RPGs, playing A role or playing YOUR role

[IBlackKiteI]

Snip

I actually felt pretty connected to Gordon, I think in a way he has a hell of a lot of personality for a person who does speak.
Everybody views him as some sort of messiah, like hes come to save the world.
In the first few levels people start dying for you so you can escape.
Its not his personality or his words that define him, its the people and world around him.

I agree with Shepard, although I really dislike having to choose the same dialogue options over and over again to beat the game.
It forces you to instead of making him say stuff you would say you just choose the same options all the time.

I feel it's difficult to really roleplay in CRPGs, since generally speaking you have a set of objectives that you have to complete, or else the game won't go forward. And usually the only way forward is to kill, kill, kill.

To me roleplaying is about choices and finding my own path to victory - which doesn't always include kill-kill-kill everyone. So, while at time I feel like, I'm roleplaying Sheppard in the ME games, most of the time I'm just blasting through waves of enemies with various weapons / powers. This sort of gaming doesn't really engage me on an emotional level, which is a prerequisite for (my) roleplaying. There are moments in ME 1 & 2 where it seems like I'm making a decision based on my emotions, but the choices are usually set up so that I already know what I'm going to choose based on the type of character I have chosen before the conversation wheel even shows up on the screen.

For example, if my character's background is a hardened combat survivalist then the choices presented on the conversational wheel suddenly don't feel so much like picking from a number of possibilities, but rather like picking the one that seems logical for my character. I suppose that's "playing a role", since I'm staying true to how I perceive Sheppard would act in any particular situation. However, for the most the part the choices made during the game's conversations are so obvious that you could just as well skip the conversation wheel and keep rolling forward with the in-game cut-scene. It wouldn't change anything, really.

What I'm driving at is that the choices made in video games are predefined by necessity, and thus they can never amount to more than a hollow illusion of what I perceive to be real roleplaying.

Interesting post.

Personally, while I appreciated Mass Effect 1 and 2 I just couldn't get involved in the choices, because those choices all stem from dialogue options, which as I said before need to be the same ones over and over again for the sake of finishing the game.
Its just to me they have no substance, if you had a gun and had a more hands on choice to execute someone or let them go I'd be a hell of a lot more immersed. The dialogue just feels like a massive secondary add on that only affects that 'Good/Evil' bar.

 

[SweetLiquidSnake]

I adhere to the moral choice system in creating my characters, so I've made the same 2 characters in all my rpgs (TES4, FO3, FO:NV, ME2).

One is the extreme good, and is usually my main 100% file, keeping everyone alive, reasoning over violence, the defender of the weak.

The other is the extreme evil, always my secondary file, and is honestly more fun. Killing npcs for looking at me wrong, ravaging and leveling entire towns, absolutely brutal.

As for classes/personalities I take that from the game, such as in New Vegas my good is based on 1st Recon, my evil is a Fiend.