wow, it''s pretty shocking that someone would take a shot at an entire genre of video games like that. i sure the person hasn''t played every rpg ever created. rpg''s tend to include tons of puzzles, riddles and strategic adventures. it''s pretty immature to say "all you do i run around an pick up gems and fight monsters". that''s like saying "all you do is run around and pick up weapons and shoot people" of fps. or i could say "all you do is sit there with a joystick and stare at the screen all day" of video games period. i am an advocate of open-mindedness. oh, and for a suggestion: two things i would like to see in future rpg''s and maybe in one i create, is voice communication (DVD''s = massive storage) and more interaction with the environment.

To the vast majority of mankind, nothing is more agreeable than to escape the need for mental exertion... To most people, nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking.

saw the voice communication remark...had to respond...

I''ve been working with a real world [as opposed to virtual] team on a MMRPG...and we wwere wanting to add voice communication instead of the usual text... here are the problems we encountered that lead us to dropping this feature:

How far apart can charactors be before they are unable to hear each other? How would one player be able to wisper something to another next to them without others hearing it? How would NPCs work? How could we encourage some 13 year old kid from just swearing at every player they find? Would this actually incourage role playing or encourage a more IRC chat room experience?

Then there are problems of programing it...sound compression. Do we just collect sound from the microphone all the time [only transmitting when it''s loud enough...what if somebody has the mike to close so we can hear them breathing?] or do we make the player press a key to speak [one to speak to everybody, another to ''wisper'', etc..]? then do we send all these sound packets to the server [client only has to send once..makeing the server redirect them]...or do we have the client side just send them to the other people within earshot[client sends out multiple copies..server freed to do other things]? Do we process the sounds [far away charactors sound faint] when they get played back? Do we take the extra steps required to log every packet, or implament some form of prediction routine to fill the holes formed from dropped packets?

there are lots of other issues...sound capture bit rate...sound compression routines...but it all seems a waist of time trying to develop it when you end up with a situation where a player encounters a 7 foot tall wizard who asks them "know any good wares sites?" with the voice of a 13 year old kid