It's Mine, All Mine!

I spend a lot of time playing games. Today I got to spend some time playing various games that I love. One of them is my shiny new toy and one of them is an old favorite.

The new game is called Kingdoms of Amalur. It is a fun roleplaying game set in massive open world. The story is interesting and captivating, but as an open world game, you spend a lot of time running around doing whatever you want. I love those types of games. I really feel that I get to play an actual character of my own devising. Sure, I may only have two to three dialogue options, but I feel I can shape my character by picking which quests I do and where I go.

My old favorite game is called Shadowrun. If you are familiar with video games, you may have heard of a game called Shadowrun, the one I'm talking about is the pen and paper RPG that the game is loosely based on (how they justify turning a fantastic RPG into a shooter I don't fully understand, but I promise to keep my ranting on the matter to a minimum. Oh, that means I should have stopped a sentence ago. Sorry.) As a pen and paper game, and one that has no classes to speak of, you really get to a make a character your own. It is pretty awesome. Whether you are a recovering drug addict trying to get his family's forgiveness, a blood thirsty troll that hunts man and beasts, or an Irish Don Quixote you get to make your character truly your own. The down side is you have to share that spot light with a bunch of other people, where as in Kingdoms of Amalur you're a force to be reckoned with (pun intended for those of you familiar with game.)

Ultimately one of our big goals for our dream video game project is to make it so that each character you make you feel is truly yours. From appearance customization (which is of course old hat) to some new tricks we are playing around with conceptually (which I'm not giving away here) we want everyone to have the chance to feel that their character is really truly their own. It's a feature of the game that might not interest everyone, but just like you can play Kingdoms of Amalur without really taking tons of time in the character customization the game will work just as well for people who want to run around and not spend much time customizing their characters.

-Pratt