08-08-2023, 12:02 PM
I've been playing a CRPG as an experiment. But this is a thread about a general cultural phenomena rather than a video game or video games in general.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/qW5RJXk/image.png]
This is the game I've been playing. 'The Age of Decadence'. It's a game set in a kind of descent into a dark age period in which 'The Empire', which is just Rome, is falling apart after what seems to have been a war with a foreign barbarian nation empowered by some evil edgy fantasy magic. I don't hate the premise, but it's very stock, very plastic, very trashy, and has a strange kind of pretentiousness to it. The nature of that last trait is what this thread is about.
This is a CRPG, which means it's D&D in a computer. All CRPGs leave me with a profound feeling of "what is the point?" and they do that because they're D&D. And the point of D&D is to serve as a platform for pointless entertainment. It generates rules and settings in which things can happen. And the nature of that "things" part is interchangeable and not really relevant. In the case of D&D it seems to be about the social aspect, with the adventures to stop the malevolent druid dwarf by rolling dice being secondary. And the latter point is really two distinct ones. Stock fantasy and stock mechanical growth and exercise of power adventure.
In CRPGs the social aspect is mostly gone, limited to posting on CRPG enthusiast forums about how CRPGs are dead and will never be good as Fallout1 and Planescape Torment ever again, or posting about retarded soap opera plots in bioware circles I guess. I don't keep up with this. More importantly, the mechanical part seems far more leaned into. With an extreme emphasis on reactivity and your "character" who must be "built" to engage in complex interactions with the world around him.
These games pride themselves on and sell on their options. Their fans take pride in the creative possibilities afforded by "builds" and "options". And can't forget "endings". What is a "choice" if it doesn't influence the "ending". They even have a totem-term for this. "Choices matter". If you can influence an "ending" gamers will say you have made a "choices matter RPG". I'm not making that up, I'm reading this game's steam reviews to catch up on how these people think.
It's a very interesting store page:
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/n6rYzRV/image.png]
"setting and theme" is something I want to go back to after some more brief comments on why CRPGs displease me and why this game didn't take long to strike me as a failure in its intentions. Actually I should cover them both first to contextualise my comments, then I'll elaborate later.
By the game's "setting" they mean its gritty world and by "theme" they mean gritty storytelling. Both of these things mean, hey, there are no KOBOLDS here. This is a story about MEN. And this is DARK fantasy, so MEN are all pathologically dishonest liars and schemers and literally everyone you meet behaves like a cartoon D&D Goblin. But they're MEN so we're HARDCORE WRITERS.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/qBN7P08/image.png]
They brag about as much on Steam. They don't just call their characters or approach to conflict a stylistic choice. It's believable. It's about realistic motivations. Sorry kid, put away your pointy wizard hat. This is tough reality for us streetwise guys. You can tell we're hardcore because the game opens with this quote.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/F8GCNWY/image.png]
Yeah, that sounds like some tough, hardboiled thought from a man who tells it like it really is. Hardboiled thought from... Glen Cook?
There's a problem here. Glen Cook is... a fiction writer. The Black Company is not real. This is a self-advertised "realistic" work which proudly announces that takes its primary influence from fiction. But I'm sure the developers would tell us that The Black Company is also "realistic" fiction. You see where I'm going. Like how "indie" is not about independence, "realism" in the context of genre fiction is not about taking cues from reality, attempting to portray the true spirit of humanity, or anything of the sort. "Realism" is a very specific genre vision.
"Realism" is like a module for your D&D setting, which comes with new character archetypes who say "fuck", everyone's leather armour is some drab shade, and "the guilds" now conspire against each other. The Guards take bribes, the poor are treated meanly by them, The Nobles are corrupt. And so on it goes. There are no malevolent druid dwarfs, but only in the superficial sense. The malevolent druid dwarf is funny because it's a space-filling stock concept that exists to fill a functional purpose, something needs to be killed. Everyone in "Realism" CRPG land is still a malevolent druid dwarf. We have camps of bandits. Raiders. Muggers. etc. These guys are the functional kobolds of course. But everyone is so transparently utilitarian in their purpose that they might as well be a kobold or something equally stupid.
