While I don't consider myself a consummate gamer, I have played my fair share of computer games, and of those I return most often to RPGs. Why? Well, in part because there's that nice sense of accomplishment when you manage to complete whatever major quest there is. There's another factor though - while at their best they still aren't as good as the table top experience can be, they do provide some ability to roleplay - to choose to do the right thing without hope of gain, to help in hopes of a reward, or to be extremely selfish and try to take everything you can get.

The games that do it best add shades to these options, sometimes giving various other options based on stats. Even in these games though, there is an annoying tendency to occasionally slip up and only offer dialogue choices that amount to "be an angel" or "be an asshole" or even worse, choices like "be an asshole to group A" or "be an asshole to group B". That last one is especially annoying - if I'm playing a character with the right attributes to see a compromise and try to attain it, at least give me the choice to try! If I fail then I fail, but at least I'll know I tried to be reasonable. Yes, I'm looking at you, Fallout 3 - The Pitt!

Talk about your false dilemmas!* You have a well-meaning extremist who is using slave labor to try and build enough infrastructure so that people's living conditions will improve to the point where slave labor will be less effective than paying trained citizens to work. His wife is also working on a cure for a disease that causes people to mutate into blood-thirsty monsters called trogs. The flip side of this is to back the slaves who are tired of being forced to work and are especially unhappy that some of their number keep getting sent into the Scrapyard to hunt for steel ingots amongst the hungry trogs and murderous wildmen - people driven insane by the toxins and radiation but not mutated into trogs. Also, being a well-intentioned extremist, he will live up to the extremist part by slaughtering every slave that revolts leaving the slave population decimated and the few remaining slaves sullen and hopeless.

Obviously the slaves have a valid complaint, so they're the clear, moral choice, right? Sure...except for the fact that they want you to kill the well-meaning extremist and his wife and steal their baby since the kid might possibly be immune to the toxins that cause dementia and mutation. Also, the leader of the revolt is the former right hand man of the well-intentioned extremist who publicly claims to be doing this for the workers but really just wants power for himself. He also has no idea how to research a cure if the baby is not the hope they were looking for, he has no major plans for the future, and his methods for overthrowing the slavers also involve letting trogs into the part of the city where the well-intentioned extremist and the slavers are which will leave even fewer safe places to live. Also, some of the slavers you'd be killing are former slaves who won their freedom fighting in vicious voluntary bloodsports against other slaves for the right.

So obviously this is a completely insoluble dilemma with no right or wrong choice, right? Wrong. Heck, the designers of the DLC can't even claim ignorance of the fact because you can find a terminal where an overseer wrote that he keeps losing his best slaves to the Scrapyard and he requests some guards to send along with them to keep them alive. This is exactly the kind of compromise needed and the designers put that in there, and yet there is no way to follow up on that. You can't go to the extremist and say, hey, as someone who just clawed my way up from being a slave to being one of your slavers, I'd like to point out that working conditions kind of suck and I have some ideas that would improve things and maybe keep people from dying. See, if you tried to be reasonable and the guy turned you down, you'd feel better about shooting his face off. If you got him to make the improvements you suggest and the slaves still revolted, you'd feel less qualms about killing the ingrates. Maybe, just maybe though you could manage to make things a little better.

That is after all one of the reasons people play RPGs - to feel like they have an impact, be it positive or negative, on the world. I realize designers can't think of everything, but I really wish they'd give their writers enough time to perfect the dialogue trees. As an example, in Dragon Age: Origins, there is a frustrating tendency to have a character talk to you and be presented with a variety of choices. The character may not have asked a question, so it can appear that there is no special response to give...except there is. You see, sometimes a dialogue tree will present you with exactly one chance to say the right thing to get certain results, and if you don't choose it, the dialogue option never shows up again. Annoyingly enough, not only do the information-related dialogue options remain available after that, but if there is an option to say something that would make you look like an asshole, that option ALSO usually remains. Only the one special dialogue option disappears forever, and what is most frustrating is that there is no way to tell (barring using a strategy guide or wiki) which dialogue options are one-time only! It's frustrating to have spent skill increases to get the highest level of persuasiveness and not be able to use it to get the results you want simply because the writers give you one chance to get it right and dozens of chances to get it wrong. Considering that the other skill choices directly improve your chances in fights, the frequency of this kind of oversight and the infrequency of persuasion being useful for anything is completely and utterly inexcusable. I mean seriously, you get one chance to hand the kid his father's sword (The Green Blade) instead of keeping it and after that the dialogue option never shows up again? It speaks of yet another product rushed to the shelves without proper proofreading.

