(Thread IKs:
Nuns with Guns)
|
I also find it interesting that Patricia framed worldbuilding as a form of insecurity, of a writer's need to justify aesthetic elements that they were going to put in their work anyway. Maybe she doesn't think that applies outside of this specific context, but I can totally see this as evidence in the ongoing debate of whether worldbuilding is bad, actually or not.
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 17:48
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 30, 2024 06:26 |
|
|
Kreia is literally a Sith.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 17:50
|
|
|
Antigravitas posted:Kreia is literally a Sith. Only if you deal in absolutes.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 17:53
|
|
|
Jimbot posted:I played it to completion recent and game's real good. The Closed Fist/Open Palm system was, indeed, introduced as something more than good and evil but as the game went on it clearly was. Closed Fist also was hilariously self-defeating. Every time you encountered one and beat their asses they had to justify loss in some way because it's just an ideology that justifies being a selfish rear end in a top hat who beats up on weaker people. Combat is also extremely one-note and not very good as your attacks to propel you forward like in every other game with melee combat so you'll often find yourself hitting air. But I think that world is really rad and the characters in it are great. Fantastic villains. Probably Bioware's best soundtrack as well. I'm sad Salt came down on the twist as being so telegraphed because it blew my mind, but another cool aspect of the otherwise bungled morality system is that your main villain is absolutely an Open Palm adherent all the way through. Which I guess matches up with Closed Fist being so self-defeating, a successful villain has to think bigger.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 17:58
|
|
|
Arc Hammer posted:Only if you deal in absolutes. And that's the problem with the Expanded Universe's worldbuilding in a nutshell... (Well that and the fact that every event in galactic history had to connect back to the eternal slap-fight between the Jedi and the Sith)
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 18:02
|
|
|
I'll be honest even recognizing that Kreia's philosophy is silly as hell and that Avellone just used her as a ham-fisted mouthpiece to launch his screeds at the player, I can't hate her and end up listening to all of her dialogue when I replay because she's voiced by Sara Kestelman and the VA performance is outstanding.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 18:03
|
|
|
Solitair posted:I also find it interesting that Patricia framed worldbuilding as a form of insecurity, of a writer's need to justify aesthetic elements that they were going to put in their work anyway. Maybe she doesn't think that applies outside of this specific context, but I can totally see this as evidence in the ongoing debate of whether worldbuilding is bad, actually or not. Compare Zootopia to something like Agretsuko or Bojack Horseman where the animals just are, within their own world. They're very adult stories that deal with very adult issues that just so happen to portray their characters as animals instead Although Bojack did have an episode where it tried to explain where some of their fast food chicken comes from, but I always saw that as a "don't think about it too hard because the real answer would be really hosed up and that's not really the story we're trying to tell here," sort of thing. Happy Landfill fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Sep 6, 2023 |
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 18:06
|
|
|
She's more interesting as a commentary on narrative free will than she is on Star Wars itself and I can get behind the irony of a self aware fictional character raging against her creator while still having her actions dictated by an author with a pen. Anyways sorry for the dovetail discussion I just immediately thought back to that lecture when I heard Open Palm and Closed Fist. Bioware can gussy it up with terms like Paragon or Renegade or OpenFist ClosedPalm but it always comes back to a binary choice between good and evil and clumsy attempts to shove acts of pragmatism or charity into those two categories.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 18:10
|
|
|
in fallout new vegas instead of chris avellone's self insert being an old woman its some guy you've never met before ranting at you about all the awful things you've done to him that you had no idea about because it was only ever brought up in the dlc that introduced him and he's right yet again suck it up loser
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 18:24
|
|
|
At least he got shoved into the final one that you might not ever have gotten to if you were playing New Vegas when it was new and decided to head into the endgame right after Honest Hearts.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 18:29
|
|
|
16-bit Butt-Head posted:in fallout new vegas instead of chris avellone's self insert being an old woman its some guy you've never met before ranting at you about all the awful things you've done to him that you had no idea about because it was only ever brought up in the dlc that introduced him and he's right yet again suck it up loser [Speech 100] You're being dumb. Stop being dumb. [Success] Hmm you know you're right this insanely convoluted revenge scheme I've been setting up in the background for a full game and four DLC's was kinda dumb. Here, have a jacket.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 18:30
