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Online Role Playing Games
http://the-real-way.com
Have you ever played an online role-playing game or, more exactly, have you played one in recent times? Thirty years ago, Tolkien's The Hobbit was all the rage on the Commodore 64.
It was a 'colossal' game in which the player took the role of Bilbo Baggins on his adventures which faithfully followed the book. It was a text-based adventure with a few static illustrations and everyone thought it was the bee's knees.
However, it is a joke compared with what is on offer today. The Hobbit would run on an eight-bit machine with 64 KB of RAM. Today, I have a moderate 64-bit computer with 2GB of RAM and that is not fast enough to play a game I downloaded yesterday. I downloaded the free version trial of Guild Wars, which is made up of 35,000+ files of about 2GB in size.
It is a far cry from 'The Hobbit' though. In Guild Wars, you may choose your character or avatar as it is properly known, decide on its height, skin colouration and other items, choose the angle you would like to view from at will and zoom in and out of the picture instantly. It is as much like 'The Hobbit' as an ocean liner is to a pedal boat'.
When you have selected your avatar, man or woman, you are released into the game, but the character of the avatar changes with actions that you take and missions, known as quests, that you complete. In other words, you get older and gain experience, which permits you to do other acts that you were previously unable to do.
As you advance through the game, or even as you wander aimlessly around, you will meet other avatars, some of which will be managed by the computer, but most of which will be controlled by other human game-players who could be living anywhere in the world, but who will at that moment be seated in front of their computer screen.
The setting of these games could be anywhere, but most are in some unstated mythical past. Castles, dungeons, dragons, royalty, sorcery, swords and the like are very common features of lots of the games, although some are set in outer space, some are fairly accurate historically and one or two are set it 'contemporary times'.
As you wend your way through the game, you will be presented with quests. Some of these quests you can accomplish on your own, but you will require help with others.
The help you need could be in the form of a tool, a weapon or an extra (magical) ability or it could be the help of a friend. it is up to you to find out how to do it.
Some games have a linear progression, meaning that you must complete task number one before moving on to number two, but more complicated games allow some quests to be accomplished 'out of sequence and yet others tailor the order or sort of quests to the avatar that you decide on right from the start.
Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with Mortal Kombat Controls. If you have an interest in gaming, please visit our web site now at Mortal Kombat 4.
Article submitted Friday, November 11, 2011 & read 122 times.
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