The Video Game Revue

RPG Madness

My RPG adventures continued this week, as I played the first couple of hours of Lost Odyssey, succumbed to an impulse to assemble a CD wallet collection of classic PC RPG discs, and spent about six hours playing Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Let's review.

The first thing I have to point out is that Mount & Blade is only $7.50 on Steam this weekend. They're having a sale. It's unlikely that this news will reach anybody who cares through this blog post, but whatever: I've had far too much fun with Mount & Blade in the last month to fail to point this bit of news out.

Lost Odyssey is so far better than I expected. It has a solid combat system, the visuals are excellent, and story is surprisingly good even though the characters so far haven't been. I was well aware that Lost Odyssey got better reviews than Blue Dragon, but I somehow expected to prefer Blue Dragon--perhaps because Blue Dragon is a more traditional JRPG, or something like that. To the contrary, Lost Odyssey is fast becoming the most engaging JRPG that I've played since FF XII. I'm still pretty early in, however, and I don't know yet if the pace will start to become drawn out.

The idea to organize a CD wallet full of PC RPGs came to me as I was cleaning out part of my game collection. I had a CD wallet full of various PC game disks (stuff like F.E.A.R., Oblivion, Rome: Total War, and Quake IV) that wasn't doing me much good, and I felt that it would be useful to have a bunch of Blizzard discs in one convenient location. The project started with the install DVDs for World of Warcraft (that is, a trial DVD, the Burning Crusade Collector's Edition install DVD, and a Wrath of the Lich King DVD), as well as the contents of a WarCraft Battle Chest and a Diablo Battle Chest all neatly arranged. (These titles are especially useful for office jobs, by the way.) But this only filled half of the wallet.

For the other half, I organized the following:

- The four discs out of a Game of the Year Edition copy of The Elder Scrolls III, including Morrowind, Tribunal, Bloodmoon, and the construction set tools
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (I don't have The Shivering Isles, though)
- Neverwinter Nights: Diamond DVD (includes both expansions), Neverwinter Nights: Kingmaker (official collection of community content)
- Warlords III: Darklords Rising
- Ultima Collection (that's Ultima I through VIII)
- Quest for Glory Anthology (QfG I through IV)

That's a concentrated dose of classic CRPG goodness, and I've been savoring the collection for the past thirty hours or so. Having so much RPG content in one place makes me euphoric.

The funny thing is that I get nostalgic for many of these games even though I never actually had the time to play some of them. Out of the Ultima series, for instance, I barely touched V, VI, and VIII, which are some of the better ones (my Ultima experience is primarily with III, IV, and VII--and even then I didn't play them heavily). I thoroughly played Quest for Glory I and II back in the day, but barely played III and IV. Sunny did most of the BioWare RPG gaming back when Neverwinter Nights came out; she finished the entire main campaign and both expansion packs, while I didn't even get past Chapter III of the first game. Worst of all, much of the Blizzard content remains untapped (including the expansions for both WarCraft 3 and Diablo II). Finally, although I played enough Oblivion to get familiar with it, I'd only played a few hours worth of Morrowind and never any of the expansion content. For shame.

But, as my buddy Matt once pointed out to me, it's often more useful to have a collection of books (or games, in this case) that you expect to enjoy and haven't read yet than to have a collection that you're already well familiar with. It was in that spirit that I fired up Morrowind to dabble around in, and I quickly found myself drawn in.

There's a bit of a learning curve involved in Morrowind, but my previous experiences trying to play both Morrowind and Oblivion came in handy. Overall I would say that Morrowind is an excellent and classic RPG, but one thing that grates is how sparse the content is. The world of Morrowind is vast but mostly all looks the same and doesn't have a lot going on by today's RPG standards.

What's especially painful is how long it takes to travel from place to place on foot, which is frequently required. It's a shame because I found Morrowind to be both immersive and challenging, and yet I keep getting snapped out of my suspension of disbelief by long stretches of walking in a straight line. Occasionally I just aim in a direction, hit Q (auto-walk), and get up to fetch some water or prepare a snack. There should at least be siltstriders (transport) between each of the towns instead of only between the major cities.

The funny thing is that I remember Oblivion (Morrowind's sequel) being criticized for its travel system being too convenient. In Oblivion, one can simply use the world map to select a destination and effectively "warp" there (in-game time still passes). This removes most of the incentive for the player to explore the land on foot, but having seen how tedious walking in Morrowind gets to be, I have a better understanding of the decision to make travel so quick in Oblivion.

And yet Oblivion still suffers from the problem that walking around in dungeon areas can be quite slow, which makes the player all the more aware of how repetitive many of the areas in-game are. What Elder Scrolls games need, perhaps, is a time acceleration feature like many flight simulators have, so that the player can fast-forward through dull parts of the fantasy experience. Alternatively, the game content could be less spread out--but then The Elder Scrolls might not feel like The Elder Scrolls.

Combined with my recent RPG acquisitions on Steam, I'm now doubly reassured that I have more RPG content at my disposal than I reasonably have time to play, and that's not even counting the numerous handheld titles that I picked up last year. :) It's good to be a gamer.

posted by Parappa @ 5:27 PM