|
|
|
You say that like it's a bad thing. It is a pretty nice jacket.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 18:33
|
|
|
I don't know, I find it interesting that all of Avellone's mouthpiece characters are villainous. They may have something to say, they may have a point sometimes, but they're not really ever definitively proven right. They're more about trying to trap you in a corner, refusing to take no for an answer, and generally just desperately trying to stick themselves where they aren't welcome.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 18:35
|
|
|
SkeletonHero posted:I don't know, I find it interesting that all of Avellone's mouthpiece characters are villainous. They may have something to say, they may have a point sometimes, but they're not really ever definitively proven right. They're more about trying to trap you in a corner, refusing to take no for an answer, and generally just desperately trying to stick themselves where they aren't welcome. Har har. I'm glad Avellone's writing is less revered these days. Even if he had the occasional neat idea, I always found his characters to be unbearably didactic.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 18:39
|
|
|
Characters that make you defend your reasons for doing things are neat. But they are better when they themselves have a coherent ideology, and that's what avellone tends to mess up
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 18:42
|
|
|
SkeletonHero posted:I don't know, I find it interesting that all of Avellone's mouthpiece characters are villainous. They may have something to say, they may have a point sometimes, but they're not really ever definitively proven right. They're more about trying to trap you in a corner, refusing to take no for an answer, and generally just desperately trying to stick themselves where they aren't welcome. Literally every single one of them is wrong and that's the point of their stories. Kreia goes right back to being who she was even though she screams about leaving all that behind making you smarter and stronger, Durance is a stupid loser hated by the God he gave everything to and his whole worldview was built from. It's so funny how many people play those games and talks about them like the game is exalting any of Avellones characters.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 18:42
|
|
|
SkeletonHero posted:I don't know, I find it interesting that all of Avellone's mouthpiece characters are villainous. They may have something to say, they may have a point sometimes, but they're not really ever definitively proven right. They're more about trying to trap you in a corner, refusing to take no for an answer, and generally just desperately trying to stick themselves where they aren't welcome.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 18:42
|
|
|
I honestly think Ulysses would have gone over a lot better if he didn't suddenly force a backstory onto the player that had never even been so much as alluded too at the very last second. You get to play the whole game thinking of your character however you want and then at the very end this guy barges in and says "no actually you were the hero of this town that's never been mentioned before that you clearly loved and considered home, then you blew it up you fiend!!!" and while you initially get some dialogue choices to refute this, they peter out as the DLC progresses and at the end you really have no option but to go "yeah sorry I blew up the Divide buddy."
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 18:45
|
|
|
Happy Landfill posted:Compare Zootopia to something like Agretsuko or Bojack Horseman where the animals just are, within their own world. They're very adult stories that deal with very adult issues that just so happen to portray their characters as animals instead Yeah, I think it ultimately comes down to questions of execution and purpose - Worldbuilding is an inevitable part of the writing process even if you're not writing speculative fiction, but how much a writer focuses on it and how much is directly explained to the reader/viewer vs how much is left to them to piece together based on context is a more important aspect than trying to have everything in the world make logical sense. I think the discussion as worldbuilding as insecurity on the writer's part actually does make sense in a slightly broader context (Though not to worldbuilding as a part of writing as a whole), because a lot of aspiring and new writers are now influenced by a generation of fan commentary that treats fiction as an engineering problem rather than as a means to convey ideas more complex tan can be handled with simple statements. These writers have grown up surrounded by smug nerds on the internet pushing up their glasses, going "Well, actually..." and then explaining how a parsec is a measure of distance, not time and think that the key to being a good writer is by pre-emptively shutting down those nitpicks. But the folly in that is that writing is not an engineering problem, and writing an internally consistent story where everyone makes logical "correct" decisions is not the same as writing a good work of fiction. It's also a means of covering for the insecurity a lot of writers have about being able to clearly communicate the ideas they have in their head. Art, as a whole, can really be seen as an attempt by humans to bridge the gap of knowledge that exists between the subjective experience of different people. That two people can witness the same objective events but take away a different subjective experience from them. As a writer, or painter or any other kind of