Computer Game RPGs: Better or Worse Than The Real Thing?

Ironically, this topic was brought up not long ago with some online friends I role-play with. Part of my own love and fixation on Computer RPGs was the fact that I could do them alone. I'm a solitary sort of person, and as much as I love gaming with my online and not-online friends, sometimes I just want to be sitting by myself and playing Baldur's Gate or the like. True, it's technically not really Role-Playing, but only has the trappings of it: one shapes his chosen's characters, training them in special skills and powers so that they can complete their objective and 'save the day'. After all, one can't truly interact with a computer the way you can with live people. And that's pretty much stayed the same, from Dungeon Master, to Wizardry, to Might and Magic, to TSR line of D+D computer games, all the way through to the present. However, I'd like to think that there have been a lot of strides in the last decade or so in the flavor of how RPG style videogames are presented, and how they are far less linear than before.

First of all, let me make clear that this is not true for all recent computer games. Diablo 2 may supposedly be an RPG computer game, but it makes no real aspirations to that fact. It is linear through out, but it is still a good game for all that. There are of course, those computer games who claim to such fame, but never reach that high. There are those that carry the title, but never pretend to be anything more than they really are: just because no-one expected 'The Mummy' to be an Oscar-winning movie, it was still fun within for what it was, a tongue in cheek action flick. But then there are those few diamonds in the coal pile of the recent past that give gamers hope for the future.

Fallout was the first of these. Don't quote me on this, but I'm almost positive that this was the first game the truly let you decide what kind of character you wanted to be: saintly, malevolent, or somewhere in between. Ironically, this game was originally supposed to be used with the GURPS system, but sadly negociations between Interplay and SJ Games fell through, so Black Isle, the game development team, ended up inventing their own gaming engine called S.P.E.C.I.A.L. (no SNL Church lady jokes, now. ;) Set on the back drop of a post-apocalyptic world, you took on the persona of a hero from a Vault of survivors from that nuclear conflict, sent out to retrieve a crucial piece of technology that would mean the difference between life and death for your fellow Vault Dwellers.

The game offered you a plethora of choices, first in terms of what kind of character you wanted to be. You could engineer yourself to be a gun-bunny (combat character), a sneak (thief-type character), or a diplomat, able to talk your way out of situations others would fight their way out of. As your character encountered NPCs on his journey, there was often multiple choices in terms of what conversations forks you wanted to follow, and what deeds you wanted to do as a result of these conversation forks. Do you want to take the job offered by the local constable, to go wear a wire to a conversation with the local crime boss, so you can provide evidence to have him arrested? Or do you want to play double-agent and double cross the constable for potential profit? Do you want to convince someone to do as you say though logic? Or do you just want to threaten him? The choice is completely yours!

This hands-on method of gaming was so popular that Black Isle ended up doing a sequel, Fallout 2, which provided an upgraded engine, but no real upgrades to the player-computer interaction. Since then, three D+D style RPG games have come out, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and Icewind Dale. While they were all a great deal of fun to play, set on the backdrop of the familiar world of Forgotten Realms, I would have to say that it took a bit of a step backwards in terms of favoring conflict over conversation to overcome obstacles. True, sometimes having a high intelligence score would provide more dialogue choices, but not as much as Fallout or it's successor. Planescape:Torment, however, was another story.

This too had a D+D based game system, but it blended it smoothly with the open ended interaction method of Fallout. Plus, in this game the main character was not restricted to one character class, able to go between Thief, Warrior, and Mage classes seamlessly, although you would have to eventually choose one of them to specialize in, lest your character be too weak to face later challenges. Myself, I eventually focused on being a Mage, because that meant pumping points into Intelligence and Wisdom, (and occsionally Charisma) which meant not only a lot more dialogue paths to choose from, but a far more expansive storyline. Hell, sometimes the most interesting ways of getting experience points was just sitting around and following dialogue paths with your fellow party members of all things! Moreover, it included the concept of your PC developing relationships, even romantic ones, with your NPC party members. This was such a popular concept that they included it in Baldur's Gate 2, although it was a little more scripted there, not allowing you to instigate conversations with your NPC partymembers, but to have then take place randomly during the game. And to top it all off, the plot itself was entracing and exciting, leading up to a final climax where you can actually win the game without a fight scene, but rather by defeating the final 'villain' through the results of conversation! It truly deserves the accolades it has received.

Having martialled all this evidence of the growing sophistication of RPG video games, however, my nemesis in this conversation still maintained that video games will never be as compelling as the real thing, simply because a computer, at this point in time, cannot duplicate the ingenuity an imagination of a human mind. All the possible paths that a character can take in a computer game are all proscribed to those which the programmers have made possible. And to this comment, I must regretfully agree. In an RPG with real people and a real GM, we're basically making up conversation paths as we go along, and the method we choose to solve a problem may not be the one the GM considered, but if he's a good GM, he'd flexible enough to work around that. Until (if) we are able to invent artificial sentience, computers will never be able to duplicate that kind of adapt-as-you-play method. Even the recent best-seller Morrowind, as wide and as expansive as it is, cannot cover all posibilities. In point of fact, one of the few places that Morrowind does not excel is in dialogue paths and NPC interaction, which is usually one of my favorite things about a game.

Still, one has to admit: when the programmers do their jobs well, it can be a heckuva compelling play nonetheless. After finishing Morrowind (which could take months, the game world is huge!), I'm thinking about doing Neverwinter Nights next, to get my Dialogue path fix, and see if the game is as good as it's rep...