Confessions of an Ex-Todd Lover

ZigzagPX4 said:
The writing part isn't hard. But, you know, if writing was all you need to do to make an RPG game, I probably would've made my own by now. I mean, there's still the game part they have to worry about. Also, putting the two together.
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True, but writing should never fall behind, lest the game be let down by it.
 
DVL said:
Further derailing the thread:
I really wish Mass Effect had more of the episodic tone of Star Trek or Flash Gordon. Captain Shepard explores the galaxy on a mission of exploration and high adventure, while making loves to the alien wimmenz along the way.
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That would be be pretty awesome. From what little I've seen about Mass Effect: Andromeda, it seems like the game will focus on exploration more than the past titles, so perhaps there is hope yet.
 
Ninja said:
That would be be pretty awesome. From what little I've seen about Mass Effect: Andromeda, it seems like the game will focus on exploration more than the past titles, so perhaps there is hope yet.
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Hm. Well, if anyone was hoping it will be a better RPG than ME2 and ME3, I've a feeling it won't.

But I'm all for an action-adventure open-world exploration game with an engaging story and small aspects taken from RPGs. Especially sci-fi - I don't usually enjoy the fantasy genre, with a few exceptions.

So, exploration sounds nice. Mass Effect was trying to shoehorn exploration into an RPG. So doest his make Andromeda trying to shoehorn RPG into exploration? Who knows? We'll see. But I'm optimistic for the game.
 
ZigzagPX4 said:
Well, both the Collectors and the Reapers had a fair amount of depth and potential to them, but Mass Effect 3 sort of killed it with the Reapers and Mass Effect 2 sets up the plot in a way that the Collectors have to be a looming evil or there's no overarching plot.

Let's not expect book-level of writings out of RPGs as a standard.
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The problem with Mass Effect 2 is the game seems to forget reapers are the main antagonists until they go "Oh yeah we should mention reapers again before we completely forget". It feels disconnected from Mass Effect , yeah sure there's the collectors which need to be dealt with but you could skip this game and not really miss anything that important besides a couple events. Mass Effect 3 barely mentions many of the events that took place in Mass Effect 2.
 
MercenarySnake said:
The problem with Mass Effect 2 is the game seems to forget reapers are the main antagonists until they go "Oh yeah we should mention reapers again before we completely forget". It feels disconnected from Mass Effect , yeah sure there's the collectors which need to be dealt with but you could skip this game and not really miss anything that important besides a couple events. Mass Effect 3 barely mentions many of the events that took place in Mass Effect 2.
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I wish the Reaper's would have stayed dead from ME1, The Illusive Man and Cerberus were way more interesting.
 
A lot of people point the ending of ME3 as why they didn't like it, for me it was all the forced "oh shit we need to wrap this up" moments; seeing thane in the hospital, Jack and her students, talking to Miranda on the phone, etc.
 
MercenarySnake said:
The problem with Mass Effect 2 is the game seems to forget reapers are the main antagonists until they go "Oh yeah we should mention reapers again before we completely forget". It feels disconnected from Mass Effect , yeah sure there's the collectors which need to be dealt with but you could skip this game and not really miss anything that important besides a couple events. Mass Effect 3 barely mentions many of the events that took place in Mass Effect 2.
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To not cudgel the dead horse too much, I've never thought Bioware was good at juggling Big Bad Evil Guy style antagonists. I thought Loghain would've made a better villain than the Darkspawn Dragon Thing, but whatever. Game of Thrones by way of Bioware? Sure, I'd love that.

Geth and Quarians? That's gold without the addition of the Reaper plot. Or even tone down the Reapers because the husks and their indoctrinated cults were certainly creepy enough without explaining what they were about. (Sort of like Reavers in Firefly before Serenity made a big reveal of where they came from.) Heck, why not just give Saren actual motivations or make some political conflict with the Citadel Council? Bioware would've shone at that kind of thing.

Part of why I enjoy Avellone's style of storytelling is that a lot of his conflicts are not EPIC of EPICNESS in the strictest sense because they're always very personal conflicts (i.e. The Exile, The Nameless One, a lot of the Companion side stories in NV). NV shines in that it's a Fallout game that steps away from megalomaniacal armies of grandiose evil.

Fantasy before LOTR wasn't about the epic quest to throw The Ring of Power into the Crack of Doom to stop the Dark Lord Sauron from taking over the world. A lot of it was low or pulp fantasy with heavy existentialist tones.
 
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Who thinks that Tolkien kind of ruined fantasy by adding the whole overdone 'MEGA-EVIL' enemy? I certainly don't, but it does make sense if some people do as by making a well written fantasy story he did create the annoying evil enemy which has nothing good about them.
 
I think the whole "Enemy that's purely evil blahblahblah" it's a really good way to move a plot forward and give some significance for the characters do to something, and most often than not they act as some background enemy that explains the actions of a more important evil (i.e: Loghain and the Darkspawn, Geth/Collectors and the Reapers)
 
GabrielStorniolo said:
I think the whole "Enemy that's purely evil blahblahblah" it's a really good way to move a plot forward and give some significance for the characters do to something, and most often than not they act as some background enemy that explains the actions of a more important evil (i.e: Loghain and the Darkspawn, Geth/Collectors and the Reapers)
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I hate it, apart from a select few. I'm fine with Sauron and the orcs, as even the orcs had some kind of freedom of thinking and small tasks, as long as they follow Sauron's will, and the Star Wars Empire is evil, but has some good points (also they're cool...), while Chaos in the 40K universe has some great points and are... morally dark grey in some cases.
 
