237 réponses à ce sujet

[Fast Jimmy]

krul2k wrote...

Jimmy if you have not played it get Spec Op's the Line m8, great story there

That's what I keep hearing. 

[Br3admax]

Steelcan wrote...

Cthulhu42 wrote...

Steelcan wrote...

the devouring a god one is tempting....

I don't think I've ever done that in a Bioware game, but it was pretty fun in God of War.

God of War teaches us many things, like what the insides of a cyclop's digestive tract looks like

I stopped learnign from God of War after this:

Modifié par Br3ad, 20 septembre 2013 - 12:09 .

[Dave of Canada]

Wulfram wrote...

I don't generally play games to feel terrible.  Feeling terrible isn't fun for me.

I love it but I'm certain everyone who's read my posts knows that by now.

That playthrough was a good intense experience.

That's what I enjoy about game writing, that intense experience which you're more personally involved with than other forms of media. I love when a game has a lasting impact on the player.

That's why I'm fairly certain that my friend who cried for a week, wouldn't consult with anyone and was borderline broken after Alistair killed himself to protect her "enjoyed" more that ending than the one she claims to enjoy about living happily ever after. I'd love to pull that off on someone someday.

Fast Jimmy wrote...

That's what I keep hearing. 

I second the recommendation.

Modifié par Dave of Canada, 20 septembre 2013 - 12:11 .

[Xilizhra]

That's why I'm fairly certain that my friend who cried for a week, wouldn't consult with anyone and was borderline broken after Alistair killed himself to protect her "enjoyed" more that ending than the one she claims to enjoy about living happily ever after. I'd love to pull that off on someone someday.

Did you ask? If not, that seems remarkably presumptuous.

[Dave of Canada]

Xilizhra wrote...

Did you ask? If not, that seems remarkably presumptuous.

I won't lie that I'm presumptuous but it shows the strengths of the writing, Gaider broke her with his character and she's still deeply impacted by it. Meanwhile, she doesn't remember anything about Husbando Alistair until she repicks up the game.

Edit: Hell, I can't ask or else she broods for a good hour or so.

Modifié par Dave of Canada, 20 septembre 2013 - 12:15 .

[Xilizhra]

Dave of Canada wrote...

Xilizhra wrote...

Did you ask? If not, that seems remarkably presumptuous.

I won't lie that I'm presumptuous but it shows the strengths of the writing, Gaider broke her with his character and she's still deeply impacted by it. Meanwhile, she doesn't remember anything about Husbando Alistair until she repicks up the game.

Edit: Hell, I can't ask or else she broods for a good hour or so.

Er, that sounds more like some kind of depressive episode. Which is similar to me; if something sufficiently bad happens to me in-game, all my thoughts of it involve cringing and wishing it had never happened, and it makes my overall play experience less fun.

[AlexanderCousland]

Xilizhra wrote...

Dave of Canada wrote...

Xilizhra wrote...

Did you ask? If not, that seems remarkably presumptuous.

I won't lie that I'm presumptuous but it shows the strengths of the writing, Gaider broke her with his character and she's still deeply impacted by it. Meanwhile, she doesn't remember anything about Husbando Alistair until she repicks up the game.

Edit: Hell, I can't ask or else she broods for a good hour or so.

Er, that sounds more like some kind of depressive episode. Which is similar to me; if something sufficiently bad happens to me in-game, all my thoughts of it involve cringing and wishing it had never happened, and it makes my overall play experience less fun.

That's kind of how storytellers get their kicks, ya know, being able to make their audience react that way.

[Ryzaki]

Dave of Canada wrote...

Xilizhra wrote...

Did you ask? If not, that seems remarkably presumptuous.

I won't lie that I'm presumptuous but it shows the strengths of the writing, Gaider broke her with his character and she's still deeply impacted by it. Meanwhile, she doesn't remember anything about Husbando Alistair until she repicks up the game.

Edit: Hell, I can't ask or else she broods for a good hour or so.

Huh. I wasn't *that* bothered by Alistair killing himself. It's sad but it's so contrived and stupid how my PC just stands there like a lemon despite being a mage who could've fully disabled him safely that I just shake my head at the absurdity.

[Neon Rising Winter]

Dave of Canada wrote...

Xilizhra wrote...

Did you ask? If not, that seems remarkably presumptuous.

I won't lie that I'm presumptuous but it shows the strengths of the writing, Gaider broke her with his character and she's still deeply impacted by it. Meanwhile, she doesn't remember anything about Husbando Alistair until she repicks up the game.

