The Green Goblin Blog

I just LOVE this advert for Dungeons and Dragons. The picture looks very much like me playing Dungeon Siege 2 (night after night until 3am...). The expression is spot on.

To me, though, the computer-based RPGs are not really "RPGs" but I think I'm just showing my age. Take DS2, for example. I am playing the role of 4 characters in a game which has a lot of detail put into it - both in the graphics and the plot. And it is a level up from previous games (where the path through the story was totally linear) - there are a number of secondary sub-plots which you can follow up at any time (or not at all) while moving on the still-linear main story. The options, though, are very limited - computer-controlled characters have fixed verbal responses and you have only a couple (usually yes or no). Also, those characters that are not important to the plot do nothing apart from say the equivalent of "Hi" when you speak to them. So, in the end, it's as much like an RPG as Train Simulator.

You need a good AI for a computer-based RPG and that's as far away as SkyNet :-)