How about this for Quote of the Week:
'...but Garriott emphasizes that the traditional trading of blows while keeping a sharp eye on your health, shortcut bars, and not much else is just "not great gaming."'
From
an article about Tabula Rasa on 1UP.com, (found via Virgin Worlds), which largely seems to be an early preview of the getting-quite-close-to-real SciFi MMOFPSRPG thing that Veteran MMO Beard, Richard Garriot has been working on for the last few years. I deliberately didn't delve too far into the meat of the article, a hands-on look at what Tabula Rasa is actually like, partly because I'm lazy, but mostly, because I don't want to spoil the thing with all sorts of pre-knowledge. It sounds interesting, so I'll probably give it a go when the time comes, if anything, purely on the strength of the above quote alone. Well played, that man!
See I've been at this a while, and for quite a few different titles, and one of the unfortunate side-effects of a game-hopping existence like mine, is that you start to look for similarities, and to do this, you tend to filter out the lore, backstory, look and feel and art direction, and end up resolving each new game into a kind of abstract mathematical exercise. On some level, they cease to be maurading orcs, or nefarious space pirates, or rampaging supervilians, and instead become things of numbers and maths alone. "Heres the Red Points, here's the Blue Points. Press this one and the Enemy's Red Points go down, and so do my Blue Points...press this one and my Red Points go up, and my Blue Points go down...gotcha, let's play!"
We all do it to an extent, apart from the truly new newfolks, whom I continue to envy. We work out stats, DPS calculations, timings, often employing third-party applications to increase our precision and efficiency, and like the man says above, end up spending much of our gaming hours squinting intently on the very small areas at the top left of the screen, and on the row at the bottom, and all too often I suddenly sit back and realise that the actual things going on in the main screen - the orcs and heroes and spells and trees and shrubs and dungeon walls, are almost
completely irrelevant to the game I'm
actually playing.
That game, it turns out in a moment of further clarity, is not so much playing a game, more monitoring a process. I could just as easily be sat at the controls of a large machine in a factory or power station somewhere. "Ah, gauge A is falling too fast, press button B, there we go, A is stabilising again!" It's all about the hidden dicerolls, and I suspect much of the action in many of the MMORPGs, past and present, could be simulated in a purely numerical manner using good old Excel.
Oh, I know, there are many reasons why this has to be the case; lag, accessibility, server performance and so on, but I just find it a little depressing that my chosen obsession sees me pressing the same types of hotbutton now, as I did back in 2000 in Everquest 1. Looking at say, World of Warcraft or Everquest II, through my Matrix-like vision, I end up seeing an almost identical game to the one it all started in seven or eight years ago, only modern games tend to not show the actual dicerolls in the main chat window these days.
"You have hit a fire beetle for 2 points of damage!"
I offer no solutions, or suggestions or improvements, but do often rant about wanting a 'different' sort of game. By this, I don't really mean 'I wanna be a pirate!' or 'I wanna be a spaceman!', (I do, but that's not the point.) No, I suppose I mean 'I wanna use my brain in different ways when I play!'.
I still dabble with
Puzzle Pirates sometimes. It's a silly little game, filled with sprite-based 'lego-like' pirates all playing Tetris on the high seas, but it still appeals, mostly because the actual abstract experience of the different little sub-games is so unlike the usual red-bar/blue-bar monitoring exercise, that it always entertains, if only for short spells.
EVE Online is another good one, and although the dice-rolls lurk there, behind the scenes, the way in which they're hidden is masterful, and even though I mostly just grind out NPC missions, they still keep me on my toes, thinking, thinking...
GuildWars is another. Here the red-bar/blue-bar game exists, but is conducted in such an obscure and quirky manner, that position, reactions, timing and tactics make for a far more tighter experience, hectic almost, that is certainly feels qualitatively different to the usual thing, particularly as a Mesmer, although all the classes operate in ways mostly unlike the usual hack and slash.
Planetside was a totally different experience, almost entirely based on reactions and dexterity - like FPS deathmatches, but with an overarching strategic aspect that forced my brain to work in different ways again.
Second Life, despite what anyone else might say, is to me, another kind of game, where strange puzzles of three-dimensional spacial reasoning, and form and function, suggest
themselves out of my own brain, and then require solution.
Again and again, I find myself drawn to the Other, the games where it's not about the red bar and the blue bar, but about new and unexpected ways of thinking about the puzzle, problem, mission or scenario. It's just a shame that it's the fringe games that experiment with this kind of thing, rather than the big boys, who seem to have found a formula, and are sticking to it. I still have time for the old-style thing of course, red-bar, blue-bar, buttons, but these days, it's just one of many types of game I like to play.
All of the above soul-searching is largely why I've put off Lord of the Rings Online, and yet am quite looking forward to seeing if the great Lord British can give form to the above quoted ideals. I do hope so, because I agree with him completely...