Edit: Hell, I can't ask or else she broods for a good hour or so.

Interesting that in this discussion that ending is picked as a positive example, when for me it's one of the more morally simplistic. It's effectively Alistair's juvenile wish fulfillment ending. Which given his character makes sense, but it is another unambiguous good guy option. Just not for the PC.

Personally I'd have preferred a route that led to a more power hungry Alistair who would allow his lover to die if it secured his path to the throne. If Alistair killing himself worked, Alistair letting you kill yourself so he can use your death for political reasons should be even better!

Modifié par Narrow Margin, 20 septembre 2013 - 01:01 .

[Sylvius the Mad]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

And yet, as intriguing as all of that sounds, people just flip on the game and say "pander to me." So poking these players out of their usual habits of hero worship and simply being a stereotypical "good guy" may need to become priorities for a developer before they can even begin to assume players are going to have such high levels of complexity in character crafting.

While I agree that players would need to be conditioned extensively in order to play in that way, why do we need them to do that?

What we need is for the games to allow us to do that.  Whether other players do that is immaterial.

[In Exile]

Gwydden wrote...
In my opening post I just explained what to me seemed the logical consequence of curing the werewolves. Returning to the Dalish with no sign of their keeper, who went right behind the Warden... well, I was rather shocked that they all took it all so calmly and didn't jump to conclusions. Being left without dalish/werewolf support in the endgame was a natural consequence for being the perfect paragon, or so I thought.

I don't see why it would be natural at all. It would have to be the case that the Dalish are so petty and spiteful that they would risk the eradication of all life in Thedas to... punish the Warden for not saving Zathrian's life in events that you don't even have to disclose to them? 

The straightfoward story of Zathrian had to make a heroic sacrifice to end the curse is perfectly believable, and frankly wouldn't even involve telling them the truth about their liar of a leader.

I agree with your Connor example, but I doubt they Dalish, likely the most arrogant race in Thedas, would have their ego severly wounded or hesitate when asserting the validity of their myths simply because one of them punished some shems in a rather brutal way.

I do too - but then I think the very idea that there should be some kind of punishment for the Zathrian choice silly. But that's because I'm of the view that the problem isn't the third option, it's how inane the dichotomy of the choice itself is. Real choice - moral choices - aren't about some stark problem with world-ending consequences. "Sacrifice your principles to save the werewolves or thousands die!". It's repeatedly the same message, it's not particularly morally deep, and it's not even asking an interesting question. 

I really don't want the player to be punished. Just that there aren't "perfect" choices that invalidate the rest, and that the consequences of important decisions are felt somewhere, to some extent, in the game.

You say this, but again, all of the examples I see come down right to that. Your description about what should happen with the Dalish quest is all about punishing the player - unless you kill the werewolves or the dalish (punishment by killing perceived innocents), then I, the game developer, will kill innocents in the endgame. So, trolololol, no matter what you do innocents have to die! 

My point was that you had to give up on something, because you just can't have everything. And I dislike the concept of a best ending. Best for who? For the PC? For his/her companions? For the mages, for the templars? For the people of Thedas? Origins (and yeah, to some extent, also ME3) managed that quite well, so I am not going to say a lot about this.

Again, I agree with you. The idea of a "best" ending is stupid. But when the entire moral dilemma is "let more people die" or "sacrifice your principles", then you haven't crafted a particularly deep conflict or moral dillema. You've just said, how personally ****ty are you willing to feel, player, in return for the obviously better outcome when the majority of innocents survive?

What is the actual difference between punishing the player and denying him everything he/she wants in your eyes? I actually want to know, not being dismissive here.

There is no difference. That whole "sending children to their room without desert"? That's a punishment. Not giving people what they want? Punishment. 

Look at TW. It doesn't create hard choices by taking two innocent puppies and making you murder one to bathe in its blood. It gives you ****ty people. Unlikeable people. There's no way your hands are clean, and frankly most of the time it just makes you want to walk away. The interesting story it asks you is what do you do when almost everyone is rotten. And even TW1 and TW2 both have their rousing and resounding hero moments.

By ponder I referred to things like when I got to the end of DAO, and wasn't sure what to do because there was not a choice I could say about "this is clearly the choice that will let everyone, PC included, out of this happy. Why pick another?". At the very least, I had to wonder which variant I'd rather have. In the end, I didn't even ended up doing what I had originally planned, because later events changed my mind. That's sort of what I want, really.

I just don't flounder like that. If there's a greater good, then it's the obvious choice. 

