One Way Video Games Mimic Personal Preferences, But Not in the Way You Think

 

Yeah, it's a bit of a clickbaity title, and I'll own that.  Let's start off with some context first.

After buying Divine Divinity back on February 4th, I'd been playing it pretty regularly, a few hours every couple of days.  I'd almost cleared out the starting area map, which itself is pretty massive, encompassing a village of healers, an expanse of trees and rocks, farm lands, a castle, a monastery, a Dwarven village, another human settlement, an army encampment complete with multiple orc fronts, and a ruined village.  I'd also discovered a new map to the south, with an even larger open and heavily forested area that was beyond my level.  Then, to the north, I came to the city of Verdistis, and my play time almost immediately dropped off.  Then, a few days later, I found the entrance to a massive sewer system, and after my overly encumbered character came topside to sell my lootz, I stopped playing again.

That's when it really hit me.  I often don't like large cities in CRPGs the same way I don't gravitate towards large cities in real life.

Several years ago, in the Before Times, Conklederp and I went up to Vancouver, BC, to see her youngest brother when he was attending UBC.  We stayed at a hotel in downtown Vancouver, and I remember sitting with Conklederp during breakfast, talking about what we wanted to do that day.  We were kind of lost in that our usual activities centered around getting away from the city, usually to do some kind of hiking.  Since we only had the morning before meeting up with her family, we decided to walk around a section of downtown before walking back over to the University.  Before The Squire was born, if both of us had a free weekend, oftentimes we would head out to the Columbia Gorge to do a hike.  When friends would come in from out of town, we would suggest some places in town that felt like they were "must-see locations," but more often than not, we would also suggest the Gorge as a place to go.  We've also talked about when we'll take The Squire out to see Conklederp's family in Quebec, and we've both agreed that our ideal plan would be to fly into Montréal, then rent a car and drive two hours to a house her family has out by a lake and spend our whole vacation out there.  Skip the city altogether, just spend a week at the house next to a lake by ourselves and with her family; and I know it's not very eco-friendly of me to say, but I really hope the city/county has decided to start spraying again because those mosquitoes they got out there are something nasty.

I've talked with my younger sister, The Kid, frequently about Baldur's Gate, and the talk frequently leads to how much of the game we've played, but how few times we've actually beaten the game.  I've beaten it twice, I think, and The Kid has beaten it once.  We've agreed (yes?) that once the game leads you up to the city of Baldur's Gate, we begin to lose interest.  Part of that is due to in-city quests centered more around talking to one character than talking to another character, then doing a fetch-quest of sorts, and then turning in the quest, assuming you're not caught by the city guard.  Whereas dungeon quests are typically: Go to the dungeon, kill baddies, collect loot, kill the main dungeon bad guy, leave, turn in quest.  They're a lot more straightforward, and you're less likely to dead-end or fail a quest due to an incorrect dialogue choice.

Don't get me wrong, though, I enjoy conversations in video games, although at times I am worried that a wrong dialogue choice is going to close off chunks of the game, like in the Fallout series.  It's conversing in real life that gives me anxiety.  During character creation, apparently Conversations/Small Talk was my dump stat, and I've just never bothered to level it up.

I guess what I'm trying to say, the tl;dr if you will, now that we've already passed the 675 word mark, is that large cities in CRPGs stress me out and apparently make me lose motivation, the same way that large cities in real life (downtown Seattle, downtown Portland, downtown New York, the whole of London, the middle of San Francisco) stress me out; especially if I'm in a car and expected to park.  I'll leave big cities to people who can successfully perform small talk at parties and whose batteries recharge with schmoozing.  Cash me outside and all that.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental