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Do Gamers Want Simpler Games?
A recent GamePro article sums up a lesson that developers and publishers have been slowly learning over the last few years: gamers don't want as much from games as they say they do. Quoting:
"Conventional gaming wisdom thus far has been 'bigger, better, MORE!' It's something affirmed by the vocal minority on forums, and by the vast majority of critics that praise games for ambition and scale. The problem is, in reality its almost completely wrong. ... How do we know this? Because an increasing number of games incorporate telemetry systems that track our every action. They measure the time we play, they watch where we get stuck, and they broadcast our behavior back to the people that make the games so they can tune the experience accordingly. Every studio I've spoken to that does this, to a fault, says that many of the games they've released are far too big and far too hard for most players' behavior. As a general rule, less than five percent of a game's audience plays a title through to completion. I've had several studios tell me that their general observation is that 'more than 90 percent' of a game's audience will play it for 'just four or five hours.'"
Maybe they should focus on replayability instead of throwing in lots and lots of mindless trash. You can have lots of stuff in your game and make it worth playing, or you can have lots of redundant shit that no one cares about.
The gamer demographic is changing - I'm sure the hardcore want difficult games. Me, I'd like to have fun when I can, without the overwhelming idea that I need to devote my life to the gameplay.
Duh.
No, seriously. I'm one of those players that usually play(ed) games to completion. And maybe it's that I'm getting older, thus not longer feeling compelled to "beat" a game, but I haven't felt the urge to actually "complete" a game recently. At some point it becomes repetitive, requiring the same steps to be repeated over and over and over, and it's usually that point where I decide that it's just not worth it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I play many games, and I finish almost none of them. Most games I don't play more than 4-5 hours before I'm done with them for awhile, just like the summary says. But I usually come back to them later, and play about the same amount a few months down the road, and then again a few months down the road. I don't buy a game expecting to finish it, I buy the game to have fun. And I probably WOULDN'T buy the game if all the extra game play wasn't in it. I LIKE huge long complex games. I like difficulty (to a certain extent of course :) ). I don't want games to lose that... even though I might not play it all the way through. And for the games that I DO play all the way through, it makes the sense of accomplishment all that much better. Knowing that I've got a stack of 10 or 15 games lying around that I can go and play through for that rush when I'm bored some day with nothing else to do is great! I can't believe I'm the only one that feels like this too.
Sounds like somebody is tired of paying developers to make 40 hour games, and has decided to select the evidence they want to promote the idea of 3-5 hour games being the new standard.
I DO want more of a game I like. I don't tend to buy games that promise sub-10 hour gameplay.
Ryan Fenton
I'm not here to bash on console gamers, hell, I'm a console gamer myself too but I see a trend of (ported) PC games being oversimplified because the console audience is not buying into the "RTS with binding 10.000 keys to individual units" theme. This totally ruins some games and it's not only RTS where this applies. It applies to basically every new PC game comming out that is being ported from a console version.
Even menu's are stripped down so you can barely change any settings, I've ran into games where you couldn't even change the mouse y-ass to inverted or change advanced graphics settings.
Shooters where you don't switch to grenades but just hit the nade key and limited choices of "items" available in RPGs.
Don't even get me started about advanced game manipulation through consoles and/or modding.
I have a lot of responsibilities as well as interests besides gaming. It has been over 10 years since I could, say, spend a whole weekend diving through a Final Fantasy title. I love the epic game style, 60 hour game? yes please. But please, let me play it in 120 30 minute increments and feel good about it. Even if you can only break it down to as small as 2 hours, that is a healthy compromise. I'm a big, big fan of the idea of serialized/episodic games, especially if I know it will eventually reach a conclusion. It's not about getting the game sooner or whatever, it's about having smaller less intimidating nuggets of joy that each have their own temporary conclusion between instances like a good multi-novel sci-fi series. On top of that, if after a few episodes I find it's awful? I am sick of it? I can save my cash not buying the rest.
Unfortunately I have no idea how long I'll want to stick around for the story in a game these days. I am afraid to start into an arc that's going to strongly draw me in for more than an hour or so, and all too often I opt for a bite-size chunk of far less satisfying gaming because I'm sure I have the time. Even if, ironically, I end up doing that for over 2 hours.
Even if a game is sold all at once, I'd really appreciate if a developer wrote the story in well defined chunks and actually told me the estimated time to completion of the upcoming chunk before I started it so I could plan my time. Just like I plan time to watch movies or tv shows, and I can always find out the times for those.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
Um, can't we have both?