This is not realism. On rare occasions I have heard fans of these games say about as much even, though likely without grasping the significance of the thought. I got this from a video on the developers' next game, 'Colony Ship'.
I couldn't believe when I heard this. A fan of these games instinctively appealing to (and drawing an implied comparison to ) Aaron Sorkin in defense of their obvious and most serious weakness. The first problem here of course is that the games' developers advertise their games using the words "realism" and "realistic" and general appeals to this idea constantly. It is their stated aspiration. They do not intend to be assembling a stylish representation of humanity which serves a particular aesthetic end. They think this is realism. Second, if this is just "properties of characters", what is the point? Why of all ways to write people, write them this way? Aaron Sorkin is a drug addled Jew retard who I personally despise for hiding in the ambiguity of this issue and never pinning himself down. Is he writing a person, or an idea of a person, a person who is an idea? It's obvious how audiences take movies, and he's obviously writing to that, and he's obviously not writing truth either. In his case it's a dodge to spin his way out of being a neurotic jew who writes awful jew social realism which is simultaneously boring and mundane and a completely distorted image of reality.
But enough of poor Aaron, what about Iron Tower? Well, the guy I got the above quote from says this is all about "an entertaining story". He's a CRPG player, which means he is a retarded monkey goblin blind and deaf to art, so we should only expect as much. It is this way to be fun. Like all low-fiction genres, stock characters, tropes, and archetypes. Well this completely blows out the pretension of Iron Tower if true, and I think it is because this guy wasn't trying to be critical. He's not that type. He said the quiet part out loud. He sees it like I do and takes that the opposite way. He recognises that everyone acting like Ralph Townsend's worst impressions of Chinamen is absurd, and does not think to ascribe any creative intention to this because he is a CRPG player and cannot conceive of such things. It's just another stock setting complete with tropes, archetypes, plot beats, and characters.
This is gritty fantasy. It is retarded and somewhat beloved and enduring despite at its heart just being a drab D&D module that replaces Malevolent Druid Dwarfs with Malevolent Guild Merchants.
Now if I take a moment to write about my own experience with the game, and indulge the creators for a little while by actually trying to view the work as though there is intention and vision behind their aesthetic and mechanical choices I think we might get somewhere, potentially gain some more perspective on this thing.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/f8KRrH6/image.png]
In what was basically an act of spite I decided to play this game as a moralfag swordsman. A kind of test I expect them to fail. The test is, what will fail first, my character, or the imagination and robustness of simulation presented by the developers? I am ready to enter a "realistic" world. I'm not the hero, people won't play fair, I'm in for a rough time. How will I fare as a naive man with good intentions who knows how to use a sword? I was thinking it would be funny to be a kind of ultra-violent and capable but still naive presence, who is magnetic for that. Sort of like Ike from Fire Emblem (interestingly bad character and story I might write about elsewhere sometime).
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/sK3nKBZ/image.png]
As 'The Mercenary' my life starts in a post apocalyptic dark age pub, where the guy who runs the place, who is maybe kind of my boss, asks me to defend a guy. At night he's attacked, I get the killers, they get him. Our responses to the situation are very gritty. Unfortunately I also have to respond like a gritlord. I guess I'm a "realistic" mercenary, which means the streets have hardened me into a chinaman with non-existent nerves. Anyway my dead client had a map of some kind of ancient importance, which is now mine. I take it to our local token minority.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/V9CrJVN/image.png]
"Do you think I might find some malevolent druid dwarfs down there, Feng?"
Anyway I'm out in town now. Let's see how we can talk to who is fit company for us in this cold, gritty world.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/82PsKwS/image.png]
Tough but fair. Maybe what this world needs.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/HCBTMjB/image.png]
Okay maybe they aren't fair either. But perhaps there's an explanation for thi-ACK!
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/myTjTjr/image.png]
I am beaten, and wake up outside the next day. They did not touch the large amount of money on my person or my stuff. Or kill me even though I am apparently aware of some kind of major power player conspiracy going on in this merciless high stakes world. gritty.
Where to from here? I won't bore you with too many details. The RPG thing happens and the next major plot point, meeting the local noble, is barred by an asshole who won't let me in unless I do something for him. I'm a good guy still, maybe there's an honest solution. One job is to remove men working from another noble house from a mining project, no honest answer there. Honest men doing honest work, Severus the Good won't stop them. Other job is the kidnapped nephew of the noble, off in the local bandit camp. That sounds like hero work.
