I just beat the game for the very first time about an hour ago, been asking myself the same exact question...wtf do I do now?

I almost want to start over again but I have a pile of D&D to play through. Baldur's Gate 1 was ok but after this, man I don't know. Had BG2, Temple of Elemental Evil and the Icewind Dales lined up but it almost seems pointless now.

As someone who'll take something awesome and absorb every last bit of it that I can get my hands on just to experience as much of it as possible, your perspective is an awesome way to play games. Every game is made special.
And the experience you had with The Cat Lady is astounding. I've never had anything impact me so strongly. The game does sound interesting, actually... I might have to give it a try...

Simple, hibernate yourself until Tides Of Numenera.

lol, been doing that for Wasteland 2!

Taking a break from the big weekend discussion here about regional pricing to get back to this thread. I just finished Primordia and I really really loved it, it was a good follow-up to PS:T and I really appreciated the references to it. Crispin really had so much heart, one of my favorite video game characters and certainly an homage to Morte. Still, Primordia felt a little lacking, probably just because the game was so short in comparison to PS:T, still the endings were well done, albeit I didn't quite get to let all the anger go that built up during the progression of the game.

So, next, I think I'll go with The Cat Lady. The emotional experiences you describe are exactly what I'm looking for. I want to roll around inside depression until it becomes a giant, dense ball, love it, live it, experience every bit of contrast it can show me towards other emotions, then wrap it up nicely and put it back on the shelf.

Let's keep this discussion up through-out gaming experiences this year. It certainly is a great way for me to feel connected to other people.
In deed. The writing in this game will be phenomenal, and I have the utmost confidence in Colin and Chris that they will not disappoint the millions of PS:T fans eagerly waiting for a game with as much depth as its predecessor.
Those dungeon-crawlers feel absent-minded and pointless after PS:T. They are very good games in their own right, for sure, and I really loved them. But they feel almost childish in comparison. That's what this thread is for. Check out Primordia, as Groze recommended. You'll appreciate the PS:T references, and I hope you'll love Crispin as much as I did.

I have all of the Ultima games, but have not really given them the time they deserve. I've tried them all out for about half an hour or so each just to see the evolution of the tech, but wasn't planning on delving in at that time. What game would you recommend starting with for the type of deep experience that you think I'd be after?

Heh, yeah. I was pretty pumped to play Icewind Dale for the first time but after the archdruid told me to venture forth to the valley of shadows to save the village in the giant tree, I couldn't help but groan and roll my eyes.

I'll check out Primordia. I've owned it for over a year now but never fired it up, just really bad at adventure games. Might be time to go for it anyway.

Hmmm you probably hear it from several people all ready, but i'll say Ultima 7. The game has amazing depth of interaction of the world and characters, the virtues are still there, fun Easter eggs, the fact when every time you doing something wrong(steal, murder) your party will scowled and even try to kill you for justice, and it is the easier to get into Ultima game which is true to Ultima. Ultima 4 and 5 are outdated and hard to get into, but Ultima 4 brought the virtue system, and Ultima 5 shows how a corrupt ruler can twist the virtue system into his favor.

SPOILER WARNING for early IWD added.

That's possibly the intended reaction: playing with the standard venture-into-this-dark-place-and-quell-the-evil-of-the-restless-dead trope, when after doing that you find you've been sent on a wild goose chase, barking up the wrong tree and causing more problems than you've solved.

Well, having not gotten that far yet. Thanks for the spoiler I guess. heh.

Yeah, me neither. I was kinda bummed to hear it too. At least it could have been a worse spoiler.