Sometimes I enjoy the simplicity (flavored with a little subtle complexity) of Plants vs. Zombies. Sometimes I feel like an epic, convoluted, RTS campaign. Surely there is a market for more complex games and less complex ones. But a long and complex game calls for an investment of time; they have to make it worth it.
Have they thought about it? In the past you could play games like "Baldur's Gate" with 200+ hours of gameplay and not get bored and even go through it again a couple of times.
Most longer games tend to artificially extend gameplay by long transports and repetitive tasks. The few that has longer gameplay by really introducing new tasks are really good and worth the time.
I wouldnt want a bad movie be extented over three hours either. If the game suck after a short while, maybe it really isnt that good?
Any EA executives wet dream must be to chop good games up into countless expansions so it can be sold over and over.
HTTP/1.1 400
Generalizing gamers in this way is like generalizing moviegoers. People who play video games are an increasingly diverse group. The phrase "Every gamer wants $X" is either deceit or wishful thinking. Game publishers would love to have their customers bundled into a neat and easily-marketable demographic. However, as many /. arguments over what makes a great game can attest, every person who plays a video games has a different expectation of what the experience should provide.
They want more efficient games. With “efficient” meaning: More fun for less time. Or: If they are shorter and don’t require as much getting into, they should just as much be more intense.
Your question falls to the classical “KISS” fallacy. Simplicity is a oversimplification of the original goal (efficiency). And, being oversimplified, it’s worse, not better, than that goal. :/
Did you ever use software that was “so easy”, that you weren’t able to use it anymore? (At least not without disabling most of your brain.) I get that a lot nowadays.
So you also misunderstood what gamers actually want: To have a just as great experience without investing a lot of time in it. The “just as great” is the key here. Because 1 hour of some level of greatness is only a fraction of 40 hours of that same greatness. You know what I’m trying to say.
Also, even a beginner game designer knows, that if there is no challenge, there is no fun, and there also is no game. So simple is by definition not an ideal in game design. :)
But efficiency... or rather emergence is very much.
Make the UI (or rather the whole game) emergent, and the experience great. That’s it. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Make your 40 hour long game if you must... but break them up into 8 episodes of 5 hours each. Make each one "self contained" as much as is practical, even if that means you need to put a "previously.." at the beginning of eps 2 to 8.
And, here's the brilliant part: Charge $15 per episode. Many customers will bork at buying a $120 game, but plenty will happily do that over weeks/months.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I think of the exact opposite. I don't like sandbox games at all. If I'm playing a game with a storyline and a quest, I want the gameplay to be tight, focused on the storyline, and with minimum to no distractions or side quests. I play those games for the story, I don't want to wander around lost or go off and do other things- I want the story, and I want a well written plotline engaging and long enough to be worth the game with nothing else tacked on.
When I think replayability, I think Civ. Strategic gameplay instead of tactical and each game plays very different just by altering the starting conditions.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
If the overwhelming majority of gamers don't finish the game in the first place, how would replayability help? The problem is that people give up anyway, not that they don't start it once more.
If anything, this seems to confirm what I've been saying all along: Forget about replayability, just make it worth playing once. To even think about playing it again, you have to find it worth playing the first time. If people get to the end scene with a sensation of "man, I wish it had at least 5 more hours", they'll tend to replay it anyway. If they gave up in boredom or frustration before even getting to the first contagonist, they won't.
And it seems to me like ultimately too much focus on reserving stuff for the replay is self-defeating. You have the time and budget to put X quests / locations / dialogue lines / etc in the game. If you show the user only a quarter of those on the first run, because essentially for some he's not the right class, for some he took the wrong choice (e.g., in Fallout 3 it's possible to never even discover a quest hub by as little as skipping one side-quest and succeeding on a persuasion check on another), for some he didn't explore enough to find the secret quest giver locations, for some he explored too much (FO3 again, you could skip two thirds of the main quest by just going exploring and stumbling upon the "wrong" location), and some is bonus stuff to be unlocked, essentially what that user sees on the first run is a quarter of the fun. If that puts it below the fun threshold to play it the first time, there'll be no replay to find that extra stuff either.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I think you gave your own answer there. The problem isn't with the number of hours per se, but basically with making a 10 hour game and padding it to 60 with 50 hours of dumb repetitive filler or with boss fights that you need to try 20 times to get to the next chunk of actual story.
