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fantasy or sci fi does it matter to you?
Silkraven
Member UncommonPosts: 74
I prefer fantasy myself.
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Silkraven
Member UncommonPosts: 74
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I have never liked high fantasy. I really dislike the over-use of magic. When it does exist it should be a very rare commodity that damages the user. Unfortunately it is used as an excuse for all sorts of game breaking nonsense. I can suspend disbelief, but only so far, and magic in most high fantasy stretches it far too far.
I love sci-fi- who was it who said, to paraphrase, that advanced technology would appear like magic to those who have not experienced it?
I like a game bound by real world limitations, but allowing for advanced technology. I dislike FTL or travel to other solar systems because again it breaks immersion for me, but set a game in some twin orbit Langrangian type solar system and have those two planets competing or something presents huge opportunity for a great sci-fi world within the realms of possibility.
Never saw much of a difference. Take Star Wars for example: You got Jedi >Knights< fighting with light>sabers< against an evil emperor.
Star Gate was also Scifi and in the end it was some people entering worlds and fighting Ancient Egyptian Gods etc.
I remember people criticizing the waypoint system on GW2 claiming it breaks their immersion. In fact Scifi inventions such as teleportation, Golems and Mechas are part of the lore.
Fantasy and Scifi mixes all the time.
I'm the opposite. I love magic and find it great that you can pretend to do very difficult if not impossible things with it. It makes the game more interesting then if you were restricted by real world limitations.
I like fantasy in the style of Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance. The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings is OK as well, but doesn't have quite as much humor to it. I find the races and classes of high fantasy today are not that interesting. I find this is because elves, dwarves, humans, orcs, goblins, halflings, etc. all are the same aside from appearance. In reality they should all tend towards specific actions, ideas, and prejudices except for humans. Humans are supposed to be the ones that can be anything. They can be quick and agile. They can be big strong brutes. They can be kind or evil.
I like Sci Fi, but not as much as I like fantasy. I really enjoyed Star Wars, Knights of the old Republic, Chrono Trigger, Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3. Strangely I found Dragon Age to be rather bland by comparison to Baldur's Gate 1 and 2. I guess it really depends on what the developers image of fantasy or Sci Fi is.
Steampunk/Post/post apocalyptic isn't really my thing, but I somewhat enjoyed Fallout and Shadowrun Returns.
I should add I also prefer exploring the earth as opposed to exploring the blackness of out space. Earth tones make me feel comfortable and are more easy on the eyes.
I would like either but Sci-Fi is too costly to do it justice and nobody is spending amounts of time and money on MMORPG's anymore.
I believe Epic Games could make a really good sci-fi game but they are currently about to release a different kind of game.Square Enix and Blizzard are the only others with money but Blizzard tends to make low budget games so that leaves just Square and they already have their hands full.
So bottom line there will not be a solid sci-fi space game for quite some time,maybe 5+ years.I find even the Fantasy game design has run very stale and lots of corner cutting,nobody is building Triple A games anymore,Archeage perhaps the exception but still has holes in it's design.
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mainly fantasy gotta have those fireballs and dragons ya know
but if there would be a scifi mmorpg that has space mother ships, planets and huge robots that i could pilot as a mech pilot, or build them as an engineer yes i would play it, my sci fi tastes are very specific, titanfall meets mech warrior meets eve and so on
wildstar scifi does not interest me at all
Unfortunately they are fairly bad fantasy games IMO.
haha, wildstar isn't sci-fi, it is fantasy. Yes, it pretends to be sci-fi, but it is firmly fantasy.
I prefer Fantasy. Preferably of the lower magic variety bu t will take anything well done so long as the 'world' makes sense.
I have been a fantasy junkie since my days of learning the old D&D red box in the early 1980s.
I like Sci-Fi, especially settings which mix fantasy/sci fi in a meaningful way (Think Phantasy star 4 on Sega genesis) and would be willing to play any game that is GOOD in either genre. Hell, I hate Star Wars (think its really stupid) but SWG was one of the best games I have ever played.
So year=- As long as the World is unique, makes sense and is done with care - I can get into it. I would take a genre I hate (like Monster collecting/pokemon type stuff) over a genre I love (LOTR) IF the genre I hate has a better 'game. For instance LOTR is my favorite series of books and Middle Earth the most realized setting I have ever seen- The MMO sucks though. I would play a good pokmon mmo over a bad lotr one regardless of my preference in genre.
I really want to get into Sci Fi truly I do but it's like the art goes out of it's way to be UGLY. Is that what sci fi means to artists? Ugly barren and monsterous? Why do all sci fi planets look like an aftermath or desert? Why do all sci fi chars look human or orcish? The clothes omg can you hope to get any uglier if you tried???
