Still no internet, and to keep myself from going mad(er), I seem to be reinstalling old RPGs at an alarming rate, two or three a night. I shaln’t list them specifically on the left, as not many of them are actually any good, and there’s links a plenty there already.
It’s a familiar process; see box on shelf, recall fuzzy rose-tinted memories of how great that game was, reinstall, spend hours agonizing over character creation, and then slam right into the same opening prologue/intro/first few levels that I’ve tried to push past countless times before, suddenly realising that my fond memories of the game largely occur toward the end parts, where I’m powerful, and doing powerful things.
Let’s take Baldur’s Gate, for example. A fine game – genre defining, well-crafted and an all-round best-seller, with good reason. Objectively, that is. For me it’s different. I’ve done that circuit of the Candlekeep courtyard so many times! Over and over, I’ve run the fetch-n-carry, learnt how to use my journal, watched Gorion be killed, found Kahlid and Jaheira, and to be honest, for me the game doesn’t even start until I’m well into the mines at Nashkel. Mostly it’s my own fault, because often, I’ll just give up before Nashkel, and play something else, meaning that the post-Nashkel sections of the game are far more novel and interesting for me, simply because I’ve done them less often.
All my RPGs are similar – there will be a point, not far in, which once passed, reawakens my interest in the game. Up until that, I’m just quickly clicking through dialogue, and going through the motions, barely even registering what’s going on. MMOs are similar, as anyone who has more than a couple of alts will know. ‘Oh god…Westfall AGAIN!’
Over-exposure, I guess – too much of a good thing, too often, and the danger is that with each failed or aborted attempt, the overall average impression you’ll have of the opening levels of the game erodes further, until eventually you reach a point where you simply can’t face even installing the game anymore. It can recover over time, but slowly – which is why I’ve always been uncharacteristically self-disciplined with Planescape: Torment, my own personal Best Game Ever, for fear of damaging its potency somehow. Just lately though, I feel as if I ‘deserve’ another go at it.
Right from the intro cutscene and ‘tutorial’ levels, I was an entranced as I’ve always been with it. For me the reasons are many, but are mostly to do with the writing and design, and the entire experience is more akin to a lavishly illustrated interactive novel, than a hack-n-slash dungeon romp. The game contains somewhere around a million words of text dialogue, and pretty much every NPC you meet is unique and interesting. The wordy and sometimes impenetrably metaphysical nature of all this prose most likely put a lot of gamers off it, and the first Diablo game sold 40 times more copies than this game. With only four places in the entire game where a fight is totally unavoidable, it deviated far too far from the expected norm for fantasy sword-romping, and was punished. Personally though, I’ve not seen anything like it before or since, and love it.
The story is powerful and magnetic; you awake from the dead with no memories, in a bizarre and twisted world, only to discover you are immortal, with no idea how or why. The ensuing journey of self-discovery is a popular, and sometimes cliched, theme, but set against the backdrop of the now-abandoned Planescape D&D setting, itself a strange, sharp and thought-provoking place about as far from Tolkien as it’s possible to get while still falling in to the ‘Fantasy’ bracket. The execution of the game is masterful, and draws at you all the way through, constantly wondering what happens next, and going ‘Ahhhhh’ as more and more of your shrouded past is revealed, and tied to the world around you.
It’s also shot through with a wry humour that ranges from puns; “This is your eye. It looks like it’s seen better days,” to rampant parody of the genre, such as the robotic fake ‘Dungeon’ designed to study the habits of Adventurers and at the same time, neatly side-steps these clichés itself, with all sorts of novel ideas replacing the more traditional concepts of something like Baldur’s Gate, not least the idea of player ‘death’ being necessary in places to solve certain puzzles. Largely it was brought to us by the people who did Fallout, and it shows; a lot of that tongue-in-cheek style, and clever design can be seen as you play through, and there are so many plot paths to explore, that it definitely lends itself to replay.
And that’s its real strength, for me; having already done it all before, I still find it captivating to play through over and over. If only all games could claim that…
Alas, while we may never see the like again, those with Neverwinter Nights can at least attempt to recapture some of that essence at The City of Doors Initiative, a fan-based project to recreate Sigil and environs using NWN tools and mods. As with all things NWN, it seems well-intentioned, but somewhat patchy and incomplete, and quite slow to update, but then fair is fair – no-one is paying them to do this stuff.
EDIT: Awoogah awoogah....absolutely massive and huge gigantic spoiler warning: The game, in novel adapted form can be found here: http://www.wischik.com/lu/senses/pst-book.html, but really, only download it if you believe you've exhausted the game's myriad plots - you're just shooting yourself in the foot if not.