Why Storytelling in Fantasy Role-Playing Games Sucks
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 1984
The good guys tend to be "good" because their avatar's glow or their armor glitters. The bad guys are often "bad" because they snarl and drool or have black-slits for pupils. Even the occasional "humanized" enemy deploys multitudes of Dionysian creatures (horns, tails, feral snarls) before showing up for the obligatory "boss battle." Grandstanding ensues, then "save-die-reload" ad nauseam.Is he really suggesting that the storyline in Fallout 3 is better than anything fantasy RPGs have produced since 1995?
Some call that operatic. Sturm und drang. Extravagant theater, sentiment, or melodrama.
I call it dead. As dead as cable news. Or games journalism. Or quips about Elvis.
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It's just that I've been wanting more from fantasy gaming for decades. Since I first played The Hobbit on a Commodore 64 in the 1980s and it let me change up interactions by fiddling adverbs. Since I tripped over inSCAPE's The Dark Eye in 1995, with its haunting experimental narration (thank you William S. Burroughs). Since I caught a glimpse of things to come in Bethesda's Fallout 3, 2K Games' BioShock, and Lionhead's Fable 2. Since I realized I'm in this hobby to have my lid flipped, not just master rocket leaps and climb leader-boards or crack level eighty-something.
