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A simple, but firm gently caress your offer will suffice.
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Aug 16, 2022 22:09
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THE DEVIL-GOD!!!! Welcome back! Last time, on Black Geyser, we got ambushed by the goddess of GREED who offered to help us stop the curse of GREED. Goons voted to tell her to gently caress off.  I was curious to see whether or not the game was going to let us fight Zornilsa here.  : Zornilsa! I am going to end this now! : Calm yourself. You will end nothing without me. : Never! Begone, goddess of greed. Nothing you can say will tempt me.: The foolishness of mortals never ceases to amaze. So brief are your lives, yet so quickly do you rush to die... Very well, go your own way. See what it gets you. : Later I'll be glad to have the story to tell, but please tell me we won't ever have to see her again. : I think we came out of that quite well. : We face the devil-god, yet you turned away a strong ally. The strongest possible ally....Alnarius?  : You did well to keep that parley as brief as possible.TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
 I know I said we were going to the Broken Monastery, but does anyone really care? We're past the point of no return, and there is no Christine to sing with us.  Rothgor's realm is both uninspired and boring. Here are some lava elementals. They're the first of 4 bosses we need to kill to unlock the final battle sequence.  You COULD go in there and tank and spank them, but they do annoying amounts of damage and have high resistances.  However, after reloading because I accidentally got Sea Hag killed, I discovered something. You can cast spells onto the platform without pulling aggro on these idiots, so we kill off 2 by spamming acid rain and then go in and kill them all.  Killing the elemental - who drops nothing - lowers the first wall of this staircase of EVIL or whatever.  Of course, the ultimate problem with this whole sequence is that none of this poo poo actually matters.  The game opened with Aldnar killing our father and then we killed Aldnar a chapter ago and got sucked into some gobbledegook on a crusade to slay "Rothgor the Devil God", who we've never met and who has interacted with us in no way except empowering Aldnar. It's not even clear Aldnar was obeying his orders as opposed to just getting powers from him.  This is Xurzax the Devourer. I don't know who he is or why we're fighting him. He's a giant named demon, but he's really only taking arms against us because we bust into his house and is content to let us wander Rothgor's realm until we wander onto his little claw platform.  It's a huge problem with this denouement. We are here to break the Black Geyser pact. Zornilsa just told us she was breaking the pact. We could have turned around and left the Black Geyser, or buried it under the rubble and let her break the pact to do whatever.  Of course, this wouldn't let us do the Pact Prophecy nonsense about unleashing the Dark Moon or whatever so we get railroaded into entering this boring place.  If anything we're going after the wrong target! Our goal is nominally to stop the curse of GREED or whatever, but instead of fighting the actual goddess of GREED - who, according to the Black Geyser website, approached Rothgor with the idea - we're going to murder the delivery boy.  This is a hidden reward for the Alakai quest.  Seeing the sword helps him realize Rothgor is bad and then he murders all the people awkwardly standing on his platform.  When I say "murders" I mean he becomes allied and we still have to go through with another boring fight. We have one more of Rothgor's evil guys to deal with.  I'm not sure I understand the point of this. This guy is supposed to be a legendary hero so I'm not sure why Rothgor got his soul, and frankly I don't care.  You get an achievement for doing this and I just don't care because this man is barely mentioned and nothing in this game fits together. The game has never bothered to make a theme of redemption or any of that nonsense, and he helpfully dies instead of helping you go fight Rothgor or anything useful.  The game suddenly remembers this idiot was a character and brings him back because they don't have recurring villains.  You know who should be here instead? Aldnar! You don't even have to offer the choice of allying with him because he despises you personally for stealing his birthright!  Argos has a spell that summons up two copies of himself. They do a fuckton of ice damage because he can cheat and cast spells off the wintermage and necromancer lists. It takes me a ton of reloads to get through this.  The last staircase wall falls.  Then the game remembers that Baldur's Gate 2 had a demilich fight, and like it was cool and stuff.  They bring back Agelas one last loving time! This man has no character and despite being the Grandmaster of a literal international conspiracy has never been mentioned at all. It's amazing! You can go deep down the wiki rabbit hole logic and link him to the Rauche assassination and Aldnar's rise, but he never mentions that, you can't ask him about it, Aldnar never mentions learning from him, and it's just a loving joke. If anything I don't understand why Rothgor resurrects him twice seeing as its his fault we got in in the first place. He lays down a generic threat and I have to reload again.  It turns out Argos the Demilich has the same problem as the elementals and we can bomb him to death with spells from outside his aggro radius.  Bjalla and Jade can seriously just unload their entire damage complement and while it takes all their spell slots, he can't actually do anything about it. My guess is that no one playtested a party not using physical attackers and he just waits like a moron for you to enter melee range.  With his death the stairs open and we can go to the final boss.  : How did you come to be trapped here?Now, this seems completely out of left field, but it was actually foreshadowed when we did the quest to go kill all the necromancers in the mine. Earlier in the game posted:Keep this in mind because none of this poo poo is going to make sense.  Zoria's voice acting is actually decent. I'm shocked too. : If you are his enemy, why did Rothgor not simply kill you? This raises more questions, such as "why did you teach your followers to do blood sacrifice"? : A goddess in a cage! There must be a story behind this. I'm sorry. WHAT? Look, in any other mythology this kicks off a god war. When Persephone was kidnapped Demeter wandered everywhere and Zeus himself had to intervene. Loki got exiled and eternally tortured for the death of Baldur. We're going to talk about this once we talk about Zoria's story.  : And your sister? This seems like a choice. It really isn't. Remember how the Pact Prophecy is that the Dark Moon shall rise? To be fair Zoria could drive me mad anyday. : I will free you. What must I do? : I will keep my eyes open for something which might have the power to break your chains, but no guarantees. : Then make haste! Please hurry!TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