[In Exile]

Fast Jimmy wrote...
Your suggestion of "making the Dalish feel really bad" doesn't really sound that effective to me. Yes, it would cause then to lose some of their faith in their ability to restore the old ways or live forever... but what does that mean? Does the player care, at the end of the day, if the Dalish are grumpy? One of the options is to slaughter them to the last man, woman and child. How does making them grumpy compare to that option? There is no equity there. If a player wanted to chose the option with the least amount of harm, it is still very apparent - huge lile of bodies<<<<<<<<hurt feelings.

And... what, exactly? It doesn't suck enough for the player, so there's no real choice, because the player isn't hurting enough? That comes back to punishing the player to get them to adopt the moral theory you want. 

[In Exile]

Fast Jimmy wrote...
Every other media - movies, books, television, music, etc. - all have segments of their industry that seek to better examine the human condition, to tell stories that make people think, that do more than tell a story but to touch the audience in a instrumental way.  

And compare those movies with something like.. the Avengers. Or Iron Man 3. What are the stories that most people want to see? The stories that examine the "human condition" are all highly regarded critical works that tend to have pretty low circulation, with very rare exceptions.

People can play the game however they wish. However, what I would hope for is Bioware to tell a story that doesn't permit, let alone encourage, mindlessly moving through the world and the setting with zero thought about their character or, even more hopefully, themselves. 

But your suggestions aren't less mindless. This is what I'm objecting to. It's as easily to reduce what you want - and the morality that you favour - to a simple algorimth. I don't need to think very deeply at all about it. It's literally a mathematical equation. 

There's nothing there to explore. 

[In Exile]

EntropicAngel wrote...

Can you give a specific example for TW, In Exile? You've mentioned it several times but you haven't given an example.

For the original game, a good example is the Act I culmination choice with the witch. The village is bigoted, filled with just completely vile people, and up in a religious frenzy. They want to kill a witch who, similarly, is a liar and a murder. No one in that conflict is "morally good". To a degree, the witch is the victim, in the sense that she isn't guilty of what they want to string her up for. But you're not really saving an innocent at all. 

For TW2, the initial choice between Iorveth and Roche. On one level, they're both absolutely horrible people. Iorveth is a racist elven supremacist who'd build a throne out of human skulls if he could. Roche quite literally leads Temeria's equivalent of the SS - the non-human hunters. On another level, Roche is a loyal and honourable man who loved his king and (generally speaking) loves his men. And Iorverth is, to non-humans, a dashing freedom fighter.

If you side with Roche in Act I, Iorveth is imprinsoned by a bunch of racists and an entire non-human resistance movement is in precarious danger. Non-humans are abused by a bunch of crappy, racist and abusive humans. And if you side with Iorverth, his people burn and ransack and entire town. 

There's isn't a "good choice" because no character is "good" and no one has their hands clean. You choose between ****ty people, with morally questionable to repugnant goals, and in the end you draw out your own moral compass. But neither choice punishes you as the player. 

[In Exile]

EntropicAngel wrote...

I'm forgetting where Abigail was a murderer--that seemed like a clear-cut choice to me.

She's part of the Coram Agh Tera. Lore wise, that means human sacrifice. There's evidence at least she got that merchant to kill her brother. The game didn't do the best job ever in getting it across.

And I understand about TW2, but I also didn't really get the sense that Roche hated non-humans. He hunted the ones who he considered hurt Temeria, but not just in general. Or if he did I missed that part.

The actual unit, the Blue Stripes, were referred to in-game as the non-human hunters. Ioverth attributes the murder of elven women and children to Roche himself, but whether that's true (in the sense of whether Roche personally did it or just the Blue Stripes as a unit) is never directly confirmed. It is confirmed that the Blue Strips took part in massacres like that. 

However, I see your point. The problem with that is that--how does it question us, the player (or protagonist). How does it make us examine ourselves? It can come off as contrived and deliberately dark beyond suspension of disbelief, just like what's being suggested is contrived specifically to punish.

I don't think it makes us examine ourselves. Remember, I don't think self-reflection like that is really possible unless you're not aware of your own limits and/or moral code.

I just think they're more interesting moral problems to reason through based on a given moral code. 

[Han Shot First]

MWImexico wrote...

I didn't played to the Witcher, but if that means to get punished for my choices at every corner, count me out. I'm not against bad consequences though, I just wish thoses consequences to be both interesting and realistic at the same time.

It doesn't punish you for making choices. But certain choices do result in very different branching storylines.

