I’ve not had a great history with first person role-playing games. It’s not their fault by any means, it’s me. My problem is that they are ever so tempting!

It started back during my console gaming heyday. It was around the time when I was swimming in the vast awesomeness of the Sega Saturn (and I will defend it’s greatness with tooth and nail). I was on an RPG kick ever since I played Final Fantasy 3 on the Super Nintendo, and was always branching out to various forms of character building, story telling goodness. What I hadn’t tried yet was a first person RPG. It was undiscovered territory for me until I tried out Shining the Holy Ark.

I won’t go into great detail, but I didn’t enjoy it. Figuring it was a singular case, I tried other first person RPG’s but none of them felt right. Years later, I tried Morrowind; didn’t like it. Then Oblivion; nope, didn’t like it. In fact, I wound up buying Oblivion on the PC twice because of all the hype being shouted from the rooftops by my friends and didn’t enjoy it one bit until I picked it up for the third time on the Playstation 3. Even then I only thought it was “okay.”

The idea of roleplaying from the first person perspective makes total sense to me. I’m a person who in most games attempts to make my avatar look as much like me as possible. I mean, when you look this good, why not let a virtual world have a slice of this pie, right? Yet the games that utilize the idea of putting me into the world as if I were looking out of the helmet of my warrior always make me feel more detached from my character.

The one series that gets a pass in my book is Fallout. Now, I initially thought that I overlooked it because of the fact that I treat the game more like a first person shooter. The problem is that as a first person shooter, it’s quite shit. I think the real reason I can look past it is because of the environment I’m in. Of any open world game I’ve ever played, Fallout is the one I’ve actually enjoyed spending great deals of time in.

This bring me to Skyrim.

I want Skyrim. Badly. Now, I know my past history, and it worries me that I want the game so much, but everything I’ve seen gives me goosebumps. From dual wielding spells or pulling a Bioshock and having a spell in one hand and a weapon in the other, to the very Nordic overtones (I loves me some Norse mythology) it’s just firing all my cylinders. Well…except that it’s in first person.

There is hope, though. Bathesda stated that they completely revamped the third person mode to make it much more playable. Hopefully this turns out for the best, and I have an RPG that I’ll spend countless hours in. Regardless though, the game is impressing me enough that I have to test my taste buds yet again.

Will you be picking up the game? How about that collector’s edition?

Steve "Slurms" Lichtsinn

Blogger and Podcast host for Multiplaying. All viewpoints in my words whether written or spoken are my own, and do not reflect the views of the community I am a part of. I don't do this for a living, and it shows!