I'm really sorry, but remember that "Creation Myth" I mentioned at the beginning of the LP? We have to talk about it now. Black Geyser Creation Myth posted:Time began not with a bang and a roar, but with the smallest spark and the faintest whisper. A single light of warmth breaking the unmeasured and undisturbed void of nothingness. A light that grew and divided the void, from that which was, to that which will forever be. Alnarius and Tilindia are the most powerful of the gods and they know Rothgor wants to murder them. They then sit back as Rothgor murders one of their daughters and kidnaps the other and drags her off to hell. Now, I think this is trying to emulate the vaguely Christian idea that God doesn't eradicate evil because he wants you to choose good, but - in Catholic teachings at least - if you try to defeat evil God will help you out. Look at the section in Dante's Inferno when Dante and Virgil are confronted by Medusa - who represents evil that reason cannot defeat - and God sends a messenger angel to tell all the devils that if they don't gently caress off they're eating lightning bolts to the dick. The creation myth tries to have that by having Alnarius declare that if humans cannot resist darkness they deserve to fall, but Rothgor's sins aren't just about humanity, they're against Alnarius personally. We end up with this weird dualism where instead of a struggle Alnarius just goes "meh whatever" instead of mustering his allies to march the gently caress into Rothgor's realm, break Zoria out of prison, and execute Rothgor. Myths are full of great battles waged by the gods and as far as my limited knowledge goes there is no mythic tradition where the gods just kind of awkwardly abandon their families to eternal torment because of free will or whatever. For that matter, free will means just that, and this raises the question of how anyone in this game has free will if undead spirits of GREED can just kind of mind control you into being a badman. King Velianrick broke free of it, but it wasn't a matter of willpower so much as being confused. It's also not clear why the gods of Yerengal chose us for this destiny instead of just beating the poo poo out of Rothgor whenever he pulled this poo poo. It's certainly not like Rothgor has any friends who will protect him, and his goal is literally to destroy the world where all the mortals live - you know, the mortals who believe in gods to give them power? There's a whole section on the Black Geyser website where they explain that Rothgor and Zornilsa are doing this because no one believes in them and they're literally wasting away.  Once again we're stuck in a land where nothing makes sense.  This is it. The final confrontation. : Your pact with the goddess of greed is over, Rothgor. Let me stop the Black Geyser and you may stay in your own dimension.This confrontation means literally nothing. We have no history with Rothgor, hell, the malicious player character combat bark is "To Rothgor with you!" which he can say to Rothgor when ordered to fight him. We've never met Rothgor or fought any of his agents who declared themselves to be working in his name (until we stormed the tower). Rothgor doesn't have anything we want, and we're not here to destroy the Black Geyser because of anything it's done to us, but because a time waifu who may or may not be a Zoria cultist told us to do it. I can't even think of what Rothgor represents. He's not a tempter because that's Zornilsa. The game refers to him as a "trickster" in one of its achievements, but he doesn't do anything sneaky as far as I can tell.  : I am starting to reconsider the decisions which led me here. I think I'll head back now.It's kind of amazing how few options we have to interact with Rothgor. We can't tell him Zornilsa betrayed him. We can't tell him the Prophecy says he's hosed. We can't even ask him to let Zoria go - sure, it probably wouldn't work, but he could mock us for trying.  : Hahahaha! No. For the next few minutes, you will be my guest. I insist.: You came to challenge a god, and now the doom you have so doggedly pursued is at hand.: Do you suppose simple oblivion awaits you, or that I will devour your souls? No, no I will not, no matter how much you wish it. I have a certain piece of sorcery I reserve for especially aggravating wretches like you.: After you have been slain, I will bring you back to life as my servant, your will broken but your soul very much intact.: You will be my herald as I stride across Yerengal, my unquestioning slave. You will speak for the devil-god. You will fight for me wherever my will is resisted, and suffer, and die and rise anew, again and again. And everywhere you appear on my errands, your rotten, eyeless face will be the sigil of your failure.You know, that sounds a lot more interesting than the main "plot" of this game. gently caress it, let's join Rothgor. Reload!  : I wish to serve you, Rothgor. I want to witness your reign of destruction over Yerengal! I admit the first time I saw this line I couldn't stop laughing. See, the problem is that the game needs to enact the Pact Prophecy to set up as obvious sequel bait. However, the game developers couldn't come up with an evil option - even though Zoria is right there and you could swear to be her evil lieutenant spreading madness across the land or whatever the gently caress - but they remembered that other games had one. Thus we get this half-assed option that honestly should have just not been in the game. : Then I intend to stop the Black Geyser. Step aside and you may remain in your own dimension. : Yes. *I* am telling *you* to step aside. It never occurred to me a god could be deaf. Then he goes back to his rant about challenging the devil god and turning you into an undead or whatever. Naturally none of your party members have anything to say when confronted by K-Mart Satan. TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
