![]() The story (when it finally begins to tie together plot threads) is relatively straightforward, but nonetheless interesting for it. where the story takes a back seat to the hacking and slashing). As game crimes go, keeping the player waiting ages for the story to kick off isn’t quite a capital offence, but it does smack of taking the expectations of your audience for granted, even if you are touting your game as an “action RPG” (i.e. ![]() Here, though, there’s a real risk that the player may simply lose patience and go off to play something else and that would be unfortunate, because once the story takes off, it really starts to soar. Both KotOR 2 and Planescape: Torment took a good eight hours or so to build any real sense of intrigue and immersion. ![]() Though given Obsidian’s track record – both in their current guise and their previous incarnation as Black Isle – perhaps it’s not really a surprise that Neverwinter Nights 2 is a slow starter. Yet because Never winter Nights 2 is an RPG, and because RPG players expect a campaign game of forty hours or more, somehow making you wait a quarter of that time for things to really get interesting is somehow considered (by developers) to be acceptable. Think about it: eight or ten hours is a longer time investment than you’d put into a lot of first-person shooters. So you can imagine my consternation while playing an RPG such as Neverwinter Nights 2, when it dares to make me wait over half a dozen hours before something really interesting happens. ![]() There is no defence against the torrent of bile that will be unleashed against you, and old age, infirmity or only having five items is not a sufficient excuse. ![]() And pray that you never take a small trolley through a “basket only” queue in a supermarket in my presence. If some poor hapless driver in front of me at a set of traffic lights takes five seconds too long to drop the clutch, such abuse will stream from my mouth that even on a rain-sodden, foggy day the air will turn decidedly blue. It has been observed that I am, quite possibly, the most impatient man in the entire universe. ![]()
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