RPG's and MMORPG's (part 3)

I love a good story, and I really love the way that Square Enix crafts their worlds. I can lose myself in their ideas, the way they make their game worlds feel huge and involved, with ongoing plots that seem to sweep your seemingly insignificant character up into them until you realize you've become the hero. The series is filled with memorable characters, great dialogue, bizarre adversaries, and something almost magical that just grabs you and never lets go, even long after the game has finished. Great video game stories are about experiences and characters that stay with you and cause you to remember them alongside your real-life memories as if they really happened to you. However, in an MMORPG, I don't feel like I'm really part of the immediate experience. Instead, the game is more of a setting, though the story does supposedly develop slowly once you've completed countless repetitive chores (they're called quests in the game, but kill X amount of Y, or deliver this to so-and-so, etc. amounts to being a chore, in my opinion.) Honestly, though, the story is peripheral to the main objective in an MMORPG: gain more money, possessions, and power so that you can do longer and more difficult chores, and even team up with your friends to do the repetitive chores together! While fighting monsters together can be exhilarating in some games, MMORPG's tend to remove the emphasis on strategy and skillful button combinations, instead reducing the experience to waiting for certain skills to recharge before pressing a single button again, with some running around in between. Perhaps at higher levels strategic choices can be made for which skills to use, but often the choices are obvious—higher level versions of previous skills are all you need.