 Rothgor opens with this bullshit magic spell which knocks everyone down, even if they're wearing the Dwarven Gar boots of knockdown immunity.  He then summons a bunch of duplicates of the party while we try to pull him toward the chains.  There are two ways to win this fight. The first is to get him to cast the fireballs at the chains, and when all four are broken you win.  The second is simply to beat the poo poo out of him.  This is extremely difficult. See that portal with the wraith? Rothgor is going to keep loving dumping adds on you this entire fight. There's a big shadowfury demon down at the bottom there.  Rothgor himself is going to wail on you with his greatsword and only occasionally cast magic. I suspect he's the reason they rebalanced resistances - someone must have sent them a youtube of Helgenhar tanking him with 200% physical resistance or something stupid and they got really offended and instead of making the Rothgor fight more interesting they did this. It is actually an interesting fight, but the fact they had to resort to infinite adds and undodgeable status effects doesn't speak well to their encounter design. I then realize that we're actually hurting Rothgor and that if people die it's literally the last fight in the game.  Rothgor will use his bullshit AoE stun again when you beat him up enough. Of course, this means that all the adds can get free hits on your rear end and there's a very real chance that you're going to lose party members as they wail on your incapacitated players. Did I mention resistance doesn't apply because gently caress You?  I just don't have enough healing up to keep everyone alive.  Sea Hag dies because I tasked her with holding off the adds. In retrospect Helgenhar probably should have stayed in the party.  Hamlin is tasked with holding off Add Zone while everyone tries to burst down Rothgor. Of course, because this game is poo poo it's nearly impossible to tell where Rothgor is (he's behind the big demon) and he still has a ton of resistances and hit points because gently caress deciding fights quickly!  In horror I realize that I must have sold the life drain sword, as I'm using every bullshit trick I have to keep Inta alive.  Hamlin somehow died offscreen. I kinda wish I'd figured out Mystic Bulwark earlier as it would have let us tank more things - but then again, I'd have to play more Black Geyser and the game sucks.  Rothgor naturally cutscene knocks out all the player characters, and it's the one part of this that has thematic resonance, as the player characters have accomplished nothing all game.  We resume here with the surviving party members. Rothgor is obviously diabolically plotting to make them play jump rope until they die of exhaustion.  He uses his patented Cutscene Powers to shoot us again, but I guess all the adds took a union mandated break.  Even if you don't agree to free Zoria, this happens anyway. This sequence is incredibly stupid, because Rothgor has a big fireball attack and a sword, and he could have just used those and put the chains at no risk whatsoever. He's used that attack at least three times and it did nothing to Zoria's chains.   Zoria uses her cutscene powers because of the power of drama or whatever.  : Leave me be, Night Queen! I am the devil-god!This is what happens when you try to write myth but you only had your parents read to you from the fantasy section of the bookstore. : Zornilsa, come to my aid! Our pact demands it. Where is she?!I keep bringing up that in actual myth, oaths have meaning because they're sworn on something. Even Zeus dared not break an oath made on the river Styx. Rothgor is supposed to be a trickster and would presumably know the value of leverage. However, I guess he just trusted Zornilsa because... he was in lust with her? I don't know.  : You are nothing now, Rothgor. Nothing. How? Why? You personally murdered a moon goddess. You know better than anyone.  But Rothgor wants to destroy the world and return it to the Void because that would make him supreme god. Why is the Void in any way a punishment?  : And now my reign begins. Apparently banishing Rothgor to the Void involves shooting him with lightning.  Oh, he's... he's dead? Well, we can't go through the geyser, can you help us out? You're the moon goddess and you traveled through the skies. : I won't forget what you did for me, here. Now go.The actress switches demeanors, so I don't know if Zoria is supposed to have multiple personalities because she's the goddess of madness or whatever the gently caress. The game certainly doesn't explain it, and I don't care. TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
 The developers wasted a bunch of time having Rothgor's pillars and poo poo collapse as you ran by. They seriously could have just faded out and ended the game with you all running.  I grabbed all Hamlin and Sea Hag's equipment so they could be resurrected. It's kind of rude of Zoria not to hit them with a Twisted Revival, but whatever!  Escaping through the Black Geyser yields this - oh, no.  This is all voice acted as well. Yes, this is what we are ending the game on - the game's worst two exposition dumpy characters expositing at each other in a dull attempt to drum up interest for the sequel.   : Change comes. Death, and rebirth.Wait, I thought you were supposed to "cease to swing" or whatever. Are you in a monogamous relationship with Isla now?  : And you? Will you be reborn?: I have reached equilibrium. My time is over. I'm sure the developers thought they were leaving some kind of intriguing mystery over whether Isla is an angel or something, and I don't care. : They will find their way. Or they will die in the darkness.: Have you no further guidance?I want to point out that in the plot as laid out by this game, we never needed the Pendulum for anything. He gave us exposition about the Pact Prophecy before we busted into the temple and found the original text of the Pact Prophecy. He was briefly referenced as ceasing to swing when the Dark Moon rises. He's a guardian spirit who hasn't done jack poo poo either to ameliorate the not-curse or stop the war.  I suppose that we could be generous and question whether we would have figured out about the Pact Prophecy if Isla hadn't made us do it, but you could easily restructure the plot to remove her entirely. Have Aldnar talk about what he learned from the Rothgor cult, maybe gloat over how despite us killing him the Black Geyser will avenge him and destroy the world or whatever. : Farewell.: Farewell, spirit. I will remember. Isla wanders off to look at the view from Yerengal's tiniest mountain. TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
 That's it! That's the ending! The civil war literally does not matter, because Zoria is going to bring the Dark Moon upon Yerengal and her parents are stupid and lazy. You cannot complete the game without fulfilling the Pact Prophecy, but it never feels like an inevitable tragic doom. I wouldn't even compare it to a lazy author contriving circumstances to fulfill the prophecy, the game's way of ensuring the prophecy gets fulfilled is to have Isla tell you to do it and then railroad you into being unable to refuse. Sure, we formed a "new alliance" of... the kingdom that previously existed, but we also unleashed an evil dark moon that's literally in the sky that somehow no one is able to see that will destroy everything anyway.  