grotbag

I got a 360 just to play Deadly Premonition. I understand how you feel I actually played it on the 360 the first time. After that I ordered the Japanese import version for the PS3(because I just had the 360 for a brief time)and played it until I had collected every single trophy I just love the game because of the same things grotbag mentioned. I was looking forward to this release as well, but I just watched 2 new gameplay footages and the character voices seem to have changed. York sounds like a 15 year old now! Damn it, why the hell would they do such a thing?! Really? I just tried one of the videos and he sounds the same as ever to me. You think the pitch is higher than before?

'Inspired' is a polite way of putting it. At times it's merely cheaply derivative (it has a 'pot lady' in place of a 'log lady') or copies parts of Twin Peaks in a ludicrously over-the-top sort of way that doesn't understand what made the source material so good. Its unworldly, socially-incompetent and insane Agent Cooper-inspired lead, however, I think is fantastic. He's the most charming antidote I can imagine to the tedious industry fallacy that games need to be an insecurity-exploiting power-trip with a badass superawesome brooding hero to make the player feel 'cool' by proxy - partly because the deeply ropey writing lends him an offbeat, bizarre personality, but also because of some quite inexplicable brilliance in the character concept, especially in how it handles the player/player-character relationship.

That doesn't really follow, though. Expressing the desire for the series to go back to its earlier incarnation doesn't mean that you have a chauvinistic inability to enjoy any games that aren't turn-based or isometric, just that the essence of what you admired in these particular games has been lost, weakened or mismanaged by the franchise's transition from turn-based RPG to Bethesda-typical open-world game.

Perhaps it's asking too much of a really dreadful tone-deaf Blade Runner reference, but I'd like to question the common sense of an advanced post-apocalyptic society spending their time obsessively creating and managing anatomically-perfect human-replica androids with adult-level artificial intelligence to perform basic manual tasks for no particular reason.

This a funny example, since the much-loved original novel had no romance in it at all; Hitch was forced to come up with some rather silly plot contrivances (that whole business with the handcuffs, for example) in order to accommodate Madeleine Carroll as a love interest. But again, I think we did already have this exact debate, with most of the same points being made, just a few pages back.

Yup, totally - I'd just argue that all of these experiences are far less demeaned and corrupted by being made into a challenge, partly because in reality they're one-sided personal experiences and partly because in reality they are challenges. Winning a physical contest or a fight is a challenge. Getting a good price from a shop is a challenge. It's all about you overcoming the obstacle, and actually, the obstacle is nebulous, because it's all about you. Saving the world is every kid's self-centred fantasy, and again, it's a challenge, and it's all about you, it's ego-driven. Placing a 'romance', in which two people are supposed to fall in love with one another, mutually, into the context of an interactive experience turns it into a one-sided challenge in which it's all about you getting a certain response out of that same 'other', overcoming the obstacles of their not displaying affection for you, and that's far more troubling, because love isn't meant to be like that, it's the sociopath or the narcissist or the plain creep's way of looking at love, with the other party and the other party's displays of affection quite explicitly as a prize to be won through the correct behaviours. A real love affair by definition involves two actors (or more. If you're very lucky); putting it into a game results in one actor (the player/PC) and one pre-programmed reactor - a passionate tale of one man and his database. It's turning a meaningful mutual experience into a solipsistic fantasy - turning sex into masturbation if you like - which is what makes it more concerning than your other basically harmless examples. I meant a blank slate from the writer's point of view, sorry. As in they're not writing the character as falling in love with another character, they're writing the character as falling in love with a vague arbitrary blank space which the player's character can then step into when they boot up the game. Which is pretty awful, I think.

Look, if you're going to start reading something into a perfectly innocent story about a group of sailors hunting for sperm on the high seas I don't think we're going to get anywhere with this.

