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[Pseudo the Mustachioed]

Ragabul the Ontarah wrote...
What person on Earth is defined solely by some issue they are passionate about?  

One who is posessed by the single-minded embodiment of a virtue that does not let him stray from their course, whose entire life has revolved around striving for freedom?

Working as designed. The point is that his entire being has been reduced to a single concern.

Pretty much all of your criticisms boil down to not caring about the issue the series is currently addressing and that's coloring all of your points. If you don't care, you don't care.

Modifié par Pseudocognition, 01 novembre 2013 - 06:57 .

[Jaulen]

MassivelyEffective0730 wrote...

Plaintiff wrote...

I expect to be able to determine 'right' and 'wrong' for myself, thanks.

My party members will never be 'right' when they criticize me. If I thought their opinion had any merit, I would've done what they wanted to begin with.

See, this is just being stubborn and too wound up on your own opinion to accept any kind of inpur or different perspective. It's a terrible style of leadership, let alone management. 

Even if I don't agree with a squadmates position and probably won't accept it as my given solution to a problem, it's still always useful to get another perspective or opinion on an issue. 

Assuming you're always right only gets you so far until your head lands in the dirt and your ass is hanging in the air when you inevitably reach a point where you've misjudged or miscalculated. 

Oh yeah...Iv'e worked for managers like this.....the worst most dysfunctional people I have ever worked for.
Heck, I played DA:O merrily imagining each person my rogue flurried to death, or swept the head off of was said manager.

Only time leadership style like that 'works' is in a cult of personality dictatorship.

[The Heretic of Time]

MassivelyEffective0730 wrote...

Heretic_Hanar wrote...

Ugh.

Am I the only person who actually likes to play video-games primarily for... well.... you know... the gameplay? 

I don't think you are, but I'm with Wright and Sylvius.

I'd rather have ok gameplay (though I think it would be interesting if the difficulty had a noticeable effect on the story, like with having greater possibilities coming from playing a higher difficulty) with excellent characters in a good universe with decent writing.

For me, I like having good characters, with a good Player Character that I can customize and RP with. That's my preference anyway.

Honestly I think "roleplaying" in video-games is too restrictive to be interesting for me. If I want to roleplay, I rather actually roleplay in a pens-n-paper RPG with friends. Much more enjoyable for me.

What I like to get out of video-games these days is good gameplay, but also also amazing interactivity between myself and the game-world.

What set video-games appart from other entertainment mediums is the interactivity between the player and the product. As the player, you're an active part of the story and world you engage in. I like it when video-games use this fact and try to come up with clever ways to let the player influence the story, the world or the general direction of the video-game. It doesn't necessarily have to be an RPG for me, I love sandbox games as well for the same reason.

The Saints Row series is one of my favorite series because of this very reason. It allows me to toy around with my character and the "sandbox". The world is my playground, the NPCs, objects, missions, etc. within the world are my toys and my character is my virtual self (though I'm not "roleplaying" him, he's merely my avatar if you know what I mean).

I play Skyrim the same way. The story in Skyrim is rather boring, but the world is rather interesting and especially with mods, that game is and stays interesting for a very long time. Right now I got some cool survival mods, and I basically just try to survive the harsh environment of Skyrim right now as a regular explorer, no fast-travel, no Dragonborn shouts, I'm not even doing the main quest at all. Basically I turned my Skyrim into a survive-the-wild simulator, which I really like because of the interactivity between myself, the game-world and the survival-mods.


So yeah, long story short; when I talk about "gameplay", I'm not merely talking about the core game-mechanics such as shooting, hack-n-slashing and killing enemies, but I'm also talking about the interactivity between the player and the game-world, such as dialogue trees, choices and consequences and just general customization options.

Story is pretty low on my list and "roleplaying my own character" even more so. That doesn't mean I don't appreciate a good game with a good story ofcourse.

Modifié par Heretic_Hanar, 01 novembre 2013 - 06:55 .

