The Cistern

"In the rainy season they’ll live. But in the dry seasons - that’s sometimes months - they’ll have long rest periods; they’ll lie in little hidden niches, like those Japanese water flowers, all dry and compact and old and quiet."

 

Ray Bradbury - The Cistern

 

 

October is Bradbury country, a time for autumn people to think autumn thoughts, for your footsteps in the early dusk to dissipate in trickles of rain gathering to slip underground, each rivulet an ephemeral pattern never to be repeated. Two sisters sit in a cozy little house, keeping the needlework company. Face pressed against a reverberating windowpane, one recounts to the other a tale of another world, a city under the city. The rain has done something to her. It has germinated the poisonous seed of a long-withered hope.

It's Halloween, a time to give your loved ones over to the shades of the past, to camouflage them safe against the other world's hunger. How good is your costume? Can you pretend, for one more night, to be the mask of vitalism? Can you pretend you're just pretending to be dead? Porch light, candy, plastic bucket, requisite pumpkin grin, fake cobwebs at a dime per square meter. Is this you? Or is this the grotesque fantasy, the fear of life gone wrong for a youth buried decades past, swept down the gutter, while you shambled on, decaying, piloting hope's nightmare year by year?

The sistren, time-leeched, skin folded by negation, sit and listen to the flow of the world outside their room. One listens more attentively than the other. She hears the beauty of emaciation, dessication, sees the gurgle puffing lithe, disarticulated limbs into a glorious ballet, patience conjoined not sundered by the passing of the seasons, longs for not-being to be what never was. Both of them can open the door. Neither can stop the other from opening it, if she wishes, if torrential wishes carry her away into a reality to which this is only a cautionary hypothetical.

Come away from the window, into the hollow, dry air.

But for how long will this empty space continue to outweigh the other, as hopes drain into it year by year?

How long a flow does it take to fill the buried hollows in your loved ones' psyche?

The Open and Shut Secret World: Human Interest

Part of a series on the death of a bad game with excellent atmosphere. Presume spoilers.

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"There was no color in the room; neither of the two sisters added any color to it.”

Ray Bradbury - The Cistern

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"Contact. I read you."

 

While many video games have provided immersive atmosphere, characterization tends toward pastiche when present at all. The Secret World earned its somewhat damning reputation as "the best-written MMO" not least for concisely and incisively fitting into its apocalyptic scenario a host of characters which even players above fifteen years of age could (for once) give a shit about.

 

While many are indeed comical, like the Colonel Kilgore copycat army officer or Scrapyard Edgar the grease monkey hick and quantum physics savant, even the goofballs you'd only visit for one or two quests were often permitted some unexpected undercurrent of integrity. From the detective in the fur suit to the half-drunk layabout 'injun' brothers to the socialite turned cat hoarder and ghost-sitter to the trigger-happy explosives expert and action movie buff and the goth clubber waiting for her personalized beautiful death (("he will be taller, with eyes flashing like winter ice") oh, lord...) they all display, on some level of consciousness, a frame of reference for their behavior. They own their insanity.

As for the more central cast, well, here's one I never heard appreciated enough while the game was still active.

"Mr Noble, Mr Right, Mr 'Quote Some Ancient Knight'"

Richard Sonnac serves as your main contact for the Templar faction. His dignified erudition more or less singlehandedly convinced me to opt for Templars over Dragon despite my fundamentally chaotic leanings, but the factions deserve their own post. Suffice to say Dickie's the guy you want watching your backside. As a minority he successfully emphasizes personal qualities over identity politics (something TSW failed at about half the time.) As a personification of Lawful alignment, he successfully moves beyond blind obedience to the pragmatic or aesthetic underpinnings of his allegiance. One of his introductory lines of dialogue even reads: "You must be singleminded but I want you to arrive at that singlemindedness yourself. To a refined palate, propaganda leaves such a bad taste."

But most of those you meet in the secret world lack the benefit of Sonnac's luxurious nigh-impregnable fortress. Their attitudes tend to be defined more by struggling to keep their footing in a shifting physical/metaphysical landscape or come to terms with their conscription in the game's various conflicts. Despite their colorful quirks their writing and voicing reveal just how wrung they are of vitality in the face of doom. They shuffle about, they sulk, they sneer, they grit their teeth in anticipation of their last stand, they pluckily, timidly, desperately or fatalistically point you in the direction of some slim hope.

Harumi's lines in All Alone Together certainly gain gravitas in the post-COVID19 age of social distancing (her brother even wears a face mask) as she struggles to stay connected to her online friends from behind her apartment door and maze of Home Alone boobytraps protecting the building.

 

In fact, though it provided plety of bigger and badder and ever-biggerer and badderer monsters to pummel into submission, TSW's storytelling success depended on forcing players into an awareness of adult fears: not only is there a fanged monstrosity thundering through the corridors after you, but it already got your parents. Your enemy cannot kill you - so she will leave you crippled. You can save the world! - by being ritually sacrificed and becoming an immobile statue for millennia. You staved off the zombie apocalypse, but all the people you've struggled beside have breathed too deep, and now it's only a matter of time...

