PrimeJunta

Haha no way I'll be able to resist temptation.

Nah, plastic. But it is from the original D&D Basic boxed set...

Mine hasn't fared as well.

A big bestiary was one of the project goals. They've shown us a bunch already, and I'm sure there will be more. Just how big it is we don't know yet and probably won't until release, as they're likely to keep some stuff under wraps until then.

It would be comparable to a localization in scope, I think. All of the PC's lines would have to be dumbified, and a significant number of NPC reactions would have to be added. I'm sure it would be technically doable, but it's a large feature and I would expect a somewhat low-priority one.

And if you only put in one romance, but it's a girl dating a guy, or a guy dating a guy...?

OK, well, that is more interesting. It stands or falls on the control scheme though. If done well, it could be fun to play. If not, it'll be horrid. I briefly checked out the pitch and frankly it sets off my alarm bells though. Great pitch with some clever and innovative ideas, but they'll have to pull some serious rabbits out of hats if they want to actually make it with that kind of budget. If it does come out I'll happily buy it, but this does look like a high-risk project.

I doubt it. They'd have to rewrite all the dialog everywhere, which would be an enormous amount of work. Given the constraints of the project, I'd be extremely surprised if it's in.

I don't really have a problem with the species being humanoid and "relatable," that is after all pretty standard space opera fare. I thought however that it was a missed opportunity to have all of the Council races be culturally so similar. Take the Asari, for example. Yeah, they were female-only, had the maiden-mother-crone... uh, matriarch lifecycle, and lived really long, but they lived in shopping malls, operated a stock market, had military units organized among familiar Earthly lines, and so on and so forth. Basically just transplanted standard American capitalist/consumerist cultural assumptions there with surface exoticism added for flavor. It would've been a lot more interesting if someone had taken the trouble to think about how a thousand-year lifespan with mothers having a string of children across the centuries would shape a culture, and come up with some more interesting ways to organize it. The same goes for the other races too. I could go on with specific nits to pick, but I don't know if there's any point. (It is also true that a lot of sci-fi in general shares these problems.)

This is true. It's also why I think that if BioWare really cared about writing, they would have at the very least "franchise czars" who are tasked with maintaining overall setting and story consistency and continuity in each franchise. Otherwise they'll just go all over the place.

Why d'you think the antimancers should pledge anything? There are already AAA games with romance. Can't you guys let us have at least our little niche games without insisting that they're just like the AAA titles? Please?

Uh... there's a guy on a beach awkwardly swinging a stick. I don't get it. What am I supposed to be impressed about?

He did but he didn't really do space opera. Solaris wouldn't have made for a great shooter. I think space opera needs more familiarity than Lem, which includes relatable races. However I think if the races show less diversity in culture and behavior than, say, Europeans--a single, small, geographically distinct cluster of cultures--then they're doing something wrong. The species of the KOTORs were a good deal more interesting already, and I'm sure you could do even better if you tried.

It's a shame this only came out now. Would've saved me some typing... http://youtu.be/S5_mHgxSRzQ

I would add "general lack of imagination." One of the poins of space opera is that there are wild, exotic, and above all different planets and species to discover. Almost all of ME's locations looked frankly boring, and the visual style was entirely uniform across the whole galaxy. I can find a lot more variety in a five-minute walk around my neighborhood! I also thought most of the species--especially the council species--were not all that interesting. The cool and exotic ones--hanar, rachni--were on the sidelines. I liked what they did with the geth in ME2 and to a lesser extent in ME3 where they overdid the 'they're just misunderstood' pathos thing. These are second-tier problems, though, compared to the general lack of consistency and overall plan you point out.

@Orogun01 I agree, except that I'm not sure MCA is so much better than others who know that craft too. Fallout 1 and FO:NV and TES: Morrowind are all extremely good in this respect and he didn't have all that much to do with them. What they have in common is solid, broad, and deep lore, with the writing squarely anchored in it. I also think CD Projekt Red's writing shows a lot of promise; while it has its problems I thought both Witchers hung together much better than most computer games.

