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Last night, I finished playing through the single player campaign of Call of Duty 4 and was amazed by the storytelling. Perhaps I’m out of the loop on FPS’s and should give them a closer look.

Here’s the best way to put it… Look, regardless of what genre of games you’re into, you should try a First Person Shooter at least once. And if you’ll only ever play one, play Call of Duty 4. I’m serious. It’s that good.
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Yes, as a player you can be defined, and with surprising accuracy too.

In 1978 a man by the name of Richard Bartle, along with Roy Trubshaw, would create the world’s very first MUD (multi user dungeon). For those of you newer to computer games, imagine an all text based, no graphics, MMO, and you have a MUD. Now imagine how cutting edge that would be in 1978. MUD’s were popular up through the mid 90’s even making the transition from BBS’s to the internet.

Bartle, who has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, would go on to write a study on what he defined as the four player archetypes found in MUD’s (and later MMO’s). These archetypes were achievers (diamonds), explorers (spades), socializers (hearts), and killers (clubs).

In the mid 90’s a named named Erwin Andreasen would create an electronic version of the Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology. And yes, you can take this test. It only requires a couple minutes of your time and you may find it uncannily accurate.
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Remember Gladiator? That movie with Russel Crowe? Fun movie… won the Oscar, and had a climax that was a complete let down.

Why? Because it kept repeating the same promise throughout the movie only to completely abandon it in the third act.

What am I talking about? Russel Crowe’s army. The movie keeps strongly inferring that Russel is going to reunite with his army and storm Rome. The movie was peppered with all sorts of lines in different places…

Senator, “But… but… there hasn’t been an invasion of Rome in over 700 years!”

Russel, “Where is my army?”
Servant, “Right outside the city my liege. And they are fat… and bored!”

Awesome! An event that hasn’t happened in centuries! A cantankerous army invading Rome led by Russel Crowe! Uber-awesome!

Did it happen? NOPE!

Instead the movie pulls a 180 on you. Russel is caught trying to escape, and instead we have him, now hobbling around crippled, fighting a one on one duel with the Emperor. We don’t even get to see the hero at full strength fighting the bad guy at full strength. Yes it won the academy award. Take a look at other best picture winners though and I’d say that had more to do with Russel dieing at the end than anything else.

The fact of the matter is, from a storytelling standpoint, the ending felt like a let down. Don’t infer something over and over in your story then not follow through.

Why am I mentioning this? Because it looks like Chris Metzen is considering doing this.

It happened at Blizzcon ‘07 and it has to do with Garona, the famous half-orc, female rogue first featured in Warcraft 1.
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