Not all games are automatically that way just because they're 60 hours long. There are a rare few which can stay reasonably interesting. Unfortunately, a lot do just pad it so they can write a big number on the box.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I do not want less complex games.
Games don't need to be dumber, the average age of a gamer is over 25, we aren't morons so stop treating us like them.
I like a bit of complexity and puzzle solving in my game, I absolutely hate the hand holding and linear corridors of recent games.
Complex does not mean harder or longer it means that it is meant to provide a player with a challenge and after that challenge was defeated a feeling of accomplishment
Anything that could force the player to make hard decisions or challenge them slightly has been removed. Like an inventory system where you had limited space, so you actually have to make difficult choices about what to carry (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. did this to some extent). Near unlimited ammo and and regenerating health have become the Deus Ex Machina of gaming, killing decent game design. At no point do you have to take it easy and plan your moves due to low health, in HL1 if you wasted your rockets you'd find the game difficult if not impossible at some points. Now days, even in HL2 there is an infinite "box-o-rockets" where you engage anything that needs them. Now that's just for game-play, now let me get started on story.
Here's the story line for the next Gears of Duty game.
You are a red meat easting, muscle bound, flag waving all American hero (even if you've got a foreign accent but I'll get to that bit later) needless to say, you are 100% good and pure. Your enemy are the evil Nazi, zombie terrorists who want to blow up the White House with a dirty bomb (sound familiar) so they are unambiguously evil in every fashion. You will fight through a mixture of the standard tile sets (urban, jungle snow, desert) which are quite linear (any illusion of openness is optical) whilst never running out of ammo or health until you get to an unimpressive anti-climax where someone hands you a gun and you kill the ultimate Hitler Zombie Alien with one shot in a cinematic perspective. Further more, simply adding a foreign accent to this archetype does not instantly make them foreign. I cringe when I hear the British soldiers in COD as they are just Yanks with cockney accents. I'm sorry but this just doesn't cut it and why I'm glad they've never tried to use Australian characters (Bioshock again, Australia Day is 26/01 (DD/MM) not 01/26 (MM/DD) no Aussie would ever write dates in a yank format)
Personally I'm sick of it. It's like the publishers don't want me to see anything that could accidentally kick my brain into gear. I remember System Shock 2, you had a love-hate thing with Shodan, the ideas of the many were seductive, you could associate with the logs of the dead crew (Bioshock was a really, really poor copy of SS2's story with the intrigue taken out). Deus Ex where you weren't sure who was on who's side. I've been waiting 10 years for another game that could get my attention and imagination so completely as DX and SS2.
So yes, give me complexity, a deep involving story and some actual challenging game play. Also ramping up the enemies hit points to make things harder is cheap (Bioshock), design better AI.
Standard Disclaimer: this is for PC games and consoles pretending to be PC's. Casual games are a different kettle of fish all together.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
why should a game have a completion. why it should have an ending. and why the hell do we have to see them ?
games used to be played for the entertainment they induced WHILE they were being played. they werent some struggle that we would get rewarded in the end. really, WHAT can you do possibly to reward a player, after forcing him/her to go through a lot of arduous 'challenges' over 30-50 hours average in a game ? have him/her laid ?
increasingly after the mid 90s, games were made to give 'challenges'. some screwed up corporate engineering wisdom that is probably centered around usa (they are very obsessed with 'challenge' and 'success' as a culture) made games more and more synonymous with the words 'challenge' and 'success'. and, the value of the game started to be evaluated around how much 'play time' it offered. culmination of this has been world of warcraft. endles cycle off challenges and successes. an ultimate success (boss) in the end, refreshing every 6-12 months.
games became stuff that subjected the player to arduous work towards interim or ultimate objectives. the enjoyment was considered as progressing through those objectives. the fun while doing that, was discarded and made synonymous with the progression and struggle. also, 'better' graphics, 'cooler' sounds came with the package as additions, with technology. it was thought this was the way.
