Are Games Too Big Or Am I Trying Too Hard?

The first RPGs I played were the original versions of Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy on the NES. These games had a lot to do and explore, but with a little dedication, you could see everything the game had to offer. In fact, that became a very reasonable goal. Even in RPGs on the PS1 and PS2, it was realistic for dedicated gamers to hunt down every boss, get every item and complete every side quest. Then came "Neverwinter Nights" on the PC.

I'm a looter. I like to pick up everything I can to either use or sell later. But in Neverwinter Nights, books on bookshelves really had a boatload of words in them! They were almost like... well, books! I couldn't really be expected to read all of this, could I? Are these books vital to the plot, somehow? What about this person I'm talking to? They're giving me a ton of conversation options! Are these clues? Is this the introduction of a side quest? No wait. I think they're just... talking to me.

Now, in the Bioware games "Dragon Age Origins" and "Mass Effect" (1 and 2), the addition of files and histories you can find along the way is staggering. When I first played Mass Effect, I was turned off by all of the reading. But when I gave it another try months later, I decided that I would just skip reading all the "files". I suspected that maybe I didn't really need to read all of those files to play the game successfully. Maybe they were just there for the people who WANT to read those kinds of things. Turns out I was right!

The development of this kind of detail and choice has thrown me for a bit of a loop in the last couple of years, and I've had to learn how to enjoy RPGs in a different way.

One game that may have been a victim of my slow learning curve is "Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion". The first time I tried it, I gave it about 3-5 hours of my time and then returned it. I don't remember exactly what my problem was. Maybe it just felt too big and open-ended and I felt like I was lacking direction. Maybe there were too many things to do, pick up, read or investigate. Or maybe I was just trying too hard.

So I'm strongly considering giving it another shot, applying my new "just do the things I want to do" approach to massive RPGs. Hopefully I'll discover the same gem of a game that so many others have been raving about for years!