692 réponses à ce sujet

[Daemul]

CronoDragoon wrote...

iakus wrote...
Remember when games were made with the intent to be fun?

Videogames can fill different niches for different people. Some see them as art and/or social-political-cultural-commentary, others see them purely as entertainment.

Yes, though there are games which fill both of those niches. 

[Iakus]

CronoDragoon wrote...

iakus wrote...
Remember when games were made with the intent to be fun?

Videogames can fill different niches for different people. Some see them as art and/or social-political-cultural-commentary, others see them purely as entertainment.

I really hope you're not going to try and argue that ME3 was intended as social-political commentary. 

[CronoDragoon]

iakus wrote...
Was Mordin saying  "Had to be me" one more time reduntant?
How about Thane's final prayer?
Anderson's "You did good"
"I tried, Shepard"

If not approval, then at least understanding.

Redundancy is good.  Redundancy is good.

You are talking about emotions. I'm talking about morality.

Let me approach this from a different angle. You accuse the EC slides of whitewashing the endings while simultaneously asking Bioware to write a scene where synthetics are okay with you destroying them. This seems like a contradiction to me.

Modifié par CronoDragoon, 14 janvier 2014 - 07:27 .

[dreamgazer]

AlanC9 wrote...

Daemul wrote...

dreamgazer wrote...
Both EDI and Legion's comments throughout the game reinforce this, to a point where notifying them would almost be redundant.

What sort of awful logic is this? You could justify any sort of atrocity with this sort of reasoning. Bloody hell. 

Yes. If the consequences of not committing the atrocity were dire enough, you could.

I agree, but not exactly for "any sort of atrocity".  That's a broad, false generalization. 

If you're forced in a difficult decision and have only the subjects' prior philosophical stances to recollect, you can arrive at justification for some.  And nobody's saying it would be easy.

[dreamgazer]

EntropicAngel wrote...

i'd rather play games for story and intelligent thought, and yes emotions, than simple hedonistic gratification.

I agree with your general sentiment, man, but you lose me when you start relating certain things to hedonism. 

[CronoDragoon]

iakus wrote...
I really hope you're not going to try and argue that ME3 was intended as social-political commentary. 

Commentary or reflection, actually maybe. You can easily say the Council is an allegory to the development of international reliance and politics in the world, but I would never argue that this was the primary intent for the ME story. I simply think they wanted to tell an epic "space opera" as they called it. Spin a damn good yarn.

[GreyLycanTrope]

I'm all for story and intellectual thought when it's not just something clumsy masquerading as such. I'm also fine with popcorn flicks.

[Iakus]

CronoDragoon wrote...

iakus wrote...
I really hope you're not going to try and argue that ME3 was intended as social-political commentary. 

Commentary or reflection, actually maybe. You can easily say the Council is an allegory to the development of international reliance and politics in the world, but I would never argue that this was the primary intent for the ME story. I simply think they wanted to tell an epic "space opera" as they called it. Spin a damn good yarn.

Then if they wanted to "spin a damn good yard" might I suggest they take their inspiration from stuff other than the Matrix trilogy?

[CronoDragoon]

There's a lot of great ideas in the Matrix trilogy, they just weren't executed well. Hey, parallels ahoy!

[AlanC9]

iakus wrote...

AlanC9 wrote...

That depends on the design goals, doesn't it? If the design intent is to not give you what you consider a palatable choice, increasing the number of choices only increases your chance of getting a palatable outcome slightly, since you're essentially hoping for the developer to make a mistake.

It's not an accident that Destroy was made unpalatable for you..

A design goal to not make palatable chocies doesn't strike me as a good business strategy for a developer of games that tout the importance of choice.

Remember when games were made with the intent to be fun?

That's why I put in the "you consider" above. It's not like Bio intended to make the choices unpalatable; they didn't for me (if anything, I'd be better served by making Control worse, but given the distribution of ending supporters this would have been counterproductive for the general population).  Bio was shooting for a certain level of hardness in the choices. You're more vulnerable than me to this sort of thing, so you're hurt by the current set of endings and I'm not.

The point is that adding more choices wouldn't have been likely to help you, since the design is about making the choices hard. The multiple choices weren't there to give everyone an option he'd be completely happy with in the first place, so any new choice Bio added to the current would have been flawed in some key way. Maybe they might have had an accident and you would have found the new choice acceptable while all the others aren't. But that's an odd thing to hope for.

Edit: I guess my real point is that you're opposed to the fundamental concept of the ending choice design, rather than the particular implementation.

Modifié par AlanC9, 14 janvier 2014 - 08:31 .

[Chashan]

EntropicAngel wrote...

pleasure for pleasure's sake. people  shouldn't assume a horrible connotation by the word.

do you feel it's a buzzword? serious question. i haven't heard hardly anyone use the word in conversation, which makes me feel it's acceptable to use without unnecessary historical baggage.

There's the connotation with carnal pleasure that hedonism implies, at least in my good Deutsch. So that may be one problem there.

From the sounds of it, it would further seem that you rather disapprove of simple escapism. Am I wrong?

Modifié par Chashan, 14 janvier 2014 - 09:00 .

[CronoDragoon]

AlanC9 wrote...
The point is that adding more choices wouldn't have been likely to help you, since the design is about making the choices hard. The multiple choices weren't there to give everyone an option he'd be completely happy with in the first place, so any new choice Bio added to the current would have been flawed in some key way. Maybe they might have had an accident and you would have found the new choice acceptable while all the others aren't. But that's an odd thing to hope for.