then wii came. it bitchslapped the exceedingly corporatized and industrialized gaming sector. simple, concentrating on actual continuous play fun rather than progression and objectives, it brought fun back into the games. 5 year olds as well as 80 year olds started gaming, along with the hardcore gamer who was supposed to be toiling his/her life away during progression/challenge runs in between objectives. entire game industry was stupefied, and instantly they started to imitate left and right. even world of warcraft was softened, the grind lessened and game was made more fluid, along with added 'fun' elements which you could experience during the gameplay, instead of interim objectives. all the games and platforms took their share from the new wave. even mass effect 2 was simplified (maybe unnecessarily and maybe too far). the simplicity and actual playtime fun of games were brought back from the indie game circle they have been pushed to.
was it too hard to understand that, people who worked or studied during their weekday time, would not like to repeat the same thing again, in a game, which they were supposedly to have fun ? if you ask me, it doesnt take 2 brain cells. but, it happened. im tying it to the exceedingly vocal minority that is present in gaming crowd on the net, ie 'achievement deranged' crowd, along with the increasingly corporate engineer nature of gaming companies.
games need to be designed with a childish mind, not a corporate engineer mind. for, games are not going to be sold to vendors, or marketed to government officials or corporate bigwigs in order to strike juicy deals. games are going to be sold to the man in the street for entertainment. its about human nature. its about human nature that comes into being while wearing pajamas at 20.00 in the still of one's own living room. you cant understand it in a corporate environment with a corporate mind.
well, anyway, here we are now; wii bitchslapped the industry, and they all jumped in the bandwagon. we will see how many of them will succeed in understanding.
Read radical news here
Yah umm, screw oblivion.
The first time I tried to kill the council of mages (or whatever they are called) and failed (they are invincible!) I dropped the game and gave up.
Open world my arse.
Oblivion is far too SIMPLE. Combat is simple, the storyline is linear and simple, and the promised "multiple paths" are only in terms of limited scripted events. Ooh I can be an evil bad ass if I do what the brotherhood of assassins (or again, whatever they are called, its been awhile) says I do. SCREW THAT. What if I want to jack all of them up? Oh can't do that, not in the script.
Fooie.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
How is the weather on your planet?
Because games have becoming shorter and shorter. Have they become cheaper?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
A movie has a running length of 120 minutes, but everybody leaves at 115 minutes when the credits start rolling. Conclusion: People want movies to be shorter.
Eh, no. They just don't want to sit through 5 minutes of credits.
People watch commercial TV. Conclusion: People want to watch ads every 5 minutes and overlayed on the program.
Eh no. That is just what people have to put up with.
Statistics and user figures are very easy to misinterpret. Would you take the vcr action recordings of someone watching a porn movie and apply them on how to make a regular movie?
So why apply the actions of a console beat-em-up to a RPG?
There are some games that are big for the sake of being big. Some beat-em-up is coming out, that was reviewed as having even more characters as before. So if I don't play all of their piss-poor story lines, I haven't finished the game? What if a path through an RPG doesn't appeal to me? I never bother with the evil path. Does that mean I am recorded as only playing through half of the game? I enjoyed F1 games in the past, but only with one did I do a complete realistic season (Grand Prix Legends). What if I don't do the game on nightmare mode or for that matter easy mode? What if I cheat to go straight to nightmare mode (another reason consoles suck donkey balls, locked difficulties)?
Yes of course there are people who look at an RPG and complain it takes 60 hours. So? Then that game is not for them. Because if you shorten it to 5 hours you ruin it for all your customers who love a 60 hour game.
Here is a simple sales man trick. Concentrate on selling to people who are buying. People who are not buying will always find another reason not to. But people who are buying, need only 1 to become part of them.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
There are many classic games that are fun for more than 4 hours, and are repetitive: pacman, tetris, that card game that comes with Windows...
So essentially what you want is D&D? No single player game is going to allow you to do what you want where you want because unfortunately the AI isn't all that advanced and won't be in the foreseeable future. If you want an open ended game where you can do anything, grab a bag of dice, a dungeonmasters guide and start creating some characters!
Monstar L
it's the same with all Bethesda games unfortunately, as well as all the other "huge open world" type games I know. It begins with the environment being indestructible even for the strongest of weapons (in Fallout 3 you cannot even blow up a simple door or even a window with all your firepower/explosives). The more "visual" realism they add, the more disappointing it is when the characters and environment do not react in a realistic way. These games aren't RPGs or Adventure games, they are effectively very constrained "jump and run" type games.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I don't want simpler games. I want games as complex & rich as they were back in 1995, i.e. Master of Magic.
There is a war going on for your mind.
