Boss Fights

[Erick.S]

Since nobody has mentioned this so far - the boss fights in Dawn of War 2 were long, tedious, and boring.
Whoever thought that was a good idea is probably the kind of person who finds rearranging rocks for an hour a delightful way to spend time.

 

[thenamelessloser]

I finished System Shock 2 without cheating!!!! It was easy once you figured out how to kill everyone with melee.
Some other games that use what Yahtzee said are Planescape Torment and the first two Fallout games. That further proves my point that the game industry has been getting worse and worse while under some stupid illusion that games are getting better. I mean, how retarded must you be to think that today's games are getting better?

In Fallout 2 I think you had to fight the last boss, even though it could be easier with more party memmbrs and with using the turrets. In Planescape: Torment there are a few mandatory boss fights as well such as

Spoiler

Ravel and that falle Angel

. The only RPGs without mandatory boss fights I think are Fallout 1 and maybe Arcanum.

Funnily enough also, some of the same people worked on Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment as Alpha Protocol.

 

[BehattedWanderer]

Some bosses make sense--the all powerful creature of the moment, where you'll have to really use your skills learned (a la Zelda, Metroid, Infamous, Darksiders). Others are just obnoxious nuisances, like Prototype and Bayonetta. Others are creative, and what the game uses as most of it's selling point,in the God of War/Shadow of the Colossus way. So, if we avoid the pointless wastes of time, and focus on the other two, or where a boss is actually a decent story element, then, KAZAA! *blows a party streamer* We've figured out what to do. If not...a big resounding "meh" for how uselessly tedious it is.

 

[RvLeshrac]

Boy, he's gonna keep beating the "RPGs should be about universal choice for the player, about giving him unlimited options and letting him affect the world however he like" drum until people start marching, won't he?

In this case, though, it's bullshit.

Some skills are legitimately less useful than others. Some fights are unavoidable, and sometimes you have to use gunplay rather than stealth skills. If part of the "awesome-life simulation" aspect of an RPG is that you can make your character however you like, there's some realism in that if you chose to devote your energy to learning useless skills, you get bum-raped.

That's what I'm gonna call realism. If I decide to spend my time learning to be an expert in WoW playing, rather than an expert in Shotokan, those times when the latter would be useful, I'm getting my ass kicked. The irony of the Yahtzee-style RPG player (who wants to be able to do whatever he wants, and let his inner id run wild) is that they don't want any responsibility for what happens. Sure, they want the "this is so badassed" responsibility, but not the real "I pissed off all of my allies, and now I'm fucked" responsibility, or the "I faffed around for too long, and now the evil empire has won" responsibility, or even the "I decided to specialize in stealth, so I can't fight encounters where I have to fight straight-up". If RPGs are meant to be anything other than a simple succession of times when the player gets to feel awesome beating a boss only slightly more wimpy than he is, that's fine. But if RPGs are meant to actually be about role-playing, then there are going to be times when the suave, effete, faceman isn't going to be able to win in a shootout.

It's like how in most games the big bruiser with the massive guns, and even bigger firearms, isn't going to be able to pull off good social interaction.

Would it be nice if there were similar social "bosses" in such games, where you have to really work ten-times as hard at winning if you put your skills exclusively into gunplay? Absolutely, but no game should exist wherein you can "win" using any given "build", because that's not how life (even awesome, sci-fi, life) works.

I've got to completely agree with this. There are some skills that are going to be useless in any given situation. I think it's be more immersion breaking to be prepared for every single boss than if you had some that you had to defeat with different tactics than you're used to.

Let me use Demon's Souls as a prime example. Sure you can build your character any way you want but all those points you put into melee that took out the Phalanx boss aren't going to work on the physically resistant Flamelurker boss 3 stages from now.

A truly immersive game and a series of immersive boss fights will mirror life IMO. Some challenges are easier to tackle with your unique set of skills than others. I think gamers should just accept that these kinds of fights will happen and try to find a way to deal with them instead of just bitching about a short spike in difficulty.