I go there, there are seven men and the hostage, I try to attack their leader, and they beat me up and send me back to ask for a ransom. I speak to the noble's guy and he wants the situation resolved. "Can I kill them?" he asks? Obviously no, as I just tried. Here the game gives me two options. I can go back and challenge these seven men to combat by myself again, or I can say "no I can't kill them there are too many", and he'll give me the opportunity to tell him about the camp [PERCEPTION CHECK, because EVERY CHARACTER HAS A CHANCE], and if that check fails, like mine did, the men fail to rescue the hostage and the noble's guy gets so mad at me that I can't talk to him anymore. At this point the game appears to be softlocked for my character. A fairly common fate according to reviews, and one that I kind of brought on myself and kind of didn't.
I tried the camp fight a few times, killed a couple of them, couldn't get them all. My character was actually quite good at killing people, I had killed about six people in the town of Startertown over the course of a day because street toughs kept challenging Severus the Good. Severus was looking for them to get [SKILL POINTS] (because this isn't a stupid kobold wizard hat game, KID. You don't LEVEL UP with EXPERIENCE, you get SKILL POINTS. That's totally different fuck you.) but they're street toughs so they deserved it. There were also various minor incidents scattered across the opening town which would grant small amounts of experience for the trouble.
This is where the game really breaks down in my view. That I am supposed to be limited by "realism" and the limits of what my guy can do, because he's just a man and a certain kind of man at that. Only the limits which I'm actually hitting all feel contrived. On one hand there is the experience and levelling, which is absurdly important because of the game's "difficulty". LEVEL is unfortunately more important than general BUILD. If I can't do something it's because I need to patrol the town looking for people who are secretly SKILL POINT pinatas until I get slightly better at it, not because my guy is just too human. The line between success and failure in some critical task is one more mean hobo stabbed to death in an alleyway.
The idea behind this game, in what is in my opinion the most charitable and ambitious reading possible. is that its REALISM would create a kind of emergent realism in my own outlook. The hard limits of my own self-insert's virtual humanity would make me realise I'd have to get my hands dirty to get anywhere in this GRITTY life the world has handed me. I don't dislike that premise. But it's a rather ambitious one, and I dislike the tone of the marketing and tutorials. It feels very haughty and self-satisfied. Like they already know they've pulled it off and can't wait for me to feel stupid doing something that isn't STREETWISE, because I'm not a cool CRPG writer from Canada who gets it and would totally be able to chill with cool nigger.
They would probably be very satisfied with their result. Severus the Good is good at killing and not much else. And he's hit a wall where he just can't kill hard enough. The developers might feel very satisfied with this result. But I'm not. I'm not satisfied because it feels like the limits I have hit are very clearly defined by what they're allowing me to do on an arbitrary level rather than one related to the capacities of my character. I can either fight this camp alone or have men sent who I can only advise in a very general way. Why can't I go with them? Because the developers didn't write that in.
There are people who won the fight at this point in the game. Were they better at the game than me? No, your options for input are so simple as to make skill a virtual non-factor. They got more experience from doing guild quests. How does 'guild quest' reasonably translate to being a significantly better fighter? Well this is a video game so about a day's experience in fighting makes for about a quadruple increase in your ability to do something you had been honing your entire life up to the point the game started.
It strikes me as obvious that a key problem this game has is experience, or SKILL POINTS, as they would have it. This metagaming mechanic of banking potential skyrockets in particular competences to solve particular problems as they emerge is completely absurd, and it would make more sense for them to give me a character with fixed capacities at the start of the game to avoid situations like this. A friend who also played the game recently ran into an experience similar to this and dropped the game in a similarly satisfied and unimpressed mood. It seems to be a general problem.
But my proposed general solution isn't quite complete. Fixed capacities suggests a fixed idea of what I'm meant to be doing. That is actually what I think that this game needs. Firm and clear yes or no answers for every possibility based on a firmer idea of who you are. As it stands the game is very obviously built around and full of signs telling you that you are only meant to do certain things as certain characters. The character is you, but realistically you are building one of about five meaningfully different types.