artist you want to take the ideas that are in your head and put them into a form where they can be holistically understood by another viewer, but you are always limited because the nature of human existence and the medium means you can't convey the subjective meaning of those events in a way that will be universally understood by everyone in the same way. And a trap a lot of aspiring writers fall into is thinking that if you explain more, add more detail and more specifics it will make their ideas better conveyed, not realizing that part of the power of art is its ability to invoke a unique, subjective experience in the reader and that in the experience of reading a story the emotion evoked by the events is often much more important than the specific facts of those events. Worldbuilding is only as important as how it serves the story you're trying to tell, and stopping the action to infodump on exactly how some aspect of the world works will rarely make the story as a whole stronger than just presenting aspects of the world as is and leaving the reader to put together the pieces themselves.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 18:57
|
|
|
I've always wanted a series of checks where you could slowly convince him that you're actually Courier 3 and there was a mix up at the office and that's how you got the Courier 6 package.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 18:58
|
|
|
A whole lot of genre writers seem to actually want to write ttrpg source books or documentaries about fictional worlds. They are either unaware these outlets already exist or are too insecure to actually do so, and instead write very bad novels instead. Expedition/Alien Planet were good.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 19:14
|
|
|
Here's a serious video about police brutality. Just probably not the police you're expecting.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 19:20
|
|
|
Sydin posted:I honestly think Ulysses would have gone over a lot better if he didn't suddenly force a backstory onto the player that had never even been so much as alluded too at the very last second. You get to play the whole game thinking of your character however you want and then at the very end this guy barges in and says "no actually you were the hero of this town that's never been mentioned before that you clearly loved and considered home, then you blew it up you fiend!!!" and while you initially get some dialogue choices to refute this, they peter out as the DLC progresses and at the end you really have no option but to go "yeah sorry I blew up the Divide buddy." Who are you going to refute it to? The marked men won’t listen. ED-E is kind of head empty full of RALPHIE. And you get to refute it to Ulysses if you really want to, maybe not explicitly but you can talk him down and disassemble him with the Speech checks. The whole idea of Lonesome Road is you versus Ulysses. Refuting him is the complete story. There’s nothing more to be done.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 19:42
|
|
|
Sydin posted:I honestly think Ulysses would have gone over a lot better if he didn't suddenly force a backstory onto the player that had never even been so much as alluded too at the very last second. You get to play the whole game thinking of your character however you want and then at the very end this guy barges in and says "no actually you were the hero of this town that's never been mentioned before that you clearly loved and considered home, then you blew it up you fiend!!!" and while you initially get some dialogue choices to refute this, they peter out as the DLC progresses and at the end you really have no option but to go "yeah sorry I blew up the Divide buddy." I mean, you being a courier is how the whole game starts. Your only established connection to the Divide is that you also did courier jobs for them, which was important for the community. Everything else is and is meant to be Ulysses projecting because he can't move on. which is the whole through line of the four DLCs, dealing with people who can't move on from the past e: Like beyond some ideas about unintended consequences, I don't think there's ever a point in the DLC's story where you're meant to think Ulysses is right about everything unlike the past three DLCs worth of misguided and delusional sad sacks TGLT fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Sep 6, 2023 |
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 19:45
|
|
|
KingKalamari posted:
You're definitely seeing that with Song of Ice and Fire, the longer it goes on. You can tell Martin is very invested in adding to, and fleshing out his world--and it's all really interesting stuff but it's frustrating because it seems to be taking readers farther and farther from the initial mysteries he laid out in the first three books. I think what you said about people treating stories like an engineering problem is really spot-on. World building should be the cherry on top of a Good Story sunday--a story can't all be cherries, you have to also have the sustience of a good story and good characters to hold it all together...otherwise you only have cherries and no ice cream. Yeah, I definitely worry for the state of storytelling from people who grew up on CinemaSins and Thinkpieces--other people's thoughts and opinions about movies they never bothered to watch, but think they know all there is to know about it because they watched a Nostalgia Critic video about it
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 19:52
|
|
|
16-bit Butt-Head posted:giving a homeless person 10 dollars and then being lectured by chris avellone's self-insert, an annoying old woman, in every single game he's written ftw lmao