But would it be fun?

Wait, wait, I know this one!

"No."

Seriously, if you want realism, DON'T PLAY A GOD-DAMNED FANTASY OR SCI-FI GAME. RPGs like Alpha Protocol posit themselves as "choose-your-own-ability" titles, when they're actually "choose-these-specific-abilities-or-we're-going-to-punish-you" titles. This would be perfectly acceptable if they made it clear that they expected you to, say, shoot everyone in the face. That, however, is not the case.

The game was advertised as providing the player with a number of options, all of which were equivalent methods by which you could finish the game. Instead, we have a game where direct, violent confrontation is the most effective course of action, while all other methods require that you make specific decisions demanded by the developers.

*edit*

Oh, and the problem with a line of thought that demands all builds be unequal is that it ignores the single longest-lasting bastion of modern gaming: (A)D&D. The DMG makes it clear that the DM should have a way for every single character class in the campaign to contribute to an event or encounter, and that's one of the primary *reasons* the system has passed through decades of competing rule systems nearly unscathed.

But what's choice without consequence? I'm not for complete realism in games but if I can make a choice I'd like it to really mean something. I'm not saying make it so it's impossible to finish the game but at least make it so our encounters are different because of it. If I was able to kill a dragon easily with ice magic on my first playthrough of a game it should be far more difficult to take down next time if I opted for a melee class. perhaps instead of nuking it with magic I need to fire balistas like in Dragon Age.

It's not that we want every boss to punish the player for their specific choices but some bosses should be easier and some should be more difficult based on choices as well.

Sure like you said, DnD has it so all classes can contribute but isn't one class going to contribute more to a given situation than others? That should translate to video games as well.

One class may contribute more, but one class making things slightly easier doesn't mean that the encounter should otherwise be punishing. The encounter is simply different.

If a character can be taken down with a rocket to the face, you should also be able to talk them out of it. Sure, the "talk them out of it" option might require more thinking, but it requires a *different* set of skills, not necessarily more difficult ones.

The problem specific to the Alpha Protocol school of design is that the dialogue choices don't correspond particularly well to the events in-game. Most of the time, the actions you need to take in the game don't even correspond particularly well to more than one path. If the designers want you to blow a door down, then you'll damn well blow it down and like it, since they won't have given you any other options.

Anyone who wants to see an effective use of character-skill-based gameplay should look at the QFG/Hero's Quest series. Every puzzle had a solution which used each class's skills, and each solution was equally challenging, designed for the people more likely to pick a particular class.

Mass Effect and ME2, while not being nearly as deep, also embrace this: Every class has skills which are useful in a fight against any enemy. While ME2 places a clear emphasis on combat (the gameplay direction they decided to move in), each player can advance the story in a way that is meaningful to them.

The point is that in a game, YOU are the (anti-?)Hero. The game world is supposed to bend and shape in a way that ensures that the Hero can overcome all obstacles, no matter what type of Hero you decide to play. Yes, some challenges are more difficult than others. That doesn't mean that a challenge should be nearly insurmountable for one type of Hero; instead, EVERY challenge should be as close in difficulty as possible across all types of Hero.

Back to the basic RPG example: while a strong Hero might fell a tree to cross a chasm, an intelligent Hero might build a rope bridge. The intelligent Hero might have difficulty felling a tree and tossing it across the gap, but building the bridge should, in a gameplay sense, be no more taxing. Each requires a raw material (tree, rope), a skill (strength, intelligence), and some luck (skill checks).

When it comes to a fight, of course, each Hero will need to take a different tactical approach, but it should be just as challenging for an intelligent Hero to win a fight at a distance as it is for a strong Hero to win a brawl.

 

[Helmutye]

Boy, he's gonna keep beating the "RPGs should be about universal choice for the player, about giving him unlimited options and letting him affect the world however he like" drum until people start marching, won't he?

In this case, though, it's bullshit.

