Revan91
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Posts posted by Revan91
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It would probably be wiser to just ignore anyone who unironically uses words such as "cishet", "cisgendered able-bodied man", "allistic" and other made-up, meaningless labels.No, that's a completely ignorant take on the discussion here. We're talking about representation compared to real demographics.
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Only those two characters were exclusively gay, but Lily and Cass were arguably LGBT. I agree that it didn't feel as forced - part of that was good writing, but part of it was also not having player romances. It was always a background detail.
Cass seemed straight to me, you could even flirt with her if you were a guy.
Lily was a very old woman with some kind of mental illness, I wouldn't really say she was LGBT or whatever.
Lily was a physically male character who took on a female persona, so basically trans. Cass iirc admits to being bi at some point.
Are you sure about Lily? She has a male body because that's the standard body-type for supermutants, I don't think there even is a female version. And I wouldn't call her trans, she's just mentally ill and is no longer sexually active and not interested in men nor women.
I don't know about Cass, but I don't think you could really flirt with her if you were a female PC. Maybe I'm just misremembering, I don't know, but I never considered anyone gay aside from Arcade and Veronica in the base game.
Still, the representation of non-straight party characters versus real demographics wasn't exactly realistic, but even if Cass was bi the game never even got close to BW levels of pandering, so it's fine.
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Micamo, 10% or less of the population is estimated to not be heterosexual. There's a kind of bizarre tendency in RPGs and some genre fiction to portray this as the 'lived experience' of a large portion of people or even a majority (see certain Bioware titles).
Which BioWare titles have non-heterosexual characters in the majority?
(Spoilers: it's none of them.)
Dragon Age 2. And DA:O was 50/50.
If we're only counting LOVE INTERESTS then DAO was 50/50 and DA2 was 80/20 ... but that's not what you said. There is no BioWare game in which the majority of characters you can interact with are lesbian, gay or bisexual. There are a heck of a lot of characters in Dragon Age 2 who aren't love interests, and most of the ones that have a stated preference are straight. Even a majority of the companions are heterosexual in DA2 - it's Bethany, Caver, Aveline, Varric and Sebastian vs. Anders, Fenris, Isabela and Merrill. (I guess you could count temporary companion Tallis and have it balance out at 50/50, but she's only available for one DLC.)
Across the whole Dragon Age franchise - counting novels, comics and The Last Court as well as all three games - there are forty-nine LGBT characters with speaking parts, including a few that aren't important enough to have names and some that are only ambiguously gay. Given that the whole franchise has well over five hundred characters, I don't think that's disproportionate at all.
(If anyone is wondering why I bothered to count them, it's because when people on the internet complain that there are too many LGBT Dragon Age characters I like to have some actual numbers to put things in perspective.)
This is a thread aboout romance, we're talking about romanceable characters in BW games, not side characters whose sexual orientation is left unknown.
In DA2, four out of the five love interests are bisexual and one is straight, but not a majority of your companions, let alone a majority of the characters in the world.
There are various reasons why there's less homophobia in Thedas than there is the real world, but my essay about that would be really off-topic.
Is the fifth LI a dlc character? I never played that and so I only know of the base games one and think those are the ones that really count, but if you want to add her to the list ok, it doesn't really change anything.
And the reason why there's less homophobia than the real world is because the game is written by "progressive" designers/writers that want to pander that small part of their audience which is susceptible to these things. It has nothing to do with setting consistency.
Just to be clear, I'm not advocating for settings were everyone hate gays or whatever, I just don't like that sort of pandering BioWare likes to do, and I think when you want to treat these issues you should deal with them with more respect and intelligence than just making everyone bisexual and/or politically correct, which is just the easy and dumb way.
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In Dragon Age II they were all bisexual.Micamo, 10% or less of the population is estimated to not be heterosexual. There's a kind of bizarre tendency in RPGs and some genre fiction to portray this as the 'lived experience' of a large portion of people or even a majority (see certain Bioware titles).
Which BioWare titles have non-heterosexual characters in the majority?
(Spoilers: it's none of them.)
