The Melancholy of Lost Civilizations in RPGs

Gamasutra recently reported on a presentation by veteran RPG designer Ken Rolston, in which he noted that world-building often means creating objects and settings from days gone by:

Often, that melancholy comes when exploring the remains of long-dead civilizations, seemingly something of a preoccupation of Rolston, and one that frequently makes its way into his games by way of in-game artifacts.

"Melancholy, I think, is the underlying tone in most of the role-playing games I've done," Rolston said, adding, "I know games are all about fun, but there's an underlying tone I'm always trying to speak to."

That aspect of RPGs never struck me before... but how appropriate that a sense of melancholy is consciously integrated into the design of most RPGs!

By its nature, the typical RPG conventionally contains several things, among which are a relatively well-developed world and characters roaming that world killing each other. Well, what does it say about these worlds that it's considered normal for people to go around killing each other without being clapped in irons immediately as a danger to society?

As worlds in which the player character can run around killing people, that naturally suggests some kind of breakdown of order. This makes it almost inevitable that the created history of the world of a computer-based roleplaying game must include lost civilizations, in which a Golden Age of the past was more civilized than the Hobbesian present.

It's virtually commonplace to see cultural and architectural fragments of former civilizations in a fantasy milieu. Michael Moorcock's Elric, last emperor of languid Melniboné, is regularly described as melancholic. In computer RPGs, there were the Ayleid Empire of The Elder Scrolls and the Tevinter Imperium of BioWare's new Dragon Age. But a more aesthetically advanced past is almost always part of other well-developed RPG settings as well -- the mythically idyllic pre-invasion past of the Fallout series, for example, or the Republic before Palpatine corrupted it, or the pre-catastrophe world before The Computer took over Alpha Complex in Paranoia (another game Ken Rolston worked on).

In such worlds, where you can't swing a sword or fire a bullet without hitting some burnt-out ruin, any character capable of thinking beyond moment-to-moment survival must feel some sense of melancholy for a life that might have been. It's a natural way of lending some emotional depth to what otherwise could have been a simple action-oriented killfest.

Consider the choices and placement of objects in Bethesda's Fallout 3. The use of artifacts in Fallout 3 are a graduate-level course in how the objects placed in a gameworld can define the narrative of that world.

Fallout 3 was filled with what might be called "microstories." Open a door to a bathroom and see a skeleton in a bathtub, surrounded by empty bottles of booze and a pistol. Look into a small bedroom and find an array of children's toys, seemingly abandoned in the moment of play. Peer into a closet in a tunnel and discover a rat's-nest of useful items guarded by a lone teddy bear. (And let's not forget the "plunger room" or the Rube Goldberg-style trapped grocery store....)

In every place where people lived, there are artifacts posed in ways that tell a small story of the moments just before The Big One... or the grim and hopeless days after. I can't imagine even the most hardcore gamer, who cares only for how many Super Mutants he can kill, being insensitive to the pathos of the little stories and the overall sense of lives meaninglessly snuffed out that they tell.

Is that "fun" in and of itself? I suppose not. "Experience feelings of loss!" will probably never be part of the advertising materials for a game. But did the care that went into telling those sad microstories make Fallout 3 more memorable -- more fun -- for me?

Absolutely yes. More generally, I would say they contributed to making Fallout 3 a more satisfying game for many gamers.

But should that sense of melancholy be a part of every RPG with aspirations of worldiness?

The question for RPG designers is, do they want to continue to create worlds in which emotional heft is supplied by an elegiac regret over the remnants of lost civilizations?

Or is it possible to build a deep RPG world that includes all the lethal conflict that gamers seem to want, but that takes its emotional depth from some place other than comparison to "a more civilized age?"

A Comparison of Oblivion and Two Worlds: Exploration RPGs

I enjoyed both Oblivion and Two Worlds. In fact, I've had more fun in both of them than I've had in a number of other recent games.

That's actually the first point to make: for all their differences, Oblivion and Two Worlds are much more similar to each other than either is to other games. In both of them, you can spend 40-100 hours wandering around exploring. I happen to really enjoy exploring, so I'm already predisposed to like both of these games. Fortunately, despite the flaws of each game, both of them were rich enough and polished enough to keep me exploring.

I liked Oblivion better for letting me create my own skill template. I don't mind the occasional swordplay, so I could handle Two Worlds just fine, but the stealth-mage character I was able to develop in Oblivion fit my preferred playstyle a lot better.

The downside was that this build was perhaps too effective! Combining the 6x backstab modifier with fully-leveled-up magic (including an easily-enchanted dagger that does 100 Health damage) meant that pretty much everything became a one-shot-kill. While that kind of power is initially satisfying, it eventually gets boring. If the rest of Oblivion weren't interesting, the high-level combat would not be a reason to keep playing the game.

