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What games made you care?
Meridion
Member UncommonPosts: 1,495
Well, you know, about an hour ago I had one of those lucid, precious moments, one of those moments you don't seek actively while gaming but once they happen you know this is why you stuck to the hobby in the first place.
First off, don't get me wrong, doing quests because they're fun, challenging, give nice rewards etc. is perfectly fine. But this time, I got involved. Naturally, Skyrim. And by involved I mean I made my ingame choice out of emotional involvement and not out of "well this may yield a fun quest, let's do it" like 99% of the time.
So what happened, if you care (spoilers); I started the dark brotherhood questline with the usual thing in mind: Well-written noir stories, maybe a good dagger, nice armor (although I found out I already owned the coolest looking armor with the nightingale set) and lots of gold (although I already owned a fortune due to reestablishing the thieves guild)... So 2 hours or so into the Dark Brotherhood line the quests get more and more morally questionable. But well, it's a videogame and i still hard-calculated the mechanisms behind the game; You know, dagger, gold, armor, safehouse. And then, the psycho-killer-girl tells me to kill the bride on a wedding. Well, you know, I really told myself that I wanted to see how the whole questline ends lada lada. But Skyrim got me right there, I traveled to the wedding and decided not to fulfill the contract purely out of emotional involvement. Instead, I untagged 'essential' for all the guys in the dark britherhood sanctuary by script, backstabbed each one of them and piled their bodies at the feet of the Night Mother, spat on their nonexistant graves and sold all their belongings to my 4000 gold fence in Riften. If the game had let me, I would have burned the whole place to the ground....
as a matter of fact, i rage-broke the whole, potentially entertaining questline just because of emotional involvement towards pixels.
THIS is something only very, very few games ever did, and I love Skyrim for being one of them.
So I guess the actual question is, have you ever experienced anything alike in Skyrim or any other games?
M
Comments
Concerning that particular questline, my emotional breaking point was at the very beginning of the chain lol. *Spoilers Continued* She lines up 3 strangers in front of me, tells me they deserve to die but doesn't tell me why, and asks me to kill one or all of them? Yeah, I killed her instead. The end.
But yeah, in general, I feel like these moments occur all the time in games. It's by no means a rare occurance for me, and by no means exclusive to Skyrim. Hell, I feel bad if I don't buy the flower off of Aeris in the beginning of Final Fantasy 7.
Max Payne and the whole slaughtering his child and wife thing. Max standing over the crib, stairing down at a big spot of blood, then finding out some og these guys are still in the house. The lucid nightmares and the baby crying in the background was a nice touch too
Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen on Playstation. I remember feeling the urge to get some payback from the townsfolk killing me for no reason.
Eye of the Beholder I and II really immersed me. I didn't "care" but It drew me in none the less. haven't had that feeling since not even from Skyrim as great as it is.
Final fantasy VII and Aeris death was a great twist too that made you want to get some revenge.
I really like Skyrim but nothing in it makes me care much. I think it has to do with the NPCs having next to no personalities or any background worth caring about
Unreal II when the crew sacrifices themselves in the end. I was sad and pissed.
Skyrim (yes again). *Spoiler Alert* I had been "living" off of Whiterun for quite a while, established myself there, did all the quests, interacted a lot with the merchants there, etc. I eventually decided to join the Stormcloak side in Windhelm (those damn Imperials wanting to ban people from worshipping Talos) and at one point, had to siege Whiterun and overthrow the Jarl. After defeating the Jarl, he looked at me and said "I thought you were better than that" or "I thought better of you" (can't remember which of the two), and I paused for a minute and thought "What did I just do? Why did I do it!? Why won't you understand me! I mean...Talos...wait but....no...it's for the future....against the evil Thalmor and...gaaaaah!". Eventually started a new character and joined the Imperials to protect Whiterun.
I crept up on the opposing city wall, waited for her to start addressing the crowd and stuck an arrow right though her smug head all the while chuckling evilly to myself.
Bren
while(horse==dead)
{
beat();
}
Heh, I just went to the balcony with her and crushed her skull with a 2-h hammer, in front of everybody. Then I just bribed the city guards so that they kept a blind eye and slayed the remaining personal guards.
Then I went back to the wedding, snatched a couple of bottles and went back to the sanctuarium to celebrate it with my assassin mates.
I killed one then after it said quest completed I killed the other 2
.
I don't get emotional over games because I get them to have fun not to feel bad if I do this or that. I do run through games several times for different outcomes. Like my 1st playthrough of Skyrim I decided to go Stormcloak route so I plan on making another character and going the imperial route next.
Well, it was close there too. I mean first the bi*** kidnaps me and then wakes me up in the middle of the night and wants to force me to kill some random person I don't even know. Wait a second, nobody tells me what do like that.
I just got through it without cutting her twisted head off because the khajiit was obviously a wanted criminal and pretty much asked for getting slain. And well, I was dedicated to see the Dark Brotherhood content... Well turns out those basement-dwelling freaks had it coming all along... =>
Conerning general moments like these. TBH, nope, most of the time - in single player games - I choose considering the game's backround (like choosing the imperials over the stormcloaks, you know, because a weak empire is exactly what the thalmor want). But not emotional involvement.
