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beeoi posted:It is definitely not a Critical Role thing. I might have missed something since I've watched barely 12 episodes of CR but being noticeably horny was a thing the entire cast did and not just Scanlan the bard. It usually didn't go very far with NPCs and I don't recall anything verging on bestiality. And yet, people make Paladins aggressively unhorny despite also having high charisma.
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Jul 9, 2023 13:18
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BECMI DND had a mass battle system that I remember liking. I think it’s in the Companion rules.
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Jul 9, 2023 13:23
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Ash Rose posted:And yet, people make Paladins aggressively unhorny despite also having high charisma. Speak for yourself.
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Jul 9, 2023 13:24
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neonchameleon posted:Why? The writing for Paragon was much better; Renegade was a complete mish-mash of "Hard man making hard decisions", "moustache twirling villain", "World weary", and "troll". And some of the renegade choices were just bad; there was almost never a pure benefit to (non-interrupt) renegade options - and only one where I can think of a short term benefit in the whole of ME1 (killing the colonists). While the game incentivised locking you in one way or the other when only one way made sense. the benefits for renegade were that they were frequently extremely funny
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Jul 9, 2023 14:28
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Dexo posted:Also the worst crime of the Mass Effect players were that like some ungodly low amount of people played as Femshep. The superior Shepard. I think BioWare eventually found the majority of players just picked whatever was the first character creation option available to them which meant male Shepard/Soldier/War Hero. Same for Dragon Age so a lot of male human nobles. Unlike me, who'll spend an hour getting a character face down, tweaking a nostril just so and feeling like it turns their appearance into Two-Face, wonder what's the deal with noses at all, start over from scratch and then get 10 minutes into the game and feel like I need to start over again because I hate the way light hits their face from their most common speaking position. LatwPIAT posted:Don’t forget “racist”. "I can't believe Ashley said that line that one time!" I say, orchestrating the murder of the Council to be replaced by humans (which admittedly doesn't take).
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Jul 9, 2023 14:42
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The best way to play mass effect was to mainline paragon in the first game to get your charisma high enough to pass any check (with the bonus of dodging all the space racist renegade options that exist mainly in the first game) and then do whatever the hell you want in the next two games; mainly renegade interrupts which 99% of the time involve sick one liners. Also femshep was probably better overall but maleshep has a goofy earnestness to it that kinda works.
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Jul 9, 2023 15:12
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Colonel Cool posted:I was shocked to recently learn that 92% of the playerbase apparently went Paragon in the Mass Effect trilogy. To be marginally fair there, the paragon/renegade dichotomy in Mass Effect is extra hosed because they could never settle one what those two meant after unhitching the game from an explicit good/evil/law/chaos alignment system. In 1 being renegade means saying a lot of space racist things and snap killing NPCs, while being a paragon is mostly being a boring narc. In 2 the space racism gets dropped. So you're more Dirty Harry, but if you're mindlessly following renegade prompts you'll still get NPCs and possibly a squadmate killed. Paragon meanwhile is just kind of the "default" safe playthrough. In ME3 renegade is a full on war criminal. The outcome of most renegade choices have turned into flat "you kill this long-running beloved character AND gently caress over the war." And that's on top of prior renegade choices where you killed people also paying off with the worst outcome in 3 as well. Like say what you will about the light and dark side paths in KOTOR or the good and evil playthroughs in Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, but at least you can still reach what feel like comparatively "sensible" outcomes with satisfying endings by doing the evil routes. Mass Effect was trying to drop alignment systems and instead just set up a situation where any major renegade choice leads to an outright Bad Ending and you were a fool for behaving this way across 3 games. You can still beat ME3 like that, but Shepard come off as psychotic and way more people you're attached to die. So I guess the takeaway here is "alignment systems bad". Feels Villeneuve posted:the benefits for renegade were that they were frequently extremely funny The renegade interrupts in 2 were always funny. They should've dropped paragon/renegade and just had a "punch this guy, throw this mook through a window, break this antique vase to upset a rich man" quick time event button so you knew what you were getting.