Edit: I guess my real point is that you're opposed to the fundamental concept of the ending choice design, rather than the particular implementation.

The counterpoint here would be that the hardness of a choice can be determined either by the severity of consequences or the viability of alternatives, or a combination of both. I think Iakus wants choices with few undesirable effects, but well-balanced positives.

Of course choice without enough gravity of consequence becomes relatively...well...inconsequential. Do you want cake or ice cream? type of thing.

Modifié par CronoDragoon, 14 janvier 2014 - 09:09 .

[Almostfaceman]

CronoDragoon wrote...

The counterpoint here would be that the hardness of a choice can be determined either by the severity of consequences or the viability of alternatives, or a combination of both. I think Iakus wants choices with few undesirable effects, but well-balanced positives.

Of course choice without enough gravity of consequence becomes relatively...well...inconsequential. Do you want cake or ice cream? type of thing.

But, players still enjoy "good" consequences for making the "right" choices previously. That's one of the things I was curious about going into ME3 - how did my choices in the previous two games affect the last act? Did I make the right choices to kick the Reapers in the daddy bags?

Modifié par Almostfaceman, 14 janvier 2014 - 09:15 .

[Iakus]

CronoDragoon wrote...
The counterpoint here would be that the hardness of a choice can be determined either by the severity of consequences or the viability of alternatives, or a combination of both. I think Iakus wants choices with few undesirable effects, but well-balanced positives.

What I want are a variety of good and bad consequences.  And I want to be able to choose from among that list what is worth sacrificing.  Undesirable effects are in the eye of the beholder after all

Some people think destroying AI isn't really an undesirable effect "Fry the toasters" and all that.
Some are convinced Shepard lives on to become a Reaper god in Control.  How is that a bad thing?
A few even see Synthesis as a transhumanist's dream come true.

[Wayning_Star]

cannot let you know if you're wrong and still remain objective.

(there are so many objective posts here, it's amazing

[Almostfaceman]

CronoDragoon wrote...

The counterpoint here would be that the hardness of a choice can be determined either by the severity of consequences or the viability of alternatives, or a combination of both. I think Iakus wants choices with few undesirable effects, but well-balanced positives.

Of course choice without enough gravity of consequence becomes relatively...well...inconsequential. Do you want cake or ice cream? type of thing.

I'm curious if you think that gravity of consequence requires negative aspects in the end result. I can enjoy a positive consequence completely and it will have plenty of consequence. An example: I work through basic training to achieve membership in the military. I succeed, making choices along the way that end in success. The consequence is purely positive - it's everything I worked for and want. Making the wrong choices could and would have ended with some very negative consequences. So, it follows that a game can be the same way - I make the "right" choices throughout the three games and I defeat the Reapers (failure of course being a big negative consequence) and have some results that are purely positive. So, it's ice cream after having to eat very nasty veggies in a very particular fashion. 

Modifié par Almostfaceman, 14 janvier 2014 - 09:36 .

[Wayning_Star]

what gets most fans (IMHO) that no matter what, you're left hanging by the thread left by star gazers... it's all on a need to know basis and we surely don't need to know..lol

[CronoDragoon]

Almostfaceman wrote...

I'm curious if you think that gravity of consequence requires negative aspects in the end result. I can enjoy a positive consequence completely and it will have plenty of consequence. An example: I work through basic training to achieve membership in the military. I succeed, making choices along the way that end in success. The consequence is purely positive - it's everything I worked for and want. Making the wrong choices could and would have ended with some very negative consequences. So, it follows that a game can be the same way - I make the "right" choices throughout the three games and I defeat the Reapers (failure of course being a big negative consequence) and have some results that are purely positive. So, it's ice cream after having to eat very nasty veggies in a very particular fashion. 

What you have just described is a series without much "hard" choice at all, since there are right and wrong answers, like deciding whether to pick Jack or Garrus to lead the second team in the Suicide Mission. While that's certainly a valid design choice, it's not one that centers around difficult decisions that are morally grey. I will say that if BW decided that fans liked the Collector Base decision more than the loyalty/choosing squad for strategy of the Suicide Mission, and based the content of ME3's ending choice on that, they probably misjudged.

Modifié par CronoDragoon, 14 janvier 2014 - 10:22 .

[PocoToro]

I have found peace with the ending of Mass Effect. It has taken over a year. At first I said "It was lazy and under written"
But now, after it has soaked in to my brain, I am now saying "The ending of Mass Effect 3 is poetic genius"
We all have, each, spent how many hours with our own Shepard's and the crew of the Normandy?? Making our individual Shepard in the process. (1200 hrs. plus in my case)  
And what BioWare has given us all, is an outline for an ending. So that we, each of us, can write our own, individual, and personal ending to the story of "The Shepard"
What BioWare did wrong (before and after the extended cut DLC) is simply communicate "The story is now yours to complete. You, the player, know your characters better than we do. So how could we tell you how it ends, for your Shepard."

Taking cover under a flame proof blanket...............PocoToro 

[TuringPoint]

The star gazer was a nice easter egg. It wasn't an insult, it was a tribute to the spirit of Shepards journey, tying it in to real life and our own curiousity and imagination.  How is that inappropriate?  It's just a goodbye.  

Modifié par Alocormin, 15 janvier 2014 - 02:12 .