Some skills are legitimately less useful than others. Some fights are unavoidable, and sometimes you have to use gunplay rather than stealth skills. If part of the "awesome-life simulation" aspect of an RPG is that you can make your character however you like, there's some realism in that if you chose to devote your energy to learning useless skills, you get bum-raped.

That's what I'm gonna call realism. If I decide to spend my time learning to be an expert in WoW playing, rather than an expert in Shotokan, those times when the latter would be useful, I'm getting my ass kicked. The irony of the Yahtzee-style RPG player (who wants to be able to do whatever he wants, and let his inner id run wild) is that they don't want any responsibility for what happens. Sure, they want the "this is so badassed" responsibility, but not the real "I pissed off all of my allies, and now I'm fucked" responsibility, or the "I faffed around for too long, and now the evil empire has won" responsibility, or even the "I decided to specialize in stealth, so I can't fight encounters where I have to fight straight-up". If RPGs are meant to be anything other than a simple succession of times when the player gets to feel awesome beating a boss only slightly more wimpy than he is, that's fine. But if RPGs are meant to actually be about role-playing, then there are going to be times when the suave, effete, faceman isn't going to be able to win in a shootout.

It's like how in most games the big bruiser with the massive guns, and even bigger firearms, isn't going to be able to pull off good social interaction.

Would it be nice if there were similar social "bosses" in such games, where you have to really work ten-times as hard at winning if you put your skills exclusively into gunplay? Absolutely, but no game should exist wherein you can "win" using any given "build", because that's not how life (even awesome, sci-fi, life) works.

I think this is a very strange attitude to take. If a skill has no legitimate use in a game, or if only certain skills allow you to succeed, then it should not be an option for you to take the useless skills or avoid having the indispensable skills. It just clutters the game and makes it frustrating, and frustrating is not the kind of realism that people seek in games, unless they are gluttons for punishment or very, very stupid. I think we all experience enough frustration and setbacks in real life--is it too much to expect games to provide an escape from that?

If you think of a game as its own little world, then there would have to be a reason for the possible skills to exist in that world, otherwise nobody would have invented them. It would have to be possible for people to succeed with those skills, or they wouldn't exist. If there was a world where your survival depended solely on your ability to swing a sword, then everybody would spend all their time learning to swing a sword. The skill 'Left-Handed Doily Making' would not exist. But if it were possible in this world to become a master Doily Maker, earn money by doing so, and hire security guards to do your swordfighting for you, then Doily Making might be a skill that would exist.

The problem we face these days is that games always attempt to fool the player into thinking the world is bigger and more detailed than it really is. Despite all the fancy graphics and massive hardware requirements, it is pretty rare to find a game where you can even break windows or open certain doors to get to areas of the map that you can see but that don't really exist. Just because there's something that looks like a sky above you doesn't mean you can go into space--it's just an illusion. In reality, that is a sky-textured ceiling set just high enough so that you shouldn't be able to bump into it (though there are plenty of games where you can actually "bump into the sky" if you manage to get somewhere the designers didn't think of). The real world doesn't have these kind of limitations. It is true that, in the real world, there are situations where certain skills aren't helpful, but in the real world you also have the freedom to try approaches that may take you through certain doors or windows, or up into the sky. If you lose total freedom to wander the world, it is only fair to make the skills you can choose relevant to the areas you can go to. And yes, I know that life isn't always fair. But as I said earlier, games are supposed to be a fun and interesting departure from our normal lives.

And as far as consequences go, it is strange to hear someone say that people who want to pursue non-violent alternatives need to understand consequences! Violence is generally not a good option to take in the real world because there are lots of consequences for it--getting arrested, getting killed by the relatives of whoever you beat up or kill, not having any friends because you're a jerk, etc. But in most video games, the usual consequences for violence are removed--rarely is there any real reason why you can't just kill your way through the world. Most games are in fact little more than that. If there's no reason not to kill somebody, and you can quickly become better than anyone else at killing, then violence and combat become the best way to get through life. No matter what other skill options are available, violence is always a legitimate way to get through an entire game. Isn't that weird? Isn't it weird to respond to a complaint that there are forced violent episodes in a game that supposedly advertises free choice with the statement that someone trying to get through it non-violently doesn't understand consequences? I just think it would be interesting to have a game where violence actually carries meaningful negative consequences in a game, rather than saying that the other skills need to have negative consequences.