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Jul 9, 2023 15:19
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Nuns with Guns posted:In ME3 renegade is a full on war criminal. The outcome of most renegade choices have turned into flat "you kill this long-running beloved character AND gently caress over the war." And that's on top of prior renegade choices where you killed people also paying off with the worst outcome in 3 as well. To be fair to bioware, most of the renegade options in 3 are set up to be the better option if you've already been a renegade genocidal rear end in a top hat in 1 and 2. And they also changed the alignment system into a single bar to encourage you to pick whichever option you feel is best at the time rather than being locked into picking all the good or all the bad options like you were in 1 and Especially 2, where your ability to pass/fail a renegade check wasn't based on your absolute value but on based on what percentage of the available renegade points you had already accumulated up until that point in the game.
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Jul 9, 2023 15:36
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Pretty much the whole problem with binary moral choice systems of that whole era was one was 'be the hero of the story' and the other was 'be a dick in random ways for no reason', and no incentive to do anything but go fully one or the other.
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Jul 9, 2023 15:43
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lariat has made a powerful enemy with their disturbing inclusion of sex comedy...
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Jul 9, 2023 16:01
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Mass Effect as a narrative would have been stronger if it removed the ability to go Paragon / Renegade and just had Shepard be Paragon Also the bear thing is funny
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Jul 9, 2023 16:06
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Terrible Opinions posted:Though if Wrath of the Righteous is any indication playing an undead wizard is significantly more popular than other evil choices. Lich Mythic Path is so loving cool. WOTR is probably the best game in which you can be a necromancer periodm
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Jul 9, 2023 16:39
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Pretty much the whole problem with binary moral choice systems of that whole era was one was 'be the hero of the story' and the other was 'be a dick in random ways for no reason', and no incentive to do anything but go fully one or the other. I’d say there’s something lost from Fallout 1 where Fallout wanted to be a game where you could do be as nice or as nasty as you wanted as long as you got the water chip, and reputation was a system for measuring how people would react to the kind of person you played as. Having the entire game revolve around which of two specific options you pick on a regular basis is a very reductive take on that, really: suddenly your morality is an objective force in the game world that gates your access to dialogue options and special powers. Ultima IV got away with that, but only because it made the literal objective of the game be maxing out the mortality meter. LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Jul 9, 2023 |
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Jul 9, 2023 17:04
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So the bard thing sorta crept into Larian discussion, but just to clear it up, that elf, Astarion, is a rogue. He's also a vampire, which I think is supposed to be an ingame reveal but all the art of him is with fangs and blood dripping down his chin so they may be self-spoiling a bit. Dunno if either thing matters, but you know what they say, when a man fucks a bear, that's not news, because it happens so often. But when a bear fucks an elf vampire rogue, that is news.
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Jul 9, 2023 17:17
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 These comics were going around online starting a good 20 years ago. (A lot of them get pretty borderline if not outright NSFW.) And the reception was pretty much "hah, yes, so true," about the horny bard thing they were lampooning, as I recall.
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Jul 9, 2023 17:18
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Dexo posted:Also the worst crime of the Mass Effect players were that like some ungodly low amount of people played as Femshep. The superior Shepard. I suspect I'm not alone in letting romance options determine my Bioware character's gender and IIRC Mass Effect had a whole ton of those locked to MShep.
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Jul 9, 2023 17:25
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Plutonis posted:Lich Mythic Path is so loving cool. WOTR is probably the best game in which you can be a necromancer periodm
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Jul 9, 2023 17:28
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Drone posted:Would it be a stretch to attribute this to the influence of Critical Role? I am 98% certain that Keyleth and Vax (the Druid and rogue that romance) mention at least once Druidic shapeshiftijg into animals during sex. Like, it’s not a graphic told scene, but is absolutely a thing they mention once or twice off-hand and everyone chuckles. Is it necessary? Nah. Is it weird? Sure. But that’s probably the point.
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Jul 9, 2023 18:11
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Pretty much the whole problem with binary moral choice systems of that whole era was one was 'be the hero of the story' and the other was 'be a dick in random ways for no reason', and no incentive to do anything but go fully one or the other. See also Jade Empire's attempt, "Open Hand" vs "Closed Fist". It aimed to be "help people and risk them becoming weak and dependent" vs "let/enable them to grow strong enough to help themselves", but with a few exceptions the decision trees forgot to include any negative consequences for OH choices or benefits for CF other than "you personally don't/do benefit". And even that was neutered by the design decision to have stat/skill benefits for every choice. It pretty much boiled down to "pet the puppy" vs "kick the puppy" like every other Bioware-style rpg.