It's true that absolute openness is, at least right now, impossible. But there have been many games that have given the players much more freedom, like the original Fallouts. Meanwhile Oblivion and Fallout 3 are open only in the sense that you can go where you like and complete quests in random order. Even if you do get a choice from time to time, it has no real consequences.
May the source be with you.
Only because you manage to make them interesting over and over. The games you mention do not have a linear, follow-and-succeed path, which is the case with most contemporary games. For most games today there is only one sensible or fast way to succeed. There is such a thing as a best practice. Thus repeating the game is usually fairly unentertaining, because you simply repeat the steps you already did. They are scripted to the point where you basically play through a movie.
Recreating this freeform, every-game-a-new-challenge modes of the past is not easy with today's complexity in games. It's pretty tough to create such open games while at the same time managing balance.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I would suggest they stick more to the Blizzard style, like the methods used with Diablo, and Diablo 2. D1 was a relatively quick 16-20 hours if you trolled every square inch of the map to the end. D2 was much bigger than D1, but didn't suffer from the larger scope. There were almost no useless 'side quests' as everything was focused on the main story in some way. They did none of the 'go here and collect # of X and return to Y'. There have been very few games that I've finished over the last 10 years due to either a weak/no story line, or the game trying to be to open-ended, or simply because they sucked. They focus so much on creating huge environments, that it gets more than a little tedious to go through it all. By the time you've hit a quater of it, you pretty much have nothing left to discover except for some new scenery.
That said, I've run across a few exceptions. Half Life 2 (great story line). I've played it a few times through. I also recently started playing Dragon Age (Bioware). It's got a pretty hefty amount of those side quests, but they tend to resolve themselves without you doing much to work for them. I don't mind them accepting them and if they get solved great, and if not, no worries). The map layouts tend to allow you to resolve them just as part of your normal progression through the map and I've noticed that many tend to showcase certain uses for skills that you might not have considered (haven't cracked the manual). On the plus side, it allows a fairly free story line, with your choice of what order you want to solve the major plot points, and what side you want to be on, so they get points for that as well. They also ditched the huge world map environments that I was used to seeing in Sacred, and trips between them are without all the tedious 'hiking'. When you get to specific 'areas', the maps expand to a much larger sub-areas that are again broken down by more sub-areas that aren't shown unless you opt, or are forced to go there.
That is another important part to my way of thinking. If they try too hard to be 'free and open' as far as story line, you end up lost as to what to do or where to go next because the game provides no direction other than 'talk to blahblah' and that typically prompts a "Who the hell is 'blahblah and why can't I find him/her?". Dragon Age fortunately has a strong enough story line that even paying a minimal amount of attention will get you there and they clearly mark the target of a particular question on the map, although they don't show you how to get there.
Haven't finished this one yet, although it's been good enough for me to stop 3/4ths of the way through and create a new character out of curiosity and that's saying a lot. About my only major complaint is that it tries almost too hard for a story line, and ends up being a little heavy on dialogue. Fortunately you can just skip it with the escape key.
I have to wonder if a lot of these studios every play the entire finished product from start to finish. I suspect if they had a little more perspective of the entire game, we wouldn't see such a high failure rate in regards to games not being finished. I suspect they play their little component areas or specific parts of the project and think it's great, but rolled into the rest of it, they dont' realize just how tedious, boring, repetitive, or how difficult the entire game can get.
Maybe what this shows is that games companies should focus more on properly marketing their games. Everyone likes something different from their gaming experience, the problem we often have as gamers is finding games that match what we want, and the main reason for that has to be the fact that they're marketed as widely as possible. That and a shift away from lengthy demos is bound to result in a good portion of your audience being disappointed. If you then make the games simpler and the storylines linear, but continue to market it to everyone, you're going to see the reverse (the people who like linear games will play longer but the people who like sandbox will lose interest), it won't tell you anything meaningful.
Word. When I try to play a game like Oblivion, it's like one of those conversations: "...so, what should we do?" "I don't know, what do you want to do?" "I was hoping you would have something in mind..."
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I've gotten back into Chess lately, and I agree. The gameplay never changes, but there's a whole world of strategy and tactics in there to discover, and it's seriously good brain exercise. It's also nice not having to worry about DLC to buy the new Warlock piece that can move in a Q shape just to compete, or Ubisoft's restrictive DRM making your chess board not work if it's not sitting on a certain kind of table. Now if I only I didn't suck so much. :)
--Obyron
Ahh GURPS, the linux of PnP RPGs.
