In response to "A Three-Year History of Gaming" from The Escapist Forum: another great article, Mr. Pitts. Yes, the industry has indeed come quite far in its short life span. I'm excited to see where it will go from here. personally i hope this trend of dumbing games down doesn't continue. As of late i've been turning back to classic games to get my complexity fix. I can understand making games more appealing for the larger market, but i hope at least a few companies keep making games for the more in depth people like myself.
- the_tralfalmadorian
I enjoyed this article very much. I'm pleased to see that Myst made it into this broad overview, since it is a particular obsession of mine (but no, I haven't bought the DS version, either.) I have a question, though: When you say that "It took almost a decade for anyone to follow [Myst's] lead," what are you referring to? From my point of view, no game (excluding Riven) has tried to do what Myst did since... But if so, I would be very interested to check it out.
Oh, and by the way, hi everyone. I'm Steven. I've been reading this fine publication for some time; it's an honor to finally become part of its community.
- Rampancy
***
In response to "The Age of the World-Builders" from The Escapist Forum: An interesting read, but all you're essentially saying is that as technology has improved, developers are able to create more realistic and interesting environments. I'm disappointed that you've just stuck to RPG's and (of all things) MMO's. I also disagree with the early quote regarding characters: in MMO's especially, the character is treated more as a vehicle for traversing the game world, and most certainly are not a "character". Perhaps this is different in the CoV/H games, where customisation actually counts for something.
There's more to world building than terrain and architecture, and Oblivion is one of the games that I think just didn't have that extra *something*. Something that makes you feel like you aren't just increasing your character's stat block as you hunt down orcs, or as you venture into the mountain cave, that you're trying to take down a dragon because it's actually important to do so, and not just because you want the next epic armour piece in the item set, or the XP or quest reward from the (usually completely static) NPC you found.
Fallout (the original), now THAT had something. Lots of games have it. I think even GTA 4 has it, and is one of the titles that would have been a better example.
But as a rule, MMO's don't, and (in my opinion) nor does Oblivion.
- darkhart666