I've said before that the baseline of any story or message game should be a VN. I imagine this game pitched to me as a producer or publisher, and I see that all of the complete and coherent detail seems to be in this gritty story. But on top of that it's a fully rendered CRPG world. Three dimensions, high interactivity, fully customisable character, almost infinite possibilities, organic and responsive emergent scenarios. Let's say I have extraordinary foresight and can see how the game will come together as made by this guy. I ask what it gets from this particular restrictive vision of open options and interactivity that it wouldn't from being a Visual Novel. I would ask for each element beyond text and flat imagery to be justified. As implemented in this final game I played, can any of it be? I would be very interested to hear a response from someone who likes this game. If there are any here.
I hope you understand from here my problem with the game itself as a potential expressive vision with something to say about people. It tries and fails to back me into a corner for not accepting its worldview. The corners are entirely contrived and mechanical. I am not cornered by the hopeless cruelty of human nature. I am cornered by SKILL POINTS and typical very unimaginative and limited CRPG possibilities for action. Basically playing a choose your own adventure novel that's absolutely full of extremely undramatic bad endings which aren't even endings. My capacity to leverage open-hearted human brilliance against open problems did not hit a wall. I was following a line of fixed and plotted options and took a combination that led to a narrative dead end.
I know I talk about Pikmin and Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Halo as games where you can leverage yourself against problems with total freedom, but you can perhaps fairly argue that these are simpler systems. They are only modelling violence so they can afford the depth without losing on anything else they're supposed to care about. But RPGs that also do this work. The example that comes straight to my mind is 'Gothic'. A game where assholes bully you and you come across plenty of organic incentives to be mean back to the world. And seemingly infinite options to take on the world that's kicking your ass to the point where whatever you do will be a genuinely interesting interplay of your nature and your capabilities. (I am aware that I am rather off track now and just intending to run out some thoughts and hopefully entertain you.)
My first problem with this game is that it fails to use its elements to sell me on grit. I don't feel like I'm in a sad world where I'm forced by the nature of things (which doesn't have to reflect reality) to act as the writers consider appropriate. I feel like I'm in a retarded world where reality arbitrarily bends and warps to make me do what my BUILD is meant to do. I'm in a VN with fake extra steps that punch you in the balls if you have the audacity to try taking them. We can't create open human challenges that CRPGs run on which are actually constraining, so these stories can only coherently be about demigods and overmen.
Then this leads into the second problem. Why of all things, did they try to write grit and realism? This is adjacent to a few other issues that have come up in other places. It's like every action heroine being a lesbian. It's like moronic cartoon BOOMER SHOOTERS having bad guys explode into red pieces. It's a superficial compensation for a spiritual deficiency. Nobody was upset by this game. Except for maybe a few less patient types who found the soft locking and general CRPG idiocy pointless and absurd. I don't believe that anybody found the nature of this game or its world truly confronting or heavy. The common steam review reaction seems to be "good writing". Which means it's not a cartoon and people state their motivations for things out loud. Good writing is like how FEAR achieved good AI. You need your characters to be announcing they are good for the peanut gallery to get it. FEAR gave us enemy soldiers who scream "I'M MOVING TO COVER THEN I'M GOING TO FLANK THE PLAYER, BECAUSE I'M ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT" during gunfights. While "well written" genre fiction has characters who act like assholes then explain why they're assholes so that the moronic fans can have their minds blown by the idea of fictional people having lives for the 50th time. It's a stock good and challenging signal that will get people to repeat that without thinking about what they mean. It's a very safe way to write.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/Vx3bHCb/1633132333286.png]
Was this thread meant to be about the grit thing. I'm sorry I seem to have gotten very sidetracked and written a 2000 word stream of consciousness about hating CRPGs. It's too late for me to fix this now but I still want to post a thread. You guys feel free to talk amongst yourselves, I may fix this tomorrow.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/qW5RJXk/image.png]
This is the game I've been playing. 'The Age of Decadence'. It's a game set in a kind of descent into a dark age period in which 'The Empire', which is just Rome, is falling apart after what seems to have been a war with a foreign barbarian nation empowered by some evil edgy fantasy magic. I don't hate the premise, but it's very stock, very plastic, very trashy, and has a strange kind of pretentiousness to it. The nature of that last trait is what this thread is about.
