Online Role Playing Games

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Online Role Playing Games Have 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 'colossal' game in which the player took the role of Bilbo Baggins on his adventures which faithfully followed the book. It was a text-based adventure with a couple of stationary illustrations and everybody thought it was the bee's knees. However, it is a joke likened to what is on offer today. The Hobbit would play on an eight-bit machine with 64 KB of RAM. Today, I have a moderate 64-bit computer with 2GB of RAM and that is not fast enough to run a game I downloaded yesterday. I downloaded the free version trial of Guild Wars, which is made up of 35,000+ files of around 2GB in size. It is a far cry from 'The Hobbit' though. In Guild Wars, you can choose your character or avatar as it is correctly known, choose its height, skin colouration and other things, choose the angle you want to view from at will and zoom in and out of the picture instantaneously. It is as much like 'The Hobbit' as an ocean liner is to a pedalo. Once you have chosen your avatar, man or woman, you are brought out into the game, but the character of the avatar alters with actions that you take and missions, known as quests, that you complete. In other words, you become 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 aimlessly around, you will meet other avatars, some of which will be managed by the computer, but most of which will be controlled by other human game-players who can be living anywhere in the world, but who will at that time be sitting in front of their computer screen. The setting of these games can be anywhere, but most are in some unstated mythical past. Castles, dungeons, dragons, royal family, sorcery, swords and the 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 be presented with quests. Some of these quests you can accomplish on your own, but you will need help with others. The help you need could 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 task number one before moving on to number two, but more complicated games allow some quests to be accomplished 'out of sych' and yet others tailor the order or type of quests to the avatar that you opt for right from the beginning. Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on numerous topics, but is at present concerned with Mortal Kombat Controls. If you have an interest in gaming, please visit our website now at Mortal Kombat 4.


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