Also, Inquisition had two gays and two bisexual. The straight characters were four, just like the non-straight (three of those were only available for females PCs, though).
That's not a correct representation of sexual orientations, since more than 95% of the world population is straight. I'll also add that having a setting based on medieval Europe where people think it's ok to kill others because of their faith or social class but somehow everyone is more open-minded than contemporary real world people about being sexual orientation/identity is also ****ty fanfiction-tier writing.
Cass seemed straight to me, you could even flirt with her if you were a guy.Only those two characters were exclusively gay, but Lily and Cass were arguably LGBT. I agree that it didn't feel as forced - part of that was good writing, but part of it was also not having player romances. It was always a background detail.
Lily was a very old woman with some kind of mental illness, I wouldn't really say she was LGBT or whatever.
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Micamo, 10% or less of the population is estimated to not be heterosexual. There's a kind of bizarre tendency in RPGs and some genre fiction to portray this as the 'lived experience' of a large portion of people or even a majority (see certain Bioware titles). It's insipid, unrealistic, pandering and forced. There are 7 companions in PoE2 - if they want to represent sexual orientation proportionally, they would include zero or possibly one companion who is not "cisgendered" and heterosexual. But we all know that now that they have announced "romances" they will pander and massively distort the human experience to be politically correct.
Even Fallout: New Vegas, which I consider to be one of the more sober-minded treatments of this subject in games, has only two out of six humanoid companions who are straight. You and people like you are the reason that so many people don't want romances in this game. Because we know you will push this garbage on the rest of us who just want realistic, well-written characters. I would hope that the new writing team will avoid this kind of tumblr fan fiction, but the quality of writing in Tyranny does not fill me with confidence.
Simply this.
By the way, only Veronica and Arcade were gay in NV, iirc. Not exactly realistic that 33% of your human companions are non-straight but they never felt forced or made that way just for pandering reasons, as a lot of post-2010 BioWare characters.
Tyranny with its cast of all-bisexual people was much worse, and it didn't help the fact that the writing itself was definetely less than stellar.
There are 7 companions in PoE2 - if they want to represent sexual orientation proportionally, they would include zero or possibly one companion who is not "cisgendered" and heterosexual. But we all know that now that they have announced "romances" they will pander and massively distort the human experience to be politically correct.
In the first game both Maneha and Iselmyr were gay and that was before they announced romances.
Maneha was also quite a weak character imo, although that has nothing to do with her being gay (but the banter with Kana in which she say she doesn't want to be his wing-man was pure cringe, and definetely out of place in a 16th century-inspired setting).
I never found anything suggesting Iselmyr was gay, though.
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WTF even is a cisgendered able-bodied man? I guess you are one of those people who likes to create new labels for every meaningless thing.
I'm sorry they closed the BioWare forums, but I'm sure you can find what you want in their FB fanpage and in their terrible games and romances.
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Update isn't bad: deeper companions relationships is a good thing and that's what they promised.
Luckily Josh isn't really a romance-supporter, so we should be save from BioWare-style retarded romances in this game and their checkbox approach to them (an option for everyone, yay! even if it makes no sense whatsoever in the setting/game, who cares about consistency aniway).
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Enhancing reactivity doesn't ruin your single playthrough, it just enhances the experience of others that are willing to play the game more than once and are able to get a somewhat different experience.
PoE's reactivity wasn't really great, improving on the sequel is only fair.
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The megadungeon in PoE ended up being too big for its own good.
If it had like five levels instead of 15 it would've been a lot better, some floors just had very little going on for them and were only filled with trash mobs. Durgan's Battery in TWM was definetely better.
Hopefully (and it seems one of their goals, as they've stated in some interviews) they'll also focus on open areas that can be completed with multiple approaches, like Raedric's Hold and the Abbey in TWM2. Those were very nice.
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While I think mages and other vancian casters could've used some fixes, getting rid of the vancian magic system entirely doesn't seem the correct way to approach the problem.
Maybe they could've got more per encounter abilities and the like, while still keeping per rest spells.
As I said in another thread, PoE 3.0 was pretty good. Don't change something that already works, Josh/Obsidian.
