I love video games, I have for years. Unfortunately,
sometimes they don’t make sense, even within themselves. I’ve noticed this
phenomenon mostly with RPGs, and sometimes with open world shooters (I’m lookin
at you Red Dead Redemption!), but mostly with RPGs. There are times that
certain quests, or most quests, don’t make sense within the story arc you’re
creating in the game. If I’m on an epic quest to save the world from some form
of cataclysm, of course I want to find your lost chickens or murder a bunch of
wolves who are just minding their business so you can make a new wolf pelt
blanket. Let me put those lofty aspirations on hold, just for you, valued NPC.
What’s that? Your friend in the next town wants to give me a ring, but only if
I deliver these anthrax-laced letters for him. Sign me up, because you bet your
ass I need that shiny finger accessory.
I recently finished Dragon Age: Inquisition (whose last boss
was kind of a joke) and enjoyed the game as a whole. One part really took me
out of the flow of the story, however. I was playing a female elf and pursuing
a romance with Josephine, your liaison to high society. I know…you have
comments about my decision to pick a female character or pursuing a lesbian
romance, it’s 2015, get
over it.
You can only make steps towards having sexy times with a
character later in the story, where you’re already capable of murdering the
bigger baddies in Thedas. One day, I stroll back to my lady love’s room in the
castle after choking the life from a particularly brutal dragon only to find
out that some dude wants to duel me for Josephine’s hand. I respond in the ‘ye
olde fantasy time’ (technical term) version of ‘he ain’t shit, he ain’t never
been shit, I’ll see to it that he’s never gonna be shit. I’ll choke the life
from him too’. Instead of giving me her blessing to go body this fool, she
starts getting all panicked about the chance I’m going to lose. I just sit back and look at the TV in
bafflement. Not only have I spent the last few hours murdering dragons, I
single handedly made them extinct on this continent, and you’re worried I’m
going to die at the hand of some rich brat who has no business polishing my
blade? Come on son. There wasn’t an option for the olde fantasy time version of
‘Bitch, I murder dragons!’, so instead I go with the version of ‘don’t worry
baby, I got this’. As it turned out, he’d heard of some of my impressive feats
and backed down…you know, the way things such as this should go in video games.
Take Skyrim, another game where you can murder dragons;
after you do something impressive, or reprehensible, everyone in every city
knows about it. It’s like Skyrim has Pam from HR sending all of the memos on
everything you do. That’s how open world games and RPGs should go, when you do
something monumental, everyone in the world you’re screwing with should take
notice. I’m not saying that you need to make every quest a matter of life or
death, but something should change in the world because you found that lost
brat or gave some lady a bunch of healing herbs. Living in the world of
advanced game making that we do, with every game under the sun having influence
meters or some arbitrary morality meter, one would think that if we save the
brat, he’ll help us out with something later on or give you something valuable
for altering the world to keep him in
it, or if we donate our hard earned (I know, you walk around hitting A, that’s
not the point) herbs, that she’d offer us a free inn for the rest of the game,
or the people she’d saved will become minions. Something that gives these tiny
(in the scope of the game) side quests meaning to the universe you’re
interacting with.
Are you ready for a ‘back in my day’ rant? Here one is, get
excited! Growing up, I played a lot of RPGs, one of which was Shining Force 2,
a great game by any standard. Early in the game, you wander around the grounds
of a temple. If you wander to a certain spot, you’ll be treated to the Genesis
version of a cutscene of truly awful bird-man parents tossing their fledgling
into the air on the balcony of this temple. Sure enough, the little bastard
falls and would be a baby bird-shaped splat on the ground were you not standing
there with a soft, cushion-y head to fall on. Flash forward to later in the
game, where an indeterminate (or determinate, I forget which) amount of time
has passed as you’re traversing a mountain road, only to be accosted by a huge
birdman wanting to join your army. As it would turn out, this is that little
fledgling that you saved from being a bird-pancake so many game years ago. He’s
all grown up and wants to thank you for saving him. Another instance of choices
(or arbitrarily walking someplace) that make an impact on the world in the
game, back before Sega was put on a ventilator.
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