This is a CRPG, which means it's D&D in a computer. All CRPGs leave me with a profound feeling of "what is the point?" and they do that because they're D&D. And the point of D&D is to serve as a platform for pointless entertainment. It generates rules and settings in which things can happen. And the nature of that "things" part is interchangeable and not really relevant. In the case of D&D it seems to be about the social aspect, with the adventures to stop the malevolent druid dwarf by rolling dice being secondary. And the latter point is really two distinct ones. Stock fantasy and stock mechanical growth and exercise of power adventure.
In CRPGs the social aspect is mostly gone, limited to posting on CRPG enthusiast forums about how CRPGs are dead and will never be good as Fallout1 and Planescape Torment ever again, or posting about retarded soap opera plots in bioware circles I guess. I don't keep up with this. More importantly, the mechanical part seems far more leaned into. With an extreme emphasis on reactivity and your "character" who must be "built" to engage in complex interactions with the world around him.
These games pride themselves on and sell on their options. Their fans take pride in the creative possibilities afforded by "builds" and "options". And can't forget "endings". What is a "choice" if it doesn't influence the "ending". They even have a totem-term for this. "Choices matter". If you can influence an "ending" gamers will say you have made a "choices matter RPG". I'm not making that up, I'm reading this game's steam reviews to catch up on how these people think.
It's a very interesting store page:
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/n6rYzRV/image.png]
"setting and theme" is something I want to go back to after some more brief comments on why CRPGs displease me and why this game didn't take long to strike me as a failure in its intentions. Actually I should cover them both first to contextualise my comments, then I'll elaborate later.
By the game's "setting" they mean its gritty world and by "theme" they mean gritty storytelling. Both of these things mean, hey, there are no KOBOLDS here. This is a story about MEN. And this is DARK fantasy, so MEN are all pathologically dishonest liars and schemers and literally everyone you meet behaves like a cartoon D&D Goblin. But they're MEN so we're HARDCORE WRITERS.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/qBN7P08/image.png]
They brag about as much on Steam. They don't just call their characters or approach to conflict a stylistic choice. It's believable. It's about realistic motivations. Sorry kid, put away your pointy wizard hat. This is tough reality for us streetwise guys. You can tell we're hardcore because the game opens with this quote.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/F8GCNWY/image.png]
Yeah, that sounds like some tough, hardboiled thought from a man who tells it like it really is. Hardboiled thought from... Glen Cook?
There's a problem here. Glen Cook is... a fiction writer. The Black Company is not real. This is a self-advertised "realistic" work which proudly announces that takes its primary influence from fiction. But I'm sure the developers would tell us that The Black Company is also "realistic" fiction. You see where I'm going. Like how "indie" is not about independence, "realism" in the context of genre fiction is not about taking cues from reality, attempting to portray the true spirit of humanity, or anything of the sort. "Realism" is a very specific genre vision.
"Realism" is like a module for your D&D setting, which comes with new character archetypes who say "fuck", everyone's leather armour is some drab shade, and "the guilds" now conspire against each other. The Guards take bribes, the poor are treated meanly by them, The Nobles are corrupt. And so on it goes. There are no malevolent druid dwarfs, but only in the superficial sense. The malevolent druid dwarf is funny because it's a space-filling stock concept that exists to fill a functional purpose, something needs to be killed. Everyone in "Realism" CRPG land is still a malevolent druid dwarf. We have camps of bandits. Raiders. Muggers. etc. These guys are the functional kobolds of course. But everyone is so transparently utilitarian in their purpose that they might as well be a kobold or something equally stupid.
This is not realism. On rare occasions I have heard fans of these games say about as much even, though likely without grasping the significance of the thought. I got this from a video on the developers' next game, 'Colony Ship'.
