I am not that kid that plays D&D, period. I am that kid that plays video games because of that medium’s rules and mechanics based nature.
Pen and paper RPGs have rules and mechanics. it's what separates RIFTs from D&D. duhr You're missing out.
I certainly take no interest in video games for the sake of alien, unwelcome and tumorous concepts like narrative being ham fistedly forced into them by people who would rather write novels or direct movies but are too untalented to ever succeed in those fields. The very same people who then proceed to view this medium as ripe for sullying in a misguided attempt to realize their unfulfilled ambitions by proxy.
Pompous much? These games were designed so that people who enjoy adventure, exploration, problem solving, and fantasy worlds can enjoy the concept by themselves. Not everyone has access to a group for D&D. Games like Ultima, Might and Magic, Bards Tale, etc. all allow for a single person to embark on countless adventures.
Not to mention, games like this have very complex mechanics. Ever play Wasteland? It's not a simple game.
Mario is simple by comparison. You just jump and dodge crap. That's it. You could sit and whittle a game like Mario down into some awful, misguided attempt like you are doing with RPGs. It doesn't make it right. Peppering it with big words and university-style phrasing doesn't help either.
It certainly doesn't help that a bunch of kids and man-children who don't know any better actually praise these subpar efforts and hold them in high esteem, usually while being high on a powerful cocktail of nostalgia and ignorance.
I know far better, yet I still praise the efforts of games like Ultima and Wizardry. It ain't nostalgia. I was born in 88. This shit was old news by the time I got to it...And it sure as shit ain't ignorance. I think it's the exact opposite.
Of course this only prompts esteemed critics of the mediums being ever so poorly imitated to then proceed to misunderstand what this medium is actually really about at the core thus claiming that games can never attain the lofty status of being regarded as an equal peer to the much more noble blue blooded mediums of film and literature, no sir.
Wait, are you talking about yourself here?
The deuce you say mister critic, of course games wont ever be able do that, that is and never was their purpose, the comparison alone is farcical. This medium has a set of completely different goals and success criteria than those other narrative based mediums and these goals are all related to the origin of the medium’s name, “game”, something that you play.
This made me lol.
But then let us take a shallow gander at the so called game mechanics behind a large subset of the RPG genre. Rip open the thin veneer and therein lies exposed the ugly hunchbacked form of the problem itself. There at the core is a tabletop game inside and at the core of almost every video game RPG.
This shows YOUR ignorance to the matter. D&D is a far more complex game than you let on. There is no tabletop RPG behind Phantasy Star and the like. It's some fairly cut/dry numerical comparisons, that is it.
You don't seem too well versed in tabletop games. This makes your Tolstoy-esque complaining very funny.
When you exercise your sole interactive privilege within the combat system of Phantasy Star and games of its ilk by picking that "Fight" option over and over again, what you are actually doing is participating in a virtual abstraction of a tabletop dice roll.
Yes, because spells and items never come into play. It's all about fight fight fight.
You choose a menu command to roll a dice and see how much damage you did. That is just about as engaging as pushing the play button on a slot machine to see how much money you won.
Quit exaggerating.
It is this chicken brained, straight faced translation of mechanics made purposefully simple so as to be a playable tabletop activity for a group of humans using pen and paper over to the powerful computer with its infinite more possibilities that is at the rotten heart of this genre. That very same rotten heart which would give me infinite pleasure to rip out and shit upon.
You are aware that pen and paper RPGs (the ones you admitted you don't play), are not simple. That's why dorks play them. Your average doof doesn't want to sit and figure out how to play them.
Your average RIFTs character sheet has more shit going on than any computer game. You keep making it sound like they took some mindless, simplistic paper based game and turned it into a video game.
RPG’s were off to a lobotomized brain dead start and lo, thirty odd years later I struggle to count on one hand the number of computer RPG's that actually take the philosophical concept of the tabletop experience, the concept of adventuring, the sole element that actually made it fun, and try to implement this divorced of its simple tabletop derived implementation in order to instead take full advantage of the starkly different competencies of the video game medium as opposed to the limitations of the tabletop medium.
"Hi, I'm clueless", says you.
Yes, the computer is (was) infinitely more capable of pen and paper RPGs. Totally.
That's why the Goldbox games were dumbed down versions of AD&D. The computer could do far better than dozens of books worth of possibilities, and detailed mechanics. Definitely. That's why the goldbox games lacked entire classes, and the games often had to refer to external materials.
Unfortunately such titles count for sub 1% of the genre. The rest is a miasma of nostalgic tabletop derived wank material that I do not deem fit for wiping my ass with let alone play.
You've never played World of Xeen, Ultima V, Wizardry 7, or Legacy of the Ancients then.
What would you get if you hacked the program of most menu based RPGs to realize the following rule:
When an encounter is about to be triggered, run a sequence of quick simulations of the current party fighting these enemies by just picking the “Fight” option for a few rounds. If one average the fight can easily be won by doing this then skip the fight and instead add the experience that would have been won to the party. What you would get is many an hour of walking around without anything happening. Is this really good game design? No, it is a farce, a farce that should have ended over 30 years ago.
"most menu based RPGs"
Yes, do that in Wizardry once you've gotten down past the 3rd or 4th level. And then, go do it in Might and Magic 1 or 2 for PC. I'm sure it will go splendid.
Try it in Bards Tale, and witness yourself being f*cking mauled because your dickhead simulation doesn't use any spells. Try it in Demons Winter, or Eternal Dagger. You'll get faceraped faster than you can say "wank material".
They can keep their ham fisted narrative too. In my decades long attempt to dissect this decadent medium I've played dozens of its offerings and not even under pain of torture could I recall a single morsel of the many cliched trite plots being forced down my throat by way of dense, unnecessary and utterly clumsy forced exposition.
How is Ultima's lengthy saga a cliche? How about World of Xeen? I don't recall any stories about the Avatar elsewhere, and I certainly don't remember reading about a double-sided world being ravaged by two different jackasses almost simulatenously, complete with all the other plot-devices.
Upon completion all memory of it is all gone like the intolerable stench of passed flatulence. Which is funny because I can recall in detail the plots of any favored novel that I've read, even years after having completed them.
You might be the only person who compares CRPGs to novels. There is a reason for this, and it's not a good one for you.
So why do I keep coming back to genre? Because of its potential, the potential for passively established atmosphere, large worlds to explore at whim and deep, deep, deep rewarding mechanics that will take tens, hundreds of hours to master fully and offers fun, fun, fun.
After decades of all that potential being wasted on moving forward on tabletop grid like maze of corridors underground and pressing X to roll dices there finally was two people in the game design world that got it and realized the potential.
Play Knights of Legend. It'll keep you beating off to mechanics and exploration for hours on end.
I think before you go on some rant about how much you hate CRPGs, you should have more experience with them and the pen&paper games you compare them to. All you sound like is some crybaby bookworm with a large vocabulary that got slaughtered 10 tiles from the stairs in Wizardry 1 back in the 80s, and never tried the games again.
