Mass Effect 1 was terrible, even though ME2 and 3 were great, because the starting hours were so poor. Also, no Kelly.

But regardless, the start of any game must pull you in, and defines the entire experience. Playwrights, screenwriters, and authors have known this for decades/centuries, so I don’t see why games writers should get off the hook here.

inz:
nekosan,

my point, although said with a little bit of pepper, is that you should have stuck it out. Because as a pure GAME, Mass Effect isn’t exactly the most brilliant thing ever. But as a package, the experience it delivers rivals pretty much anything I’ve ever played in terms of its content and delivery.

As far as I’m concerned, playing the game for 3+ hours IS giving it a chance. I don’t care if the game gets good 25 hours into the story… because as far as I’m concerned it’s just rubbish if it takes that long to grab my interest.

The same applies to books, if I’m 2-3 chapters in and I’m not feeling empathy for a character or interested in the story then it goes in the rubbish, unfortunately it happens a LOT more with games than it does with books. I can only remember a handful of novels in the last decade that I didn’t finish reading (including some total rubbish) yet I find that the majority of games hyped for their story just fall dramatically short.

It’s a very fine line because I LOVED Oblivion but I only played Skyrim for 2 weeks and didn’t do more than half the main storyline because I just didn’t care. There’s something seriously wrong with developers when I can play through Baldurs Gate 2 about 8 times but I can’t finish Skyrim or Mass Effect once.

Quality seems to be going down, and the masses are lapping it up like cheap gruel from a trough.

I couldn’t agree more with what you said. And by the same token,

inz,

I had the same experience with Mass Effect (and also Dragon Age:O) where before long I just started clicking through the dialogue, which didn’t grab me at all, and actually made me really frustrated, and I quit a few hours in.

I play almost exclusively old(ish) school RPGs and love deep characters and complex story lines. I really liked the BG method of having only the first line of dialogue spoken, leaving you to read the rest. I get so tired of extended cut scenes, waiting through voice acting… I think its also about the game “director” having some subtlety, not just telling you everything, letting you realise such and such a person has this personality, might have a motive, things like that.

Games that are awesome leave space for your own imagination to contribute. That’s why old school games were (are) so addictive and left you daydreaming about them when you weren’t playing.

my point, although said with a little bit of pepper, is that you should have stuck it out. Because as a pure GAME, Mass Effect isn’t exactly the most brilliant thing ever. But as a package, the experience it delivers rivals pretty much anything I’ve ever played in terms of its content and delivery.

It really saddens me when I look at the current state of the gaming industry where you have a game like COD being the top selling game. The big gaming companies are keeping the status quo and not risking innovating games. IMHO there is so much more potential with what games can do.

I am currently at this moment playing Planescape Torment for the first time. I’ve been playing PC games since the early 90s from point-and-click adventures to FPS and some RPG, so I’ve played my fair share and experienced how gaming has evolved.

From my perspective, the majority of modern games are more about the experience of gameplay than story (there are exceptions!). Your interaction with the game is more guided in the sense that your experiences are felt more through the gameplay mechanics than the quest to find your own personal interpretation of character experience and story. This is a sad thing really because I have especially noticed something in my playing of Planescape Torment that I’d forgotten about. The experience is like reading a book in the sense that your experience of the game is more about the visions that are invoked and created in your head from the words you read, rather than a blatant simplistic graphical representation of what is occurring. For example, in PlanescapeT I’ve just walked into a gallery full of artwork of representations of the different Planes – the graphics are that bad that you really can’t make out the images on screen terribly well, however the artwork descriptions invoke scenes in my head that are so individual and special that they would possibly be diminished in any other manner. There is an invitation there to experience something that I help create through my own individual interpretations. I believe this ‘invitation’ is not often felt in modern games.

I may be old-school but I strongly believe that story *is everything*. A good game for me is one that is not guided solely through the experience and interactions of gameplay mechanics but one that entices my mind into majestic scenes and the experience of human expression that is formed independently and uniquely in my mind.

I think of recent games like Skyrim which I felt had such incredible potential when you consider the depth of the lore yet the actual game is so focused on gameplay with often shallow interactions with characters and such a hollow main quest, and I realise that these old games had a charm that I don’t feel now. My recent decision to play PlanescapeT (philosophically speaking a very deep game) has proven to myself that it’s not just some nostalgic over-sentimentalist bias for the ‘good old days’.

Some things have become better but I do believe there has perhaps been a price to pay. There are exceptions but so few.

inz:

And to the guy who couldn’t stand mass effect, I bet you love COD.

Haven’t played a CoD game since the original Modern Warfare (which I didn’t and don’t own), it’s nice to know however that anyone who disagrees with your stance on something is automatically a CoD kiddy… rather amusing considering your statement about intellectual content.

Thanks for lowering the bar (and bitching about other people doing it).

Except for the Blue Rose game. But I suspect I was doing that all wrong…

And to the guy who couldn’t stand mass effect, I bet you love COD.

Oh well, you probably shouldn’t bother with something that looks like an “old-school” RPG if all you want is a new action game with lots of visceral action, some immersive cutscenes, dark choices and sexy QTEs.

Likewise, when I picked up Mass Effect a few months back to see what I had missed out on, I found myself spending 90% of the time spamming through cutscenes and screaming “JUST LET ME FUCKING PLAY THE GAME!!!”, I think I quit after 3 hours and I’ve never touched it since..

Maybe I just read too much and the quality if the writing in games is horribly bad, dunno.

So very true about what you said, that’s gaming as a business, not for gaming’s sake. Also, the game in question, Inquisitor, doesn’t seem nostalgic so much as badly designed. I haven’t played much of Baldur’s Gate 2, and I’ve never played Icewind Dale anything, but I get the sense their design was a tad better.

I’ve always considered myself a gamer who enjoys the spectacle of gaming, not the satisfaction of my 400th headshot/explosion in 3 minutes of online play. I despise Call of Duty 3 onwards for numbing the brains of millions of gamers Being captured in the story, wanting to know more and forgetting that I’ve wasted 3/4 of a day chasing ghosts, or space marines, or reapers, or… well. You get the idea. Is to me what gaming should be about. Theater. Not necessarily action, although they do go hand in hand in a lot of instances.

Games I remember loving as a kid – for their huge worlds (comparatively) and their engrossing story lines have lost their charm as a result of my “instant gratification” look at life. I think it’s also got something to do with how much time i have available for 100% time invested gaming.

Companies like EA pumping out games like NBA 400 and Call of Duty 29, Battlefield eleven hundred and FIFA 10 million probably havent helped the industry, nor the consumers either.

Of course maybe Inquisitor is just horrifically boring, I can’t speak to that, never having played it, however I do think oldschool RPGs in general still have something to offer.