Quote:The studio has three titles in its ludography now, and three
is the smallest number of elements required to create a pattern, allowing us to identify the conventions of the iron
Tower artistic language. what do all these games have in common? Well a very
high combat difficulty is one thing, if you want an impressive body count play a combat specialist. Secondly, Vince has a
very recognizable writing voice the games are somehow both bookish and succinct with plenty of memorable
characters and many quotable lines. I heard the writing described as Grim dark,
and I suppose it's true every character in the age of decadence is a manipulative sociopath protected by
layers of contingency plans. Is this realistic? Probably not. The iodine
deficient individuals inhabiting a post-apocalyptic world would probably not be as articulate and sophisticated
as the game portrays them, but it's like Sorkin said; "the properties of people and the properties of characters have almost
nothing to do with each other." the rules of drama are very much separate from the properties of Life a world world full of
sociopathic manipulators is an excellent platform for an entertaining story.
I couldn't believe when I heard this. A fan of these games instinctively appealing to (and drawing an implied comparison to ) Aaron Sorkin in defense of their obvious and most serious weakness. The first problem here of course is that the games' developers advertise their games using the words "realism" and "realistic" and general appeals to this idea constantly. It is their stated aspiration. They do not intend to be assembling a stylish representation of humanity which serves a particular aesthetic end. They think this is realism. Second, if this is just "properties of characters", what is the point? Why of all ways to write people, write them this way? Aaron Sorkin is a drug addled Jew retard who I personally despise for hiding in the ambiguity of this issue and never pinning himself down. Is he writing a person, or an idea of a person, a person who is an idea? It's obvious how audiences take movies, and he's obviously writing to that, and he's obviously not writing truth either. In his case it's a dodge to spin his way out of being a neurotic jew who writes awful jew social realism which is simultaneously boring and mundane and a completely distorted image of reality.
But enough of poor Aaron, what about Iron Tower? Well, the guy I got the above quote from says this is all about "an entertaining story". He's a CRPG player, which means he is a retarded monkey goblin blind and deaf to art, so we should only expect as much. It is this way to be fun. Like all low-fiction genres, stock characters, tropes, and archetypes. Well this completely blows out the pretension of Iron Tower if true, and I think it is because this guy wasn't trying to be critical. He's not that type. He said the quiet part out loud. He sees it like I do and takes that the opposite way. He recognises that everyone acting like Ralph Townsend's worst impressions of Chinamen is absurd, and does not think to ascribe any creative intention to this because he is a CRPG player and cannot conceive of such things. It's just another stock setting complete with tropes, archetypes, plot beats, and characters.
This is gritty fantasy. It is retarded and somewhat beloved and enduring despite at its heart just being a drab D&D module that replaces Malevolent Druid Dwarfs with Malevolent Guild Merchants.
Now if I take a moment to write about my own experience with the game, and indulge the creators for a little while by actually trying to view the work as though there is intention and vision behind their aesthetic and mechanical choices I think we might get somewhere, potentially gain some more perspective on this thing.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/f8KRrH6/image.png]
In what was basically an act of spite I decided to play this game as a moralfag swordsman. A kind of test I expect them to fail. The test is, what will fail first, my character, or the imagination and robustness of simulation presented by the developers? I am ready to enter a "realistic" world. I'm not the hero, people won't play fair, I'm in for a rough time. How will I fare as a naive man with good intentions who knows how to use a sword? I was thinking it would be funny to be a kind of ultra-violent and capable but still naive presence, who is magnetic for that. Sort of like Ike from Fire Emblem (interestingly bad character and story I might write about elsewhere sometime).
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/sK3nKBZ/image.png]
As 'The Mercenary' my life starts in a post apocalyptic dark age pub, where the guy who runs the place, who is maybe kind of my boss, asks me to defend a guy. At night he's attacked, I get the killers, they get him. Our responses to the situation are very gritty. Unfortunately I also have to respond like a gritlord. I guess I'm a "realistic" mercenary, which means the streets have hardened me into a chinaman with non-existent nerves. Anyway my dead client had a map of some kind of ancient importance, which is now mine. I take it to our local token minority.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/V9CrJVN/image.png]
"Do you think I might find some malevolent druid dwarfs down there, Feng?"
Anyway I'm out in town now. Let's see how we can talk to who is fit company for us in this cold, gritty world.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/82PsKwS/image.png]
Tough but fair. Maybe what this world needs.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/HCBTMjB/image.png]
Okay maybe they aren't fair either. But perhaps there's an explanation for thi-ACK!
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/myTjTjr/image.png]
I am beaten, and wake up outside the next day. They did not touch the large amount of money on my person or my stuff. Or kill me even though I am apparently aware of some kind of major power player conspiracy going on in this merciless high stakes world. gritty.
