Death Machine Miyagi

One of the things I absolutely love about the Practical Incarnation is that, technically speaking, he is more of an ally than a villain for the overwhelming majority of the game. Most of the threatening things you face aren't his fault; if they have to do with some past incarnation, then more often than not they're the mistakes of the Paranoid Incarnation, often trampling on Practical's attempts to help. He left behind a journal that would have explained everything, for example; Paranoid burned it. The tattoos on your back, giving you a rough guide as to what you need to do? Practical's work. Deionarra only shows up to help you, both in the early and late game, because of his cold-blooded manipulation. Vhailor and Morte and Dak'kon are all only available as companions because of his cold-blooded manipulation. In short, a good chunk of the things that help you out tremendously through the course of the game come to you only because one of your previous incarnations was a complete sociopath willing to do whatever it took to advance his own interests...which just happen to be your interests, too, since technically he is you. Above all, if the Practical incarnation hadn't been a complete monster, then the Transcendent One would have sealed you in the crystal at the end and Deionarra would not have been there to free you. He was thoroughly evil...and yet absolutely necessary to win the game. So yeah, I agree, even as I wonder whether to properly classify him as an antagonist. He is an antagonist for your final conversation with him, when he seeks to absorb you, but before then your interests and his are conjoined.

Yeah, I've read that before. And to be clear, as I've stated elsewhere, I hate cackling mustache-twirling villains who wear their evilness on their sleeve. Games for adults that are meant to be taken seriously should never have those. Any villain you meet n game should be convinced that, on some level, they are doing the right thing. The most horrible people in world history, I'm guessing, have all thought that somehow they were in the right. That being said, they were still horrible. Really, I wish more of Josh Sawyer's concept of the Legion made it into the actual game. I wish we had had the chance to see some civilian areas under Legion control, with no raiders and the chance to interact with people living fairly ordinary lives under Caesar's rule. The Legion still would have been the clearly 'evil' choice, but the balance wouldn't have been tipped quite so heavily towards them being utterly godawful.

For the record, I understand and agree with people about the importance of providing lots of grey moral choices and lots of factions which are neither 100% wrong nor 100% right. However, I think its silly to think that every faction will be like that....or should be like that, for that matter. That there should be no villains at all. Even in a world where people are partly right and partly wrong, there will be some who are much more wrong than right. And why not? That's the real world, people. We have plenty of people who are genuinely awful, whose beliefs and values are genuinely a dead-end, and smacking them down can be genuinely satisfying. We have our Stalinists and we have our Nazis and we have our terrorists of all political and religious persuasions, just as we have the Idi Amins and Pol Pots to lead them. Villains aren't inherently bad. They just need to be done well and satisfying to defeat. So we have a group like Caesar's Legion: in their favor, they 'make the trains run on time' (well...they would if they didn't believe trains and technology in general were evvviilllll), keep the peace in their territory, and the folks who aren't chattel slaves can usually live fairly well under their rule. They also commit genocide (cultural and otherwise), use child soldiers, practice mass enslavement, backstab and forcefully extinguish the cultural identities of their 'allies', crucify entire towns, burn people alive, promote the most vicious form of misogyny use terrorist tactics, suppress technology, support totalitarianism and militarism...and are led by a hypocrite who reserves life-saving technology for himself and gets rid of anyone who is as educated as he is. Oh, yeah, and the whole thing is pretty much destined to collapse in upon itself when he dies anyway. That's not grey. That's black with a few flecks of grey thrown in for appearances sake. And is that so terrible? It's fun to kill them.

I would disagree. New Vegas had three grey factions (NCR, Mr. House, and Independent) with both positives and negatives and one faction that was a pretty straightforward villain: Caesar's Legion. Oh, you could side with them, but as mentioned in post #1, that doesn't mean that they aren't douchebags. And it doesn't mean you aren't a douchebag for helping them.

Irenicus is a frustrating villain. For me, he is a good villain that started with the possibility for greatness. When I first played BG2, the entire first area ('Chateau Irenicus', as its been dubbed) gave off two major themes: 1) The guy running it is a real sick puppy. 2) He is interested in experimenting on people, in the case of Charname for the sake of tapping his/her power. There was a suggestion, a hint, that Irenicus was interested in drawing out and enhancing your power. His motivations are not given. This lead me to think: what if this 'villain', despite being a sick puppy, is in fact genuinely trying to 'help' my character in his own twisted way? How interesting would it be to have a primary antagonist who is completely monstrous in every aspect, save that his long-term goal actually advances your character's interests in some fashion? And your choice in this game amounts to either opposing him because he is so monstrous and terrible, or aiding him with the hope that his work will make you that much more powerful? All of this was building in my head until Spellhold. Then I found out he just wanted to steal my soul and indulge in some smug gloating, and that, no matter what character I was playing, I would have to beat him up in the end game. Bummer.

