Marilyn Manson - The Bright Young Things
Now, as I've of late laid waste off and on (and often below) the third Age of dubious Wonders, its weirdly uneven creative side has begun to grate a bit.
I ran across an Arch Angel. So what, I hear you retort, those overgrown pigeons are a dime a dozen in these sorts of games. Can't swing a dead manticore without hitting a whole murder of cherubs. Nonetheless it did take me by surprise as to that point I had never encountered anything simply named <Angel> in AoW3 ... and I have yet to do so. In fact, it mostly avoids Abrahamic mythology. So I'd love a chance to ask that haberdasher's whore in that picture what exactly he's an "arch" of ; if you're a ruling angel where are all your ruled angels? I'd even settle for college ruled angles, and that's allotting you a pretty wide margin.
In fact, judging by various other notes in their books, whoever scribbled and dribbled the flavor text for this fantasy wonderland ever-so-slightly abused appending "arch" to random things. The conquerable undead dwelling, the Necropolis, is stuffed with several kinds of undead "archon" units (supposedly for narrative purposes from the campaign... but still.) My first character was an Arch Druid, which sounded like, oh emm gee, totes awesomesauce until I consistently failed to discover any regular old Druid Druids. By this point I'm wondering why they didn't just go whole arch-hog and name every class and creature an arch-sorcerer, arch-necromancer, arch-warlord, arch-pikemen, arch-knights, arch-etcetera.
Games are highly prone to such... let's call them "orphaned superlatives" in their constant bid for coolness in the eyes of teenagers. To some extent it can be harmless flamboyance. We expect that our heroes will have Big Guns and Big Spaceships with EVEN BIGGER GUNS!!! But you have to draw the line at gimmicks meant to look impressive specifically by comparison to a mundane alternative - yet which lack that point of contrast! It's especially hypocritical in Age of Wonders' case, as its dev team retained the wherewithal to poke fun at DnD-inspired RPGs' fetish for appending "dire" to any wild animal to make it seem more threatening, by implementing the Dire Penguin. Henceforth known as the Arch Penguin Archon.
Neither is this only a linguistic issue. Trebuchets have become the most gratuitously overused piece of large medieval equipment by a considerable margin, both in Hollywood movies and video games. They look mechanically complex, with more moving parts than most fabrications of the castle age, and their verticality registers as more imperious to our tree-climbing primate instincts, thus making for a more impressive visual. But just chucking them into a medieval-ish setting out of context, while ignoring the fact that such devices were basically "arch-catapults" or the mere tail end of an eclectic lot of projectile throwing devices, saps them of their rightful victory over their peers. If you want some rock lobbers in your game, start with the basics, then add a special case superlative in the form of a trebuchet or a cannon.
Straining so hard to impress that you lose track of context and contrast is a great way to (paradoxically) end up looking and sounding flat and mundane. And hey, I'll be the first to admit my RPG characters and parties tend to follow a fairly strict "no filthy hu-mons" rule, but that routine's so exquisitely satisfying precisely in contrast to the filthy humon NPCs around me. Super-man is a lot less impressive if you fail to establish the baseline of "man" and many a game has made a name for itself by reining in its rising action to properly contextualize heroic apotheosis.
The alternative can be best summarized by the endless proliferation and meaningless escalation of magic items in RPGs, especially in WoW-clone MMOs and their loot grinding treadmill. When "rare" blue items describe your lowest, basest, most uselessly common gear tier, I think your brainwork's sheared a few cogs. To reiterate that ethically muddled yet still apt line from The Incredibles, "when everyone's super, no-one will be."
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edit 2019/09/23
I should mention that AoW3 is indeed "uneven" and not a bad game, and handled other examples much better. Navies for instance consist of tier 2 frigates and tier 3 galleons, with only the Dreadnought leader class having access to the tier 4... ironclad (a.k.a. Arch-Frigate) as part of their steampunk motif. How can the same game manage to present both the best and worst ways to handle an issue?
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