[Allan Schumacher]

Heretic_Hanar wrote...

EntropicAngel wrote...

Plaintiff wrote...

I expect to be able to determine 'right' and 'wrong' for myself, thanks.

My party members will never be 'right' when they criticize me. If I thought their opinion had any merit, I would've done what they wanted to begin with.

What if you're wrong? we all are at some point or another.

Don't be silly, it's Plaintiff you're talking to, he is NEVER wrong! He is always RIGHT! And if you disagree with him, you're just factually wrong! Didn't you know that?

Silly EntropicAngel...

This type of posting isn't acceptable and I'd prefer it to not keep happening.

[Allan Schumacher]

Locking thread temporarily. There's a lot of severely off topic stuff in the last few pages that requires some culling.

[Allan Schumacher]

Thread reopened.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Heretic_Hanar wrote...

Story is pretty low on my list and "roleplaying my own character" even more so. That doesn't mean I don't appreciate a good game with a good story ofcourse.

I would argue that the conversations in these games are gameplay.  Every aspect of the game that requires your input involves you making decisions on behalf of your character.  What line to speak, what quests to accept, what quests to complete, what to buy, what to sell, what skills to learn, what combat tactics to employ, what to risk, what to gain - all of it.  It's all the same.  It's all roleplaying.

And while I do agree that tabletop roleplaying is the pinnacle of roleplaying, it's also a multiplayer enterprise.  The strength of the CRPG, I think, is that ability to offer roleplaying content without the need for other players.

[Allan Schumacher]

Like, say, the Dark Ritual?

I think the Dark Ritual is close to that example. Though in that case Morrigan is leaving regardless.

I was more thinking of a situation where the NPC advocates a particular position and if you choose against that, it's a deal breaker for the NPC. Similar, but a bit different.

Am I the only person who actually likes to play video-games primarily for... well.... you know... the gameplay?

Gameplay can be applied in a nebulous way. In a puzzle game, the gameplay is about the mechanics to solve the puzzles.

I'd argue that making conversation choices and driving the narrative in a game that espouses that level of choice is still gameplay, even if it's not gameplay everyone would find interesting.

EDIT: Ninja'd by the mad one!

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 01 novembre 2013 - 08:52 .

[Allan Schumacher]

Ragabul the Ontarah wrote...

Allan Schumacher wrote...
Can you disassociate the two? Especially if you're in a situation where it IS a hot topic? (i.e. Kirkwall)

What I see as interesting characters are characters that have their perspectives and justifications for why they see the world the way they do in a manner that I think is appropriate.

Yes, they can be.  I'm talking about a design philosophy.  Instead of starting by saying "we need a pro-mage character" or "we need a pro-Circle character" it's better to build a character because you need them for some specific plot moment/gameplay role/etc. and then ask "given this character's background and personality, how would they respond to situation XYZ?"

Gaider is better equipped to answer this, but I don't believe we create characters with the idea of "we need a pro-mage character."

In the first place, the character is designed to reflect a theme and tends to become almost exclusively about that theme.  They aren't a character I can form relationships with any more than I can form a relationship with the Grim Reaper, whose sole purpose is to embody the theme Death.  They aren't there for me to form relationships with.  They are there to educate me.  In the second place, the character builds depth and nuance by being allowed to respond organically to an organic world.  If you know Anders is "that pro-mage guy" before you even know what Anders will do in the story, everything he does is going to be crammed through the "pro-mage guy" filter.  Is it impossible for characters developed to address a theme to be nuanced?  No.  But combined with the plot centrality of the issue they care about, it becomes pretty darn hard.  What person on Earth is defined solely by some issue they are passionate about?  

Even if we don't create characters to clearly be "pro-mage characters" there's nothing we can do if those that play our game still label them as so.


As for your last point, sociology has already coined the term master status and I'd definitely argue that people like that do exist in life.

[crimzontearz]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

Ragabul the Ontarah wrote...

