The RPG Genre is Screwed Up
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What do I consider a good CRPG? Fallout 1 and 2 (they're two separate parts, but it's essentially one big story) are good examples. They offer you freedom, actions and consequences, all with great motivation. You are free to do all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, but beware the repercussions. This created a way to contribute to the story.Agree or disagree?
In the original Fallout games I've killed all kinds of living beings, including children. Sometimes I earned money by killing, sometimes people wanted to blast me away for it. I've made money of cannibalism. I fucked women to get what I want. I even had sex with a sixteen year old and got married to her because her dad caught me and forced me to the altar with a shotgun. I made promises to people and stabbed them all in the back, allowing me to get filthy fucking rich in the process. I made and sold drugs, and even used it to temporarily up my strength, and became addicted after a couple of uses too much. I had philosophical discussions with mortal enemies, and the list goes on and on. It even contained homosexuality, something a lot of so called RPGs avoid like the plague. At the end you could even join the '˜bad guy'. Now THAT is contributing to the story.
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Modern day CRPGs like Mass Effect and Fallout 3 pale in comparison to Black Isle's masterpiece. I thoroughly enjoyed Mass Effect for the combat, the epic story and the dialogue system, but when it boils down to it, everything consists of black and white choices. Fallout 3 is even less of an RPG: there's no real dialogue. It's just you asking people's names, jobs and things like that. These are monologues, periodically interrupted by the player. And the choices are even more black and white than Mass Effect, but there's no reasoning behind them. You can blow up Megaton and you receive a little money for it, but what does it do to you? You're not hated for it by other people, there are no consequences other than the town being gone, so why would you do it? With my first character I had already slaughtered the entire town with a baseball bat and a 10MM pistol the before I even met this quest giver.
