Mass Effect RPG Series

[Rindis]

Sorry, I totally missed Ultima, Final Fantasy and Baldur's Gate. I was busy at the time playing Civ2, the Dune games, Starcraft/Brood Wars, and the original Deus Ex I think.

I've never done more than a partial play of Ultima III years afterwards, on that series. But I saw III and IV played at the time, so it's part of the definition of 'computer RPG' for me.

The Final Fantasy series wanders all over the place quality-wise, though even the good ones are often no great shakes engine-wise. However, Final Fantasy Tactics is unlike the others, centering around a great little tactical system, and an interesting, involved plot. It's currently available for PSP and iOS, and has one of my highest recommendations.

Baldur's Gate I generally liked but stopped on because it kept bugging over which disk was in the CD-drive while playing it LAN. Plot was okay, characters were good. Main system had the advantage of being based on a solid RPG engine, and the disadvantage of being based on AD&D.

Of course, all of this is to point up the fact that there's just no reason why 'RPG' should equal 'shooter'. An interesting thing that occurs to me now, is that all these examples are party-based RPGs, which seem to have gone away too.

So you never played the old KOTOR games? You don't know what you missed. The first one, especially was a masterpiece of storytelling and pure unadulterated Star Wars. The second one (The Sith Lords) was in some ways even better, though they sort of blew it at the end. It's also interesting to note that Sith Lords was subcontracted by Bioware to Obsidian, the same people who did Fallout New Vegas for Bethesda.

KOTOR came out in the middle of my decade away from computer gaming, and I've never been the biggest Star Wars fan. (I love the original movie, but Star Trek still gets first place in my heart universe-wise.) I knew of it, but by that time I had seen a few things in the 'expanding universe' that I hadn't cared for, so I had little interest in investigating further.

So you liked the Star Wars MMO? Although I didn't think it was dreadful, IMHO it was rather uninspired. As someone else on another forum noted, it was basically WoW with lightsabers. By level 28 I was totally bored and frustrated with the grind. And like a lot of MMO's, it had way, way too much instancing, to the point where it felt like a single-player game attached to a giant chatroom. At first I really liked the story, but even that got a bit tiresome after a while. In any event I lasted about three weeks then gave it the old heave ho.

I generally play MMOs as a great way of keeping in touch with some of my friends. That kept me going on WoW long after my interest waned, and even after they started taking the system in directions I didn't like. I consider TOR to be the first MMORPG I seen that is RPG first and MMO second, rather than the other way around. The system mostly plays it safe, though there are a few nice points, like the Smuggler class. Also, firefights can actually be kind of fun to watch from a distance, not something I've noticed elsewhere. At any rate, I'm generally enjoying the plot, and the actual writing is very often quite fun.