Where to from here? I won't bore you with too many details. The RPG thing happens and the next major plot point, meeting the local noble, is barred by an asshole who won't let me in unless I do something for him. I'm a good guy still, maybe there's an honest solution. One job is to remove men working from another noble house from a mining project, no honest answer there. Honest men doing honest work, Severus the Good won't stop them. Other job is the kidnapped nephew of the noble, off in the local bandit camp. That sounds like hero work.
I go there, there are seven men and the hostage, I try to attack their leader, and they beat me up and send me back to ask for a ransom. I speak to the noble's guy and he wants the situation resolved. "Can I kill them?" he asks? Obviously no, as I just tried. Here the game gives me two options. I can go back and challenge these seven men to combat by myself again, or I can say "no I can't kill them there are too many", and he'll give me the opportunity to tell him about the camp [PERCEPTION CHECK, because EVERY CHARACTER HAS A CHANCE], and if that check fails, like mine did, the men fail to rescue the hostage and the noble's guy gets so mad at me that I can't talk to him anymore. At this point the game appears to be softlocked for my character. A fairly common fate according to reviews, and one that I kind of brought on myself and kind of didn't.
I tried the camp fight a few times, killed a couple of them, couldn't get them all. My character was actually quite good at killing people, I had killed about six people in the town of Startertown over the course of a day because street toughs kept challenging Severus the Good. Severus was looking for them to get [SKILL POINTS] (because this isn't a stupid kobold wizard hat game, KID. You don't LEVEL UP with EXPERIENCE, you get SKILL POINTS. That's totally different fuck you.) but they're street toughs so they deserved it. There were also various minor incidents scattered across the opening town which would grant small amounts of experience for the trouble.
This is where the game really breaks down in my view. That I am supposed to be limited by "realism" and the limits of what my guy can do, because he's just a man and a certain kind of man at that. Only the limits which I'm actually hitting all feel contrived. On one hand there is the experience and levelling, which is absurdly important because of the game's "difficulty". LEVEL is unfortunately more important than general BUILD. If I can't do something it's because I need to patrol the town looking for people who are secretly SKILL POINT pinatas until I get slightly better at it, not because my guy is just too human. The line between success and failure in some critical task is one more mean hobo stabbed to death in an alleyway.
The idea behind this game, in what is in my opinion the most charitable and ambitious reading possible. is that its REALISM would create a kind of emergent realism in my own outlook. The hard limits of my own self-insert's virtual humanity would make me realise I'd have to get my hands dirty to get anywhere in this GRITTY life the world has handed me. I don't dislike that premise. But it's a rather ambitious one, and I dislike the tone of the marketing and tutorials. It feels very haughty and self-satisfied. Like they already know they've pulled it off and can't wait for me to feel stupid doing something that isn't STREETWISE, because I'm not a cool CRPG writer from Canada who gets it and would totally be able to chill with cool nigger.
They would probably be very satisfied with their result. Severus the Good is good at killing and not much else. And he's hit a wall where he just can't kill hard enough. The developers might feel very satisfied with this result. But I'm not. I'm not satisfied because it feels like the limits I have hit are very clearly defined by what they're allowing me to do on an arbitrary level rather than one related to the capacities of my character. I can either fight this camp alone or have men sent who I can only advise in a very general way. Why can't I go with them? Because the developers didn't write that in.
There are people who won the fight at this point in the game. Were they better at the game than me? No, your options for input are so simple as to make skill a virtual non-factor. They got more experience from doing guild quests. How does 'guild quest' reasonably translate to being a significantly better fighter? Well this is a video game so about a day's experience in fighting makes for about a quadruple increase in your ability to do something you had been honing your entire life up to the point the game started.
It strikes me as obvious that a key problem this game has is experience, or SKILL POINTS, as they would have it. This metagaming mechanic of banking potential skyrockets in particular competences to solve particular problems as they emerge is completely absurd, and it would make more sense for them to give me a character with fixed capacities at the start of the game to avoid situations like this. A friend who also played the game recently ran into an experience similar to this and dropped the game in a similarly satisfied and unimpressed mood. It seems to be a general problem.
