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I Climb This Mountain Because It Is There.
13 years ago
I Ignore The Elevator Because I'm An Idiot.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is my favorite game of all time. Obviously this biases my views, but it doesn't invalidate them. Those being that desiring a challange is a good thing, but needing to self-flagrate oneself to do so is not.
To elaborate; one of the primary counterarguements to my belief that Skyrim is a vastly inferior (though still decent on its own merits) game to Morrowind is that many of the features that I feel inhibit its ability to be a truely immersive game can simply be ignored. One doesn't NEED to fast travel, one doesn't NEED to use the compass, and so on. I find this notion entirely foolish. As the title to this entry implies, this is much like saying one doesn't NEED to use the elevator, they could climb up the side of the mountain if they really wanted to. While technically true, it's also an idiotic proposition, as doing so would be nothing more than self-injury out of pride, and the presence of the elevator will nag the climber the entire way up, saying "you could stop being an idiot any time you wanted."
To me, it's an insult. That the part of the game I find so beloved should be considered 'purely optional,' but other parts of the game are unskippable essentials. It's piss in my stew. Why do you get to skip the beautifully immersive game world and the hours of getting lost in the wild, but I can't skip the poorly written, linear questlines, or the excessive combat against bandits for the umpteen millionth time? What makes those aspects of the game more worthy than the ones I love? To be made an unavoidable tenant of the game, while the part I came for merely an 'option'?
It's a trend I've seen plenty in modern gaming. Too often are games eager to rush you to the end and show you everything, making the very idea of hard work a laughable, backwards notion. In both World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2 (though far more the former than the latter), crafting is put on the sideline, an inherently inferior option to simply blundering in and getting violent at everything downrange until you're given something shiny. Guild Wars attempts to amend this by making some of the best endgame items only obtainable through crafting, while in World of Warcraft the products of crafting are inevitably inferior to those found on the corpse of the biggest, angriest monster of the day.
But even with what Guild Wars does right, it still is entirely too eager to rush players to the endgame, making anything but violence and XP grinding a waste of energy until you hit the level cap. This is mitigated by the fact that you're automatically leveled down to the area you're in, but this rings of the same arguement given for Skyrim. "You don't NEED to head to the endgame content, you can stay in the low-level zones for as long as you'd like!" Again, an idiot notion that one is free to cripple themselves out of pride all they want, ignorant of how foolish they make themselves feel by doing so.
I feel that modern games are too eager to babysit their players. Gone are the days of having to discover the solution for themselves. If the game isn't entirely linear to begin with, then the correct path with be brightly highlighted all the way down, with everything else left 'optional.' I'm reminded of Thief 2, where you're thrown into a sprawling, nonlinear area with a goal to accomplish, maybe a few hints, and nothing more to guide you than your wits. Any modern 'stealth' game I've played recently would make the level entirely linear and put a big glowing arrow over your target, leaving you with no more work to do than to move forward and be violent at anything that gets in the way.
I find it no surprise that the further I move forward in gaming, the more I find myself looking back. I'm not trying to be nostalgic here; I truly hope this is merely a 'phase', like the obsession with CGI in movies. I suppose one could blame the increasing popularity of games for the issue, as more and more casual games flood the market. Videogames are popular enough now to be widely known, but new enough to be 'newfangled' and full of fans who couldn't navigate their way out of a paper bag without a flashlight and a map.
Perhaps, if we're lucky, once this newness wears off developers will begin to respect the average gamer's intelligence again, and maybe I can walk through the wilderness without it constantly trying to tell me how to get back to the plot.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is my favorite game of all time. Obviously this biases my views, but it doesn't invalidate them. Those being that desiring a challange is a good thing, but needing to self-flagrate oneself to do so is not.
To elaborate; one of the primary counterarguements to my belief that Skyrim is a vastly inferior (though still decent on its own merits) game to Morrowind is that many of the features that I feel inhibit its ability to be a truely immersive game can simply be ignored. One doesn't NEED to fast travel, one doesn't NEED to use the compass, and so on. I find this notion entirely foolish. As the title to this entry implies, this is much like saying one doesn't NEED to use the elevator, they could climb up the side of the mountain if they really wanted to. While technically true, it's also an idiotic proposition, as doing so would be nothing more than self-injury out of pride, and the presence of the elevator will nag the climber the entire way up, saying "you could stop being an idiot any time you wanted."
To me, it's an insult. That the part of the game I find so beloved should be considered 'purely optional,' but other parts of the game are unskippable essentials. It's piss in my stew. Why do you get to skip the beautifully immersive game world and the hours of getting lost in the wild, but I can't skip the poorly written, linear questlines, or the excessive combat against bandits for the umpteen millionth time? What makes those aspects of the game more worthy than the ones I love? To be made an unavoidable tenant of the game, while the part I came for merely an 'option'?
It's a trend I've seen plenty in modern gaming. Too often are games eager to rush you to the end and show you everything, making the very idea of hard work a laughable, backwards notion. In both World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2 (though far more the former than the latter), crafting is put on the sideline, an inherently inferior option to simply blundering in and getting violent at everything downrange until you're given something shiny. Guild Wars attempts to amend this by making some of the best endgame items only obtainable through crafting, while in World of Warcraft the products of crafting are inevitably inferior to those found on the corpse of the biggest, angriest monster of the day.
But even with what Guild Wars does right, it still is entirely too eager to rush players to the endgame, making anything but violence and XP grinding a waste of energy until you hit the level cap. This is mitigated by the fact that you're automatically leveled down to the area you're in, but this rings of the same arguement given for Skyrim. "You don't NEED to head to the endgame content, you can stay in the low-level zones for as long as you'd like!" Again, an idiot notion that one is free to cripple themselves out of pride all they want, ignorant of how foolish they make themselves feel by doing so.
I feel that modern games are too eager to babysit their players. Gone are the days of having to discover the solution for themselves. If the game isn't entirely linear to begin with, then the correct path with be brightly highlighted all the way down, with everything else left 'optional.' I'm reminded of Thief 2, where you're thrown into a sprawling, nonlinear area with a goal to accomplish, maybe a few hints, and nothing more to guide you than your wits. Any modern 'stealth' game I've played recently would make the level entirely linear and put a big glowing arrow over your target, leaving you with no more work to do than to move forward and be violent at anything that gets in the way.
I find it no surprise that the further I move forward in gaming, the more I find myself looking back. I'm not trying to be nostalgic here; I truly hope this is merely a 'phase', like the obsession with CGI in movies. I suppose one could blame the increasing popularity of games for the issue, as more and more casual games flood the market. Videogames are popular enough now to be widely known, but new enough to be 'newfangled' and full of fans who couldn't navigate their way out of a paper bag without a flashlight and a map.
Perhaps, if we're lucky, once this newness wears off developers will begin to respect the average gamer's intelligence again, and maybe I can walk through the wilderness without it constantly trying to tell me how to get back to the plot.