The only one of you who was in any way competent at your job is the composer Igaz. The music in this game isn't bad. I wouldn't consider it memorable, but it's not as awful as the sheer garbage that dripped from the metaphorical pen of Padraig C. Nolan. He put the stupid time travel quest in his portfolio to show to employers with the caption "Look upon my works, ye mighty". I do despair, just not for the reasons he had in mind. I can't believe this. Then again the selection of poetry opens with a horny wizard and a succubus ripping out his soul with a kiss followed by an ode to Urf the Manatee, so what do I know? His resume claims he wrote the entire plot of Black Geyser, and I think that's more damning than anything I could write. He apparently directed all the voice acting as well. I note that he lists no actual literary experience - or interests - besides "storytelling" on his resume, and while the selection of poetry almost indicates that he's branched out, most of it is dull fantasy nonsense. I don't want to turn this into a witch hunt against one man, but reading his writing makes it very clear he's approaching this from the perspective of someone who has been exposed mostly to the fantasy-industrial complex. Black Geyser would have benefitted immensely from taking a look at real mythology instead of regurgitated pap nonsense.  I'm also shocked they sprung for this many voice actors on a project that by all accounts needed a strict budget. Serpent in the Staglands is made by a husband and wife team, has no voice acting at all, and the story kind of falls apart at the end, but it's entirely possible to play it just reading the text and you're never left scratching your head as to why the characters are suddenly possessed by a devil who wants them to do something else until you get the bad ending, but you can at least see what the writers were TRYING to do. David Zakal, the Game Director Interview posted:RPGWatch: You revealed a story about evil forces that repeatedly tried to destroy the world until they came up with a scheme based on greed and destruction from within. Some people would probably say it is a common fantasy story while others would see some parallel to our world in it. So how would you describe it? Is it mostly based on common fantasy tropes or is it mostly allegory? Or is it more complex than it seems? Source here. I want to reiterate that I don't have anything personal against these people, but judging from what they've put forth they just don't have the talents to make a story-driven game like this. Mr. Zakal here is talking about greed motivating people to do ruthless things to hang onto power, and that's something that's a huge problem in the world today! It's not hard to come up with something people can relate to, but we immediately veer hard into dark gods and curses and Dungeons and Dragons inspired nonsense that goes up its own rear end. Baldur's Gate 2 isn't a success because of all the blather about Bhaalspawn and elven souls and whatever else, but because the story stands in spite of that. Irenicus is a powerful and amoral enemy who targets the player character to deprive them of their inheritance. He further messes with your family by kidnapping your adopted sister. Yes, the story is told in the Forgotten Realms, but many of the elements could be easily adapted into another format and they resonate not because Irenicus is a level 20 sorcerer with a +2 sword but because you can relate to what's going on (and also the considerable talents of the late David Warner). I'm not going to claim Baldur's Gate 2 is super deep and should be studied in English classes, but it is about something. Black Geyser is about nothing. It has 300,000 words of "hand-crafted narrative" and has nothing to say. It is certainly not fantastical, as mighty gods strut into the picture to offer sad bargains and go away meekly when denied. Compare the Zornilsa scene to Paris being told to gift the golden apple! It is not a game about greed, as the game portrays greed as an external force that can be removed with the precise application of swords and arrows. It is not a game about war or politics, though they happen in this game. It is not a tragedy of a cruel fate because said fate could be knowingly avoided merely by staying home and teaching people to overcome the curse of greed. It is not even a coherent chronical of fictional events, because the events are so disconnected from what came before or after while the game maintains a realist tone. Members of the thread described it as a mechanical evocation of tropes and setpieces desperately strung together to emulate better games and I don't think there's much I can add to that. There will be a bonus update taking a look at the kickstarter promises and then this LP will be over.
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Aug 17, 2022 07:48
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: Uh, actually Rothgor, you're supposed to say "the devil-god does not accept the fealty of insects". Now respect the Pact Prophecy or I'll replace you with another character the player has never heard of. We need a totally garbage boss fight and you're it.
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well that was a terrible waste of everything
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Aug 17, 2022 08:41
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So, in the end, the Goddess of Greed was irrelevant. Wow. Does her offer to help you change nothing at all? Also, uh, did we ever actually fight/meet the "couriers of darkness"? Were they just generic demons from Rothgor's realm? Was Rothgor the courier of darkness? And do we get gently caress all narration for our ending? Not even rudimentary descriptions of how our choices changed things? Just "and then peace returned but not really because sequel"?
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Aug 17, 2022 08:45
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Well that certainly was a wet fart of an ending.
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Aug 17, 2022 09:17
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LJN92 posted:So, in the end, [everything] was irrelevant. What a terrible game. Thanks for playing it so nobody else has to suffer and my condolences to the kickstarter backers.
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Aug 17, 2022 09:24
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I think my favourite part is that they had to dump most of the plot explanation (for a given definition of explanation, anyway; it doesn't seem to have actually explained much) on their website because they couldn't figure out how to include it in the actual game.
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Aug 17, 2022 10:20
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Wait, did they have actual foreshadowing in this game full of plot points that are dropped as quickly as they're brought up? Though I'll admit that the "twist" of "Everyone assumes that the plot refers to an even worse event when it's just freeing the goddess" isn't that bad. We don't even have any evidence that she'll actually cause madness, she could just be called that because her personality changes like the phases of the moon. Which is something that was done for a God in another fantasy novel. I mean, she used to be around, and clearly the world hadn't ended then, so people are probably freaking out over nothing.
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Aug 17, 2022 12:00
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Wow, what a thrilling conclusion.  Feels like I've read tabletop stories with a more thrilling conclusion than this.
