The final episode of Games Britannia was actually quite lacklustre, although I can't put my finger on exactly why. I do find Rockstar's history to be interesting and important as well as the development of Elite to be fundamental to some of the best genre games we have today.
The episode begins with more talk on the influence Dungeons & Dragons has had on the gaming world in general. This can be very clearly seen in a huge number of computer games, ranging from the direct D&D rules games such as Baldur's Gate and Knights of the Old Republic to the 'inspired by D&D campaigns' games such as Everquest and the Elder Scrolls series (although Elder Scrolls may have been a different ruleset, it was definitely a tabletop RPG campaign to begin with). The presenter, Benjamin Woolley, takes part in a very typical D&D game complete with wargaming miniatures and a battlemap, although this isn't discussed in any great detail.
The episode continues on with highly influential British games such as Elite, which has since paved the way for many more open-world games, ranging from the directly influenced such as X3 and the less obviously (but still inspired by) games such as Pirates of the Caribbean (SeaDogs 2).
Black & White (and it's predecessor Populous) is also mentioned as being one of the first of the 'God games' in which you must micromanage people as if you were a god of either benevolence or malevolence (entirely your choice, although Peter Molyneux's grand claims of morality based games usually end up having fairly simplistic mechanics after a large amount of hype and speculation).
Wipeout, Tomb Raider and Grand Theft Auto get a lot of good mention for their various influences into the console gaming world, with Wipeout being revolutionary in terms of soundtrack, visuals and smooth controls. Tomb Raider was one of the first console games to feature a player character with some amount of personality so this gets a mention, too. Finally Grand Theft Auto sent sandbox gaming in a far less serious direction than Elite originally had it. Consequences in Grand Theft Auto are negligible and therefore promotes a reckless style of gameplay, where if you find yourself bored in the middle of playing you can happily go on a rampage and mess around with the mechanics to your heart's desire. This freeform and carefree gameplay has engaged people to such an extent that it got the general media's attention and various anti-game lobbyists decided it was the cause of reprehensible behaviour of youths the world over. The games also featured well-written stories which made fun of America in not so subtle ways while simultaneously celebrating American culture. This presumably translated well in America as it has quickly become one of the biggest selling games of our generation.
Ultimately this episode was interesting, but as I had already discovered much of the information from my own interest in game history I found the episode a little stale and uninteresting. I still found the series to be very informative however, and there was a lot to take away from it.
No comments:
Post a Comment