What if I want to jack all of them up? Oh can't do that, not in the script.
Fooie.
Yes you can. None of those people were invulnerable. You just didn't make a good attempt.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I don't have access to The Escapist's website at the moment to get the exact quote, but in his review of Portal, Yahtzee said something to the tune of - The only bad thing I can say about this game is that it's short, which actually isn't so bad since that means I can finish it and move on to all of the other games that I want to play.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
I would pay THIRTY dollars for a good 10-hour game more often than I would pay forty for a good 40-hour game. Why? Because I have a much higher chance of getting to see the ending of the 10-hour game and feeling fulfilled with it.
Here's a better question - would you rather spend 40 hours of your time playing and finishing four good 10-hour games, or would you rather just play one good 40-hour game?
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
wait! This implies that not everybody wants the same kind of game! boggle!
You're overreacting a hair with your rebuttal. Consider this: In Morrowind you could kill anyone, even if it broke the entire game. You could go do basically what ever you wanted. Hell, I didn't even touch the main quest until after many hours of just dicking around.
Oblivion is horribly closed in and simplified, a trend that has sadly taken off with RPGs. Instead of living worlds like Morrowind and Baldur's Gate, we've instead got tightly directed experiences like Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins. It's a shitty trend and one I'd love to see come to and end, however gamers these days tend to not go for the old style RPGs. They consider them to be too clunky and without the constant carrot on a stick style of modern gameplay, most gamers these days get horribly lost and confused.
Thank god for those crazy Russians and the progressively more and more awesome games they're putting out.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some artifacts to go scan down.
I am sorry, but DX:IW is the very definition of a bad game. It is quite literary the "Highlander 2" of video games.
It can't be the Highlander 2 of video games, there can be only one Highlander 2!
And I think you meant literally. I've never heard Highlander 2 referred to as literary...even amongst fans.
[UID-HeinzIntel]
Mostly I agree with you, but just to play silly:
That's easy. Elite. I don't even think it can be "won" as such.
Daikatana. Hey, was curious, you know?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If I'm playing a game with a storyline and a quest, I want the gameplay to be tight, focused on the storyline, and with minimum to no distractions or side quests. I play those games for the story, I don't want to wander around lost or go off and do other things- I want the story, and I want a well written plotline engaging and long enough to be worth the game with nothing else tacked on.
I won't disagree with your interest in well-written stories, but the thing about side quests and unmarked quests is that they are optional. I can understand your stance perfectly, but I like a game to have optional exploration -- a lot of it. You can play Fallout 3 from Vault 101 to Megaton to GNR to RC to the Jefferson Memorial to Vault 112 and keep going until the game is over, but you'll miss out on chatting with Harold, finding Rockopolis, rigging an election in a shack, and so much more.
I look for storylines mainly in RPGs and for an RPG to work, I need to have some space with my character that isn't in the "tunnel of events" that so ofter describes how I feel about the main quest line. Video games tell stories in which you have limited control over your character, which presents a unique dilemma: you might pick a profession, allot personality traits, select gear, make limited decisions that reflect on your personality in largely insignificant ways, but, in the end, you're going to end up fighting the same final boss and saving the world. The more is taken up by the main quest, the more events for your character are scripted, and more and more of the decisions you have to make can only take you in the one direction.
Side quests and exploration free you from that problem, even if just a little. You can succeed, or you can fail. You can be a hero, or a bastard. Since they don't affect the ability to complete the game, they create more room to play your character and interact with the in-game world. I don't consider such things distractions. In my mind, being able to wander into towns that have things going on that aren't tied to some destiny of mine makes the story all the better.
What a coincidence. I want a browser that doesn't freeze when I open the Frozen Bubble website - or any website, for that matter - in another tab.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I think of the exact opposite. I don't like sandbox games at all. If I'm playing a game with a storyline and a quest, I want the gameplay to be tight, focused on the storyline, and with minimum to no distractions or side quests. I play those games for the story, I don't want to wander around lost or go off and do other things- I want the story, and I want a well written plotline engaging and long enough to be worth the game with nothing else tacked on.
So I am not going to buy any of the games you buy and you are not going to buy any of the games I buy. Stories on rails bore me to tears. I gave up on Final Fantasy XIII in disgust 20 hours in. If I want that I will watch a movie. As the GP noted (where are the mods) Oblivion is my idea of a near-perfect game.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?