Allan Schumacher wrote...
Can you disassociate the two? Especially if you're in a situation where it IS a hot topic? (i.e. Kirkwall)

What I see as interesting characters are characters that have their perspectives and justifications for why they see the world the way they do in a manner that I think is appropriate.

Yes, they can be.  I'm talking about a design philosophy.  Instead of starting by saying "we need a pro-mage character" or "we need a pro-Circle character" it's better to build a character because you need them for some specific plot moment/gameplay role/etc. and then ask "given this character's background and personality, how would they respond to situation XYZ?"

Gaider is better equipped to answer this, but I don't believe we create characters with the idea of "we need a pro-mage character."

In the first place, the character is designed to reflect a theme and tends to become almost exclusively about that theme.  They aren't a character I can form relationships with any more than I can form a relationship with the Grim Reaper, whose sole purpose is to embody the theme Death.  They aren't there for me to form relationships with.  They are there to educate me.  In the second place, the character builds depth and nuance by being allowed to respond organically to an organic world.  If you know Anders is "that pro-mage guy" before you even know what Anders will do in the story, everything he does is going to be crammed through the "pro-mage guy" filter.  Is it impossible for characters developed to address a theme to be nuanced?  No.  But combined with the plot centrality of the issue they care about, it becomes pretty darn hard.  What person on Earth is defined solely by some issue they are passionate about?  

Even if we don't create characters to clearly be "pro-mage characters" there's nothing we can do if those that play our game still label them as so.


As for your last point, sociology has already coined the term master status and I'd definitely argue that people like that do exist in life.

unless the DA team does things differently it was revealed (in an interview a while back) that yeah...you kinda do (it was about TIM) but it was more complex than that

[Wulfram]

(Not sure if this counts as creating characters to be pro-mage or not, so I'll just leave a section of Mr Gaider's blog here for others to judge)

http://dgaider.tumbl...ting-characters

First things first: we probably have a very basic list of characters we know about once the pitch is completed. It really depends on how much those characters are involved in the main plot. Alistair and Morrigan would have come up in the overview for Dragon Age: Origins, for instance… but they wouldn’t have had those names. “Bastard Prince” and “Witch of the Wilds” would have been their references at the time, probably, and little else to recommend them.

So we have to figure out a few things. How many followers do we need, for starters? This is usually dictated by gameplay— an array of classes (and possibly specializations) which cover the combat roles required— combined with the word budget. If I know how many words I have to work with, how thin do I want to spread those words? The fewer followers we have, the more content we can give each of them but the fewer options the players have… and the more “bases” each of those followers will have to cover.

What do I mean by “bases”? Well, that depends on the story. The best uses of characters such as these are as ciphers. They humanize the conflicts, so ideally you want them to come in on different sides of any issue… so you need characters that are moral as well as immoral, characters that reflect different cultures and viewpoints, characters that want different things. It’s this kind of push-pull on the player which makes it interesting… if all of them agreed on everything it would make for an incredibly boring experience.

Modifié par Wulfram, 01 novembre 2013 - 09:22 .

[Pseudo the Mustachioed]

crimzontearz wrote...
unless the DA team does things differently it was revealed (in an interview a while back) that yeah...you kinda do (it was about TIM) but it was more complex than that

I am pretty sure their goal is to have most or every character be at least somewhat relevant to some aspect of the core plot.

I don't see why that's a bad thing; for example you wouldn't expect a gay person to be ambivalent about the issue of gay rights. You would expect that even less if the story being told was specifically about the turbulent politics surrounding gay rights at that very moment in history. And in that framework, even ambivalence is topical.

Modifié par Pseudocognition, 01 novembre 2013 - 09:21 .

[crimzontearz]

Pseudocognition wrote...

crimzontearz wrote...
unless the DA team does things differently it was revealed (in an interview a while back) that yeah...you kinda do (it was about TIM) but it was more complex than that

I am pretty sure their goal is to have most or every character be at least somewhat relevant to some aspect of the core plot.

