Online Role Playing Games
Posted by Owen Jones in Uncategorized, tags: computers, entertainment, equipment, gaming, hardware, home improvement, home movies, internet, leisure, multimedia, other, technology, UncategorizedHave you ever played an online role-playing game or, more to the point, 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 ‘huge’ game in which the player took the part of Bilbo Baggins on his adventures which closely followed the book. It was a text-based adventure with a couple of static illustrations and everyone thought it was the bee’s knees.
However, it is a joke compared with what is on the market today. The Hobbit would play on an eight-bit machine with 64 KB of RAM. Today, I have a modest 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 long chalk from ‘The Hobbit’ though. In Guild Wars, you can choose your character or avatar as it is properly known, select its height, skin colouration and other items, decide on the angle you want to view from at will and zoom in and out of the image instantly. It is as much like ‘The Hobbit’ as an ocean liner is to a pedalo.
Once you have selected your avatar, man or woman, you are released into the game, but the character of the avatar alters with actions that you take and missions, called quests, that you conclude. In other words, you get older and acquire experience, which allows you to perform other things that you were previously unable to do.
As you progress through the game, or even as you wander without direction around, you will meet other avatars, some of which will be controlled 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 time be sitting in front of their computer screen.
The scenario of these games could be anywhere, but most are in some unstated mythical past. Castles, dungeons, dragons, royal family, sorcery, swords and such like are very frequent features of many of the games, although some are set in outer space, some are fairly accurate historically and one or two are set it ‘modern times’.
As you wend your way through the game, you will get presented with quests. Some of these quests you can accomplish on your own, but you will have to have help with others.
The help you need might be in the form of a tool, a weapon or an extra (magical) ability or it could be the assistance of a friend. it is up to you to find out how to do it.
Some games have a uni-directional progression, meaning that you must complete quest number one before moving on to number two, but more complicated games permit some quests to be accomplished ‘out of sequence and yet others tailor the order or sort of quests to the avatar that you opt for right from the start.
Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many topics, but is currently concerned with Mortal Kombat Controls. If you have an interest in gaming, please go over to our web site now at Mortal Kombat 4.
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