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Jul 9, 2023 18:29
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disposablewords posted:
I do like when “horny bard” isn’t just played as a guy hitting on every tavern server, but as the humans-in-space trope of “if we can figure out how to gently caress an alien, we’ll gently caress that alien.”
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Jul 9, 2023 18:49
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Kurieg posted:To be fair to bioware, most of the renegade options in 3 are set up to be the better option if you've already been a renegade genocidal rear end in a top hat in 1 and 2. And they also changed the alignment system into a single bar to encourage you to pick whichever option you feel is best at the time rather than being locked into picking all the good or all the bad options like you were in 1 and Especially 2, where your ability to pass/fail a renegade check wasn't based on your absolute value but on based on what percentage of the available renegade points you had already accumulated up until that point in the game. I think you can get an ending to the Krogan Genophage trolley problem where you don't lose all krogan support if you were a complete monster back to ME1 and killed Wrex, but if you followed the renegade path and sold Legion to Cerberus I don't think you can avoid a situation where Tali survives in 3, so lasting peace can't forged with the geth. This is more of a "they had no idea where to go with this or what would end up mattering" problem with the games as a whole, but it does also feed back into the issue that they wanted to buck D&D alignment stereotypes and just ended up making them worse in the series because they never had a coherent guide all the writers could follow. LatwPIAT posted:I’d say there’s something lost from Fallout 1 where Fallout wanted to be a game where you could do be as nice or as nasty as you wanted as long as you got the water chip, and reputation was a system for measuring how people would react to the kind of person you played as. Having the entire game revolve around which of two specific options you pick on a regular basis is a very reductive take on that, really: suddenly your morality is an objective force in the game world that gates your access to dialogue options and special powers. Ultima IV got away with that, but only because it made the literal objective of the game be maxing out the mortality meter. I'm sure a lot of it is that video games following in the vein of D&D have wanted to simulate the flexibility of alignment choices a TTRPG offers, but even binary good/evil paths clearly open so many possible plot routes that it becomes hard to have a game properly account and react to all possible choices. Reducing things down to one Lawful Good and one Chaotic Evil path ends up being cartoonish, but also still means allocating tons of resources to whole segments of the game the majority of people may never see, and that's a chilling prospect to all the money people involved in game development. Saxophone posted:I am 98% certain that Keyleth and Vax (the Druid and rogue that romance) mention at least once Druidic shapeshiftijg into animals during sex. Like, it’s not a graphic told scene, but is absolutely a thing they mention once or twice off-hand and everyone chuckles. Yeah Larian seems to think the whole thing is hilarious more than anything. https://www.ign.com/articles/baldurs-gate-3-lets-you-have-sex-with-a-druid-in-bear-form posted:“Have you ever considered the joys and pleasures of sexual congress with a wildshaped Druid?” added lead writer Adam Smith. “Because at Larian, we have, and ultimately landed on the side of giving the people what they want: tender, consensual romance with a man temporarily transformed into a grizzly bear.”
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Jul 9, 2023 18:56
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I have to say, expansive your-choices-matter CRPGs have had some truly, clearly, utterly reprehensible moral choices available for as long as they've existed. I just can't see any issue with having a deeply optional path to have consensual fantasy sex with what's clearly a person, even if that person has transformed into a bear. Some people will find it hot, some people will find it funny, everyone else can avoid it, and it's nowhere near as bad as the genocides, murders, and other just straight up wretched behavior you've been able to get up to in these games for ages. (Which, to be clear, I also think is totally fine, even if I'm never going to pick those options myself.)
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Jul 9, 2023 19:58
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Ultiville posted:I have to say, expansive your-choices-matter CRPGs have had some truly, clearly, utterly reprehensible moral choices available for as long as they've existed. I just can't see any issue with having a deeply optional path to have consensual fantasy sex with what's clearly a person, even if that person has transformed into a bear. Some people will find it hot, some people will find it funny, everyone else can avoid it, and it's nowhere near as bad as the genocides, murders, and other just straight up wretched behavior you've been able to get up to in these games for ages. (Which, to be clear, I also think is totally fine, even if I'm never going to pick those options myself.) I like Larians stuff a lot mechanically and ultimately you are deeply unlikely to get to that content unless you go looking for it, but there is a fierce bang of "But she's a 7,000 year old dragon even if she looks 15" off it.
