I've been playing games for a long time.
I'm twenty-four years old, and videogames have been a part of my life for nearly all that time. I started on the Atari 2600, somewhere around twenty years ago. It was great fun, and I loved it. Then the NES. And computer games. And new consoles. And more computer games. I was having a fine time.
Games were growing with me! Each generation saw not only technical advances, but gameplay advances aplenty. I wanted some story. Out came games like Final Fantasy. I wanted some immersion. Out came games like DOOM. I wanted a game where it felt like I was living the story. Lo, the industry did answer, and Valve Software did bestow Half-Life upon me.
But somewhere along the line, I kept growing up, and the gaming industry forgot to follow.
The past few years have seen an amazing amount of technical innovation. GeForce 3 cards push polygons around with surprising ease, allowing prettier and more complex geometry, models, textures...
But the crucial elements that kept me loving games for so long are getting more and more difficult to find. Story? We're still getting Star Trek fan fiction. Immersion? No one since Valve has had the courage to give me a game without cutscenes. Character? Thin clichés. Acting? Amateurs and semi-Pros who can barely grasp the basic concepts of line delivery.
So we get Metal Gear Solid 2. We get Return to Castle Wolfenstein. They're fun games, and a lot of effort went into their creation, and I feel a little bad slagging them and their creators. But I'm going to anyway, because they're not giving me anything new. They're not giving me anything interesting. They're giving me the same old stuff, wrapped up in a shinier package. And the truth is, the same old stuff has lost its charm for me.
The latter, well... that's the one I'm really interested in. That's the one I want to talk about here. Don't give me any story. At all. Give me a world, instead.
Next: Build me a city...