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How can people have problem understanding the health/stamina bars? It's pretty easy to figure out how it works.
To Josh and Obsidian: don't change something that works. You spent more than a year patching and balancing PoE and the end result in 3.0 was great. Let's start from there, instead of changing the health/stamina systems, the vancian casting and other things.
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Hopefully, Tyranny will have little to no influence over PoE2, aside from wiki-style hyperlinks in conversations.
Cooldowns have no place in PoE, area design was terrible with very small maps filled only with monsters to kill and NPCs to talk to (nothing even remotely resembling Raedric's Castle or the Abbey in TWM2 design-wise), combat was bad systems-wise and encounter design even worse, with basically the same enemies to kill through the entire game.
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If they do a DLC/expansion for PoE2 as well I hope they place it after the ending MotB-style. Having to load an older save to go on new adventures and then refinishing the game to have the "true ending" that takes into account all the new stuff (but you still have to kill the same enemies and view the same content you already played through) is kinda meh.
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Is there actually a giant statue built into the levels of the Endless Paths that you can see parts of while exploring?
Yup. It's pretty much like in the concept art piece posted by Suen.
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The White March was a step in the right direction: area and encounter design was better, the dungeon (Durgan's Battery) was superior to the boring Od Nua's endless levels (15 levels, wtf where they thinking?) and the writing was good, so I'm hopeful for the sequel.
I guess still excited and full of regret?
From the kickstarter:
People REALLY wished to see the feet of the statue.
Yeah, they probably regretted adding so many levels themselves, but they should've realised during the KS campaign that it was too much and commit to do something less enourmous. The dungeon would've been much better if it had 5 well-designed levels instead of what we got.
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We know Pillar of Eternity 2 is in development, but it hasn't been formally announced yet. That hasn't stopped Josh Sawyer from posting various images over the past few months, however.
https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/734073381872504832
(older stuff here: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/83320-project-louisiana-not-fallout-related/)
Josh Sawyer, playing Tolkien...
This is the very reason Pillars of Eternity (PoE) was such a disappointment. And here we go again. I was extremely disappointed with PoE solely due to this reason. Rather than an RPG, which was supposed to be a spiritual successor to IE games, we were given a semi-Welsh, semi-English history of lamelands to read. Everything including the combat, areas, NPC's (bar Durance, Mother and maybe Eder) was incredibly dull, comparing those lifeless cities to the cities in BG2 is just painful.
I was expecting Avellone to step in and clean up this mess, exactly like he did with Neverwinter Nights 2. Remember the kalach-cha, vanilla NWN2, that is Sawyer right there with Avellone saving the merchandise in MotB. Now that he left Obsidian, it seems like we are stuck with this.
I will not be so cruel, PoE was OK, but only that. Thousands of people did not donate money so that Josh Sawyer could play Tolkien. Instead of coming up with better story writing, fixing issues with the combat and talent system, and focusing on ambience, someone is working on his runes. Amazing!
I am not impressed. At least learn something from Tyranny! Tyranny felt quite experimental and incomplete, yet I would take it over PoE any day.
Yeah sure, you're completely right! Except JES worked on NWN2 only in its later stage of production and therefore had very little to do with it, and MCA only wrote two companions in MotB while the story was made by Ziets.
You're one of the many people who think MCA did all the good things that worked on Obsidian game and Sawyer is responsible for everything that went wrong, which is not only wrong but also disrespectful to the plenty other designers that worked on their games and helped shaped them.
Avellone had a key role in Torment, KotOR II, Alpha Protocol and the New Vegas dlcs (except Honest Hearts), of which P:T was terrific and KotOR II could've been a masterpiece if it was finished, but other people like Gonzalez, Ziets, Saunders, Fenstermaker, Stout and others had bigger roles on the other Obsidian games.
Beyond that, I do think that the focus on balancing everything for more than 1.5 years was probably too much (3.0 is better than the base game, but after that patching the game to change a 0.x % damage of some skill and other stuff was excessive) and some of the language stuff was weird. Then again many of the things you're criticizing in PoE were developed by other designers, not Sawyer (he's mainly responsible for the systems and the setting, iirc).