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Aug 17, 2022 12:12
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LJN92 posted:Also, uh, did we ever actually fight/meet the "couriers of darkness"? Were they just generic demons from Rothgor's realm? Was Rothgor the courier of darkness? (seriously though I have no idea)
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Aug 17, 2022 12:15
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It's mostly that "courier" is such a horribly un-fantasy word. What's wrong with messengers? Package for Mr. Rothgor, please sign the dotted line, etc.
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Aug 17, 2022 12:22
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At the end of it, it appears the author doesn't actually understand how stories tend to work. That, or it is extremely experimental art.
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Aug 17, 2022 12:39
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Lol it just dove off a cliff for no discernible reason. Not enough of a train left by this point to call it a trainwreck either. Looking forward to the postmortem
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Aug 17, 2022 12:42
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I'm glad this story is over so I can stop checking on it out of curiousity. This was just getting painfully tedious to the finish. I'd say 'at least it was short' but I honestly cannot tell if that's really just because TGEK updates really quickly. I certainly can't tell how long the story is from the content given how ridiculously disjointed the entire experience was.
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Aug 17, 2022 12:43
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Wait, if Zoria was trapped in not-Hell by not-Satan, then how did she tell her followers that story? Was he allowing her to send messages to her followers? Was he allowing her to form and maintain her own religion with its own religious book? Why bother with the ambiguous "Traveller" and not "Help, Satan deceived my sister and they captured me"? And writing that, I just realized... Zornilsa is supposed to be her sister, isn't she, and her "death" was meant figuratively, not literally? Zornilsa is convinced by Satan to help him capture Zoria, she "dies" from doing so as the greed aspect takes over and she wants to fill the void in her soul with wealth, Satan convinces her to destroy the world with him somethingsomething only the two of them left to make ugly hatebabies in the void. I mean, the plot spent a surprising amount of effort at the end going on about how it takes a lot of power to kill a God (and then Zoria just ganks Satan anyways?) and Satan COULD have killed Zoria but it would have taken too much power, but he was able to poison the sister but can't poison Zoria for reasons... Also, the "Chaos god imprisoning another God in his realm" was done much better in Warhammer 40k. There, the Chaos God of disease and plagues, Nurgle, has the Eldar goddess of Life and Healing, Isha, kept in a gilded cage in his garden of rot, and he inflicts new plagues on her regularly. However, he keeps her because he's in love with her, and she whispers the cures to the plagues to her followers when he's working on new plagues. There is a reason why he keeps her around. In Black Geyser It's... Satan is just too lazy to kill Zoria? Do they actually have a reason for why she is still alive other than "Satan is, like, REALLY lazy"?
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Aug 17, 2022 13:03
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let's play black geyser, where everything's made up and the plot doesn't matter
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Aug 17, 2022 14:49
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LJN92 posted:So, in the end, the Goddess of Greed was irrelevant. Wow. Does her offer to help you change nothing at all? The couriers of darkness are the spirits of the damned carrying GREED. Isla mentioned it once. They are mysteriously absent from Rothgor's Realm for, uh, reasons. I believe allying with Zornilsa has her laser Rothgor but I'm just quoting a guide. Zoria always gets out as far as i know. Randalor posted:Wait, if Zoria was trapped in not-Hell by not-Satan, then how did she tell her followers that story? Was he allowing her to send messages to her followers? Was he allowing her to form and maintain her own religion with its own religious book? Why bother with the ambiguous "Traveller" and not "Help, Satan deceived my sister and they captured me"? The first is through the miracle of Black Geyser. Maybe we're supposed to infer Rothgor tricked the cult into summoning a big demon with the blood rites instead of her. She also sent undead monsters to help us attack Bowser's Castle. I don't know. As far as Zornilsa being the ugly sister, I don't think that's intended because Sea Hag says Zoria's sister was outright slain. The narration on the website says Zornilsa's beautiful and implies she and Rothgor had a "union". I can't say you're wrong because Black Geyser, but I can't say you're right either. Then again, for a goddess honored through blood sacrifice who plans to plunge the world into darkness she doesn't seem to resent her sister for letting Satan capture her and promises to remember what we did for her. I still have no idea why she's associated with the undead - that's Rothgor's thing. Zoria is just lovely Persephone.