Like the real world, there are many more possibilities to explore once we agree that violence is not the ultimate power.

 

[RvLeshrac]

Depends upon your own definitions. I find conquering the soul crushing difficulties of Mass Effect 2, Demon's Souls and Persona on Hard to be quite enjoyable. Sure I die a lot but the feeling of conquering these near impossible challenges far outweighs any sense of anger or frustration I had before. Gamers are getting complacent with easier games and I find that kind of sad. There are few that would even attempt to conquer games as difficult as Super Ghouls and Ghosts in this day and age. I think developers should go in the direction of From Software. make difficulty a draw like they did with Demon's Souls. Victory is always sweeter when it's harder to achieve.

Oh, and I agree with this. I just don't agree that it should be applied to every single game ever released.

I enjoyed playing through Prinny. I love a good bullet-hell shmup. They're exhausting, however, and sometimes I want to play something sane.

 

[thepj]

Snip.

But would it be fun?

Depends upon your own definitions. I find conquering the soul crushing difficulties of Mass Effect 2, Demon's Souls and Persona on Hard to be quite enjoyable. Sure I die a lot but the feeling of conquering these near impossible challenges far outweighs any sense of anger or frustration I had before. Gamers are getting complacent with easier games and I find that kind of sad. There are few that would even attempt to conquer games as difficult as Super Ghouls and Ghosts in this day and age. I think developers should go in the direction of From Software. make difficulty a draw like they did with Demon's Souls. Victory is always sweeter when it's harder to achieve.

I must agree with you there, however i don't beleive that deliberately setting out to make a difficult game is the way to go, that's why difficulty levels were invented. Having said that games that are too easy are no fun, sometimes easy modes or areas are just incredibly carthatic though, running through a building blowing everyone into tiny shreddy bits is possibly one of the best ways to blow off steam ever.

 

[Seldon2639]

I think this is a very strange attitude to take. If a skill has no legitimate use in a game, or if only certain skills allow you to succeed, then it should not be an option for you to take the useless skills or avoid having the indispensable skills. It just clutters the game and makes it frustrating, and frustrating is not the kind of realism that people seek in games, unless they are gluttons for punishment or very, very stupid. I think we all experience enough frustration and setbacks in real life--is it too much to expect games to provide an escape from that?

As I said, if the point of any RPG is simply to provide that sort of escape, and allow you to beat enemies slightly less powerful than you over and over again, that's fine. But then it's also very shallow. I'm not saying that we should be allowed to take "useless" skills (nor do I believe skills should be "bought" with points, I'm a fan of "the more you use it, the better you get" mechanics), but the reality is that if I spend hours a day playing WoW, I'll get good at WoW. What that skill won't do is help me defend myself from a mugger

It's games as pure escapism versus games as something deeper. If I want choice, I want the choices to mean something. Choices can't have meaning if they can't fuck you over.

If you think of a game as its own little world, then there would have to be a reason for the possible skills to exist in that world, otherwise nobody would have invented them. It would have to be possible for people to succeed with those skills, or they wouldn't exist. If there was a world where your survival depended solely on your ability to swing a sword, then everybody would spend all their time learning to swing a sword. The skill 'Left-Handed Doily Making' would not exist. But if it were possible in this world to become a master Doily Maker, earn money by doing so, and hire security guards to do your swordfighting for you, then Doily Making might be a skill that would exist.

Exactly. And you could master your skill in horseback riding by faffing about. Or become a master horseshoe player. But neither of those skills helps you fight battles or defeat enemies. Choices in games must have consequence. If I want to spend my time stealthing about and stealing money, that's great. But it should also mean that I don't get to be a big, brutish, tough-guy. If my choices are "badassed action hero, who happens to be stealthy" or "badassed action hero who happens to be attractive", I'm still the same guy either way.