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Jul 9, 2023 20:12
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15 years is middle-age for bears, excuse you
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Jul 9, 2023 21:05
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It seems like such a weird marketing tactic. The game has been in early access for years, it’s the third in a well-loved series under a brand that’s still very popular among the target audience. They don’t need to play the “any publicity is good publicity” game here.
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Jul 9, 2023 21:48
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The pre-order jumped back to Steam top sellers, apparently, after the bear thing.
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Jul 9, 2023 21:50
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I'm playing a game right now called The Long Dark and although the campaign mode of the game really doesn't seem to be about making good vs. evil choices, a recent one showed up that reminded me why these sorts of things are so often frustrating. A seemingly small choice is not signaled clearly to the player as "this is the bad choice" but then an unavoidable consequence happens that makes you feel super bad. In this case, minor spoilers for what I think is a side plot in act 3: Some scared guy hiding in a cabin wants you to go fetch some papers and supplies for him, before he'll let you in. He's like the fourth actually alive human you've met so far in many days, and one of the people you met was an escaped criminal murderer, so you have no particular reason to trust this guy. When you bring him his stuff, he says to leave it for him outside, and you get a prompt to leave the stuff or leave the stuff but take the ammo yourself. I'm thinking maybe don't give this guy ammunition, he's given no explanation for why he'd need it, and maybe he'll just shoot me since he seems paranoid. So I kept the ammo. I figured I'd give it to him later when he opened the door, if he turned out to not be an escaped convict like the last guy. You come back in a day and he's lying outside his cabin, dead, with an arrow in his body, blood everywhere, and he's left you an angry note inside the cabin about "stealing" his ammunition leaving him defenseless and how much of an rear end in a top hat you are. So that's it, you got the guy killed. Who knows if he was going to be an ally or someone important later, he's dead now because of you. Like that's a feelsbad outcome but the game could just as well have had the action I took be the good choice, but I guess the game designer just never thought about why someone might think doing what I did was the obviously good choice? I get conditioned by poo poo like that to the point that even apparently very minorly "bad" or selfish choices in games I am likely to shy away from because they so frequently end up with unavoidable you're-an-absolute-monster-now outcomes. I really dislike this typical lack of a convincing gray area, second chances to fix something starting to go wrong because of what you did, or often even just any clue as to why stealing a coke from the coke machine is going to genocide some natives. If you're going to give me moral choices you need to give me clues about which one is which, at the very least, and it'd be really nice to be able to play a character who is sometimes selfish but comes through in the end, vs. "if you're not a paragon of justice and good, you're a monster instead".
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Jul 9, 2023 21:55
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actually3raccoons posted:It seems like such a weird marketing tactic. The game has been in early access for years, it’s the third in a well-loved series under a brand that’s still very popular among the target audience. They don’t need to play the “any publicity is good publicity” game here. I mean, they legitimately think it's funny. Like they aren't trying to be edgy, for the sake of being edgy, to pop some sales. Like this is just their sense of humor.
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Jul 9, 2023 21:59
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Dexo posted:I mean, they legitimately think it's funny. That’s a good point, thanks. I wasn’t thinking of it that way.
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Jul 9, 2023 22:58
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actually3raccoons posted:That’s a good point, thanks. I wasn’t thinking of it that way. Additionally, even really big games sometimes try risqué or outré marketing to maintain interest. The Overwatch Twitter page tried to wink at foot fetishists a while back. It wasn’t very good marketing, but sometimes companies make bad decisions like that.
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Jul 10, 2023 00:45
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Or Overwatch PR has foot fetishists.