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Aug 17, 2022 15:50
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The real couriers of darkness were the terrible companions we met along the way, if you think about it
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Aug 17, 2022 23:16
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Postmortem: What Was This Game Supposed To Be? It will come to no surprise to astute observers of terrible games that Black Geyser came from kickstarter, but it's worth questioning what, exactly, Black Geyser promised to the people who have them money and why the finished product is such an incoherent mess. Now, a lot of this is going to be blanket speculation based on the credits on the kickstarter and the credits on the game, but rest assured that the more I look into these people the more terrible projects they've been associated with. I'm not going to do a complete breakdown of everything in the kickstarter, because their obsession with minutiae like Brewing and Drying is just laughable and tedious, and the constant invocation of "classic-style RPGs" - and the mention of Baldur's Gate in the trailer - is exactly what you'd expect from lazy nostalgia bait. We could talk about how they desperately wanted to ape the feeling in Baldur's Gate I where you wander around running into random crap like dryads who give you a game over if you make out with them or the gender reversal belt, but talking about the derivative part of derivative games isn't honestly that interesting. Where's Rothgor? I was going to make a joke about Poochie, but then I remembered that having people asking "where's Rothgor" whenever Rothgor isn't on screen would be much better than what we got. If you watch the entire 5 minute promotional trailer/developer interview video at the top of the kickstarter or read through the promotional material the focus is on Zornilsa and how the player can choose to be a "defiant hero" opposing her or give in and surrender to greed. Kickstarter posted:When one door closes, another opens—chaos has its advantages and disadvantanges[sic]. You can become influential and powerful regardless of the path you choose. No path is inferior or superior to the others. Being extremely greedy will lead the kingdom into much greater chaos by the game's final chapters, allowing you to fish in troubled waters or become a ruthless tyrant in the eyes of the people. Being generous, on the other hand, will bring you different types of challenges and allies while you strive to become powerful enough to openly defy a dark goddess. The choice is yours—and so are the consequences. Rothgor is never mentioned. The trailer shows a feminine hand moving pawns while narrating about the perfidy of the goddess of greed and heavily implying that Zornilsa is the real villain and that the game is going to be about confronting her. I don't think it needs to be stated that this would be a much better game than we actually got - at the very least, it would be a game with a clear narrative and you would have a goal to work for. This is eliding the elephant in the room which is that Rothgor and Zornilsa are essentially the same character. Both are evil gods who reward the wicked for doing selfish or evil deeds and try to trick people into making bargains - Rothgor makes bargains with Zoria's sister, and Zornilsa desperately tries to tempt the player with nonsense. Many dialogue boxes are wasted prattling on about their novel idea to form a team, but it's not really clear why they have to be two separate characters or why they need each other at all. This isn't like Paradise Lost where all Satan's followers argue about redemption before Satan proves he doesn't give a drat about any of them by arguing for them to be in hell, these are two allied characters who differ in... I dunno, desire to destroy the world? Now, I'm not sure how much to read into this, as evidence of the plot we know and are confused by show up in various kickstarter updates such as this 2021 update about religions of Yerengal or the worst temple in 2020. The Team of Evil appears in 2021. It's worth noting that the original release date for Black Geyser was 2019 and the kickstarter lists one Nick Macari as the Narrative Designer. This is notably different than the finished game. Padraig C. Nolan, who we briefly talked about earlier, is listed as the Narrative Designer while Nick Macari is relegated to the role of "story consultant". I don't understand what happened, but I can rampantly speculate! It's worth noting the original release date for Black Geyser was 2019, but the aforementioned Temple update in 2020 notes that the game is a much bigger project than the developers were expecting and thus release got pushed back a few years. After this 2020 decision suddenly we get Rothgor (oddly pronounced Roth-gar) trailers, updates on how the Rothgor cultist's highest aspiration is to be possessed by a "courier" - a concept that never appears in game, even with the Rothgor cultists we encounter - and a whole bunch of nonsense reminiscent of the plot we got. Remember, Mr. Nolan's web page links the time travel inception quest with Isla as example work to impress potential employers. So was there a last minute plot change brought on by a new Narrative Designer, or what exactly happened here? Tower of Time Looking at Macari's web page is interesting because it's mostly a bunch of games you've probably never heard of. He has an entire section of his website devoted to the craft of writing. It's worth looking at some of the articles he's written, because comparing what he says to do versus what Black Geyser actually does is a complete whiplash. Macari, "Are you working on a phantom story" posted:I can’t tell you the number of times a script or outline lands on my desk: five, ten, twenty pages of writing and the story is nowhere to be found… totally, MIA. There's a lot about using loglines - a one-sentence description of the story - to ensure that the story can be followed by the reader and he places a lot of emphasis on how poor execution can ruin a great story idea. I'll admit I only read a few of his articles, but what I've read seems completely at odds with what Black Geyser became. I do not know how to summarize the story of Black Geyser in a single sentence, precisely because there is so much convoluted bullshit that goes nowhere. Heck, let's see what Macari has to say on themes: Macari, Master Themes posted:This picks up after I make an analogy of writing and cooking. It's interesting how little of this Black Geyser seems to have absorbed. The cynical among us might notice that to the right of the Writing Craft section there's a description of hourly billing rates, but if you told me that if I had to describe the theme of Black Geyser or die I'd tell you to pull the trigger. It's kind of a mess, but you know, Macari is a contract worker. It's entirely possible that the client threw out his advice entirely and went with their own nonsense, right? Now we need to talk about the only one of Macari's works I'm actually familiar with, a game named "Tower of Time."  This graphic is taken directly from Macari's website describing the story of Tower of Time. It's worth noting that I don't recognize any of the names except Post Malone, and I can't find independent verification that Malone even played this game. Now, Tower of Time's story is bad enough I could easily make it my next LP. It doesn't have anything as offensive as Stygian's Coaly Willie or ATOM's nonsense, but it's not very good. The gist of the story is that a character named "you" - the most boring fantasy white man imaginable - has a vision from some wizard after finding a tower on a doomed world, and you return as an adult with some heroes in tow to explore the tower to maybe find something that can fix the world. A bunch of Age of Wonders characters show up as you get deeper into the tower, and while the game starts off reasonably promising with mysteries of who built the tower and what it is, the game ultimately explains everything in ways that are unsatisfying and don't make any sense. The tower was built by the ancient civilization that ruled the planet and has both advanced technology and magic. Magic was originally invented by an intergalactic alien empire from another dimension who ascended to being energy beings but then discovered they had to eat everyone and devour energy to survive. It turns out that using magic lets them into the characters' world so they can devour it, and the wizard realized this and trapped himself in the tower under a time spell to fight the