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Mantis42 posted:Originally I think the dip wasn't a hard game over but they realized it would be unfeasible to create a whole section where you play as a Super Mutant. That said, while The Master is a gestalt consciousness his army wasn't and also the Fallout 2 thing is just a joke and not canon (like 40% of the content in that game). Father Elijah's in Dead Money More seriously, both Deus Ex and New Vegas share the problem of being made by people with a very obvious libertarian bent, and that coming through in how they chose to frame their endings.
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Aug 3, 2023 04:16
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 08:19 |
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I do like the JC/Helios ending of IW forces everyone to know the thoughts and feelings of every other human being at all times, like a more morally uplifting version of the Borg. Try being a greedy sociopath like that, assholes!
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Aug 4, 2023 22:17
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Typo posted:As presented in game House prob House is just Caesar's dictatorship with nicer packaging and less overt conservatism. Robots instead of slaves, building towards Elysium for the rich, it's basically transhumanist utopia bullshit designed to appeal to the typical tech savvy video game player. NCR is just real world America and all its shittiness. The game presents Yes Man's anarchy (with heavy investment in the sidequests) as the only "good" option (you still need to genocide the Brotherhood or they get up in everyone's grill, but gently caress those fascist dipshits anyway)
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Aug 7, 2023 04:58
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Kaal posted:Yes Man's endings are effectively the same as the Helios ending: The player controls a super computer and rules the world (presumably until the next hero strolls along). Whether or not that's a better ending than the others sort of depends on whether you support benevolent dictatorship / "total liberty for the good guys" or not. I have no idea why people (even the developers!) say this about the Yes Man ending because the ending is very clearly "The AI uses the robot army to kick out the imperialists, stand guard at the border, but otherwise does nothing, and you personally gently caress off and let the various indigenous groups of the region live or die by their own actions." Yes Man could be a dictator with that kind of power but is very specifically programmed not to be for the ideological deus ex machina it represents to work .
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Aug 8, 2023 15:50
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True, and it's here we arrive at the core issue with basically all video game storytelling: the medium is inherently narcissistic in that the player is literally the most important person involved. Any attempts to make NPC characters in a single-player game more important than the player character in the narrative feels (rightly or wrongly) as a direct attack on the player's agency, and we see what a disaster getting lots of real players in a single room can cause with poo poo like MMOs and VRChat and such. Video games are in fact the worst medium for trying to communicate any ideas or concepts about communism or democracy, but very good at making sociopathic darwinian dictatorships seem sensible.
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Aug 9, 2023 01:31
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That's what I'm saying: literally nothing can happen in a single player game without the player themself. Yes, Animal Crossing was first marketed as "the game that goes on - whether you're there or not"... except that's a lie. All that happens is when you load up your file, the game uses the system clock to determine how long since your last save and calculates town changes to match. But if you don't load it up... well, nothing happens. If you reset and change the system clock, the game doesn't really know what the "real" time is. The whole point I'm making is that in a single player game, all decision making is ultimately first the developer's, then the player's. Any semblance of "other" agents making decisions is either adversarial in nature (opponent AIs), a facade for the benefit of the story, or an actual decision-making agent that necessarily removes some agency from the player (which when this does happen, usually results in players screaming bloody murder about not getting/not having their choices respected by the game). In that city builder, all decisions are still ultimately the player's. Unless I'm unaware, there's no town council of AIs that can overrule anything the player decides to do. All single-player games are ultimately dictatorships of the player, and cooperative/cohabitative multiplayer games... well, we see what clusterfucks those tend to be.
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Aug 10, 2023 03:49
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My point isn't so much that video games encourage sociopathic behavior per se. Indeed, if metrics are any indication, I think most people play video games for the power fantasy of safely choosing to be the big heroes they feel they can't be in real life. Rather, I'm saying video games are generally a very poor medium for communicating the importance of communicating, cooperating, and working with others, at least in single-player experiences. Because in the real world that involves... people being able to say no to you, and you having to just deal with that. In video games, giving the players choice, but then denying them satisfaction of that choice by having the games agents deny them agterwards is considered anathema to good game design specifically because it pisses players off.
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Aug 10, 2023 04:10
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 08:19 |
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MadDogMike posted:Maybe “merge” means Helios evaluates decisions by “if JC opinion = yes, then correct answer = no”, and in the meantime it can keep JC Denton from wandering the streets randomly looting and killing people. The Illuminati ending is literally called "Kill Bob Page" so that the rest of the facility, Helios and Universal Constructor included, can be preserved for the Illuminati. I guess in Helio, yeah, he just gets to wither in his self-imposed oubliette, heh.
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Aug 11, 2023 22:42
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