Why do they make these people wear the most ugly outfit they can find:
At least in old sci fi they attempted to make the ladies look good:
And Twi'lek's have always been hot:
But I am really sick of being stuck in ugly clothes in games. At least in a fantasy game I have a chance of working my way up to some hot armor.
I prefer a fantasy setting if it's a role-playing MMO. For an MMOFPS I would prefer modern or sci-fi, for example.
Apparently it does.
With the exception of strategy games (Masters of Orion II, Andromeda, Galactic Civilizations) I actually lose interest in science fiction "based" games pretty quickly.
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I think magic can often feel a little too casual in a lot of High fantasy MMORPG. I mean, when you do melee or ranged it tends to feel like magic, because the lines between abilities and actual spells have been blurred by the need to give them equally epic/visually descriptive FX. And, magic is also used as a convenient excuse for explaining how a bottle of fluid fixes broken bones destroyed flesh. Or how NPC's have knowledge outside of what they really should know. High fantasy games do tend to wave the hand and say "Because, Magic." a lot.
However...Sci-fi kind of does this as well. With it's alternate universe laws of physics. Space works like Ocean and anything they can't explain or that works contradictory to things they have already established about their universe, is simply future tech. In-so-much as High Fantasy will excuse itself with the whole magic spiel. Our Sci-fi MMORPG tend to say "Because, Super Science".
All that aside (and to the point of the OP's opening question). I tend to lean towards High Fantasy more the Sci-fi. Why? I think it's simply that I like doing something I can't explain or accept as a real possibility at some point, than something that I can. One thing to remember about Sci-fi, is that it is often the predictor of future Science fact...Most of it, is technically possible. Escapism simply works better for me with less of an anchor to realism.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
I like high fantasy and magic simple because (as you said) it can't be explained. This is where your imagination comes in if you have one. The problem I have with fantasy games (current ones) is that everyone has to have powerful magic (including melee) of a sort. This pretty much destroys the points of magic and how powerful/uknown it is in the first place. Fighters should be fighters. Thieves/Rogues should be just that. They don't need to be kung fu masters with magical effects every time they swing a sword or their arms.
Hm I would say that I think there are so many bad games, that I couldn't possibly state whether a 'fantasy' genre or a 'sci-fi' game matters the most to me.
That is what I meant with the first few lines of my reply (not sure if you are simply concurring or didn't understand it, is why I mention it).
I should elaborate in any case...While I feel this is a heavy handed aspect with a lot of High Fantasy. I also think it is entirely necessary. How enraged would many players be if only some people got to do magic. Or if the only thing that looked really cool in a game combat wise was magic. Or if anything even remotely magic related needed to have a magic class player fully relied upon to pull off. Those are all rhetorical questions. The answer being obvious. A lot of players simply wouldn't stand for it. Perhaps in a pre-WoW environment we would have gone for it. But, the doors the held the genre closed off to all but the most involved people have long since been kicked open. And, the flow of people is to thick and steady to ever close them again.
I think in our current environment... We need magic to be flashy and as common as everyone having a map and compass and instantly being an expert navigator.
That said... I would like to see a lot more effort put into making it feel different aesthetically. I don't need neon tracer trails behind every and enemy NPC's oozing their status effects. or an ethereal trumpet blasting off above my head as each swing of my sword has a tron bike trail behind it. I feel their are better ways to convey the meatiness of physical combat.
Here is a free idea: Magic users that can hide their eh profession. It would require that a magic user look like any other player (no role title, or default mage look to reveal their profession), and they would have to practice in secret or deal with consequences. One reason for magic users being hunted, could be that any group of players with one magic user, might pray on other magic users for their power. Or perhaps they are simply known to carry valuable items, or maybe magic users are just that annoying to attract other peoples attention.
I would be more than happy to play a game, where I either could or could NOT be one of few people that was allowed to have any magic powers at all.
I would also like to play a game where you could play as older looking people.
I have seen a lot of people say that...But, it is unjustifiable from a development standpoint. lets say even as much as 1/100 players are magic users. That means there has to be an entirely different progression/item/quest line/system in place for only 10% of the player population. At this point (of magic becoming a rare thing) developers have to build an entirely different game within a game. From this launch pad they can no longer think about magic as just another aspect of the same combat system, but a dynamic factor. And, how do you balance that. how do insure that there are always just enough magical players both in the game and online? How do you keep a certain times of day from becoming radically imbalanced game play? The difficulties with this out weigh the rewards.