Okay, I've been called a raging asshole on Facebook for the last time and want to know if this is something a good number of other people can relate to.
When I play a game, I expect the story to be something personal, something to relate to, way before it tells me I need to save the world. I expect the world to catch me, and get me to understand what it is and how it works before it goes "Oh, well, yea that darned dragon wants to eat the King and rape the Princess again so you gotta go save them by killing it." (Add "FOR THE LAST TIME" or "END THE BLIGHT" if you're going for some 'dark fantasy' oxymoron of a game) I find stories like the one in Dragon Age 2 to be far more enjoyable than the ones in Morrowind or Dragon Age: Origins because I start at the bottom (in an actually 'bottom' role instead of 'Fate chose to make you an amnesiac prisoner/made Duncan look here today' Deus Ex Machina kind of way), work my way up, then have wound up in a position to save the world.
When I play a game, I expect to have a role assigned to me and that - while I get some freedom to make that role my own - I don't want the embarrassing mistake of this trend gaming has of "Just plaster yourself in this character's pee-suit so that you can "BE IN THE ACTION" or the "imagine that you're the hero in this fantasy tale by making him look like you" kind of cop-out. Then, when the big conflict arises, it becomes apparent that the world could take any one of the fifteen options I had to choose from when I made my character and gone "Oh that's who you were" and that'd be the only reference to it past the introductory phase of the game.
An example of what I dislike is Morrowind's whole 'Nerevarine' plot. Honestly I hated that, because it was "Everyone in this world hates you, you hate everyone in this world, and they're all relatively impersonal bricks of flesh-textures that just say "Hello, Outsider" or "Fuck outsiders" when you walk by, but guess what you're the big cheese now so you have to man up and do a job you couldn't be assed to do otherwise." It felt like a really shoe-horned way to make me give a rat's ass. And if I chose not to do the main story, there was no impact. The things that were allegedly time-intensive wouldn't happen if I didn't initiate them. I never felt an urgency to do things, and honestly on my first playthrough I groaned whenever they told me I was going somewhere new. Why? Because I had been given rough, horribly inaccurate directions to fifteen hundred locations and the game generally was "suck it up ******" about it and refused to let my character write that important info in his journal at times, forcing me to break the 4th wall and physically write things down myself or look up guides.
What I like however, is something like Dragon Age 2, where you are put into a realistically dark beginning and forced to work your way up. When the game's climaxes start up, you get pulled into the world and you find really interesting things that immerse you and add urgency to everything. In the hub-world map of Kirkwall, it removed all of the confusion of the overlapping maps and intricate pathways that the city had established. This stopped me from doing what happens in Fallout 3/New Vegas where I miss one small detail and run around a town for hours looking for the magical door into the Vault or in Mass Effect where I wanted to get into that room but because I didn't know to look in a specific direction I'd never have found it. It added to the sense and simplicity that would've come from just living in the town and knowing it by heart without me having to actually learn it by heart.
Something that is an exception to this is Halo: Reach/ODST, because you weren't integral to the story and the game didn't really bother to lie to you about it. In Reach, you knew right from the start you'd die and that you were going to lose at the end. However, it didn't go "SAVE THE WORLD" all the time as much as it did "SURVIVE." ODST said "This story is important, now we've scattered the clues all over you figure out why it is. Then draw your own stuff from it." I appreciate games that don't lie to me about the world: if I'm small and insignificant, don't pretend I'm some one-of-a-kind hero, just make me put my own spin into the endeavor instead of the bold-faced lie that is "defend the world that will love you after you save it!" I've been promised by games like Morrowind, Oblivion, and even Halo: "Master Chief Fell Out Of The Plot" (AKA Halo 3).
Am I some kind of opinionated elitist jerk, worthy of all the hatred I get on Facebook for enjoying DA2, hating pointless "YOU'RE THE CHOSEN ONE" plots and being a faceless space marine in a world that wants you to be important but fails to make you so?
When I play a game, I expect the story to be something personal, something to relate to, way before it tells me I need to save the world. I expect the world to catch me, and get me to understand what it is and how it works before it goes "Oh, well, yea that darned dragon wants to eat the King and rape the Princess again so you gotta go save them by killing it." (Add "FOR THE LAST TIME" or "END THE BLIGHT" if you're going for some 'dark fantasy' oxymoron of a game) I find stories like the one in Dragon Age 2 to be far more enjoyable than the ones in Morrowind or Dragon Age: Origins because I start at the bottom (in an actually 'bottom' role instead of 'Fate chose to make you an amnesiac prisoner/made Duncan look here today' Deus Ex Machina kind of way), work my way up, then have wound up in a position to save the world.
When I play a game, I expect to have a role assigned to me and that - while I get some freedom to make that role my own - I don't want the embarrassing mistake of this trend gaming has of "Just plaster yourself in this character's pee-suit so that you can "BE IN THE ACTION" or the "imagine that you're the hero in this fantasy tale by making him look like you" kind of cop-out. Then, when the big conflict arises, it becomes apparent that the world could take any one of the fifteen options I had to choose from when I made my character and gone "Oh that's who you were" and that'd be the only reference to it past the introductory phase of the game.
An example of what I dislike is Morrowind's whole 'Nerevarine' plot. Honestly I hated that, because it was "Everyone in this world hates you, you hate everyone in this world, and they're all relatively impersonal bricks of flesh-textures that just say "Hello, Outsider" or "Fuck outsiders" when you walk by, but guess what you're the big cheese now so you have to man up and do a job you couldn't be assed to do otherwise." It felt like a really shoe-horned way to make me give a rat's ass. And if I chose not to do the main story, there was no impact. The things that were allegedly time-intensive wouldn't happen if I didn't initiate them. I never felt an urgency to do things, and honestly on my first playthrough I groaned whenever they told me I was going somewhere new. Why? Because I had been given rough, horribly inaccurate directions to fifteen hundred locations and the game generally was "suck it up ******" about it and refused to let my character write that important info in his journal at times, forcing me to break the 4th wall and physically write things down myself or look up guides.
What I like however, is something like Dragon Age 2, where you are put into a realistically dark beginning and forced to work your way up. When the game's climaxes start up, you get pulled into the world and you find really interesting things that immerse you and add urgency to everything. In the hub-world map of Kirkwall, it removed all of the confusion of the overlapping maps and intricate pathways that the city had established. This stopped me from doing what happens in Fallout 3/New Vegas where I miss one small detail and run around a town for hours looking for the magical door into the Vault or in Mass Effect where I wanted to get into that room but because I didn't know to look in a specific direction I'd never have found it. It added to the sense and simplicity that would've come from just living in the town and knowing it by heart without me having to actually learn it by heart.
Something that is an exception to this is Halo: Reach/ODST, because you weren't integral to the story and the game didn't really bother to lie to you about it. In Reach, you knew right from the start you'd die and that you were going to lose at the end. However, it didn't go "SAVE THE WORLD" all the time as much as it did "SURVIVE." ODST said "This story is important, now we've scattered the clues all over you figure out why it is. Then draw your own stuff from it." I appreciate games that don't lie to me about the world: if I'm small and insignificant, don't pretend I'm some one-of-a-kind hero, just make me put my own spin into the endeavor instead of the bold-faced lie that is "defend the world that will love you after you save it!" I've been promised by games like Morrowind, Oblivion, and even Halo: "Master Chief Fell Out Of The Plot" (AKA Halo 3).
Am I some kind of opinionated elitist jerk, worthy of all the hatred I get on Facebook for enjoying DA2, hating pointless "YOU'RE THE CHOSEN ONE" plots and being a faceless space marine in a world that wants you to be important but fails to make you so?