Missed that, or I would have bought it then.

Yeah, yeah, grey morality this and moral ambiguity that. Most games still have some major enemy, or enemies, you spend most of the game fighting against. You may even get the chance to side with them in the end-game or before, but that doesn't mean they aren't douchebags. So...which RPGs have done a good job with these characters? Which RPGs have done a bad job? When you picture the villains of P:E, who are you hoping they resemble the most? Irenicus? Sarevok? The Transcendent One? Caesar? The Master? The Enclave? Insert-cool-villain-here (my personal favorite)?

Still haven't played AP. The lousy reviews scared me away. Not made of money, you know. I am tempted to buy it sometimes, though. I'll probably pick it up when there's a sale or something.

Yes, but I always find realism kind of satisfying and absurdity kind of annoying when I see it, even in a Fantasy RPG. A touch of realism lends a feeling of authenticity to everything, whereas a hero wielding a JRPG-style sword that is as big as his entire body just provokes amusement or eye-rolling. That doesn't mean realism is always the best option. If it were, I suppose our adventuring career might amount to getting stabbed by the first enemy we encounter, getting taken out of the fight by the wound and dying of an infection a few days later or some such. Still, I'm kind of hoping that outside of the blatant fantasy aspects, the majority of the game will have a realistic feel to it.

This isn't the developers' problem. Tabula rasa is a slate upon which the player writes himself, creating his own background for the character, personality, quirks and so on and so forth. If the end result is a "walking set of statistics pretending to be a character," then that is the player's failure, resulting from not grasping the concept of roleplaying. Except, no matter what wild and wacky exotic story you dream up for your character, you will still have the exact same dialogue choices, interactions with characters, quest lines, and so forth. A Tabula Rasa is all-to-often interchangeable with the game treating you as Mr./Ms. Generic, with no friends, no family, no history, nothing. A CRPG is not like Pen and Paper, where the GM can accommodate whatever background you've dreamt up. 'Unstated background' is treated the same as 'no background.' That said, you're certainly right that a player can imagine any background they choose. They can also imagine dialogue options that weren't there, enemies they didn't actually fight, and so forth in order to facilitate the character they want to play. Its still just not the same as it being actually in the game.

The 'assigning a last name so people can call me by it' has indeed been soured by Bioware, or more accurately by its association with fully voiced games that are extremely restricted in how much choice they offer in the dialogue. Every voiced game has to find something to call you, be it Shephard or Hawke or Kalach-cha or the Knight-Captain or whatever else. A game with a minority of voiced lines, by contrast, can bring us back to the glory days of Charname, when you could type in your name and the game would actually use it somewhere. Best thing for me: first name and last name, with the game willing to use both or either as appropriate.

478 days 6 hours 12 minutes 52 seconds.

BG2 actually gave me what I feel is one of the more frustrating examples of forcing a background on you. Namely, it started with the assumption that you had a party consisting of Imoen, Jaheira, MInsc, Khalid, and Dynaheir which behaved heroically and made various virtuous decisions your character from BG1 might never have made. A little tweaking of the dialogue could have established that you did not travel with any of those companions or behave heroically at all, allowing the past to be established by your dialogue selections ala KOTOR2, but nope. Jaheira flat out tells you, 'we've been adventuring together for a long time now.' That, at least, is something to avoid like the plague. It makes an evil playthrough of BG2 feel extremely weird from the very start.

I suspect the number of possible culture/race combos means that you're right, but as the original Dragon Age showed, there are ways to provide even characters of wildly different backgrounds with their own unique back story. I doubt P:E will ever go so far as to provide a whole 'origin story' for every race/culture, but its certainly possible for them to thrown in an NPC from whichever area you come from who recognizes you and gets into your past relationships a bit.

Yes, but on a sliding scale of 'background undefined' vs. 'defined', BG was still pretty heavy in the 'defined' territory. You were the ward of Gorion and raised 20 years in Candlekeep. Your friend growing up was Imoen. Your mother and (obviously) your father are explained in-game. The background tab could thus be a way of explaining what you thought about all this, and how you acted as you grew up and so forth...but yep, you were Gorion's ward, and your history was pretty solidly laid out for you.

