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"Freeform or not Freeform?"

Now don't get me wrong, I think Black & White is a fantastic game. It's execution is almost perfect in every way, but it lacks something. It is frustrating having to constantly molly-coddle your villagers ("we need wood!!!" you've already cut down the forests! "We need babies!!!" you don't have enough houses or wood to build more! ARRR!) but the real thing it lacks is some proper "drive" to the game. It's all very well and good being able to do what you want, but if you have no idea what you want to do, you're up the excremental creek without a propulsion device, yes? There is quite obviously a balance to be struck. Project IGI, for example, would have been just a real-time hiking simulator without actual objectives to meet. Apparently, you can walk all over the mountains in the background. Has anyone actually done so? No, because the missions are far more interesting. You need something to work towards, a goal to achieve, a plot to further, a character to level up, OR SOMETHING more than just aimlessly throwing fireballs at whining villagers. The mention of characters brings me to the phenomenon of MMORPGs (haha! at last I sound clever by using a ridiculous acronym IN THE RIGHT PLACE). A fine example would be Everquest. I've only ever played a little Everquest, but I have a number of beardy-inclined chums who swear by it. And at it if I remember right. Everquest is fascinatingly freeform, but still worth playing because you want to improve your character and become almighty and slaughter everything in your path. I think. So again a purpose, something to work towards, albeit greedy and power-hungry. I think the best of these freedom-stained games has to be those with a little freedom to make certain choices, but essentially tells a story. Fallout 1 & 2, Deus Ex, and similar games have achieved this perfectly, and the aforementioned masterpieces also benefit from the empowering touch of the RPG genre. While you might not give a stuff about your goal, you still want to earn experience and make a more powerful character. Fortunately, both these games do make you care about the goal and really make you want to work at it. They also let you achieve almost every task in a variety of ways, often depending on the character you've developed.
If anyone else has a view on this topic, write a quick reply. You know you want to.

S'Funny you should mention MMORPG's because I'm currently downloading (for the second time) the Client for Legend of Mir, which everyone is currently raving about in the online RPG community. It's the beta test version, but it looks like they might keep it up after the commercial version is released.

I've read the Acrobat Beginners' Guide, the Acrobat Manual (both chunky downloads in themselves), so I'm pretty sure of what I'm getting into, it's like Diablo II but you can do more player killing, and after having played Planetarion for two seasons (browser based space warfare game) where the gameplay was such that you couldn't really kill anything, Legend of Mir looks like my cup of blood er tea.

But there's no real TASK there, no QUEST that I can visibly see, apart from continually levelling up your character and equipping it with more and more powerful items. So what's the point? Well, I like the RPG element, and although graphically or framerate wise we're not talking Quake III, I like RPGs combined with killing online players. Afterall, in offline RPGs you tend to kill a lot of monsters, so in this one I fancy the challenge of real AI opponents and doing some major damage once I've levelled up. (If they don't all get me first that is).

Maybe something about Black and White attracted it's huge fanbase, plot or no plot, maybe it was the powerkick of controlling populations (common to God-sims, naturally)? I agree there seems to be no end-quest there, but perhaps the gameplay makes up for that in some other way.

Perhaps developers have finally learnt to program 'Je ne sais quoi'?

Now don't get me wrong, I think Black & White is a fantastic game. It's execution is almost perfect in every way, but it lacks something. It is frustrating having to constantly molly-coddle your villagers ("we need wood!!!" you've already cut down the forests! "We need babies!!!" you don't have enough houses or wood to build more! ARRR!) but the real thing it lacks is some proper "drive" to the game. It's all very well and good being able to do what you want, but if you have no idea what you want to do, you're up the excremental creek without a propulsion device, yes? There is quite obviously a balance to be struck. Project IGI, for example, would have been just a real-time hiking simulator without actual objectives to meet. Apparently, you can walk all over the mountains in the background. Has anyone actually done so? No, because the missions are far more interesting. You need something to work towards, a goal to achieve, a plot to further, a character to level up, OR SOMETHING more than just aimlessly throwing fireballs at whining villagers. The mention of characters brings me to the phenomenon of MMORPGs (haha! at last I sound clever by using a ridiculous acronym IN THE RIGHT PLACE). A fine example would be Everquest. I've only ever played a little Everquest, but I have a number of beardy-inclined chums who swear by it. And at it if I remember right. Everquest is fascinatingly freeform, but still worth playing because you want to improve your character and become almighty and slaughter everything in your path. I think. So again a purpose, something to work towards, albeit greedy and power-hungry. I think the best of these freedom-stained games has to be those with a little freedom to make certain choices, but essentially tells a story. Fallout 1 & 2, Deus Ex, and similar games have achieved this perfectly, and the aforementioned masterpieces also benefit from the empowering touch of the RPG genre. While you might not give a stuff about your goal, you still want to earn experience and make a more powerful character. Fortunately, both these games do make you care about the goal and really make you want to work at it. They also let you achieve almost every task in a variety of ways, often depending on the character you've developed.
If anyone else has a view on this topic, write a quick reply. You know you want to.