The problem we face these days is that games always attempt to fool the player into thinking the world is bigger and more detailed than it really is. Despite all the fancy graphics and massive hardware requirements, it is pretty rare to find a game where you can even break windows or open certain doors to get to areas of the map that you can see but that don't really exist. Just because there's something that looks like a sky above you doesn't mean you can go into space--it's just an illusion. In reality, that is a sky-textured ceiling set just high enough so that you shouldn't be able to bump into it (though there are plenty of games where you can actually "bump into the sky" if you manage to get somewhere the designers didn't think of). The real world doesn't have these kind of limitations. It is true that, in the real world, there are situations where certain skills aren't helpful, but in the real world you also have the freedom to try approaches that may take you through certain doors or windows, or up into the sky. If you lose total freedom to wander the world, it is only fair to make the skills you can choose relevant to the areas you can go to. And yes, I know that life isn't always fair. But as I said earlier, games are supposed to be a fun and interesting departure from our normal lives.

Yes, the extent to which the game limits us should limit our skilsl. But that's not what's going on. Instead you have people (Yahtzee) insisting on complete creative control over a character, but who doesn't want to suffer the possible bad results of his choices. He figured stealth would be a good way to be a spy, so do lots of actual spies. But, if those spies don't also train in gunplay, they'll get shot up. It's more realistic if you can be punished for failing to properly plan for contingencies.

But, especially in games with a lot of faffing about, it seems only reasonable that you can spend your time learning useless skills, or spend so much time the evil empire wins, ect. The more freedom we have in games, the more opportunities should exist for us to screw ourselves over completely.

And as far as consequences go, it is strange to hear someone say that people who want to pursue non-violent alternatives need to understand consequences! Violence is generally not a good option to take in the real world because there are lots of consequences for it--getting arrested, getting killed by the relatives of whoever you beat up or kill, not having any friends because you're a jerk, etc. But in most video games, the usual consequences for violence are removed--rarely is there any real reason why you can't just kill your way through the world. Most games are in fact little more than that. If there's no reason not to kill somebody, and you can quickly become better than anyone else at killing, then violence and combat become the best way to get through life. No matter what other skill options are available, violence is always a legitimate way to get through an entire game. Isn't that weird? Isn't it weird to respond to a complaint that there are forced violent episodes in a game that supposedly advertises free choice with the statement that someone trying to get through it non-violently doesn't understand consequences? I just think it would be interesting to have a game where violence actually carries meaningful negative consequences in a game, rather than saying that the other skills need to have negative consequences.

Like the real world, there are many more possibilities to explore once we agree that violence is not the ultimate power.

That's not the point, though, because nothing you do ever has really bad consequences in games. What I want is for everything to have real consequences. If I kill an innocent bystander, maybe I get arrested (for long enough that I miss some crucial part of the game, making it more difficult to proceed), maybe my friends abandon me for being such a bastard. The problem is that the games are giving us more and more choice, with less and less responsibility.

 

[RvLeshrac]

I think this is a very strange attitude to take. If a skill has no legitimate use in a game, or if only certain skills allow you to succeed, then it should not be an option for you to take the useless skills or avoid having the indispensable skills. It just clutters the game and makes it frustrating, and frustrating is not the kind of realism that people seek in games, unless they are gluttons for punishment or very, very stupid. I think we all experience enough frustration and setbacks in real life--is it too much to expect games to provide an escape from that?

If you think of a game as its own little world, then there would have to be a reason for the possible skills to exist in that world, otherwise nobody would have invented them. It would have to be possible for people to succeed with those skills, or they wouldn't exist. If there was a world where your survival depended solely on your ability to swing a sword, then everybody would spend all their time learning to swing a sword. The skill 'Left-Handed Doily Making' would not exist. But if it were possible in this world to become a master Doily Maker, earn money by doing so, and hire security guards to do your swordfighting for you, then Doily Making might be a skill that would exist.