Sure. I didn't mean to indelibly associate the two. By 'emotional attachment and even sex' I meant 'emotional attachment or even sex', but honestly, I find the 'emotional attachment' bit even more of a concern. Well, I don't think your plan can do anything more than obfuscate the fact that this so-called 'love story' is a reward-based game by making it a more complicated and therefore naturalistic reward-based game. So player characters have to be brunette or gnomish or under the age of 24 for the romance to trigger - it doesn't change anything significant. The player is still involved in a challenge in which the aim is to successfully win the fake affections of a fictional character through a proxy. That's not going to become less deeply problematic or Lars-And-The-Real-Girl-ish just because there are more specific conditionals required to win; it's just chipping away at Pygmalion's statue to make it more life-like.

I might get some of these wrong but: pretty much all of Beckett. Definitely some of Borges. Kafka. Moby-****. Tristram Shandy. Arguably Joyce? A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich. If you're into that sort of thing, Blood Meridian. Life A User's Manual. Fernando Pessoa. Robinson Crusoe. The Old Man And The Sea. To Kill A Mockingbird doesn't include any significant functioning romantic relationships as far as I can remember. If On A Winter's Night A Traveller... ...no, there's tons, (and, sure, plenty more that do concern itself with the mechanics of love in painstaking detail) but I think this tangent misses the point. Even in a very soppy romantic story in other media, let's say Jane Austen, a highly-talented artist creates two fully-formed fictional characters who display such empathy and humanity and who seem to mesh so well together even in their flaws, so perfectly as individuals, that the reader sincerely hopes they'll find happiness with one another. In an in-game romance, the artist isn't creating these two characters. They're creating one character who needs, at certain pre-set points if the player chooses the correct options, to pretend to be overwhelmed by the affection and charms of a total blank slate, and the audience is not invested in the tension of whether or not these two stars-aligned perfectly-matched individuals will find happiness together because one of the individuals is a puppet under their total control and because that NPC will always put out for anyone who chooses dialogue options ABBC and gives her a flower or rescues her once she's been kidnapped by the blue dragon, you can check it on GameFAQs. This sort of thing is never going to result in a genuinely, objectively great love story, because by the very token of being an interactive experience it has to be a (usually-dialogue based) predetermined challenge in which emotional attachment and even sex are presented as rewards for the correct forms of play. The paradigm's just inherently bust. ...okay, that was my last rant on the subject. Promise. Sorry.

I think there's a fairly clear and substantial difference, at least in terms of character, between a system that says 'You spared the life of Old Ma Kettle. As a result, your companion Amelia Kettle is grateful towards you' and a system that says 'You spared the life of Old Ma Kettle. As a result, Amelia Kettle would like to have a conversation with you where she toys with her hair and asks if there'll ever be something between the two of you because she's been finding you attractive for some time now.' In short, I think having general reputation amongst your companions rise and fall according to this cause-and-effect system is simplistic but basically fine - it's a management mechanic that simulates the player character's leadership skills (or lack of), their ability to flatter and manage and control their team, and it can basically make logical sense so far as motivations go (you kill an orc. Your orc party member becomes unhappy. Fine.). Having a party member automatically become attracted to or fall in love with the player character as a direct result of a cause-and-effect system has nothing to do with how real-life love works and, really, it's rather odd. The party member turns into a kind of bridal Tamagotchi.