aliens forever where they breached into the real world. The big reveal, once your "champions" fight their way through the tower, is that the wizard realized the laws of physics in the home dimension would make the aliens killable and also he summoned you and your heroes so he could kill all the heroes to steal the life energy of... seven people that would let him teleport the tower through space so a new civilization could rise and kill the aliens. The story has familiar hallmarks from our time with Black Geyser too. A mysterious woman referred to as "the Tower Avatar" shows up to spew exposition but refuses to explain anything. It turns out she's a robot built to stop you from reaching the wizard. A bunch of random interdimensional Nazis named after Spanish conquistadors show up. The characters are all boring fantasy stereotypes who refer to each other with appellation such as "Noble elf". There's an entire section where you go to another dimension to be judged by different alien energy beings in a sequence that doesn't matter at all. Lastly, it has one ending - after making a huge deal of the player's ability to make moral choices - which doesn't follow from the rest of the story and is utter nonsense. Instead of storming the fortress of a completely different god than the main antagonist, the characters make it to the bottom of the tower, where the wizard explains he needs to drain their life force to save the world. The champions are understandably less than enthused by this notion, so you have a boss fight against the wizard and a mind-controlled "You", which enrages the characters who are upset about having to fight their friend. You win the fight, but the wizard says some nonsense and all the characters obligingly line up so the wizard - whose goal is to start a new civilization elsewhere - consumes the best and brightest of the dying world's people because he can't figure out how to get energy out of the tower's advanced fusion reactor. It's a very stupid ending and the Steam forums are full of complaints about it and the plot in general - but if you're familiar with Black Geyser much of this will be familiar to you. The point I'm making is that Macari was involved heavily in the creation of Tower of Time and it suffers from the same flaws as Black Geyser. The characters are shallow and uninteresting stereotypes, and anything interesting about them is excised for cliches. The ending is unsatisfying and railroaded as the designated "smart" characters (Isla, Proteus the Tower of Time wizard) explain their idiotic nonsense and force the player to go through with it. I've written a lot about how things in Black Geyser don't logically follow, such as telling the king you have an alliance with the Rillow or Lord Frelsi drafting you to join Traitor Town to continue the war. I think a lot of it can be explained by this: Macari, Maximize Your Turns posted:As you’re well aware, surprise is the magic behind a story… At its core it really shows that Macari has no clue what he's talking about. Let's go look at Moby Dick. Melville heavily foreshadows that Queequeg and Ishmael getting on the Pequod and joining Captain Ahab is an absolutely terrible idea, from Ishmael discussing the fate of the biblical king Ahab to the prophet Elijah showing up to warn them not to get on that ship. Melville makes it clear to the reader that this is going to end badly, but it makes sense for the characters to do so because Ishmael is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. Moby Dick posted:I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was really dogging us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with Queequeg, and on that side of it retraced our steps. But Elijah passed on, without seeming to notice us. This relieved me; and once more, and finally as it seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug. Thus when the Pequod goes down with all hands because Ahab insists on following Moby Dick while loudly swearing allegiance to the devil the reader is unsurprised, because that is the logical conclusion of the actions of the characters and their flaws that led them to this point. Then again, Moby Dick is a beautifully written story of mythic proportions while the excerpt from "Samurai Onyro" is a bunch of demons raping a woman while the protagonist and a mentor character debate whether or not the protagonist should intervene because it's a test or some nonsense. I started with Moby Dick because I really like it, but it's worth comparing to the Macari stories because they're all trying to do the same thing: show how a heavily foreshadowed tragic doom actually happened. The Pequod sank both because of the hubris of Ahab and because the denizens of the ship had their reasons for not resisting him. In Black Geyser, the Pact Prophecy is supposed to lead to a tragic ending where the heroes have no choice but to release the Dark Moon to stop the curse of greed. In Tower of Time the tragedy is that the characters all agree to die to save the world, even as they finally profess their love for each other and other maudlin nonsense. Macari and the other writers do not do the work to get to this point. Ahab dies strangled by the spear he dedicated to the devil, and the entire novel is about the choices he and the others made that brought them to this point. In summation, the Black Geyser developers seem to have brought this man on to fix their script - and also act as a kickstarter consultant - and were sold a bill of goods. There's a lot of writing about themes and twists and storyboarding and ensuring the story has resonance to the reader, but none of this was actually delivered upon. Tower of Time and Black Geyser are both notable for being about nothing. The endings don't make sense and don't relate to the rest of the game's plot. I can't tell if there was a later attempt to rewrite their way out of whatever Macari gave them, or whether the developers went along with it, but ultimately the prime failure of Black Geyser is the story, and it's heartbreaking. It's clear from watching the kickstarter videos that the developer team was genuinely enthused about the project, and much of the cringeworthy lore has the excitement of a twelve-year-old kid talking about his Dungeons and Dragons setting. Now, Black Geyser as written was never going to be a good game, but it's not hard for me to imagine that if the artists and programmers hired someone who could actually write we'd get something that was actually enjoyable to play.  Now that's it! We're done! There's not much more to say about this game, so we can all go on with our lives.
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Aug 22, 2022 14:40
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Oh, stories have got to surprise the player at every turn to work. Well, I have sorry news for all those Greek tragedies over there. It's a common writers disease, though, on par with Tvtropes writing.
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Aug 22, 2022 17:47
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That was a great wrap up post and a great LP. Thank you for playing games so we don’t have to.
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Aug 22, 2022 18:02
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I particularly appreciate you looking at the writers involved, that's a step beyond.
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Aug 22, 2022 18:08
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Great wrap up. Looks like nobody had much to say and set out to write a story that said nothing in as many steps as possible. It just picks up and drops the themes randomly. It doesn't seem to have much of a unifying vision. Not all writers start out with an exact plan, mind you, but this one story especially looks like plain winging it.
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Aug 22, 2022 18:08
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Mzbundifund posted:That was a great wrap up post and a great LP. Thank you for playing games so we don’t have to. drat right. I'd like to repeat my lazy observation that the creative team should have really started with something a lot smaller in scope of plot, maybe a visual novel or RPGmaker free game. The reason that so few narrative rpg games are as loved and successful as Baldur's Gate is that it is the hardest and most time consuming type to make.
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Aug 22, 2022 18:10
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Amazing LP, as always. May you inflict ever more horrible RPGs upon yourself.