@Nonek I did actually read the first DA novel. I thought it was kinda cute actually, sweet and childish and enthusiastic, like something written by a clever 13-year-old. I even reviewed it (sort of). (It was a total rip-off of Ivanhoe, though. I'm surprised nobody else seems to have noticed.)

@Keyrock, yes. Yes, it was. Mind-bogglingly bad. Puts the midichlorians to shame. (Well, almost.) @ManifestedISO Those were among the minor quibbles IMO. I could go on about the problems in the systems and gameplay too, many of which were far bigger than the economy-related stuff, but eh.

I'm mostly writing this just because I need to get it out of my system, but partly because it relates to something close to my heart. Namely, writing, and the quality thereof, in computer RPG's. I just finished the Mass Effect trilogy (finally), and it's made me want to scream almost all through. Not because it's irredeemably bad. It isn't. There's some fine writing in it actually, Mordin and the Krogan for example. But because it would have been so easy to make it so much better, and because it illustrates a lot of what's wrong with writing in computer games. A cRPG's story is, by definition, not perfectly linear. You make choices which have consequences, at the very least, or you can do things in a different order, or choose how you react to characters and events. This means that consistency in the setting is paramount. If the setting makes sense and sticks to the rules that have been made up for it, then every individual event and story-let can also make sense. If it doesn't, it won't. Mass Effect's great flaw is that the authors didn't even try to have the setting and story make sense, and they keep violating the rules they have established earlier. It wouldn't even have been hard. My version follows, and it didn't take me more than a half an hour to think it up. The Reapers. The crucial flaw in ME: the authors had no idea what their motivations were and came up with a really colossally stupid explanation at the end. My solution: The Crucible, and the completely nonsensical deus-ex-machina endings. My solution: The Normandy and Shepard. My main beef with Shepard and the Normandy is that Normandy was a warship and Shepard is a soldier -- but the game itself has her swashbuckling across the galaxy, romancing aliens left and right, and doing all kinds of inconsequential stuff while the Universe is being destroyed. It simply doesn't fit. I would've written a different Shepard in order to keep the swashbuckling. I would also have made the various cultures of the galaxy much more distinctive; in particular I thought it was a cryin' shame that everywhere looked either like a bombed-out parking garage or an office building, with even the exact same font in use all across the galaxy. I would also have made the Asari Communists, but that's only because I think Communists are cool and no galaxy would be complete without interstellar Communists. End rant. Had to get that out of my system somehow.

Also polyamory is wrong. You don't mix Greek and Latin roots. It's polyphilia or multiamory dagnabbit! (JK)

The personal is the political, mang. The status quo is not neutral. Silently approving it is a political act, every bit as much as protesting it. Everything we do and say shapes our social environment, in games forums as much as anywhere else. I also don't accept that criticizing a game's particle effects is OK but criticizing its use of racial or gender stereotypes is not, because it might make a small minority of reactionary white males upset. Sorry, @Malekith!

:must: :resist: :temptation: :fail: :runs off to buy a beta key:

@Macrae, what ethnicity and gender are you, out of curiosity?

Absolutely.

Not exacctly. We're not infallible. I'm sure there are times when people see racism when it's not really there. I'm also pretty damn sure that this is much rarer than not speaking up when seeing racism that is actually there. So I'm not saying that we should call out racism if it isn't there. What I am saying is that (1) we should develop more tolerance for the "false positives" so that the social cost of calling out the real thing becomes lower, and (2) that a lot of the time we -- as in, we whites -- tend to reflexively reject call-outs of racism without examining if they actually have some merit, and this is bad. I.e., I don't think false accusations of racism are a problem big enough to get all flustered about, whereas I do think that racism is. Therefore, I think we can fairly safely ignore any events of the former, while paying attention to the latter.