's where you are free to do just about anything you want in the game world. Examples of this are the Grand theft Auto series, Elder Scrolls:Oblivion, and the recent Fallout game. In these games there are hundreds of things, maybe thousands of different things to do, decisions to make. You have the ultimate freedom.
For me, this freedom sucks.
I make enough decisions in the real world. What show should I watch? What do I eat for lunch? Do I have to go to work today? In a video game, the only real decision I want to make is, what bad guy do I shoot next? I don't really want to think all that much in a video game.
I played Elder Scrolls:Morrowind on XBox, excited to start an epic journey, only to be confronted by dozens of different missions and decisions. I wandered around the huge landscape, got completely, utterly lost, and ended being killed by a peasant by accident. I gave up. I may try the game someday,when I'm not looking for fun.
Everyone says ES:Oblivion is an awesome RPG, which is really big, man. The game looks cool, but after Morrowind, I'm not sure if I want to waste 500 hours of my life playing it.
Western RPG, which are becoming more popular than Japanese style RPGs, are famous for being open worlds. JRPGs are too linear, some say, they don't give you an EXPERIENCE, they follow a storyline too closely for that. Well, fuck that, I want the story, I want the linearality. If I want create a story, I'll write a story, and writing a story is HARD.
So in my book, open world games suck, linear games, like JRPGs and most FPS, rule. That's my choice and I'm sticking to it.

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