The problem we face these days is that games always attempt to fool the player into thinking the world is bigger and more detailed than it really is. Despite all the fancy graphics and massive hardware requirements, it is pretty rare to find a game where you can even break windows or open certain doors to get to areas of the map that you can see but that don't really exist. Just because there's something that looks like a sky above you doesn't mean you can go into space--it's just an illusion. In reality, that is a sky-textured ceiling set just high enough so that you shouldn't be able to bump into it (though there are plenty of games where you can actually "bump into the sky" if you manage to get somewhere the designers didn't think of). The real world doesn't have these kind of limitations. It is true that, in the real world, there are situations where certain skills aren't helpful, but in the real world you also have the freedom to try approaches that may take you through certain doors or windows, or up into the sky. If you lose total freedom to wander the world, it is only fair to make the skills you can choose relevant to the areas you can go to. And yes, I know that life isn't always fair. But as I said earlier, games are supposed to be a fun and interesting departure from our normal lives.

And as far as consequences go, it is strange to hear someone say that people who want to pursue non-violent alternatives need to understand consequences! Violence is generally not a good option to take in the real world because there are lots of consequences for it--getting arrested, getting killed by the relatives of whoever you beat up or kill, not having any friends because you're a jerk, etc. But in most video games, the usual consequences for violence are removed--rarely is there any real reason why you can't just kill your way through the world. Most games are in fact little more than that. If there's no reason not to kill somebody, and you can quickly become better than anyone else at killing, then violence and combat become the best way to get through life. No matter what other skill options are available, violence is always a legitimate way to get through an entire game. Isn't that weird? Isn't it weird to respond to a complaint that there are forced violent episodes in a game that supposedly advertises free choice with the statement that someone trying to get through it non-violently doesn't understand consequences? I just think it would be interesting to have a game where violence actually carries meaningful negative consequences in a game, rather than saying that the other skills need to have negative consequences.

Like the real world, there are many more possibilities to explore once we agree that violence is not the ultimate power.

This is an extreme take on what I'm getting at, but there are fantastic points here.

The only games that have done "evil" properly have really been Bioware RPGs. You can be a complete dick, but it makes the game very, very difficult to finish. Why do I accept that as valid, when I've already made the "one type of character shouldn't be demonstrably better" argument? Because proceeding as Evil assumes you're generally taking the substantially easier way out of every situation, and this is merely delayed challenge, as opposed to artificially-induced challenge.

Sure, you killed all the guardians of the temple and stole a +50 Sword of Asskickery, but if you hadn't, they'd be assisting you against the boss. Unlike the "illusion of choice" that makes certain skills useless without warning, there's rarely no indication that being an asshat is unwise.

 

[Cameron Sours]

Thank goodness I'm not wearing a shirt, so I know he's not talking to me.

 

[lijenstina]

Yes, you, in the stupid shirt. Sort yourself out, for god's sake. And buy nicer clothes.

... And my book.

 

[Tomster595]

Ok, good points but I was actually kinda more interested in your mini rant about how many RPG's don't really let you play how you want.

 

[RvLeshrac]

Yes, the extent to which the game limits us should limit our skilsl. But that's not what's going on. Instead you have people (Yahtzee) insisting on complete creative control over a character, but who doesn't want to suffer the possible bad results of his choices. He figured stealth would be a good way to be a spy, so do lots of actual spies. But, if those spies don't also train in gunplay, they'll get shot up. It's more realistic if you can be punished for failing to properly plan for contingencies.

Yahtzee's point is that the game makes you choose between Stealth and Gunplay, with no real balance. You can't be someone who is sneaky and a good shot, despite the fact that weapons training hardly takes up a particularly large amount of time. Several hours a week on the range is more than enough to develop excellent marksmanship.

There are penalties in Alpha Protocol if you choose to play as anything *EXCEPT* a full-on run-and-gun badass. That's the issue. You can simply pummel most of the people you meet, be an utter dick, and you're basically pressing the Win button. The only reason to employ anything other than combat skills is if you're a masochist. So why, then, do they bother allowing players a choice? Because they know that "choice" sells games.

