232 replies to this topic

[Namutree]

 

 

Well for one halflings are ugly midgets and were never cool to begin with outside of the lotr story. All these races are overdone in fantasy what is the point adding them over new creatures. 

 

Well, but orcs are so cool too..

There's something "strenght and honor"ish about them..

 

 

You can apply that strength and honor to some new race and there you go. Personally I think it be funny to see a highly intelligent chimpanzee race inspired from planet of the apes. Not related at all to human races in origin and are total **** to colonists they capture and humiliate with chimp grunts and throwing poop at them. Basically a goofy playful monkey race.

 

I'd like to see a monkey race inspired by Sun Wukong. Give em a boost to agility and a slight resistance to elemental magic, but lower concentration and a slight weakness to non-elemental magic. They could look like this:

Edited by Namutree, 21 July 2014 - 03:11 PM.

[SKull]

 

 

Bear in mind, the same criticism holds true of traditional elves; they're the inverse of orcs and just as unbelievable.  Josh et. al seem to have had a significantly hard time making them interesting and relevant for that reason.  But I would argue that elves are more core fantasy than orcs, because stories of elves and faeries played a significantly larger role in English canon than orcs.

 

 

To be fair though this is the failure of the fantasy genre to get elves, or to portray them as complex creatures, at least from Tolkien`s perspective. If you read Silmarillion for example, the elves there are about as different from run of the mill fantasy elves in games as you can imagine. If you could do elves like that they would certainly not be boring. Jon Irenicus is probably the closest I`ve seen to getting there in any computer game at least, and he was also not boring. When this becomes a problem with any race or class it is because there`s no proper vision. Orcs are the same, and usually incredibly dull and generic. But Tolkien`s orcs were not dull and generic, but had complexity, both within each character and socially.

 

It`s all down to the writing, and you can make all this stuff very interesting or very dull.

[anameforobsidian]

I would agree about Tolkien's elves, at least in the Silmarillion, but it's been ten years since I've read any Tolkein so my recollections may be off.  There's a very interesting contrast between them being angry ****ups who are destined to fail and their seeming perfection to human observers (although this varies from work to work).  However, I never got the same picture of the orcs, which were corrupted elves who spoke a language that was a corrupted form of elven.  They seemed to live in material and cultural poverty, and it doesn't seem like Sam gained any insights into their culture when he pretended to be one.

[Jarmo]

 I'd like to see a monkey race inspired by Sun Wukong. Give em a boost to agility and a slight resistance to elemental magic, but lower concentration and a slight weakness to non-elemental magic. They could look like this:

 

 

You wont.

 

Because then you'd also see a siht storm of "black people portrayed as stupid monkeys", vendors would decide to do the right thing and not carry the game. It wouldn't matter at all if the game would also have black people portrayed as black people with superior intellect and angel like presence. Because that's how things work, take one thing out of context and go crazy.

 

Neat pic though.

 

-----

BTW. I'm perfectly OK and happy to see orcs and goblins and such in a fantasy game.

 

You immediately know what's what and what to do. It's mostly when the game tries to be overly clever and start

making up cultural differences and oppression and reasonings and stuff, when things go south and fail.

 

They wont fit well into a super realistic scenario where everyone has mixed motivations and all.

More fun games, where orcs are orcs, skeletons are skeletons and bandits have black hoods and live in a bandit camp.

Edited by Jarmo, 22 July 2014 - 03:37 AM.

[salo]

I would actually like a RPG where there wasn't any humans, but the other "regular" fantasy races could show up, as well as that Sun Wukong idea above. It'd be cool, I think.

[IndiraLightfoot]

No, ape people, please. I don't even like Planet of the Apes. And King Kong is even worse than Tarzan. I'm so tired of all these tribal humanoid races, like orcs, kobolds, goblins and hobgoblins. I'm not very fond of those ogres and giants either, at least as long as they are portrayed in that dumb evil brutes which gravitate towards LE leader tyrant humanoids. All that sucks just as much as the demonspawn in Dragon Age, which pretty much ruined that game for me. The orcs and bugbears-section of the NWN2 OC is the worst part. I want a game much more along the lines of Mask of the Betrayer, slightly exotic, weird, ever so exciting and still ever so believable.

[PrimeJunta]

I sometimes think that the most underused monster in fantasy cRPG's is the human.

[anameforobsidian]

I sometimes think that the most underused monster in fantasy cRPG's is the human.

 

No, it's the Neogi.

Edited by anameforobsidian, 22 July 2014 - 06:51 AM.

[TrueNeutral]

I sometimes think that the most underused monster in fantasy cRPG's is the human.

 

That's because the human is the most used monster in everything else. Except for maybe Sci Fi.

[IndiraLightfoot]

 

I sometimes think that the most underused monster in fantasy cRPG's is the human.

 

No, it's the Neogi.

 

And here I was, thinking it was Zygom.

[drake heath]

That's a fascinating concept that I would love to see explored.  Weren't the orks in 40k something like the decayed remnants of a eusocial culture?

The orks in 40k are sentient fungus.

Edited by drake heath, 22 July 2014 - 09:55 AM.

[Namutree]

 

 I'd like to see a monkey race inspired by Sun Wukong. Give em a boost to agility and a slight resistance to elemental magic, but lower concentration and a slight weakness to non-elemental magic. They could look like this:

 

 

You wont.