Dr Fallout said:
Who thinks that Tolkien kind of ruined fantasy by adding the whole overdone 'MEGA-EVIL' enemy? I certainly don't, but it does make sense if some people do as by making a well written fantasy story he did create the annoying evil enemy which has nothing good about them.
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Tolkien was original when he first wrote it though. He coined the Gandalf archetype, which he took from Odin. He was really into mythology and used that as an inspiration for his fiction. The dude championed Beowulf as a legitimate piece of literature worth reading.

It's just that people focus on the superficial qualities of his work and ignore a lot of the really gritty picaresque fantasy that inspired D&D in favor of ripping off Tolkein. But a lot of people assume D&D was meant to be high fantasy.
Think about how the game works. The original system gave you exp for each gold piece you could extract from a dungeon. (And this stuff was heavy, so monster encounters weren't necessarily the best exp.) You level up and become more powerful and you're basically self-employed vagabonds and mercenaries. You're Cugel or Conan. You take odd jobs and your life is a series of episodes without a larger story arc.

And it's why you see a lot of stupid RPG assumptions that never make sense. Bilbo and Frodo never wanted to leave home. They were really wealthy hobbits and most the Fellowship were people of high social standing that have no reason to go adventuring the way Cugel or Conan would. They aren't motivated by stealing whatever is nailed down and becoming more personally powerful. And quite to the opposite, wanting more power is actually a corrupting influence. Characters didn't become better fighters or learn mystical powers when they were done.

So get this. You're the heroes of light destined to save the world. But you're stealing things out of people's homes and farming monsters for exp. Gah.
It's why I think Dragon Age was confused because it was trying at the same time to be both Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings.

A skill-based system in the vein of White Wolf makes more sense for either of those settings. You can then spend background points to have an heirloom sword that was passed down to you. Or you can spend those same background points to say that his character is particularly wealthy or of high social standing.

Why the heck is it that humanity's spacecop-cum-diplomat, the first nod to the political legitimacy of humanity on the Citadel, is looting guns out of containers? Does this make sense?
 
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D&D is high fantasy by definition:
High fantasy is defined as fantasy set in an alternative, fictional ("secondary") world, rather than "the real", or "primary" world. The secondary world is usually internally consistent, but its rules differ from those of the primary world. By contrast, low fantasy is characterized by being set in the primary, or "real" world, or a rational and familiar fictional world, with the inclusion of magical elements.[2][3][4][5]

It fully functions in a fictitious world with its own laws as is Tolkien's Middle earth or Warcraft's Azeroth, etc. Because of the move from a ''primary'' world, as stated above in the description of what high fantasy is, it in the process shifts the boundaries of what is simple - small and complex - great. It introduces you with several new elements that help progress things, one of them predominantly being magic which one could - to an extent, compare with technology and engineering in today's age. If going from city A to city B was 100 years ago a great feat in itself, it is a mundane 1 hour trip today, without any big planning, worries, etc. A task which was complex, great, is now rendered simple, small. So with this in mind, it makes sense that in such a world the main obstacle of the heroes has to be elevated to it's standards of complexity.

Heroes in a D&D setting couldn't face a threat from a setting as is the Witcher for an example, because it wouldn't make for a challenge. It's standards of simple - mediocre are equal to those of the complex in the Witcher. The Wild Hunt nothing more but minions in their world. But also, given the challenge from the Warhammer 40k universe, would render the heroes in the D&D setting useless as it is far above their level of complexity to the point it becomes impossible.

It's really just about what for a law you introduce in the setting/fiction/universe that will then offer the options for the main conflict - obstacle. If there exists something that can twist reality and render entire planets obsolete - I don't think having the main protagonist resolve his inner conflicts of depression as an appropriate goal to reach. I am not stating that it cannot be used - but if there's something present that can twist reality and render planets obsolete, that depression kind of falls flat out in terms of danger or complexity.
 
DVL said:
Tolkien was original when he first wrote it though. He coined the Gandalf archetype, which he took from Odin. He was really into mythology and used that as an inspiration for his fiction. The dude championed Beowulf as a legitimate piece of literature worth reading.

It's just that people focus on the superficial qualities of his work and ignore a lot of the really gritty picaresque fantasy that inspired D&D in favor of ripping off Tolkein. But a lot of people assume D&D was meant to be high fantasy.
Think about how the game works. The original system gave you exp for each gold piece you could extract from a dungeon. (And this stuff was heavy, so monster encounters weren't necessarily the best exp.) You level up and become more powerful and you're basically self-employed vagabonds and mercenaries. You're Cugel or Conan. You take odd jobs and your life is a series of episodes without a larger story arc.

And it's why you see a lot of stupid RPG assumptions that never make sense. Bilbo and Frodo never wanted to leave home. They were really wealthy hobbits and most the Fellowship were people of high social standing that have no reason to go adventuring the way Cugel or Conan would. They aren't motivated by stealing whatever is nailed down and becoming more personally powerful. And quite to the opposite, wanting more power is actually a corrupting influence. Characters didn't become better fighters or learn mystical powers when they were done.

So get this. You're the heroes of light destined to save the world. But you're stealing things out of people's homes and farming monsters for exp. Gah.
It's why I think Dragon Age was confused because it was trying at the same time to be both Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings.

A skill-based system in the vein of White Wolf makes more sense for either of those settings. You can then spend background points to have an heirloom sword that was passed down to you. Or you can spend those same background points to say that his character is particularly wealthy or of high social standing.

Why the heck is it that humanity's spacecop-cum-diplomat, the first nod to the political legitimacy of humanity on the Citadel, is looting guns out of containers? Does this make sense?
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This was beautiful.
 
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