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Aug 22, 2022 18:11
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Well, you can learn writing from the man himself: https://www.amazon.com/Working-Writers-Comics-Graphic-Novels/dp/B07BPWDHWF With broad comic experience of.... 10 Z level press issues: https://comicvine.gamespot.com/nick-macari/4040-88913/issues-cover/ Only has cover credit for 4 issues. I don't know if this is fake it until you make it self-promotion, or dunning kruger effect but it's sad nonetheless. So this isn't entirely bagging on Nick, I enjoyed this LP. The game is a bizarre melange of mostly adequate technology combined with terrible systems, incoherent plotting, and completely disrupted story/themes. Like I read this whole thing, and have actually looked it up a little elsewhere, and I still have no idea what it's about. The games they are aping, e.g. BG1/2, have clear progression and themes, but this game changes things up so much there's no through line from beginning to end, to the point where it's almost farcical. Like it could have taken a Expedition to Barrier Peaks swerve at the end and introduced aliens and laser guns and I'd just shrug and go "sure, I guess??".
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Aug 22, 2022 18:26
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Thanks for another LP, TGEK! 
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Aug 22, 2022 18:36
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This was a good LP of a bad game. I can only hope that if they do try to make a sequel,
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Aug 22, 2022 21:15
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Scaramouche posted:Well, you can learn writing from the man himself: I think it's telling that the cover has a pointlessly over sexualised woman front and centre.
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Aug 22, 2022 21:16
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Honestly that cover art really tells you exactly what you're in for with that book.
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Aug 22, 2022 21:44
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They couldn't even make it topical by having her sitting reading comics.
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Aug 22, 2022 22:19
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With that spine I don't think she can sit down for anything.
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Aug 22, 2022 22:20
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Nah, that's perfectly doable, the tits and rear end pose is very much possible, it's just that its use is pretty much only for fairly transparent purposes.
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Aug 22, 2022 22:22
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SIGSEGV posted:They couldn't even make it topical by having her sitting reading comics. Or holding a pen and paper or any number of things really.
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Aug 22, 2022 23:12
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mortons stork posted:Great wrap up. Looks like nobody had much to say and set out to write a story that said nothing in as many steps as possible. It just picks up and drops the themes randomly. It doesn't seem to have much of a unifying vision. Not all writers start out with an exact plan, mind you, but this one story especially looks like plain winging it. Oops, we posted at the same time so I missed this. I think the problem is that, going by the guy's website, while you can attribute part of the mess in sidequests and such to not ever doing any planning, for the main story on some level it is deliberate, for one it matches the advice given of trying to surprise the player at several turns, but especially considering the storyline consultant did a similar thing in another game. Overall I am rather happy that the whole mess was that bad, when there's diamonds in pig slop I get upset because they belong in much better things, here there's only Sea Hag and Jade to rehome to better pastures. (I can't say I expected the big titty goth gf / manic pixie dream girl / hardline second wave waifuist creation to be as much as "actually worth a look, as a character" but here we are.) In that sense the lack of thematic consistency and characterful writing is a sort of blessing, because it means I don't have to watch potential get pissed away uselessly, or get pissed off by a would-be deep and intelligent dive in human nature and values and stuff that's just cynicism that pretends to be insight and art hard enough to convince itself.
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Aug 22, 2022 23:37
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Jade is such a curious case study here. For all intents and purposes, she should've been terrible. She has the keywords for a questionable character, and is a character in THIS game of all things with these writers. Instead we get a believably human disaster character, who brings in some needed levity both because the situations she finds herself in are kind of ridiculous, and because she's the only character to actually crack some jokes like ever. Her being a necromancer could've easily turned gross, her introduction being about her weird relationship with her kind-of-ex that we make an ex, so many things could've went wrong here. But.... no, she's charming and likeable.
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Aug 23, 2022 00:04
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SIGSEGV posted:Oops, we posted at the same time so I missed this. I think the problem is that, going by the guy's website, while you can attribute part of the mess in sidequests and such to not ever doing any planning, for the main story on some level it is deliberate, for one it matches the advice given of trying to surprise the player at several turns, but especially considering the storyline consultant did a similar thing in another game. Sorry, I just meant that it seems the writer had nothing to say and laser focusing on that. The surprises fall flat because they are stupid and not set up at all, yes, but I think the deeper issue is that the writer just had nothing to contribute. Not even his own perspective or take on tropes or common fantasy themes, which he just contented himself with regurgitating, barely digested. Just nothing at all to say, which is how you get to snow elves with an incredibly stupid name and the most boring and trite backstory this side of d&d. Which is why everything is just so flat and boring, I would say. Even the trite fantasy poo poo could be harnessed into something if the writer wanted to input anything at all of his. As it stands the lore, themes and story could be markov chain generation. mortons stork fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Aug 23, 2022 |
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Aug 23, 2022 01:43
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Oh yeah, absolutely, I agree completely, it's just a collection of fantasy setting and plot elements that no one bothered to connect, the shocking bit is that at least one person involved, actually at least two, think that this is how things are done optimally, instead of a bitter failure following a grueling crunch to finally push out a nightmare project and make it the problem of the players.
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Aug 23, 2022 01:55
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Amazing. Does that other writer even understand the Ozymandias poem he quoted?
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Aug 23, 2022 04:18
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Solitair posted:Amazing. Does that other writer even understand the Ozymandias poem he quoted? "You see, Percy Bysshe Shelley gives us that line so that we're all expecting to see Ozymandias' great works, but then he subverts our expectations by telling us that nothing is actually there. This is a demonstration of how surprise is the magic behind a story."
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Aug 23, 2022 05:45
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