PoE was good imho, although BG2 is obviously the better game, and the sequel team should definetely try to improve on the reactivity, the companions (I liked most of their personalities/backgrounds but they were not developed enough, extremely unreactive to your actions and had little interaction with each other, the player and the NPCs), the encounter design, since PoE had too many trash mobs.
The White March was a step in the right direction: area and encounter design was better, the dungeon (Durgan's Battery) was superior to the boring Od Nua's endless levels (15 levels, wtf where they thinking?) and the writing was good, so I'm hopeful for the sequel.
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PoE is superior in basically every way, especially after the patches and the expansion.
Tyranny's gameplay, ui, encounter and area design are just way weaker than PoE's. The world's background is fairly interesting and reactivity is better than Eternity (though not as good as AP or NV), but that doesn't make up for the incredibly small maps with nothing to do besides killing enemies, combat which is the dumbed down version of PoE, with less companions, no friendly fire, cooldowns but it's still more chaotic and confusing and also it poses no challenge to the player since it's just too easy (at least at Hard), you face the same groups of enemies for the entirety of the game with almost no variance whatsoever and it gets annoying soon, and Act 2 is a goddamned slog (Act 3 only starts with interesting premises again but after one hour you've finished the game).
Also, from the game marketed as the one where "evil won" I expected something more impressive in that regard and less politically correct bullsh1t. Kyros' laws promote equality between genders, races, give the same opportunities to the rich and the poor... it doesn't make sense in a supposedly evil faction, even without considering the fact that the game was supposed to take place in a Bronze Age inspired setting and not in a 21th century inspired one. In the end, the Bronze Age inspiration turned out in having javelins as a weapon, everything else has nothing to do with Ancient Greece or whatever they claimed was their source for the game, and in fact the Tiers' population has the mindset of 20/21th century americans in many aspects of their lives, which doesn't make sense.
Pillars on the other hand had a lot darker setting, with real nasty things going on such as the Waidwen's Legacy, the controversity surrounding animancy, the Purges against Eothas' followers, racism and hatred against orlans, Glanfathan, outsiders, and a lot of other things that made the world felt more grounded, real and believable.
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They have Armored Warfare, Pathfinder Card Game and Pillars of Eternity 2 in production. Then we have one more unannounced game.
Considering the questions in this survey, they're also obviously considering doing a Pathfinder RPG as well.
I'm kinda neutral to it because I don't know Pathfinder and never played it and would be interested only because of Obsidian's name, but frankly I'd rather have them exploring other settings than yet another generic high fantasy. I mean, it might be good and enjoyable (Forgotten Realms are as dull and generic as it gets and still BG2, Mask of the Betrayer and other titles were great, although no thanks to FR), but I would like to see Sawyer's historical project and maybe some modern/contemporary settings or a sci-fi first, something a bit more unusual at least when it comes to RPGs.
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I have to say I wouldn't mind seeing Pillars and Tyranny go to PS4 too....just preordered Tyranny for PC on GOG today and backed Pillars on KS so I'd love to see them expand to new audiences.....we've seen Torment, Wasteland 2, and Divinity Original Sin go to consoles so surely Obsidian can make this leap too.....and now inXile is pitching Wasteland 3 as a simultaneous launch on all platforms kind of thing....if they can do it sure Obsidian can, they are a much better studio than inXile or Larian.
God no, that would be terrible.
I didn't backed PoE to see them doing a console port, inXile is behaving like **** and has lost its credibility in the meantime, Obsidian should be wiser.
Regardless, there's nothing good to come out of a console port, only the potential for bad things to happen. Also, Obsidian games are RTwP which is more difficult (and ****tier) to play without mouse and keyboard than TB gameplay, which already sucks with a gamepad. And last but not least, the market on console for these kind of games is small: Larian with D:OS has been the most successful rpg of this kind to come out recently and has stated that its game sold more than 1.5 mil overall, of those 1.1 m were sold on Steam and I guess they sold another 100k at least on GOG and other digital resellers, leaving both consoles combined at about 300k or 400k at best (1/4 of the PC version alone).