The sad thing is that they never actually make anything of it, or if they do, it's given so little lip service that I never noticed; they realize they've been duped, then just kind of shrug and go on to kill the big bad. In a better story, the villain would have made sure to rub that little factoid in the protagonists' faces as a villainous moment in an attempt to demoralize the PCs and maybe communicate something to the player. To give another example from Spec Ops (I know I keep bandying that game about, but that's only because of its unique degree of applicability to discussions like this), here is the very VERY brief cliff notes on Spec Ops: the Line and what it means/why it is relevant to the discussion at hand:

*SPOILERS*








Spec Ops starts with Captain Martin Walker and his two wise-cracking companions entering post-apocalyptic Dubai on a mission to rescue people. As they continue exploring Dubai, the team are attacked by the insurgents they are trying to rescue and the US armed forces (the Damned 33rd) that remained behind during the initial evacuation attempt (which killed a large number of people). Having located the refugees and noted the state of the region, the team, under Walker's orders due to a subconscious desire to "be a hero", stay in the city to combat the 33rd and attempt to rescue the civilians. In the process, the team slaughters the US forces who had stayed in Dubai and attempted to protect the remaining civilians, going so far as using white phosphorous to clear out a path to a key objective; the use of the white phosphorous burns the soldiers horribly, and kills 42 civilians that the 33rd had been trying to help. Walker shifts the blame on to the 33rd and their leader, John Konrad, with his motive for remaining in Dubai gradually becoming predominately revenge; in pursuit of the remains of the rescue attempt, the team team up with the CIA to steal the city's water in an attempt to coerce the civilians into leaving the city (despite the fact that they could not survive the desert the first time around), the failure of which results in the city losing its water. Eventually, Walker gives up on the rescue mission and devotes his attention to killing Konrad for "forcing his hand" with regards to the white phosphorous, destroying the last of the 33rd and leaving noone alive capable of helping the remaining civilians.

Literally *everything* the player and the PC did in that game made things worse, and the game takes delight in confronting the player with that at the end, as it replays clips of all the horrible things that the player did, including horrific imagery from the aftermath of the white phosphorous attack, all of which the game tells the player via Konrad that "none of this would have happened if you had just stopped". Amid the game's general evisceration of MMS tropes and the genre as a whole, it attempts to force the player to ponder why they kept playing, despite the fact that nothing they did was helping, and that every moment they assisted Captain Walker in his goals they made things worse, not dissimilar to the way that Konrad asks for and then proceeds to shoot down every rationalization Walker offers for his actions at the end; the players who bought into the same desire to be a hero that plagued Walker are confronted with the realization of just how easily they can rationalize a course of action that is obviously a poor idea from the start, while the players who started to distance themselves from Walker and blamed the PC for what they did are forced to question whether they are engaging the same blame shifting that Walker did with regards to Konrad.

In short, the game uses the failures of the main characters in an attempt to make a point; it doesn't let it happen and then never bring it up again.






*SPOILER END*






I'm not asking for every game to try and be as self-referential or insightful as Spec Ops when it turns out that the protagonists have been ultimately made things worse by their actions, but to not do anything with it, not even something as small as having the villain establish their villainous nature by taunting the protagonists with it, is just disappointing as hell.

So do all the Spec Ops games haves deep story with heavy emotional impact on the player, or just The Line?

Funny, that. The series was a typical shooter series that kind of died off several years prior to The Line, and The Line pretty much had nothing to do with the rest of the series as a whole; kind of an interesting development, given that The Line is so diametrically opposed to the MMS genre in general. It's not unlike the naming convention for the Far Cry series: make a sequel that has a recognizable name that has bugger all to do with the prior game(s) in order to try and boost sales.

I feel the same way every time I finish a really memorable game...! It's one of the joys of playing a computer game--a great one, that is. You're drawn into the story and become a part of it almost subconsciously, and unlike a movie or a book, you are not just a passive spectator but actually become involved in the story yourself! Unlike a movie, the whole thing isn't over in 90 minutes +, either...;)

It's just the way of it, though. There just aren't that many "great" role-playing games made--just like there aren't that many truly "great" books & movies, etc. It means that whenever I play a really "great" computer game it stands out of the crowd and I'll take a part of it with me when I'm done. It sounds like you could say the same thing. That's why I genuinely feel sorry for people who (lack the imagination?) cannot for some reason play and enjoy rpg's because the story and characters actually bore them--they're your "twitch" gamers who think the only kind of real game is an arcade shooting game...!...;) It's sad that some folks are just fundamentally incapable of enjoying PST and recognizing what superb game play it offers. It's one of the prices they unknowingly pay for impatience and a lack of curiosity, I suppose.