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Jul 10, 2023 00:47
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Or Overwatch PR has foot fetishists. I feel like this is the more likely explanation tbh
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Jul 10, 2023 02:49
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Dexo posted:2. This is like what Larian does. This is an M rated game, made by the same people who made Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2. This is extremely their sense of humor. Leperflesh posted:Like that's a feelsbad outcome but the game could just as well have had the action I took be the good choice, but I guess the game designer just never thought about why someone might think doing what I did was the obviously good choice? This is basically the complete opposite of what you're talking about because it was very, very, very obvious (my only defense was that I was sort of half-paying attention and checking every box the game offered me), but I think what's interesting is that experiencing that somewhat predictable tragedy in a video game ten years ago would probably lead me to make the same call you did in this completely different game with a completely different outcome. Sorry. Kai Tave posted:I feel like this is the more likely explanation tbh
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Jul 10, 2023 03:04
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Lemniscate Blue posted:See also Jade Empire's attempt, "Open Hand" vs "Closed Fist". It aimed to be "help people and risk them becoming weak and dependent" vs "let/enable them to grow strong enough to help themselves", but with a few exceptions the decision trees forgot to include any negative consequences for OH choices or benefits for CF other than "you personally don't/do benefit". And even that was neutered by the design decision to have stat/skill benefits for every choice. Jade Empire screwed the pooch by having the final choice give you so many Open Palm/Closed Fist points that it determined the ending. All your previous choices literally didn't mean jack poo poo.
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Jul 10, 2023 03:12
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Why do people take, "This is the type of humor that Larian employs" as as reason to say "but but this other game didn't literally have this specific thing happen in it"
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Jul 10, 2023 03:19
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Yeah, I just started playing through DOS 2, and to craft the skillbook for the "Favorable Wind" skill, you need to use a pair of panties. This is their sense of humor, and it's easily one of the worst things about their games.
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Jul 10, 2023 05:43
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Drakyn posted:I never looked into DOS2 but the first one was one of the very first video games I'd voluntarily started playing that I chose to not finish, because it felt like every single word in the game had been filled with jellied smarminess. I don't remember a bear loving anyone. Did I miss a bear loving someone? There was a cat that was also an archmage who shapeshifted but I'm pretty sure he either didn't gently caress anyone or was only interested in loving people shaped like the same species as he was at the time. The gently caress dude? Do not gently caress a cat! Even if he looks like a person now. Conversely, do not transform into a cat so you can gently caress real cats! Couple dudes like loving each other and one of them looks like a bear some of those times, not my problem.
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Jul 10, 2023 05:53
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L5R 1E's mass battle system was neat in that it wasn't really about playing out the mass battle (you had a very generic "the generals roll their Battle skill against each other, first one to win three times wins the battle" rule for that) but about figuring out what happened to the PCs during that. The PCs picked a level of risk from "hiding in the backlines" to "frontline slaughterhouse", then rolled their Battle and compared their results to a table that also noted how well the PC's side was doing that round. Fighting in the vanguard as your army is getting rolled was very dangerous, but also very glorious, and earning Glory was how PCs progressed socially in 1E. You could also roll into special opportunities like finding an enemy hero to duel mid-battle, or other heroic things like taking the enemy's banner, reaching their casters just as they notice you're about to turn them into mincemeat, etc. The Battle skill was basically only used for this, so it was possible for a PC to be a deadly duelist or a meat-chopping machine in a small-scale skirmish and be completely at a loss when a hundred humble peasants with spears run them down. Of course, it was 1E L5R so getting absolutely merked with nothing to show for it on the first round was a very real risk. The system was iterated in later editions, but in 5E with the massive overhaul/rewrite of the rules it became a more standard "PCs are unit commanders and this is a large scale application of the normal conflict rules" thing.
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Jul 10, 2023 06:08
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JMBosch posted:Yeah, I just started playing through DOS 2, and to craft the skillbook for the "Favorable Wind" skill, you need to use a pair of panties. This is their sense of humor, and it's easily one of the worst things about their games. Stuff like this is why I haven't been able to play a Larian game despite their being two of my favorite things (RPGs and co-op). I was really hoping that BG3 was going to have a tone shift imposed from on high, but, uh, yeah.
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Jul 10, 2023 08:17
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One of the issues with the whole good/evil - paragon/renegade thing is that it is easy to present a single option as a good option to follow that is ethical and cool and works for all parties, but it is hard to have the same for bad people, since the goals and reasons for going against what is considered good and ethical is as wide and varied as the number of means for actually doing it. You're never going to be able to do it well in a static format that video games currently exist in. You might be able to do it well if you already characterise the player character as a bad person for reasons, in which case you can create a series of options more or less extreme to follow along that pre-determined route that fit with the character, but in something as open as games like Baldur's Gate and Divinity Original Sin you are not going to be able to accomplish that sort of thing. It's far easier in pen and paper where the only real limitations are your imagination and what the GM and the other players will let you get away with.
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Jul 10, 2023 09:32
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