The Story Hook

I was trying to reflect on recent games and why I get hooked or not.

And for the most part I will stay interested in a game along as I feel like I am progressing though the Story of the game. This goes for both single player and online RPGs. However there must be room for exploration and to go off the beaten paths for a while.

The trick is, I should always be able to jump right back in to the story at any time. Too many games with great story elements built in periods of time where you had to go wandering to collect XP in order to be powerful enough to meet the next challenge. Final Fantasy was very much like this.

This was one of the reasons I did not get hooked in to Age of Conan. Too many times I had to leave the main storyline quest to go "run errands" in order to continue on the main quest. On the other hand, I felt that the side quests in Lord of the Rings Online (for the starting areas) fit seamlessly in with the main story line quests. For the most part, the side quests put you in the same area as you were going to go to as the story quests.

WoW had some story in some of the quests, but it seemed to be an afterthought. Also it suffered from giving the player too many quests at once. So many that it devalued the whole notion of questing.

Going back to EQ, there were very few quests. Yet, I found almost everyone of them interesting. Even the Kill Ten Rats. Why, because there were not that many. Then again I was younger and just playing and seeing the world was new and exciting. I would actaully enjoy making the run from Freeport to Qeynos. Well for the first few times. But then I did not have to do that run often since there were things to do in both areas.

This isn't limited to Online games. CRPGs can do too much. The Elder Scrolls series are prone to being "too big." I played Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion, but I only ever finished Morrowind and that was though sheer force of will just to complete the story. And I did resort to a walk though to keep on track.

On the other hand, Fallout (and its various decedents) were just right in story and exploration. I never felt completely lost from the main line, but I still had time and fun to do other things in the world. Also it had the advantage to affect the game world. Granted you did not know of your importance to all the little areas until after you finished the game.

I have yet to stumble in to a MMORPG that fulfilled my need to be apart of the story and world such that I am compelled to continue to play. Not sure if I ever will, but I keep hoping with every game that comes out.

Taking a Break and Going Retro

Recently I decided to tinker with my desktop system and upgrade it to Vista. Now I already work with Vista at work and my new laptop also is running Vista. Needless to say I kind of like it. Unfortunately I had to do a complete re-install and not an upgrade (not big loss, I did back up the important bits first.) Though I am running into a bit of a snag. For some reason I have yet to get the OS to see that I now have 4 GB of memory. It only shows 2GB.

On top of that, I just got a pair of Mini-Dachshund puppies. (One is mine, the other is my GF's) So for now the desktop system is turned off and I will work on it later when I don't have to keep an eagle eye over two very active puppies.

This means I am on my laptop for gaming. I can sit in the living room and watch the puppies while on the computer. As it turns out, my laptop, which I just bought, is at least as good as my desktop system for gaming. I just don't like being cramped up on the keyboard.

Now I have a nice 32" LCD HDTV. So I was thinking of getting a console system for the living room. But with the recent laptop purchase and new puppies, I need to conserve cash for a bit. But wait! New laptop has HDMI out and I have a spare cable. Plug-Plug, Click-Click and suddenly I had a 32" monitor on my laptop. Unfortunately the couch is further away then the cable can reach.

So a quick run to Best Buy and I get myself a wireless XBox controller. Plug-Plug, Click-Click and now I have a hacked together XBox. I have a few games in my stash that were cross released to PC and XBox, like Oblivion. However my Oblivion DVD is scratched so I can not load the game on the laptop.

Quick aside: Even if the game was cross developed for XBox and PC it does not mean the PC version will natively support an XBox Controller. So you will need a intermediate program. So far I like the Pinnacle Game Profiler.

So now I am going into the bargain bin and see what I can find. A while back I got a subscription to Fileplanet (long before the Conan Beta) and it turns out I qualified for a few free games though their HitPoints system . So I downloaded a few to give them a whirl.

The first was Sherlock Holmes: The Awakening. This is a fairly simple puzzle adventure game. Nice to play and I was able to get my Xbox Controller to work with it. It was good to getting used to moving with the controller. However I miss creating my own character.

Next up is Deus Ex: Invisible War. I played most of the original Deus Ex when it first came out. I liked the mix of FPS and RPG. It was also a good story and should kept me interested for a while. It took awhile to get running on Vista since it was made a while back, but it was just setting up permissions and compatibilities. Though I need to tune the controller a bit more.

Lastly, I got Myst III, but I will save that till later. Much like Sherlock Holmes, I know that it is a puzzle/adventure game. I would need to have a walkthough handy when I get frustrated with a puzzle.

There are a few games on my Radar as well. First is Mass Effect from Bioware. A XBox to PC conversion. But Bioware makes very fun CRPGs. And later this year....Fallout 3. I fell in love with Fallout 1 and 2. So I hope it lives up to the hype. Granted it is a completely different set of developers, but so far it looks good.

So time to curl up on the couch. Wrangle puppies and play some old fashion CRPGs and Adventure games.