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 19:55
|
|
|
Arivia posted:Who are you going to refute it to? The marked men won’t listen. ED-E is kind of head empty full of RALPHIE. And you get to refute it to Ulysses if you really want to, maybe not explicitly but you can talk him down and disassemble him with the Speech checks. For a not insignificant chunk of people the appeal of games like Fallout: New Vegas is that the tabula rasa nature of your character (Mixed with the robust visual and mechanical customization options available at character creation) lends itself very well to roleplaying: You can play whatever sort of dude you want with whatever backstory you want to imagine for them and the game is expected to enforce this to at least some degree. The appeal of these sorts of games for a lot of people is about making a character who's Your Dude* and defining who they are through the choices you make in the game. There are definitely open world and immersive sim games that differ from this model, but these usually tone down the degree of character customization they allow players to do to the character as a sort of signal that, while you can dress Arthur Morgan up in a wide variety of different outfits and hairstyles you are playing a more defined character who has specific bits of pre-established backstory that are outside of the player's control. There was a not insignificant faction of the Fallout fanbase who felt that the series had drifted too much from the former and towards the latter after the release of Fallout 3 and saw NV as a return to form. NV was a game where your character was much less defined by their pre-game backstory and much more defined by the decisions they make in-game. And for a lot of those people, Ulysses' storyline in the Lonesome Road DLC, while less of an imposition of defined backstory than what 3 and 4 did, was still seen as too much of a step away from making the PC Your Dude and defining them by actions that were entirely outside of the player's control. Now, the execution of it might make logical sense within the confines of the DLC's narrative, but whether that's internally consistent is beside the point. The point is that what that narrative was doing on a broader level runs counter to what the contingent of people who dislike the DLC want to see from the series.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 19:58
|
|
|
I mean that's kind of a silly thing to say when 1 and 2 very explicitly define you as a vault citizen and an arroyo citizen respectively, with all the cultural and character history baggage those two imply. "Before the courier work you did that set off the main game, you also did some courier work that set off the DLC" doesn't seem particularly restrictive. I guess it might not feel that way given that those are also backgrounds that mesh very well with players not knowing anything about the Fallout Universe™. And players of 1 would probably want to play their old character's grandkid in 2 anyways. TGLT fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Sep 6, 2023 |
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 20:02
|
|
|
e. ^ 1 & 2 explicitly define you as those things at the start of the story though. NV defines you only as a nebulous courier with no further backstory besides "shot in head" and that's the way it stays for dozens of hours until the last of four DLC's where that backstory is suddenly expanded upon out of nowhere in a way that, at least personally, I felt intruded into my own interpretation of my character to that point. I was going to post but you did it way better than me so I won't.  As an aside I find it fascinating that Bethesda does not trust the player to be invested in the Fallout setting without an explicit backstory and motivation put forward, meanwhile they do trust you to be invested in TES as an almost total blank slate. Sydin fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Sep 6, 2023 |
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 20:04
|
|
|
As was pointed out in the strand of the conversation I was responding to, it’s highly debatable that anything Ulysses says about you in Lonesome Road is actually correct. And even if it was, the sum total of an addition to your backstory by Lonesome Road is that you carried a weapon of mass destruction (likely some sort of warhead control unit) into the Divide and bad poo poo happened because of that. I’m sorry but “courier has a previous job” is not some characterization-shattering hidden secret. Of course you had other jobs, because Johnson Nash tells you you’re recognizable when describing Ulysses setting you up. That happens in Primm, in like the second hour of the game.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 20:29
|
|
|
I suppose you could argue they should have made a nod to the Divide at the start, like "oh we're entrusting you with this chip because you did those sick nasty deliveries to the Divide", but it still feels weird to invoke the original Fallout games as a reason for FNV to not include a new character background element given that those games were way more specific about who you were in the universe.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 20:31
|
|
|
