RPG Fatigue -- Demon's Souls and Dragon Age

Couple of hot new medieval fantasy RPGs have come or will come about this fall. Demon's Souls is a PS3 exclusive and a hard-core gamer's wet dream come true. A level-grinding and body-grinding experience, the difficult gameplay turns death into a reward, through the unique multiplayer features by allowing you to learn from other people's deaths as a warning.

Even more highly anticipated is, of course, Dragon Age from RPG master BioWare. Dragon Age is billed as the spiritual successor to the Baldur's Gate series, and promises to have the strong story and quality voice acting for which the blockbuster developer is known.

These titles come on the heels of other critical and commercial successes such as the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3, Persona 4, Fable II, Risen, Sacred 2, Dragon Quest IX, and more. And while each has its own twist, its own claim to fame, they each have a core gameplay mechanic: smack things and get stuff so you can smack bigger things. Yes it's a gross oversimplification, but it's close to the truth.

And I'm just tired of all of them.

I feel like I should be really excited for Dragon Age. It promises to be an epic event, a visual masterpiece, and an intricate story in a detailed world. What's not to like? As a PS3 owner, I should be proud of the Demon's Souls exclusive, buy it and crow about my platform's ascendancy. But I don't care about either. And I can't exactly pin down this general feeling of apathy.

Looking back over my recent purchases, I can't stand on any high horse and claim moral victory over the piñata-bashing RPG horde. Katamari Forever is a game where you just roll things up, over and over and over. Scribblenauts is a game only of what you make it, with flawed controls. Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story is a RPG, which I loved, pretty much making me a hypocrite. And Defense Grid is such a narrow experience that it is literally a game made as a copy of a modification of another game.

The only correlation I can make is that the older I get, the less I care for adult titles. I've long given up on first-person shooters, with Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 the only ones I've played recently, along with Crysis and UT3, with those still a rare event in a long dry spell, as they are mostly LAN party titles. Dragon Age and Demon's Souls are just about as M-rated as you can get without straying into AO territory. Maybe I just don't have the stomach for the visceral, well-rendered violence, or just don't care to simulate acts that too closely mirror the awful events in our real world. I think parenthood has really affected my sensitivity to violence, and the decreased desire to expose my kid to those kinds of games before he's ready.

And maybe it's not only their content, but what's missing. These games frequently eschew any cooperative multi-player features as well, officially relegating themselves to sitting all alone in your basement or computer room. When I sit in my basement or computer room alone gaming in Sins of a Solar Empire, Demigod, Mario Kart, or Katamari Forever, I can at least get on Ventrilo and yell at people cohabitating my virtual world.

Here at the end of my ramblings, please know this is not a criticism of either the games specifically, either Dragon Age or Demon's Souls, the people who play them, or even RPG games in particular. Rather, I'm trying to figure out why I don't care for them.

Maybe it's because I'm old and uncool. I certainly am old and uncool, but whether that's a contributing factor, I don't know. Is it time to hand in my PS3 and unregister my Steam account, because surely I won't do anything cool with either? Am I a bad person for not lining up to buy Demon's Souls, Dragon Age, or Uncharted 2? I always wondered if I would play video games for my entire life, my tastes never changing and staying forever young -- at least at heart -- by staying current with gaming and Internet trends. It seems that maybe my wondering can end, answered by a barely audible and disinterested "No."