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Avellone lured him over to Bethesda.
Damn, that would be depressing.
Hopefully, though, MCA will start something of his own and work as a lead designer on something, instead of the minor things he's doing right now. And Fenstermaker will keep working with Obsidian, or, if he has indeed left the studio, he will continue to work on some proper rpgs, not Bethesda, BioWare or those kind of companies.
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https://twitter.com/ChrisAvellone/status/782827626012418048?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Avellone has just tweeted that Fenstermaker may have left Obsidian, is that true?
Whatever people think about PoE's plot, I think he's a solid narrative designer, so it would be sad it that turn out to be true. Also, who would take his place as PoE2's lead narrative designer?
Can any developer shed some light over this matter?
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I don't really think there's the need to include more silly characters.
The tone of PoE never bothered me and it was right in the context of the Hollowborn curse and the difficulties faced by the people of the Dyrwood. Times were bad for a lot of folks, so it would've been weird to have many NPCs act in funny ways.
Sure, some funny moments are good and don't necessarily ruin the game or its more serious tone (see The Witchers, that managed to mix good humuor and funny parts with the darker atmosphere that permeates the world), but I don't want too much sillyness in Obsidian's games. Also, Maneha was probably the most silly character in PoE and she was hardly a fan favorite, while Durance was one of the most loved (alongside Eder who has some funny lines and is not totally serious but has a serious and somewhat tragic background and questline).
Other than that, Josh seems to have focused on the right things in his slides and I agree with most of his points, so PoE2 should shape up very nicely.
I hope his talk will be available soon, should be interesting.
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The game is releasing in early 2017 (unless they delay it again), the deal with Techland was only signed like two months ago. If the idea of the porting was started by Techland, then it would mean that they'll port the game in less than a year, while also finishing to polish the game, adding the last quests and contents, working on the beta, etc. It doesn't seem likely to me, they probably begin with the port earlier and are saying it's done with Techland's money to calm down the backers who don't like this move because they wanted a CRPG.
Also, this porting will affect the PC version of the game, if only because their will to release the game simultaneously on PC and consoles is probably the cause of the last couple delays: if the console port is ready in early 2017 and they started working on it only recently, then the PC version would definetely be ready even sooner, maybe even now.
Besides, it will affect the UI (WL2 had a different UI in its DC version) and some other minor tweaks here and there, if we're lucky (but the point is, even if it doesn't affect the PC version at all, it doesn't add anything to it either, so it's waste of their resources that doesn't benefit backers in any way).
Also, console gamers usually don't like very complex games (tbh, a lot of PC gamers don't like them as well, but there is more market for those games on the PC), and by complexity I mean the systems and combat but also the quest and world design (quest compass, easy solutions to every problem, no "punishments" for making bad choices), so if they want the game to be successful on console they need to take that into account of course.
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VGChartz is terrible and totally inaccurate, guys. D:OS console port was more successful than WL2, but even that was not enough to make Larian promise to make the sequel on both PC and console at release. They preferred to focus on PC first, because that's where their game sold a lot and where (most of) their fans are.
Where did you get that information? These games don't need to sell a huge amount of units to make it profitable, they just need to cover the costs of porting.
Just getting even isn't enough, companies want to make profits, otherwise the investment is not worth it.
By the way, another slap on the backers' face by Fargo (after the terrible handling of the beta). Sure, there's been a lot of bad signs on this project since Saunders' strange departure.
Also, Fargo in 2013:
Fargo's relationship with EA goes back to 1985, when he made the original Bard's Tale for the then fledgling publisher. 28 years on, he's still making innovative games for the PC market; but does he have any plans to bring his latest games to current or next-generation consoles? After all, Torment won't release until 2015. "It’s certainly possible and technically feasible," he says. "However, we’ve gone to the crowd and they’ve given us money for a very specific purpose, which is to put our games on the PC, Mac and Linux. So that’s where we’re expending 100% of our efforts. We don’t spend any of our time wondering whether it can or can’t be done on consoles, because that isn’t our charter. Our charter is to deliver these first versions".