Helplessness, isolation, futility, alienation.

A siren song luring you to the abyss.

Children enrolled at the activity center to boost their confidence, for the sake of personal empowerment, regimented, shamed into obedience, inculcated, castrated, blanked slates, hollow vectors for abhuman apotheosis. Your existence has been given purpose, acceptance superfluous.

In keeping with TSW's meta-textual, alternate reality incipience, the Stephen King parody early in your adventures, a memory quickly lost amidst the gear-farming grind, even brings this existential despair home to the gamers, the lotophagi themselves.

 

Rain gathering trickle by torrent into a cistern, dragging you with it by your abandoned hopes, by the cowardice which drained the color from your life, by your own longing for a door into neverwhere.

 

You are the sum of your fears. Fear nothing.

 

"Leave, Chuck. I can make you leave."

Freedom Immortal

"They'll

never be

good to you

bad to you

They'll never be anything, anything at all"

 

Marilyn Manson - Mechanical Animals

 

 

Y'know, it's a bit telling that the top search engine hit for "Owlcat Games" is their bug report forum. The last patch for Wrath of the Righteous deleted my Witch of the Veil's stupidly overpowered Shrouded Step ability. Now, as a point of contention this class should not even exist but by level 15 I've already built my entire progression around that core feature and find myself loathe to retrain. (How else am I supposed to perfectly angle those banshee blasts and crushing despairs?) Given my class description still reads the same and there's nothing about it in the notes, it's probably a bug. But until they patch the patch I'm hitting pause and taking some time to bitch about a roleplaying matter.

I am Chaotic Neutral. I occasionally dabble in other alignments (because, hell, it wouldn't be very CN to not be CN once in a while (can you see why this alignment so often gets confused with insanity?)) but generally speaking I neither kick puppies nor feed them treats, or both as the mood strikes me. Kingmaker seemed to understand freedom-loving alignments. One quest even let you refuse to help an itinerant posse chasing some desperados, then follow them on their quest anyway, then help one group wipe out the other, then switch sides to help the last survivor wipe out his enemies, then for good measure kill the last guy as well, adding up to a quadruple or quintuple-cross by the end. Your last victim's confused last words to the effect of "but... WHY?!" even underscored how glorious this was. Kudos to the writer.

 

For Wrathing and Righteousing purposes, I opted for the Lich mythic path only to find myself forced to tank my cherub score in order to proceed. And, though I've been trying to perform good actions since then (conveniently, manumitting also suits my chaotic leanings) it seems nothing I do matters anymore. Liches are by definition evil. I take exception to that.

 

"Be a vampire, or a ghost, or an immortal with a paint-by-numbers portrait in the rec room. Hell, even a brain-in-a-jar, in a pinch. Anything to avoid the Big Fire Below."

Xykon the (admittedly, quite evil) Lich

 

Non-good, fine, I'll concede the point. Personally escaping death is a mindset that excludes beneficence, an either selfish or recklessly fanatical outlook on (un)life. But indifference is not malice, or rather not-malice by definition. In fact, the same argument could be made along the chaos-law axis, since enslaving others as sentient undead should probably count as a lawful act in an "I am the law" sort of way. WotR even predicates one of your undead companions' personality on this assumption, but overall the devs didn't seem to feel the need to restrict liches to lawful or even non-chaotic so that being restricted to evil instead of non-good comes across as even more forced.

 

This Quora answer by one Sean Sanders makes a nice point on how well neutrality meshes with the concept of lichdom:

"Generally, chaotic neutral characters tend to be very self-centered but not to the point of aiming to harm others for their own benefit. They often have selfish goals like gaining fame, power, wealth, pleasure, etc. They don’t try to stop others from achieving those same things but also don’t actively do much to help others, at least not for selfless reasons. They value their personal freedom and are not big on following arbitrary rules created by others.

All of that seems very much in line with the mentality that would lead someone to seek lichdom in the first place.

The chaotic neutral lich is probably just someone that wants to live forever. He likely has no desire to destroy the world and might not even care to rule it. He will gladly let others live out their lives without his interference but will not hesitate to go to nearly any length to protect his phylactery."

 

Given your log for the lich quest chain in Wrath actually reads "evil or neutral" the decision to limit players to evil only may have been taken frivolously, late in development. If I had to guess, the devs probably noted their shallow, politically correct writing was a bit light on inferior plane influence and therefore rashly amped up one of the neutral choices to evil. Also, there's more than a little of NWN2's infantile take on roleplaying reflected in Wrath's campaign (especially the infuriating companion roster) so many of the nominally evil influences are on closer inspection shallowly defined in terms of their ookiness. Just as bugs are ooky, therefore evil, necromancy fills its classic role as evil by dint of transgression of simian instinct.