If Alpha Protocol was advertised as being an action-based RPG a la Fallout 3, people would be less irritated at the false choices presented. As it is, however, they advertised Alpha Protocol as Elder Scrolls with spies.

 

[JimJamJahar]

I actually commented on Yahtzee's Alpha Protocol review and I remember that the one thing I mentioned that pissed me off most is the boss fights. I want an RPG to actually allow me to play my role, including during combat (but they did make role-playing and choices in dialogue work very well).

 

[Cameron Sours]

So, in general, a game is a thing you can do and have fun. Inside of that game there are things you can do and have fun, and generally a main story line to complete. Skills have to encompass both of those things, that is to be fun and help you complete the main story line. The Elder Scrolls (and most online RPGs) do this by letting you develop 1 or more killing skills and several helper skills (eg Potions). There is no false choice because you know you will have to develop a killing skill, and the others are there to only help.

Game designers need to make clear what skills will be REQUIRED to complete the game. Then somehow they need to stop marketing from false advertising.

 

[Helmutye]

As I said, if the point of any RPG is simply to provide that sort of escape, and allow you to beat enemies slightly less powerful than you over and over again, that's fine. But then it's also very shallow. I'm not saying that we should be allowed to take "useless" skills (nor do I believe skills should be "bought" with points, I'm a fan of "the more you use it, the better you get" mechanics), but the reality is that if I spend hours a day playing WoW, I'll get good at WoW. What that skill won't do is help me defend myself from a mugger

It's games as pure escapism versus games as something deeper. If I want choice, I want the choices to mean something. Choices can't have meaning if they can't fuck you over.

Choices can most certainly have meaning even if they can't fuck you over! Not everything is about either success or failure. The way something is achieved is very important, almost more important than whether you succeed or fail. The means tells you who you really are. If your goal is to make a million dollars, it matters a great deal how you go about doing that--a person who invents and markets a new medical tool is very different than a person who contract kills for a living. Even if the contract killer succeeds and is never caught, there is a meaningful difference between them. But in most games you either win or lose. Some games try to get tricky and give you a "good ending" or a "bad ending," but the game is still more about getting to the end rather than choosing how you get to the end. A game that is nothing but success or failure is the game that is shallow.

Escape from life doesn't mean I want a meaningless ego boost. It means I want to explore ways of thinking and acting that I don't get to in my normal life. In my normal life I am an adult struggling to live up to the responsibilities of adulthood in the world today. But in a game I can be a cold, ruthless killer, or a daring spy, or an incredible acrobat, or any number of people that I will never be but are nonetheless interesting to get into the mindset of. It is fun to try on other personas. But a game that claims to offer you choices of how you want to tackle a problem, and then makes certain choices useless for dealing with the challenges you are forced to confront, is not deep. That is not responsibility.

And yes, the WoW playing skill may not help you against a mugger. But getting mugged is also not necessarily the end of your life. You are not forced to defeat the mugger in order to continue with your life. If you cannot defend yourself, you may be forced to hand over your wallet. But you could then conceivably use your WoW playing skill to farm for gold, sell it online, and make back the money the mugger stole from you. Perhaps in playing WoW you have made contacts around the world who can assist you. If you play WoW, there is a much greater chance that you will be inside most of the time and therefore your chance of a mugger encounter will be lower. There are still ways to get through life without the skill required to defeat the mugger.

There are consequences for certain skill sets, yes. But making a game impossible to complete with certain skill sets is not a consequence--you just start over and pick the "right" skills. In my opinion, the real consequences are the choices that define your personal story through the game.

 

[Mr. Gency]

For your information, I do have nice clothes.

[sub]I just wear them sparingly.[/sub]

 

[bradleyed]

ha! joke's on you. i'm not wearing a shirt. ha!
better get back to work now...

 

[LordWalter]

Ah...damn. I Am NOT part of this problem, man. So what if I was reading this in a custom T-shirt that just has the phrase "I am not a Cyborg" written on it.

=[ LEAVE ME ALONE.