| That has been a core part of role-playing games from their very inception. Dungeons & Dragons introduced us to this concept, and it has been the constant companion of tabletop and computer RPGs ever since. The KLLR dynamic is fun and isn’t a bad thing, but it does steer stories in a certain direction because it places a huge amount of focus on combat. Dungeon crawl and hack-n-slash style of games are almost pure combat with any story often being a flimsy facilitator to get the action going. The role-playing elements are essentially a combo of tangible reward through better abilities and a more complex way of keeping score. |
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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was released nearly nine years ago, (Raise your hands if you can’t believe it’s been that long.) At the time, the fourth installment of the franchise was seen as groundbreaking, and a promise of the great things to come in the early days of Seventh Generation gaming. They were right. The Seventh Generation of games saw publishers finally start to fully utilize many of the technological and narrative innovations made during the 5th and 6th Gen of games. Bethesda itself brought us Fallout 3 and Skyrim, which were built on what was done with Oblivion. I love role-playing games, both the tabletop kind and the video games. They are my favorite genre, but that will never be true for the majority of gamers. No one thing is for everybody, and what we like is ultimately subjective, but some things will always be more popular than others regardless of relative quality. Linear and uncomplicated games will always win out over RPGs, in the long run. It’s like any other aspect of pop culture where boy bands like the Backstreet Boys outsell bands like Iron Maiden.
It’s been nearly twelve years since the first Knights of the Old Republic game was released on the original Xbox. When the game hit in 2003, we were in the latter of the Star Wars prequel/ enhanced version malaise. The doctored originals gave us Greedo shooting first, and a musical number from the Muppet Show and the prequels gave us Jar Jar and more blah than deserves to be mentioned. KotOR was a relief and beacon of hope for many. Every moment in history has some sort of allure and mystique, some romantic mythology that has built up around it – except for the 1970’s. (Star Wars and the birth of heavy metal notwithstanding) To chalk it up to nostalgia is to sell these moments in time short. Nostalgia implies that things really weren’t that good, and we’re just remembering being happy. Some things really were that good though. Pop culture icons like Star Wars, Led Zeppelin, Star Trek, and Mickey Mouse, just to name a few, continually find new audiences. There are cultural gems to be found in any era, but most of what we got was crap. The best got distilled into greatest hits and “best of” albums that Time/Life used to sell before iTunes killed off the business model. The rest was forgotten only to be occasionally dug up in someone’s basement and tossed in a landfill. |
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