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Honestly this feels like a choice that would have benefitted from a space magic relic or something for once, or some level of care taken with making the cure option seem more plausible. Not that it's all that unheard-of for a scientist with fewer resources but the right idea to make a big breakthrough, but it's one of those situations that despite having happened at least a few times IRL has the feeling of being contrived or unbelievable in fiction when it's a key plot point. Doubly so when it's in a game like this that has no qualms with introducing plot devices out of nowhere. Maybe I'm forgetting something really important from the text dump when the mission first showed up, since it was so long ago, but it feels like in trying to make this choice difficult they make it look like she just has no chance of success. That said, I still think this is pretty different than the Tosh vs Nova thing. That one is easy because Nova is a space fascist cop and Tosh is a dude who's proven himself - it's really difficult to even make an emotional argument for the Nova side that doesn't rely on racism. Whereas with this one there's a very understandable and I think generally admirable human optimism in trying to cure them. Not to say that it's correct, though I always give a very hard side-eye to any of these fictional contortions used to set mass murder up as rationally correct, but I can see admirable and understandable reasons to let Hanson have her shot. Like in any Star Trek episode they're going to go for the cure, and in most it'll work out. Or you get the astoundingly good Babylon 5 Markab episode. Whereas it's difficult for me to figure out why anyone would side with Nova, outside of being a Dominion asset or mind controlled. Honestly the weird choice here is helping the Protoss out. I get that it's because you need to have a mission either way, but they're all set to safely do the job with orbital bombardment, in terms of the story it's weird to be like "yeah let me in on that mass murder" rather than just being like "oh you've got it covered, peace out."
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Oct 29, 2023 15:30
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Kurgarra Queen posted:I legit loved that series. And I loved ME3 all the way up until the ending. The Citadel DLC is a loving riot. I agree with all this and will just add that one reason I've never wanted to replay is that the ending nonsense somehow retroactively makes the Citadel DLC, which owns, worse. Because it's such tone whiplash and makes it feel utterly irrelevant. What a terrible storytelling choice.
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Nov 6, 2023 17:16
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Calax posted:Isn't this the Independant Contractors on the Death Star argument? Not really, there's nothing you can do to stop the military threat posed by the Death Star that isn't going to be bad for any independent contractors on it (if that's even a thing that the Star Wars Empire does). It's the definition of a purely military target from every primary source I know of. Meanwhile a planet with factories on it isn't. It's an even larger-scale version of "can you morally level a city if it contains an arms plant" and while that's certainly a thing people do, it's not admirable or heroic. And at the scales we've seen in Starcraft, the city is almost certainly more factory than an entire planet is.
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Mar 12, 2024 05:11
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On the one hand the 40k setting is deeply dumb in lots of ways, and I'm sure the fiction at least sometimes claims the thousand psykers a day has some practical or logistical difficulty. On the other hand I sort of feel like the deliberate daily murder of a thousand people in order to maintain a fascist empire being downplayed because it is a tiny percentage of the population of that empire is pretty well in keeping with the (seemingly extremely occasional) cases where 40k actually manages some decent satire.
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Apr 13, 2024 03:26
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I think the X-Com example is good but it’s subtly different - what was going on there wasn’t that people thought being cautious was more fun. I mean I’m sure some people did but that wasn’t the root of the issue, the root of the issue was that with the way their system worked and particularly the lethality of individual enemies, creeping across the map in overwatch was less fun but was optimal play. I tend to be on the cautious and methodical side, though not as much as some folks, and I still really appreciated the way Enemy Within and XCom2 tried to make it so that the incredibly slow strategy wasn’t just the best one - it just wasn’t all that interesting. You see similar challenges in a lot of tabletop dungeon crawlers, where the optimal strategy is often to use your best abilities as often as you can and then rest to get them back, and you see a lot of ways to control it, like Gloomhaven’s constant card drain that creates a de facto time limit (outside of a few broken edge cases). And I think this is relevant to the SC2 thing, too. Enemy Within and XCom2 had two different approaches to the problem - Enemy Within gave you reasons to go faster in the form of meld, whereas XCom2 just had a lot of missions where you couldn’t take too long or you’d lose. IIRC there were also some where the enemy got reinforcements every so often as a soft timer - you could go slower but in exchange you’d need to fight more total enemies. Personally I do think I prefer the design where you try to enable players to have more options for how to approach a situation, rather than just outright imposing a cap that removes a slower approach because you’re worried it’s optimal but also less fun for a lot of players. But I think one big difference here in skill lies in identifying whether something is a you-the-developer problem or an objective problem. Like if someone plays your game in a way you personally don’t like, that imo isn’t a problem if they’re having fun. If you have a map where it’s possible to turtle forever and then create overwhelming forces, then that’s imo perfectly fine if it’s one option of many and not a lot more reliably successful than the others. A lot of players I think default to that strategy out of a lack of confidence and there’s some value to nudging them out of their comfort zone because they might discover they like a more aggressive strategy - but there are a lot of ways to do that without requiring it. Side objectives, for example, or initial enemy attacks that run away, tempting the player into following them to try to finish the job, or a mission that clearly communicates that the enemy is reinforcing as well. And of course an occasional mission with a hard time limit or whatever can be fun and a cool way to mix things up. But my personal opinion is that if a majority of missions have a strict time limit, that’s much more on the side of the designer deciding there’s a right way to play, rather than simply suggesting options to a player that they might otherwise not be confident to explore themselves, unless you’ve got a situation where the core parameters of the game make turtling an otherwise broken strategy, like XCom Enemy Unknown. And in that case I feel like you’d be well served coming up with a way to tweak the core parameters. (Eg in XCom, having some kind of alternating initiative system so enemy adds weren’t so immediately punishing would be a big help.)
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May 6, 2024 04:09
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