GG.
Even though I am not pleased about their decision to put their resources to port these games to consoles (because I would like them put those resources to make more PC games), but at least they don't put money the got from backers to make those ports. In other words backers paid development of PC version and publishers paid porting said games to consoles.
You know that for sure? Right now, this move it's just a big "**** you" to their backers and supporters who donated their money after the promise of delivering a solid PC old-school rpg. Also, there's no way of knowing whose money goes in this useless port, so it would've been better and more honest to deliver the PC version and use the money you received (and the ones the devs poured out of their pocket) to stand to your word and deliver the best game you can.
Instead, they did this, which in the best scenario will not affect the game and the PC version and will just be a waste of money that could've been used on making it better/longer/with more branching storylines/etc.
To make it worse, while other devs are honest from the start with their intentions, Fargo tried to sell himself as the champion and saviour of true CRPGs when it was useful to gain money on Kickstarter, but is yet again proving that it was just a facade.
Where did you get that information? These games don't need to sell a huge amount of units to make it profitable, they just need to cover the costs of porting.
Just getting even isn't enough, companies want to make profits, otherwise the investment is not worth it.
By the way, another slap on the backers' face by Fargo (after the terrible handling of the beta). Sure, there's been a lot of bad signs on this project since Saunders' strange departure.
Also, Fargo in 2013:
Fargo's relationship with EA goes back to 1985, when he made the original Bard's Tale for the then fledgling publisher. 28 years on, he's still making innovative games for the PC market; but does he have any plans to bring his latest games to current or next-generation consoles? After all, Torment won't release until 2015. "It’s certainly possible and technically feasible," he says. "However, we’ve gone to the crowd and they’ve given us money for a very specific purpose, which is to put our games on the PC, Mac and Linux. So that’s where we’re expending 100% of our efforts. We don’t spend any of our time wondering whether it can or can’t be done on consoles, because that isn’t our charter. Our charter is to deliver these first versions".
GG.
Even though I am not pleased about their decision to put their resources to port these games to consoles (because I would like them put those resources to make more PC games), but at least they don't put money the got from backers to make those ports. In other words backers paid development of PC version and publishers paid porting said games to consoles.
You know that for sure? Right now, this move it's just a big "**** you" to their backers and supporters who donated their money after the promise of delivering a solid PC old-school rpg. Also, there's no way of knowing whose money goes in this useless port, so it would've been better and more honest to deliver the PC version and use the money you received (and the ones the devs poured out of their pocket) to stand to your word and deliver the best game you can.
Instead, they did this, which in the best scenario will not affect the game and the PC version and will just be a waste of money that could've been used on making it better/longer/with more branching storylines/etc.
To make it worse, while other devs are honest from the start with their intentions, Fargo tried to sell himself as the champion and saviour of true CRPGs when it was useful to gain money on Kickstarter, but is yet again proving that it was just a facade.
Romance
in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Posted · Edited by Revan91
Actually, even punks with a tattoo-filled body and a tough she-warrior don't have to be necessarily gay for whatever reasons, but I could understand the association with lesbians since they're often depicted that way in the media (short hair, tough/strong attitude, kind of masculine attributes, etc). But Morrigan, I wouldn't really consider her masculine.
Wait, how is Hiravias bisexual? He frequently makes sexual jokes with most of the women he met. Have I lost something?Also, no one is arguing that there shouldn't exist gay people in these kind of fantasy games, just that they should make sense and not be made just to pander to SJW, and should be represented in somewhat realistic ways and numbers (aka, if you have six companions and four are gay/bi you're doing it wrong).
I won't speak about Thedas because it's a shallow setting, but PoE draws much from real world history (see Waidwen, for example) and has a coherent setting with believable factions and characters. Having a setting where people purge other citizens just because of their deity, where people think that it's fine to kill others that have wronged you in some way and in general the mentality is, let's say, more in line with 16th century than modern times and then having its people being more open-minded than today's society about gays just because of political correctness doesn't really make much sense.