In Lord British we have faith...

As a long time gamer I can't help but feel that most PC and console games have become more like Arcade games where you simply continue to pump money into the slot to either advance, gain a higher score, or get digital achieves for repetive actions. Now I do love a good arcade game and have been playing them for many years but every now and then you would like to put the quarters down, look away from your top score and play a game that can capture the imagination. The last time this happened for me was Ultima 4.

Like everyone else in my generation I was busy feeding quarters to the machince when a friend introduced me to this new game. I was astonished! This was a game where my hard work went into growing my personal character so that I could overcome larger obstacles rather then gain high scores. It was such a new and foreign concept that I was instantly hooked.

Since then the gaming world has swung back and forth between character growth and Arcade style, with the pendulum now firmly stuck at Arcade (WOW, LOL, anything with microtransactions). I only hope that Lord British will be able to recreate what he did in the 80's and offer up an alternative to button mashing, quarter feeding and score scanning. Sometimes the path is more interesting then the destination.

In Lord British we have faith!

 

It honestly sounds like you haven't really looked at what games are out there if you're painting with such a broad stroke.

 

There are some good games still out there, they are just few and far between. I don't think that is any different than it has been in the past 30 years. The difference now is a lot of the most popular games I dislike. The last new game I really enjoyed was Ni No Kuni.. before that? maybe X-com: enemy unknown. starcraft 2 (although the lack of multiplayer units is disappointing so I hardly played anything but the campaign and custom maps) I liked LoL for the pvp combat, playing with friends, but im bored with MOBA style games, especially the ones that follow that same Dota style format.

Quality RPG titles are difficult to find though, which I think is different from the 80s and 90s. I actually don't like skyrim, or oblivion to me it's an action RPG, not my style.

 

Actually I think WoW was a lot like Ultima. But WoW is 10 years old and now we have the technology, bandwidth, processing / graphics to have a more arcade style gameplay and I'm hoping we can take advantage of it.

Back when I played Ultima III and Ultima IV I remember thinking 1) why can't this be online? and 2) why can't this have real, engaging combat like I can get from the NES games?

 

WoW did, in many ways, follow a similar path as UO. Just as you hear longing for the old "pre-Trammel" UO days, you have WoW old-timers wanting a return to "Vanilla". Both made it easier to play, both steadily increased emphasis on gear and reduced the value of crafting, both made it possible to pretty much always avoid PvP, et cetera.

We do have more graphics ability today for sure, but (a) gameplay is more important than "eye candy" and (b)if we set the hardware requirements too high, we will lock out a lot of potential players as not everyone can run out and spend $1000 on a brand new gaming rig. And I don't necessarily want a PC game to feel like a console game. Not that there's anything wrong with console games, but to me those have a different feel that isn't too compatible with online multiplayer RPGs.