What else bothers me? Well, let's see...while I can acknowledge their utility in keeping me out of places with no plot significance and no worthwhile loot, I'm still tired of ubiquitous indestructible windows or wooden walls and doors. Again Fallout is the worst culprit with places like Big Town where large sections of the fence around it are made of wood without reinforcement yet the wall holds up against chainguns, lasers, missiles, and even micronukes! I realize that even semi-accurate physics are hard enough to accomplish (other people have ranted enough about the shortcomings of Fallout's rag doll physics, so I'll skip that) and destructible terrain isn't easy but...it's not impossible. Dragon Age: Origins has barricades that can be destroyed, for instance, and even further back in 1999, Zipper Interactive had a game called Recoil which featured a tank with a main weapon that could blow craters in the terrain. Mainly it was just a neat effect, but the point is that the coding existed to have alterable 3D terrain even that far back. Now I know some people are thinking that this would lead to game developers having to waste huge amounts of time laying out massive areas with no plot significance, but that's simply not the case. Procedural game design methods could rough out entire cities and populate them with a variety of semi-unique NPCs leaving the designers only the task of going in and tweaking things to add unique landmarks, buildings, and plot-relevant characters.

Related issues - persistent corpses are kind of neat...except when they're a little too persistent. Could I please burn the bodies or bury them once I've looted them? I still recall in Fallout: New Vegas how back in Good Springs you can save the town from a group of Powder Gangers which is all well and good except...their bodies just stay there. At no point do the people ever remark about the corpses strewn around town, never comment if you arrange the corpses in lewd poses, never suggest someone moved the bodies much less actually do it. Problem is you can't do much with the bodies either other than move them somewhere out of the way. Can't burn them to ash even though you may have weapons that would reduce them to ash while they were alive, and you can't bury them even though there's a graveyard nearby. It was rather frustrating.

What else...well, I'm tired of games where you can loot the bodies but the loot doesn't match what the target was wearing or using to attack you. The Fallout series was actually pretty good about avoiding that, but Dragon Age: Origins pretty much sucks and uses grossly outdated loot tables for enemies. Also frustrating - you get tons of loot, can build up entire sets of armor and you have no choice but to sell it or let it continue to clog up your inventory. There's no option to stash it somewhere, much less put it on display. That was another thing that could be said about the Fallout games: once you got a home, you could collect and display literally anything and everything you could carry into the place. That was a nice touch and the game designers deserve credit for doing a good job with that.

There are probably other issues, but right now I can think of only one other major issue that remains, one last detail that breaks immersion, and that's area loading. I know a lot of games do it, and it's perhaps one of the more acceptable breaks in immersion...except that again we have a much older game, namely Half-life, where there were never any area transitions. Yes, I know that implementing everything I'm talking about would likely use a considerable amount of system resources, but honestly I'd prefer game designers to focus on perfecting these aspects of immersiveness rather than lens flare, other light effects, and particle effects. That said, I must admit that pausing the game in Dragon Age right when walking bomb causes and enemy to explode and then rotating the camera is kind of a neat effect. Bullet cams and death finishing sequences are a nice touch. Neat effects though are not inherently immersive and can grow old after a while. Now the dappling of light and shadow beneath a tree - that's a nice effect that does aid immersion, and again Fallout as well as Neverwinter Nights get points for that little touch.

So as you can see, the elements of a truly great game exist out there. Someone just has to have the time and financial backing to put them all together to make it. Any takers? Please?

*It's worth noting that Fallout 3 was absolutely horrible about creating false dilemmas; not that there were a lot of them, but the other two that spring readily to mind (Tenpenny Tower and the very climax of the game in the Jefferson Memorial) were particularly infuriating examples worthy of rants all their own.