It's a very subjective thing that I think ultimately comes down to how an individual player wants to perceive their character. I'm not saying you have to agree with people that the backstory Ulysses ascribes to the player is a step too far in stripping away the tabula rasa presentation, but I don't think we can really say whether that presentation is objectively a good or bad decision, because that depends heavily on the subjective individual interpretation of the player and the kind of experience they want out of the game. There's definitely the subtext there that Ulysses is lying or mistaken and that's a perfectly valid out for some players, but for others they want some way to assert that statement about there character's innocence more concretely in the story and I don't think either party is necessarily wrong in their reaction.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 20:39
|
|
|
TGLT posted:I suppose you could argue they should have made a nod to the Divide at the start, like "oh we're entrusting you with this chip because you did those sick nasty deliveries to the Divide", but it still feels weird to invoke the original Fallout games as a reason for FNV to not include a new character background element given that those games were way more specific about who you were in the universe. It doesn't even really have to be something right at the start, just something that is alluded to at all. Like maybe when you get to Primm and talk to the guy running the Courier branch you can ask him about records of your past deliveries, and he has some dialogue about how it looks like you used to make a ton of deliveries to a town that's since been wiped off the map. Something to set up there's more going on than just the chip and there is a spectre of your past lurking out there.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 20:47
|
|
|
I mean, as pointed out earlier Nash does say Ulysses saw your name on the list and said what amounted to "lmao gently caress them they can have it hope they die" so you do at least establish that you have some sort of past with Ulysses there in the base game. Pretty sure that was in the base game anyways.
TGLT fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Sep 6, 2023 |
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 20:52
|
|
|
Grondoth posted:Here's a serious video about police brutality. Just probably not the police you're expecting. Tout le monde déteste la police!
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 20:52
|
|
|
Sydin posted:It doesn't even really have to be something right at the start, just something that is alluded to at all. Like maybe when you get to Primm and talk to the guy running the Courier branch you can ask him about records of your past deliveries, and he has some dialogue about how it looks like you used to make a ton of deliveries to a town that's since been wiped off the map. Something to set up there's more going on than just the chip and there is a spectre of your past lurking out there. Avellone was absolutely in love with the idea of the PC ruining somebody's life and not even knowing about it and never seemed to get most people just went "Okay, I don't care about the person I never heard of before."
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 20:54
|
|
|
Shyrka posted:I'm sad Salt came down on the twist as being so telegraphed because it blew my mind, but another cool aspect of the otherwise bungled morality system is that your main villain is absolutely an Open Palm adherent all the way through. I've gotten about half-way through the review before turning it off. He wasn't that insightful enough in his complaining about the writing that it just came off as droning so I wasn't getting anything out of the video. The twist isn't exactly telegraphed because the water dragon speaks in riddles. She's vague enough that it could have meant anything. Impermanent posted:Characters that make you defend your reasons for doing things are neat. But they are better when they themselves have a coherent ideology, and that's what avellone tends to mess up This sums it up well. His characters' outlooks and philosophies change subject to subject just so they can get some moral high-ground or be judgemental over nothing.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 20:55
|
|
|
People get so caught up on their ax grinding on the perceived rejection of their head anon by Ulysses they fail to engage with anything he actually says; if they had it becomes increasingly clear his castigation is aimed squarely at himself, you are just a convenient scapegoat for his elaborate suicide plan and someone he can vent at about the failures he sees in himself, in others, and in the post apocalyptic society as a whole.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 20:55
|
|
|
Dawgstar posted:Avellone was absolutely in love with the idea of the PC ruining somebody's life and not even knowing about it and never seemed to get most people just went "Okay, I don't care about the person I never heard of before." It really just comes down to the recurring fascination a handful of game designers have with going "Hey player, you know these actions we made you do to complete the game? The ones that you had no say in and your only options were to either do them or stop playing? What if these were BAD actions? Don't you feel a fool now?"
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 20:59
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 30, 2024 06:26 |
|
|
KingKalamari posted:It really just comes down to the recurring fascination a handful of game designers have with going "Hey player, you know these actions we made you do to complete the game? The ones that you had no say in and your only options were to either do them or stop playing? What if these were BAD actions? Don't you feel a fool now?" "We've tricked you into playing the game, you fool, you utter buffoon."
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2023 21:20
|
|