M
Never felt bad from a game or actually cared. I just play to have fun, and I don't think it should be so into a game where I'll be having emotions like being sad, mad, etc.
It's called suspend disbelief. Some people can, some people can't. There is no "should"
Mass Effect 1 and 2 probably have gotten me hooked at an emotional level more than any other games.
When Ashley fucking blew Wrex away because of my choice I was like WTF NOOOOO!
I was playing Eschalon:book 2 the other day and stumbled upon a dying man in the middle of a forest that was supposed to bring a cure to a kid that was near dead.As he was dying he asked me to complete the quest for him, for the kid would die without that potion.The potion valued 2000 gold and by the time i got the quest i never saw more than 200 gold.Also to be able to enter the city the kid was in(the main quest also needed me to gain access to that city) i had to obtain a citizen's writ(which i had no idea how) or to pay the guard 2000.I really wanted to progress further into the main quest but i still couldn't sell that potion knowing the kid would die without it so i went out in the wilds and died over and over again trying to farm the gold needed to enter the city.
I usually get emotionally involved in every rpg i play,which adds to the immersion.
hehe i valued Wrex over everyone else in the game lol,such a great character!
I NEVER wanted to get into mmorpgs (this is back in 2000). I enjoyed RPGs, RTS, etc. and was well aware that the mmrorpg genre was underdeveloped and that it would be decades before an mmorpg of any depth would exist (sadly how right I was).
But, a friend got me to try Everquest. And, while I loved the community (I was on an RP server), I didn't feel any special purpose to killing pixels that were AI spawned. Sure, it served a point. But it had zero meaning. Pixels are fairly predictable as all you PVE junkies are aware. So then I tried Asheron's Call - loved it for 9 months. It was great. But, some new RPGs came out and I got hooked again. I believe I was watching life pass as I played Command and Conquor as well as Star Craft.
But then, something happened. I found Dark Age of Camelot. I saw on log in that I had three realms to choose from. I'm not talking about those cosmetic factions you get nowadays. I'm talking a complete series of zones along a massive land mass dedicated to each realm. You won't see a single enemy here. This is your homeland. We had a true sense of us vs them, just as how it was during the Crusades, or even the Hundred Years war. What made it better was that it was us vs them vs them. That's a lot of conflct in a pvp mmorpg let me tell you.
There was a wicked dungeon called Darkness Falls, however. This place offered leveling and a few other interesting things from roughly 15-50. But here's the catch: you had to be successful in pvp as a realm to open the portal to the monolithic dungeon. As with all things in Dark Age, success in realm vs realm vs realm meant benefits for all players of the winning realm, or a loss of sorts for all players whose realm mates did poorly in RvR.
This made pvp meaningful.
This made the game meaningful and ridiculously fun. Not to mention, once you did hit level 20-24 you could go to a persistant battleground called Thidranki Faste. Here you got to test your hard spent hours leveling in actual player vs player vs player conflict. The focus as always had importance. We didn't just have a PVP zone where we ran around beating each other up like elementary school kids. There was no capture the flag or Huttball or hold this tower for x minutes until cap. This was siege warfare, complete with trebuchet, catapults, you name it.
So, in effect, each realm was a different game, complete with castles (after the mile gate RvR concept was built upon), and ships from which to take to an enemy shore. Toss in some 3 dozen plus classes and a few dozen races that matched the lore and culture of Earth's medieval history and you had a magic gem. We didn't have some imaginary races and classes to help fill out the costmetics of a typical theme park mmorpg. We also didn't have a complete lack of race and cultural depth in order to go as cheaply as possible and call the game a sandbox. What we had was what we have all grown up on (if we read).
VIkings vs Celts vs The Knights and armies of Camelot. Three realms, right out of history with a little fictional fantasy tossed in for good measure. The gods were alive and real in Dark Age, as were the heroes and stuff of legends that all mmorpgs try to duplicate - replicate, and so forth.
But here's the rub. The game spoiled the crap out of me. I can't play anything else too seriously because it's just a video game. Anime' mmorpgs with little 10 year old girls swining 6 foot broadswords is a yawnfest. Mirrored classes and races and two stagnant factions where one side is always better than the other, i..e., no third realm wild card effect, is just vanilla. Games that pop out expansions into furthering their pve goals ad naseum, instead of building on what they already have, subsequently creating zones ffrom 1-80 (as in WoW) , or 1-90 etc., EQ2, you name it, that are just nuisance grind fests and devoid of anything meaningful. Instanced battlegrounds, push a button dungeon finders, and pvp'ing folks from servers that you will never see again, along with playing with folks you'll never see again, has killed this industry.
I was spoiled. Dark Age ruined my expectations. The bar is so high from those folks that even they paid the price. EA bought them out so they would cease in development (as in no Origins server, for example), and swept them under a rug. All of this in an effort to kil anything possible that would take away from a soon to quit player base for Warhammer Online, the game that claimed to bring so much of Dark Age of Camelot with them, yet skipped not only the 3rd realm wild card, but made some of the most boring classes possible, and in the end, one of the most boring and least spoken of mmorpgs to date. I dare say more folks regard Vanguard than Warhammer. Heck, at least Vanguard was worth investing in.