I don't see why that's a bad thing; for example you wouldn't expect a gay person to be ambivalent about the issue of gay rights. You would expect that even less if the story being told was specifically about the turbulent politics surrounding gay rights at that very moment in history. And in that framework, even ambivalence is topical.

not the point really, I was making an observation on the process

[Pseudo the Mustachioed]

crimzontearz wrote...

not the point really, I was making an observation on the process

hence the tangent being in a different paragraph, to signify a different subject

[crimzontearz]

Pseudocognition wrote...

crimzontearz wrote...

not the point really, I was making an observation on the process

hence the tangent being in a different paragraph, to signify a different subject

I am not concerned with "good/bad" in this situation tho

[Allan Schumacher]

Having a dominant trait doesn't mean it's your *only* trait, nor does it mean that you don't have individualized reactions to whatever you perceive your dominant trait to be. If this weren't the case, all mages or all black people or all "mothers" or anybody with a "master status" would be completely homogenous. The fact that a mother finds her identify as "mother" more important than anything else doesn't mean she has no opinions on anything else and never thinks about anything else.

You're right. And because you only see someone's master status doesn't mean that they don't have other traits either.

At this point I think you've mostly just gone and muddled up the idea of "I found Anders boring" by introducing justifications that don't really need to be said.

Why does an RPG set in a huge, complex, lore rich world need to centrally focus on only1 issue?

Why shouldn't it? It's also degenerative, because you can boil down a lot of games to centrally (a safe word that allows for the existence of exceptions) focusing on a single issue.

That said, I still don't agree that requiring a plethora of issues inherently makes it better. In DA2 attempts were made at exploring how a lot of perspectives view mages and what justifications are deemed acceptable.

To pick on an example you used, motherhood, I think it'd be an interesting idea for a narrative (video game or otherwise) that exists as an examination of the status and what it means to different people.

One of my favourite movies, Crash, centrally focuses on the issue of racism. Introducing more into its narrative would've been distracting from the narrative.


You can not like what we did with Dragon Age 2, but at some point it degenerates into "I didn't like the story that you did. You should have done something different" which ultimately is a pretty universally applicable response to stuff that a person doesn't like.

Then they stop seeming like a character who cares about the issue.  They
instead seem like a construct trying to educate me about how nuanced
the issue is.

There's an observer bias in this too, however.  Writer intent (fairly) doesn't mean very much if the reader takes it in a different direction.  So even if we didn't intend for it to be an attempt to educate you about how nuanced the issue is, if you take it that way there's nothing we can do about it.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 01 novembre 2013 - 09:54 .

[Jaulen]

*scratches head trying to understand what Ragabul meant by "Why does an RPG set in a huge, complex, lore rich world need to centrally focus on only1 issue? I'm not saying the issue shouldn't be addressed. *

Well, focusing on one issue at a time, or making that issue more central to the story being told at that time means that the currents surrounding that issue get to be fleshed out more.

I recall reading books like how I am assuming you are saying these games should be written....without a strong focus on the story that's being told, they are very forgettable.
One of the reasons I had issues continuing on the Wheel of Time Series, as the plot lines got more numerous, and the character roster longer, the story got weaker....too many threads that it seemed the author had forgotten where he was going with it (too many things where trying to be told in every book).....maybe he didn't, and maybe the later books started to solidify again, but by book 4 the story was a mess...

DAO was about the darkspawn and choices the warden makes to gain alliances

DA2 was about the mage/templar conflict and how that set off a tinderbox for the rest of the world

DA:I right now all I know about it is the veil is torn and demons are running amok.....and this inquisitor dude/dudette is going to do something about it.

[Wulfram]

I just left Anders and Fenris at home most of the time, and hung out with Merrill, Varric, Aveline and Isabela. So they didn't bother me.

(Well, Fenris didn't actually turn up in my first game, since his recruitment quest was kinda shady)