 

Because then you'd also see a siht storm of "black people portrayed as stupid monkeys", vendors would decide to do the right thing and not carry the game. It wouldn't matter at all if the game would also have black people portrayed as black people with superior intellect and angel like presence. Because that's how things work, take one thing out of context and go crazy.

 

Neat pic though.

 

-----

BTW. I'm perfectly OK and happy to see orcs and goblins and such in a fantasy game.

 

You immediately know what's what and what to do. It's mostly when the game tries to be overly clever and start

making up cultural differences and oppression and reasonings and stuff, when things go south and fail.

 

They wont fit well into a super realistic scenario where everyone has mixed motivations and all.

More fun games, where orcs are orcs, skeletons are skeletons and bandits have black hoods and live in a bandit camp.

 

I don't have much faith in media, but I think they could at least understand a reference to journey to the west. I should also note that fur comes in a few colors. Black, white, brown, orange, and grey. Heck, we've already seen monkey people in a few video games. I doubt many would accuse Starfox of making black people stupid monkeys.

 

As for orcs; there's nothing wrong with using them in fantasy often. Ever hear people complain about how often humans are in fantasy; they are more common than orcs.

[Namutree]

No, ape people, please. I don't even like Planet of the Apes. And King Kong is even worse than Tarzan. I'm so tired of all these tribal humanoid races, like orcs, kobolds, goblins and hobgoblins. I'm not very fond of those ogres and giants either, at least as long as they are portrayed in that dumb evil brutes which gravitate towards LE leader tyrant humanoids. All that sucks just as much as the demonspawn in Dragon Age, which pretty much ruined that game for me. The orcs and bugbears-section of the NWN2 OC is the worst part. I want a game much more along the lines of Mask of the Betrayer, slightly exotic, weird, ever so exciting and still ever so believable.

Who suggested ape people? I suggested monkey people. I also never said they would be tribal. My idea of them was that they are exorcists and nomadic monks; sometimes druids. Usually a priest with maybe a few monk guards would visit small communities and help the locals with monster problems or establish temporary schools to teach their philosophy to anyone interested. They survive on the charity of those they aid or teach; at least that is how they typically are.

 

Most you would fight would be of a renegade warrior sect that want to engage in fights with unwary travelers to test and expand their martial abilities. They would not attack the player as a group if they outnumber you. So if you had a team of three and there were six of these enemies; only three would attack you. The other three would just meditate and only attack if you attack them.

 

Playing as that race or fighting the would be awesome.

Edited by Namutree, 22 July 2014 - 12:28 PM.

[drake heath]

I don't get why orcs have to be tribal savages.

 

They could be bureaucratic savages, like the vogons from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

[Lephys]

The funny thing is, if you just make some ape people, there's absolutely no connection to any real-life race/ethnicity of people until the person calling "racist!" comes in and makes one.

"Wait... I just made ape people. Are you suggesting there are people in real life that are similar to my unintelligent ape people?"

Also, apes are already pretty intelligent, and are already a lot like people, so that's kind of a weak "splice" in fantasy terms.

[Namutree]

The funny thing is, if you just make some ape people, there's absolutely no connection to any real-life race/ethnicity of people until the person calling "racist!" comes in and makes one.

"Wait... I just made ape people. Are you suggesting there are people in real life that are similar to my unintelligent ape people?"

Also, apes are already pretty intelligent, and are already a lot like people, so that's kind of a weak "splice" in fantasy terms.

Ape people is definitely a weak splice. That's why I suggest monkey people. Monkeys aren't apes.

[Calmar]

I don't get why orcs have to be tribal savages.

 

Where does this even come from? Is it a Warcraft thing? Orcs in Tolkien are different.

[salo]

 

I don't get why orcs have to be tribal savages.

 

Where does this even come from? Is it a Warcraft thing? Orcs in Tolkien are different.

 

 

Yeah, likely. And if Blizzard wasn't the source (I think they lifted a lot of stuff from Warhammer, but I'm not especially well read on the subject) they at least propagated it.

The thread title, and the discussion, just reminded me of the game Of Orcs and Men (perhaps intentional from the OP?), where you play as an Orc warrior with a goblin sidekick against monstrous humans. Bit of a fresh air, at least thematically!

[Sonntam]

 

 

I don't get why orcs have to be tribal savages.

 

Where does this even come from? Is it a Warcraft thing? Orcs in Tolkien are different.

 

 

Yeah, likely. And if Blizzard wasn't the source (I think they lifted a lot of stuff from Warhammer, but I'm not especially well read on the subject) they at least propagated it.

The thread title, and the discussion, just reminded me of the game Of Orcs and Men (perhaps intentional from the OP?), where you play as an Orc warrior with a goblin sidekick against monstrous humans. Bit of a fresh air, at least thematically!

 

 

Yes, I thought of that game too when I saw this thread title.   

 

I love orcs and anything orc related, goblins, trolls, give me everything. But I think in PoE they would be misplaced. I think Aumaua already fit the brutish, big tribal race bill pretty well. Adding orcs would just make Aumaua less distinctive. 

 

And if one really wants to play an orc, one can just create an Aumaua barbarian and paint the skin green. Should be a pretty close match.   

[nikolokolus]

The only way I'd go for orcs would be the Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea way: the unholy progeny of Picts and swine daemons.