Granted, the game was dwindling hard after 2004 with WoW's release. But folks started to really realize by Burning Crusade that they were missing stuff of substance.
My 2 cents.
To the OP: Well I skipped down to the last 2 or 3 sentences once i hit the spoiler tag as i havent done the DB questline. So thank you for that! Yet I get what you experienced. Skyrim has done this for me as well, I think the fact that I RP my characters helps with that happening
Had it happen in a very few other games in the past as well.
And while this isn't a game, your subject immediately brings this to mind: At the end of Star Wars: RoTJ, watching the first dvd trilogy release and seeing that George replaced Annakin's ghost with the 'new kid on the block's' image, instantly enraged me enough to throw my remote at the tv screen and yell "WHAT THE *&^% GEORGE?!?!"
Luckily my tv survived
But I'm glad you are able to have such experiences.
It's called immersion, bro. Any emotional investment that comes with that is what makes a game really memorable. A good RPG should make the player feel a range of emotions. The whole point of Skyrim is to put you in the world and make you believe it's real to an extent.
Haven't played Skyrim so I wouldn't know, and yes I know so many people get hooked etc. I think its okay to get hooked, but not to the point of where you only want to play that one game cause you don't want to go back to reality. When the Avatar movie came out, people were posting on forums how they wanted to suicide because they hated "our world" and wanted ot live on Pandora instead. Yes I know some people are truly immersed into a game/movie, but I don't see how they can be that delusional.
Posted a link of the avatar thing.
http://videogum.com/108591/people_who_are_depressed_from/the-new-sadness/
Morrowind.
(POTENTIAL SPOILERS)
You are Nerevarine, or Nerevar Reborn--the reincarnation of the greatest Chimer and Chief of all the Houses of Chimer (future Dark Elves, when their skin was still golden and not ash). Azura made sure that Nerevar shall be reborn so that he can right the wrong things that his most trusted advisors have done during his reign which led to the disappearance of the dwarves, the darkening of the skin of the Chimer (thus turning them to the Dunmer, or Dark Elves), and your historical Death.
Morrowind set up the lore and game story so that it will be ambiguous. There are several versions of what happened at the historical Battle at Red Mountain--from the dissident priests, to the ashlanders, to the Tribunal Temple, to the Imperials, to Vivec himself, and to Dagoth Ur himself.
I remember hunting for books about the history of Morrowind and Nerevar, because I felt that as the Nerevarine, I have the right to know what happened before I died as Nerevar.
In the end, Morrowind ended the game with you not knowing what actually happened--but at the same time, giving you the instruments to believe at a specific version of the story. In short, you do not get lost in the story because in the end you will not ask "what happened, really?". Instead, you will be saying "I believe this is what happened."
My Blog About Hellgate Global, an ARPG/FPS hybrid MMO:
http://kashiewannaplay.wordpress.com/
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http://t3funhellgate.wordpress.com/
Currently Playing: Hellgate Global, LoL, Skyrim, Morrowind
Recently Played: Cardmon Hero, Cabal, Oblivion
You guys are soft.
Walked up on the balcony in an Imperial uniform, bashed the groom and bride's heads with a shock enchanted Ebony Greatsword (better lightshow for the shocked audience).
Stripped the bride naked just before the guards arrive (because my character is a murderous perv, I guess), and I start running for dodge. Put the bride's head wreath on my guy's head because he thinks it's funny.
The Khajit shows up to help with my escape, and I do take off for the main gate. But in front of the inn and shops, I decide to stop. I'm going to spill more blood.
In the words of one of the pre-battle speeches in Rome Total War: "But today, we are here to kill all those bastards." So I commence in butchering the guard and reacting soldiers. Solitude's streets are strewn with the bodies of her guards and their dropped equipment.
Then I calmly walked out of Solitude, stole a horse, and rampaged some more in the wilderness by occasionally stopping on the road to kill anything and everything on my "escape" back to the Dark Brotherhood hideout. Rabbits. Bears. Elk. Foxes. Innocent people. It took a looooonnng time. After causing many decapitations, impalements with a Greatsword, and generally being just a mean bastard, my character makes it back. The killing spree was fast and fun.
And memorably bloody as hell.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
If you're forcing people to pick a single game, for me, nothing has beaten the feeling I had playing Chrono Trigger on the SNES. My definition of 'caring' about the characters of the game is one of ' I must stay up freakin' late and kill hours to see what happens next ' because of the story and compelling events.
There have been many moments for me previous to that as well as games that followed ( from Zork + Planetside text adventures all the way to Skyrim ), but the strength of the first Chrono Trigger playthrough is still at the top of my list.
Edit - I will echo most of the sentiments of the poster above me and their thoughts on Dark Age of Camelot. Warts and all, with mistakes made as Mythic found their way as they ran it, it was a great game.