Neverwinter Nights 2
This post is about roleplaying/video games so many of you may want to move along now. Don't worry, I won't be offended.
Just like most adult men, the only difference between myself and a ten-year-old boy is facial hair and a bit of a paunch. I still love playing games, especially "let's pretend" and "make believe." Other guys my age might get off on pretending to be Wayne Gretzky or Brett Favre on the weekends, but I love getting together with my friends to pretend that we're all bold and heroic defenders of goodness with a large chunk of cynical mercenary on the side. It's nice to forget the troubles of frustrations of real life and play in a world where all problems can be solved with courage and sharp steel. It's silly, and juvenile, and fun.
Now that we're all in our thirties and half of us have kids getting together to play games is almost as tough as negotiating a UN resolution. Once Beth is in bed and my wife is enjoying a television show I like to boot up my PC and lose myself in a game for a while. It's sometimes a poor substitute for a tabletop game, but it works. It's fun.
What makes an RPG fun is feeling like a central character in the story. You may not be playing the role of the main character, but you should at least be a main character. That's a fairly easy thing to accomplish in a tabletop game but it's much more difficult for a computer game to accomplish. To be a main character in a CRPG requires the world and NPC's to realistically react to the player's actions. The gamer's decisions should matter in the game and, just as importantly, the gamer should have the feeling that their choices have real consequences.
So far I don't have that feeling while I'm playing NWN2. The NPC's in the game are well-acted and seem to have interesting backgrounds. They talk a lot, they do, and listening to them is entertaining. But... so far I've been doing all the listening and not a lot of talking. Instead of feeling central to the game's action, I feel very much like an observer. My character wanders from scripted encounter to scripted encounter doing a lot of swordwork along the way, but I haven't yet had the feeling that any decision I make will change the course of the plot or, indeed, matters at all. So far I've just been clicking buttons to move the plot along, but I haven't influenced it at all. I'm watching, not participating.
I'm not sure why I feel this way. Maybe the cut scenes are too long? Maybe I'm just too early in the game to have faced any of the more interesting parts yet? Beats me. The fact remains that the illusion of control (and I know that it's an illusion in the essentially linear plot that almost all CRPG's have to put together, for programming reasons) just isn't there, and it's hurting the game experience for me. Which is a real disappointment because I had very high hopes for this one.
Does that mean I'm quitting the game? Nope.