Romance, as it appears in RPGs with full player choice, compromises the writing of every game it appears in. Yeah, every single one. It doesn't celebrate love and recognise an incredibly important part of the human experience, as some people are suggesting, it demeans it, because no matter how good the writing might hypothetically be, there's no way of getting around the basic situation that the player is participating in a mini-game in which the aim is explicitly to choose the right dialogue topics and perform the right actions and successfully make a fictional character with pre-set responses pretend to fall in love with your character. By its very nature, it ends up taking love and turning it into cause-and-effect emotional pornography, an artificial playing-out of an 8-year-old's conception of love as a ritual with pre-determined steps (If I give Suzy this flower, she'll be my girlfriend!) in which the winner gets to hear the robot tell them how attractive and heroic and loveable they are. It's Romeo & Juliet, if Juliet was a sockpuppet on Romeo's own wrist. Because it isn't the presence of love that's the problem, it's the player's agency which makes the whole affair tasteless and perverse. No matter how hard the player squints and sucks in their breath and roleplays it, the player character is not a real character. They're a projection, a figure that's entirely defined by their actions and their statistics; their actions can be reacted to, their statistics can be acknowledged, but there's not enough to them to make them worthy of anyone's love, fictional or otherwise - and every time an NPC character is forced to say, '(CONDITIONAL MET: ROMANCE) Oh, PLAYERNAME, I never thought I could fall in love with a RACENAME, least of all a CLASSNAME, but I just can't get over all of your UNSPECIFIED POSITIVE QUALITIES', that character is compromised; it ceases to be a purportedly living, breathing personality and becomes a Marilyn Monroe-bot who's there to gratify and flatter the player. ...you know, in my opinion.

Monte, I've always enjoyed your posts, but I think you're pushing far too hard towards making this issue a libertarian conflict of personal enjoyment rather than a debate about the practicalities of XP. You're arguing that if a player feels the dopamine-maddened urge to reach level 100 early by exploiting the game's mechanics instead of playing through a balanced challenge, no designer should have the temerity to attempt to restrict them by introducing a tighter XP system that limits this kind of behaviour. This just isn't right. If a player chooses to enjoy a game by feeling a rush of faux-achievement as the progress bar dings up faster than it should be, building an overpowered character and trampling over every challenge in the game, then they can take 30 seconds to use a level-up cheat code. It should not be demanded of any game's designers that they keep the base system baggy and vulnerable to exploitation in order to keep the players who enjoy exploitation happy, on the grounds that this won't affect all of those players who are willing to self-impose the restrictions that are aren't included as part of the product itself. Their job is absolutely to impose rules, and to impose limitations upon the player. Your argument just seems...to take your argument to the most absurd extreme, it seems a bit like arguing that the makers of chess should include a Godzilla piece with every board, because some players like to give up on the tactical challenge of the game and take out Godzilla and knock over all of the opposition pieces and win in a single turn, and what right do any of us (apart from their poor opponent, presumably) have to question how they enjoy playing chess? The restrictions of levelling-up and character creation seem to me to be pretty fundamental to the genre and so a tight XP system which rewards different playstyles sounds ideal - if you want to remove those restrictions, you can always find an easy way to do so, but it shouldn't be offered up as part of the base game. (Presumably by now the thread's moved on six pages and this post is totally redundant. Still.)

To the first point; MotB and NV both featured two non-humanoid party members with limited equipment options, a la Morte, and in both cases the game supplied them with new items/abilities to balance out their lack of normal equipment through interaction and quests rather than through standard loot (Morte, of course, had his insults too). There's no reason at all to make a link between full party creation and generic NPC party-members, just because of loot-tables.

Seems pretty obvious that this poster repeating exactly the same spiel (are the developers gay, we have a right to know/Anita whateverhernameis/I just heard the latest news on 4chan) as Troller/Nigro is just Troller/Nigro astro-turfing and agreeing with himself. God knows why he bothers, but there's no point engaging with him, peeps.

No, it's a tonal issue, isn't it? Factional dealings and political manoeuverings, done well, are gripping, but because they're character-driven and based in human needs and wants and motives, they can feel very grounded (which is a good thing, in some cases; you don't want every NPC telling you, 'Adventurer, I'd like you to wipe out the Red Fist gang. For, uhhh, reasons beyond your limited mortal comprehension'. There needs to be some sense of grounding in a familiar medieval-fantasy setting to try and make it feel fully realised and living). Too much focus on it, on the other hand, can push the fantasy-world towards the banal; it's hard to develop a sense of otherworldliness and strange enchanting wonder when you've spent the past six hours negotiating with the two groups that are buying up property around the docks because they want to control the grain trade.