But my proposed general solution isn't quite complete. Fixed capacities suggests a fixed idea of what I'm meant to be doing. That is actually what I think that this game needs. Firm and clear yes or no answers for every possibility based on a firmer idea of who you are. As it stands the game is very obviously built around and full of signs telling you that you are only meant to do certain things as certain characters. The character is you, but realistically you are building one of about five meaningfully different types.
I've said before that the baseline of any story or message game should be a VN. I imagine this game pitched to me as a producer or publisher, and I see that all of the complete and coherent detail seems to be in this gritty story. But on top of that it's a fully rendered CRPG world. Three dimensions, high interactivity, fully customisable character, almost infinite possibilities, organic and responsive emergent scenarios. Let's say I have extraordinary foresight and can see how the game will come together as made by this guy. I ask what it gets from this particular restrictive vision of open options and interactivity that it wouldn't from being a Visual Novel. I would ask for each element beyond text and flat imagery to be justified. As implemented in this final game I played, can any of it be? I would be very interested to hear a response from someone who likes this game. If there are any here.
I hope you understand from here my problem with the game itself as a potential expressive vision with something to say about people. It tries and fails to back me into a corner for not accepting its worldview. The corners are entirely contrived and mechanical. I am not cornered by the hopeless cruelty of human nature. I am cornered by SKILL POINTS and typical very unimaginative and limited CRPG possibilities for action. Basically playing a choose your own adventure novel that's absolutely full of extremely undramatic bad endings which aren't even endings. My capacity to leverage open-hearted human brilliance against open problems did not hit a wall. I was following a line of fixed and plotted options and took a combination that led to a narrative dead end.
I know I talk about Pikmin and Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Halo as games where you can leverage yourself against problems with total freedom, but you can perhaps fairly argue that these are simpler systems. They are only modelling violence so they can afford the depth without losing on anything else they're supposed to care about. But RPGs that also do this work. The example that comes straight to my mind is 'Gothic'. A game where assholes bully you and you come across plenty of organic incentives to be mean back to the world. And seemingly infinite options to take on the world that's kicking your ass to the point where whatever you do will be a genuinely interesting interplay of your nature and your capabilities. (I am aware that I am rather off track now and just intending to run out some thoughts and hopefully entertain you.)
My first problem with this game is that it fails to use its elements to sell me on grit. I don't feel like I'm in a sad world where I'm forced by the nature of things (which doesn't have to reflect reality) to act as the writers consider appropriate. I feel like I'm in a retarded world where reality arbitrarily bends and warps to make me do what my BUILD is meant to do. I'm in a VN with fake extra steps that punch you in the balls if you have the audacity to try taking them. We can't create open human challenges that CRPGs run on which are actually constraining, so these stories can only coherently be about demigods and overmen.
Then this leads into the second problem. Why of all things, did they try to write grit and realism? This is adjacent to a few other issues that have come up in other places. It's like every action heroine being a lesbian. It's like moronic cartoon BOOMER SHOOTERS having bad guys explode into red pieces. It's a superficial compensation for a spiritual deficiency. Nobody was upset by this game. Except for maybe a few less patient types who found the soft locking and general CRPG idiocy pointless and absurd. I don't believe that anybody found the nature of this game or its world truly confronting or heavy. The common steam review reaction seems to be "good writing". Which means it's not a cartoon and people state their motivations for things out loud. Good writing is like how FEAR achieved good AI. You need your characters to be announcing they are good for the peanut gallery to get it. FEAR gave us enemy soldiers who scream "I'M MOVING TO COVER THEN I'M GOING TO FLANK THE PLAYER, BECAUSE I'M ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT" during gunfights. While "well written" genre fiction has characters who act like assholes then explain why they're assholes so that the moronic fans can have their minds blown by the idea of fictional people having lives for the 50th time. It's a stock good and challenging signal that will get people to repeat that without thinking about what they mean. It's a very safe way to write.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/Vx3bHCb/1633132333286.png]
Was this thread meant to be about the grit thing. I'm sorry I seem to have gotten very sidetracked and written a 2000 word stream of consciousness about hating CRPGs. It's too late for me to fix this now but I still want to post a thread. You guys feel free to talk amongst yourselves, I may fix this tomorrow.
