3d 1st person RPGs suck.

Cafe Society
1

I am basing this opinion off of two pieces of excrebility that have left their stench on my computer:

Morrowind:

No! No no no! You do not have a god-awfully long unskippable way to make your character! And you put some frigging thought into the way the game is made! If you don’t play like a cheesemonkey, you get wacked down by wimpy bandits. If you do the merchant - money - skills progression until the cows come home, the game is too easy. There is no plot worth mentioning, it takes forever to get anywhere, and the world of the game… glass, ebony, and eggs are mined. Glass and ebony as gem-ish natural resources, and eggs as a supposedly viable food source.
NO! That doesn’t work!

Status: My computer, apparently recognizing the horror within it, made the CD get stuck and snapped a radial line in it. Good riddance to it.

The next horror to infect my computer:

Arx Fatalis:

Where to begin? The game starts with you the magical amnesiatic trapped in a dank cold place. Good start, there. However, your character is a total tool. In the One True Game Featuring A Magical Amnesiatic Waking Up In A Dank, Cold Place, you were only a tool if you wished to be a tool.

Next, the magic system. It’s rune-based, where the more runes you know, the more spells you can cast. Except you need to draw the runes on the screen yourself. Whenever you want a spell cast. Try that in combat sometime. Again, you spend forever wandering around from mundane location to mundane location, and the puzzles make no sense!

Look, designers, the 3d 1st-person interface sucks genetilia at conveying RPG-isms. The great action/adventure/RPG hybrid worked because you didn’t do stupid RPG things like taking a message from King Manderley to the Rebel Prince of the NSF, except in an Angelus-from-Buffy sense. So, if you’re going to create a world, and stick an avatar of ME in it, make it a not frigging-stupid world!!!

2

Final Fantasy VI?

3

I’m thinking Planescape: Torment

4

I’m betting on Planscape: Torment.

5

I just bought Morrowind, but I’m liking it so far. Except that I can’t kill the undead things when the ogreladynecromancer person wants me to go get a skull out of some ancestral tomb. And yes, it’s a fucking-too-far-way to walk there and there’s no mage guild in the nearby town. Does anyone know why I can’t touch the monsters there, by the way? My flaming-fire-shortsword-of-death doesn’t do jack!

Anyways, I agree that the walking can get really annoying, but I don’ t see what the rest of your complaints have to do with 3D 1st person, especially since Morrowind has 2 different views.

6

It doesn’t help that, AFAICT, Morrowind’s combat system totally blows.

7

I think he’s talking about Ultima Underworld, or whatever that game was.

I really liked Morrowind. Yeah, it gets easy eventually, no matter how you build your character, but it fits the backstory for your character to be so powerful, and even when I was very godlike there were a few times an enemy managed to kill me and I had to reload.

8

Um, there are roughly eighty-five zillion games where an amnesiac wakes up in a dank, cold place. It’s the oldest trick in the book.

None of the OPs complaints seem to be related to 3d/1st person at all. Myself, I love 3d/1st person for RPGs. If I’m supposed to be another character, I want to see the world through his eyes, not spend the whole game looking down on the top of his head or behind him at his ass.

9

I rather liked Arx Fatalis. Gave me a big rush of nostalgia for the original Ultima: Underworld (in which you did not play an amnesiac, but were the same old Avatar). I really liked the spell system. You do know that you can memorize spells ahead of time and cast them with a single keystroke, right? Just hold down shift after you finish tracing it in the air, and a little spell icon will appear on the lower left of your screen, which you can trigger by hiting the “1”, “2”, or “3” key, depending on how many spells you’ve memorized. Unfortunetly, you can only memorize three spells at a time. Still, there’s some good gameplay in there to tide the hard-core gamer over until the next big RPG. Like Morrowind.

Let me say that I was originally extremely skeptical of Morrowind. It’s the fifth in a series that has been uniformly awful. Daggerfall is one of the single worst CRPGs I’ve ever played. Oddly, Morrowind is one of the best. The graphics alone are worth the price of purchase. There is a deep and interesting storyline if you’re willing to do the work to uncover it… but there’s also a huge amount of gameplay if you decide to totally ignore the central plot. Yeah, a side effect of this is that it is too easy to accidentally walk into a fight that you won’t be able to handle for several more levels. A little caution and liberal use of the Quick Save key gets you right around that problem. I liked the freedom they gave you in character creation, although they should have had an easier, one-screen interface to make them, instead of the clunky tutorial-cum-character generator they have now. And unless you get the Tribunal expansion, the journal is totally worthless. Still, an excellent over-all game that keeps bringing me back, even though I’ve had it for months now.

Anyway, like Wumpus said, none of your complaints have anything to do with first-person perspective. To drive this point home, let’s list a few of the really outstanding RPGs that have employed a first person perspective:

Ultima Underworld 1 & 2
Deus Ex
Wizardry 6 through 8
Betrayal at Krondor
System Shock 1 & 2
Dungeon Master
Eye of the Beholder 1 & 2 (not so much 3)
Lands of Lore
Space Rogue (Kind of a cheat: 3-D space combat with Ultima-style top down RPG elements)

And that’s just PC games, and just off the top of my head.

10

Yeah, I’m still interested in Morrowind, even after playing it god knows how many hours. And I’ve still got a ton of stuff to do. It looks cool, of course (except for the character models – yeesh!), but I’m most impressed with how open-ended it is. I’ve played a little bit as an assassin-type character, a cleric-healer type, and a roll-your-own type (fighter/alchemist/dark magician) and each time was different, even when solving the same quests. I’m not sure what a “cheesemonkey” is, exactly; I haven’t tried that character combination.

And the main storyline is pretty involved, but the game has a great sense of your being dropped in a full world where your own storyline just happens to be playing out. Half the time I’ve spent in the game has been only tangentially related to the main quest.

Of course, I’m constantly driven to distraction at the very idea of an economy based on eggs and ebony, to the point where it ruins everything and I throw the CD case across the room in frustration. But somehow I still carry on…

11

Heh dont ever play any of the online rpgs then as they make morrowwind seemed focused and inear

Well If youve never been playing this type before it can be rather disconcerting as often there seems to be no plot to the game althouhg morrowind seems to be more advanced than the grandfather of this offshoot of the rp genere might and magic 2

But If there done right they can be better than the average console “lead you by the nose and bludegon every plot point possible” game
But the replay value is endless and intriguing as you cna make 50 diffrent characters …

But its a mater of personal taste ,

12

Mmm, Morrowind.

I don’t know how anyone can call it exrement. I think it is the greatest game of all time (yes, even better than Civ2). It’s amazingly open ended with a very compelling story.