Busy Weekend

Due to the fact that I didn’t write yesterday I decided to write this notification as a post. PB has requested one session on Friday as well as a request for an nightly activity. But as he himself already knew I almost decided to actually go to my parents that evening. After some consideration and due to I have been home today sick I’d decided that there will be no evening activity tomorrow. As for the session, I’m not sure yet. I’ve kind of promised to help Robert out with something…

Saturday on the other hand should be a possible day to play a brief session. Depending on if I can take the car to Boden or not there will be possible to play a session during the morning for one of you. Even if both you and I decide not to have a session then there will probably be room for two sessions on Sunday. One here and the other in Finkan, the one who will have the session in Finkan will have to accompany me to the meeting too. This though is only a preliminary thought, who knows what status I might be in Sunday morning?

Well, well… I’ve finished The Weel of Time PC-game now. It wasn’t bad although it wasn’t good either. Games like this is actually perfect length for me. New games have a tendency to become extremely boring and circular or repetitive, take The Witcher for one example. Okies, they had a lot of interesting stuff in the game that made it a bit challenging but in the end the game is too long to be build in that way. If a game should be long then it needs something to pull it forward all the time and something new almost all the time.

What makes most new games lose is two things. One, they never seem to end because they give too much freedom and two, the freedom they give isn’t freedom even though they go to extreme lengths to try and make it look like it. This is what makes MMORPG seem like something interesting in the beginning although they are just an endless circle of doing the same thing. In The Witcher, and many other games you need to level up and kill things to get further. What they lack is renewal and push, which many games lack today.

PB thinks that The Witcher is a short game, well I can understand how he sees it, but then again he can actually maintain focus of a game that is about killing endless monsters and mobs over and over again until you’ve reached level 60-ish. Well, if you don’t do any of the side quests it is a short game, but an extremely dull one too. After about the third chapter you have had a chance to do almost everything in the game. Now it’s up to plot and choices, obvious choices. Still most games are build up like this, and most gaymers of the new age are satisfied with this shallow uncreative way of gaming.

If a game should be build up like this, it should have a higher pace and be more interactive and faster to move forward. This is very hard thing to do if you at the same time want to have a game that is “free”. Most quests in all RPG’s today are like, kill someone there, or get this there or something very linear. Due to the fact that this is the only way to make an interesting thing that isn’t too short this becomes very tiresome in the end. But when the game is based solely on this, because the Witcher is, then it’s plainly annoying. You need to level up enough before you are able to fight a monster in the story.

Well, some games require thinking all the way through and aren’t a short game at all. Games like Myst, or similar games, actually give you all the means at the beginning and where everything is based on your skill and patience as player. These games are build upon other things but often physical and technical mechanisms, it often has a variety of the same problem and even after you think you’ve learned how to use something it needs of you to use it in a complete different way. These kinds of games can easily bore or make one so frustrated that you actually stop playing. This is often because you can’t think outside of the box or reverse your thinking.

Well enough about games, I will now return to some anime then if the caffeine have kicked in I will write a short story.

Best regards,
Herid Fel