[MWImexico]

That sounds great, I also would like that. But at least, even if the story line is not very different, I would like to be able to witness some significant changes related to the choice given.
For exemple, in the walking dead game, at some point you can choose to save the life of a woman (who has a gun) or an electrician. I was kind of disapointed by this choice later when I realised that the game didn't develop very well the concequences of that choice (or I missed something?). Since you must choose, pick one or another should mean something more, something concret related to their skills or their personnality or both. Here they are almost interchangeable, what's the point?

[In Exile]

EntropicAngel wrote...
I don't even know what that is, so I'll have to agree with your final sentence.

If you read the Witcher wiki it gives you a flavour. 

You're saying that you have to be unaware of your limits and your moral code to self-reflect?

About your own morals? Yes.

Look at the discussion in this forum. The complaint about the Connor and Dalish questlines is that the choice is too obvious for the player - save everyone - and no one hesitates. Because, obviously, saving everyone is the evidently moral thing to do that we all want.

The request, coming from other players, is that players have to think about their choices. What this really amounts to is a request that the quests don't have any "ideal" answer so that the player is torn between picking between two similar solutions. 

But the situations aren't identical (if they were, there'd be no actual reason to choose between them). And the better you know your own moral code and standards, the more obvious the differences are, and the more evident the answer is. 

I see, and I understand. For me personally something like that is harder to do unless the game gives you genuine reasons why you're forced to pick between two bad options. Like the Iorveth/Roche one, or Mages/Templars at the end of DA ][. 

TW2 is different here. It's not that you're suddenly forced to pick between bad options, as much as it is that the world is a bad place. And the game does give you a reason there - you're just finishing up a fight with another antagonist when Iorveth and Roche meet and begin fighting next to you, with Iorveth unarmed and asking you for a weapon.

So what do you do? Give him one? Or not? 

That's it. Everything flows from that. The village either burns or celebrates based on whether Iorveth is free, and he's free based on whether you armed him. 

All that stuff about Roche and Iorveth's character? It's background. Because it also comes down to duty as a choice: Roche helped you escape in return for your promise to help him, and Iorveth just helped you. So you kind of owe duties to them too. 

TW and TW2 are all about personal choices as well. That's what makes it believable to have these bad vs. bad choices, because you're not literally picking between switching train cars to murder more or less innocents. 

[Xilizhra]

TW2 is different here. It's not that you're suddenly forced to pick between bad options, as much as it is that the world is a bad place. And the game does give you a reason there - you're just finishing up a fight with another antagonist when Iorveth and Roche meet and begin fighting next to you, with Iorveth unarmed and asking you for a weapon.

So what do you do? Give him one? Or not?

That's it. Everything flows from that. The village either burns or celebrates based on whether Iorveth is free, and he's free based on whether you armed him.

All that stuff about Roche and Iorveth's character? It's background. Because it also comes down to duty as a choice: Roche helped you escape in return for your promise to help him, and Iorveth just helped you. So you kind of owe duties to them too.

TW and TW2 are all about personal choices as well. That's what makes it believable to have these bad vs. bad choices, because you're not literally picking between switching train cars to murder more or less innocents.

So what of the mage/templar choice in DA2?

[Sylvius the Mad]

In Exile wrote...

Look at the discussion in this forum. The complaint about the Connor and Dalish questlines is that the choice is too obvious for the player - save everyone - and no one hesitates. Because, obviously, saving everyone is the evidently moral thing to do that we all want.

I'd just like to reiterate my position that I love the Connor choice.  I think a Warden needs to be unbelievably reckless in order to choose the "save everyone" option.  This is even foreshadowed by the initial decision whether to defend Redcliffe.

Now, you're examining the choice from the player's perspective, rather than the Warden's perspective, which changes to arithmetic considerably.

Whatever they do to improve the choices from the player's perspective, I'd very much like BioWare to keep in mind how the choices look from the characters' perspectives.

That's what makes it believable to have these bad vs. bad choices, because you're not literally picking between switching train cars to murder more or less innocents.

And, for the record, I think the train car thought experiment is also very interesting, because a person's answer can tell us quite a bit about how they view action vs. inaction.  I, personally, don't see how anyone could possibly offer a moral justification for pulling the switch to kill the smaller group.

[Shadow Fox]

Dave of Canada wrote...

Xilizhra wrote...

Did you ask? If not, that seems remarkably presumptuous.

I won't lie that I'm presumptuous but it shows the strengths of the writing, Gaider broke her with his character and she's still deeply impacted by it. Meanwhile, she doesn't remember anything about Husbando Alistair until she repicks up the game.

Edit: Hell, I can't ask or else she broods for a good hour or so.

Uh that sounds kinda unhealthy to me.