Combat in Two Worlds, on the other hand, soon starts feeling like an exercise in mouse-clicking. But the "combine like items" minigame that allows you to create more and more powerful gear provides a rationale for continuing to engage in combat that Oblivion lacked. (It's not long before collecting glass and daedric loot in Oblivion is a waste of time unless you enjoy seeing how much money you can accumulate.)

Speaking of exploration, the world of Two Worlds is larger than that of Oblivion. There's just more world to explore than in Oblivion, which, although it seems large when you start the game, is soon revealed as quickly traveled even without the instant travel. (The question of instant travel is a wash, by the way; both of these games allow it. In fact, with the teleport stones, it's actually more powerful in Two Worlds.)

Another exploration note: the feature in Two Worlds of marking with a gray overlay any locations you haven't yet visited is nice. It's fun trying to expose every possible location. (Although as someone on the Two Worlds official forum said, it would have been nice if "percentage of world uncovered" had been a tracked statistic.) Trying to find all of the teleport nodes was an enjoyable subgame as well. Oblivion had something like this in its "find all the shrines" subgame, but with far fewer shrines in a smaller world, this subgame was over too soon.

It's hard to say which game's vistas I preferred more. Oblivion was extremely pretty, with the glow that everything seemed to have, while Two Worlds was a little more photorealistic. (I say "a little more"; it certainly wasn't photorealistic to the degree of, say, Crysis, which itself was only semi-photorealistic at a distance.) In both games I really enjoyed climbing up mountains to see if I could find a really picturesque view, and I was often successful in doing so in both games.

Weather was handled better in Oblivion. Rain in Oblivion was more visually appealing; it was more frequent in certain locations; and it was specific to locations. Rain in Two Worlds just seemed like a graphics effect; it happened anywhere (even in the desert -- ?!); and if it was raining anywhere in the world, it was raining everywhere in the world. And don't even get me started on how often the annoying fog showed up in Two Worlds.

On voice acting, I don't think it's fair or correct to say that the voice acting was "bad" in Oblivion. It wasn't bad; it was just that other than Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean, Bethesda only used about four people to do the dialogue of every NPC in the game. Even great vocal work couldn't overcome the repetitiveness of hearing the same voices over and over.

In certain cases, however, the voice work in Oblivion was superlative. Specifically, Sean Bean's voice work as Martin, especially in the later stages of the game, was award-worthy. As much as I enjoyed Armin Shimerman as Andrew Ryan in BioShock, and Ellen McLain as GLaDOS in Portal, Sean Bean's performance in Oblivion was outstanding.

Sadly, that points out the quality of the dialogue writing and voice acting for Two Worlds (at least the U.S. version that I played). It wasn't the worst ever, and as noted above there were some funny bits. But it wasn't Oblivion-quality.

It also wasn't Oblivion-quantity. While most the quests in Two Worlds weren't badly done (I can only think of a couple of gripes), it felt like Oblivion had more quests. (I say "felt like" because it's possible that the size of the world in Two Worlds made it feel like quest-givers were spaced farther apart.)

That said, NPCs in Oblivion were definitely much more fully realized -- with more lines of dialogue, they felt more like people. In both games, NPCs occasionally wandered off into the wilderness and got killed, which is interesting from a "state of the art in AI for computer RPGs" perspective, but Oblivion gets the nod for having more interesting NPCs. (It's worth noting that Bethesda has mentioned that it plans for Fallout 3 to have fewer NPCs than in Oblivion, but that each NPC will be more fully drawn as a character.)

Both Oblivion and Two Worlds featured a kind of alchemy subgame. I liked Oblivion's a bit better because plants respawned, and that feels more natural. Plants couldn't be allowed to respawn in Two Worlds because certain plants could be used to create permanent-effect potions (as opposed to the temporary-effect potions of Oblivion). After maxing out my Alchemy skill in Two Worlds, late in the game I was able to use all my permanent-effect resources to crank out potions that turned my character pretty much into an untouchable killing machine. So while collecting resources in Two Worlds was sort of fun, it paradoxically wasn't as much fun as Oblivion's less-powerful version of plant harvesting.

Finally, I found horses more trouble than they were worth in both of these games. They get killed too easily in Oblivion, and they're way too hard to steer in Two Worlds (sort of like the Mako vehicle in Mass Effect, only with a mind of its own).

...

There's more, but the point is that these two games balance each other pretty well. Neither is perfect, but both are enjoyable if you like long-playing combat/exploration RPGs.

No reason to avoid buying either game, especially at current prices. Both will provide hours of exploration fun.