Who was the survivor of the blimp crash in Arcanum? You can establish a background, but it doesn't really matter. The blimp crash survivor has pretty much zero history beyond what you choose to project onto him/her. Who was the Courier of Fallout: New Vegas fame before the game started? Obviously, the Courier was a courier. Other than that, no family, friends, or connections of any kind are clarified in the game. The character is thus more or less a blank slate. And so on. The advantage of this approach is obvious. It allows you to imagine your character has any background you please, albeit a background which will never be acknowledged by the game itself. The disadvantage comes in the form of possible lack of depth. With apparently no family or friends or background of any kind, the character can feel like little more than a walking set of statistics pretending to be a character. Torment would not have worked anywhere near as well as a story if your character didn't have a very richly defined background, for example. How do you hope the developers approach this issue? How much of your character's background should be acknowledged in-game?

Someone reminded me of the Half Ogre Island quest from Arcanum recently. Forgot how awesomely memorable that quest was.

I never did answer this. Kansas City, Missouri, United States of America.

Really hope someone does this for the Chris Avellone Arcanum play-through, as well. I'd like to see how he reacts to various parts of the game and the like, but sitting down and watching someone play live for hours and hours sounds pretty boring.

Allow me to illustrate the difference between 'gratuitous sex/nudity' and 'non-gratuitous sex/nudity'. The book Game of Thrones features a scene in which Ned has sex...or, well, has just finished having sex...with Catelyn. We view the scene through Catelyn's eyes. Her thoughts and their behavior help establish that the two are deeply in love and very close to one another. The sex isn't strictly necessary, but neither does the book shy away from it needlessly. It helps establish their relationship. Non-gratuitous. The TV series Game of Thrones features a scene in which one prostitute fingers another prostitute in front of Petyr Baelish while he gives a motive rant. The sex has very, very little to do with anything whatsoever and in fact is more distracting and annoying than anything. Gratuitous. The book Game of Thrones features a scene in which Daenerys Targaryen has sex with Khal Drogo in a way he isn't used to (girl on top), which helps establish why he is actually falling in love with her instead of just viewing her as his personal **** puppet. Very important for the development of the plot and the characters. Non-gratuitous. The TV series Game of Thrones has a whole scene with a prostitute giving some guy a blow job while Petyr Baelish watches through the peephole in the door. He then goes off and talks to another prostitute, with the first part of the scene having absolutely **** all to do with anything. Gratuitous. There is a difference. If a scene involving sex helps establish character or advance plot, it is justified. If its clearly just there for the sake of it, it isn't.

When you see someone hoping a company they like gets taken over by EA, you can confidently assume 'not serious.'

Satan worship is actually one of the big examples I was thinking of when considering the absurdity of evil religions. Simply put, Satan worship has had much more force in human history as an accusation hurled at people than as an actual faith. It certainly has never been a credible competitor to Christianity, and to the extent that theistic Satan worship is embraced (setting aside the LaVey stuff) it is often embraced with Satan not representing 'evil' and 'nastiness', but rather representing a heroic figure who rebelled correctly against the evil Judeo-Christian God. In other words, they worship him because they think he's good, not evil. I'm sure there are Satanists who run around embracing everything that is dark and nasty and terrible, but I'm guessing most of them have to keep quiet about it so mom doesn't ground them. Developed people who worship a deity tend to want one who will look out for them, not screw them over because 'screwing people over' is part of their portfolio.

Yes. Sadly, that quest was impossible to complete and player was left in the dark( Pretty sure it ended exactly where they intended it to end.

While this is true, its also not quite what I'm hoping for when I hear 'mature content.' HBO and Showtime have a habit of making shows (for HBO, Rome and Game of Thrones spring to mind) which are quite entertaining but are actually undermined by gratuitous sex and nudity. I have no problem with sex and nudity that feels natural and advances the plot. I get annoyed, however, when I feel like I'm being pandered to. If I want soft-core porn, I've got the Internet, guys. Only give me sex when the scene calls for sex, not to fit some kind of sex and nudity quota.

Its also associated with the simple reality of changing moral values. It isn't merely the question of whether a bad thing done for a good reason is still a bad thing; its that, by our standards, any number of things accepted as neutral or even moral goods by people in centuries past are in our eyes pretty damn bad. So if the people of some culture see it as neutral or even good to sacrifice someone to a god, does it qualify as an 'evil religion'? They're doing what they think is right, not what they think is wrong. Its certainly a far stretch from a FR villain who practically walks around with 'EVIL' tattooed across his forehead.