 

I'm even more annoyed at good choices no longer having any alignment effect. Not only is it a bad idea in general to invalidate roleplaying, but it flies in the face of one of Wrath's loading screen plot hints asking if it's possible for the evil to ascend, not to mention inexplicably running across one after another drow/succubus/kobold/etc. characters who've renounced evil. I could see the one big choice of lichdom tanking my score halfway down the evil scale if it were then possible to slowly, painstakingly regain neutrality via RP choices. Again, just neutrality, not goodness.

 

This isn't me, I'm not mechanical. I'm just a boy playing the suicide... kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing!

The Open and Shut Secret World: Mystery Machine

Part of a series on the death of a bad game with excellent atmosphere. Presume spoilers.

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I've played a few games on opening day or in open beta (when the term still held meaning) including MMOs, but I find it difficult to describe the atmosphere in The Secret World when the curtain rose back in 2012. You'd normally expect a gaggle of eager young space cadets visibly pausing every few moments to rearrage their hotkeys while they scramble for every last XP point to be first at lvl50... or 60 or 60million, whatever. Indeed there was plenty of mindless powerlevelling to be seen, especially the farther content proregressed from promising concept to stultified execution.

Yet compared to other online games and WoW-clones especially, and comparable only to the likes of City of Heroes, you'd also find a great many more participants excited not only about their status in the game but about The Game itself. This now depressingly deserted street between newbietown's church and town hall teemed with amateur detectives trying to crack The Kingsmouth Code, chasing a trail of sewer covers, an antique painting, clock hands and Bible verse via visual and verbal clues like "In the seat of power, the navigator immortalized"

 

Zone chat was full of admonitions to avoid spoilers and polite requests for minor hints in private whispers... and amazingly enough pretty much everyone held to this rule! Even TSW's various wikis hide clues beneath several layers of hints so as to maximize the player's own input. Such "investigation" missions involved little to no combat beyond simply maneuvering around your current zone, gave a relatively low pay-off for a lengthy time investment... and if I told you they often embodied TSW at its finest, you can probably guess one reason it failed as an MMO. Adventure game puzzle-solving doesn't quite mesh with farming for enchanted spaulders.

Sure, they weren't always ideal.

 

As I complained at the time, too often the designers substituted specialized knowledge for problem-solving ability. The Unburnt Bush for example led you to various altars inscribed in Arabic symbols which you needed to match to corresponding Hebrew mentions of Old Testament plagues. As many pointed out, unless you happen to be fluent in at least one of those languages you'd have a devil of a time googling any of that gobbledygook. For my own part I just winged it without looking anything up, based on length and complexity of symbols, presuming some correlation between the two languages... with mixed success. It does however show the lengths TSW's developers (and players) were willing to go to for a change of pace from the WoW-clone grind.

To facilitate such research, Funcom implemented a web browser in-game, which seems a laughable waste of development time in retrospect given the industry-wide shift to borderless windowed modes for carefree alt-tabbing just a couple years later. They even set up fake websites for various in-game characters and organizations letting you look up imaginary payrolls, ISBN codes, street addresses, etc. continuing the tradition in which they'd launched TSW as an alternate reality game, playing up the urban fantasy feel of slipping into Neverwhere. While I still think it a fundamentally shallow gimmick detracting from the game proper, there's no denying that finishing one of these escapades gave most of us a much greater feeling of accomplishment than killing ten thousand zombies.

Ah, but wait, there's more!

TSW had not one but two kinds of non-combat missions: where investigation focused on adventure game clue-cobbling, sabotage was more about spatial orientation and survival mode sneaking / dodging various hazards.

When it worked, it worked great, like In the Dusty Dark's chasms to be crossed via invisible walkways or sequences of jump pads. When it didn't work...

 

You'll likely hear The Cost of Magic blasphemed by anyone who's tried it, though for my money a later moonwalking mission in Tokyo was even worse. Yes, I said "moonwalking" - don't get me started. While TSW's adventure game roots made investigation missions a good fit and its atmosphere played well toward sneaking past security cameras or skulking demons, Super Mario platform-jumping levels were too much of a genre-bending stretch by far. Not only could TSW's physics and lag not support such fine motor sk!llz, but in order to get your achievement you had to finish the sequence without a single mistake. For all four mission stages.

 

Though often hit-or-miss, these alternate mission modes in TSW demonstrated there was a market for sneaking and clue-cobbling even within MMO demographics. No matter how much we hated some of them, we didn't stop playing because of these challenges. We stopped when they stopped making them.

Better to be frustrated than bored.

Patter(n) pit-turn

Memes stumble from the sky, each drip a baud, gathering in sheets of infosphere reflecting electric suns winking dry shielded from the torrents shimmering down each guttering pennants from the victorious cloud shearing in and out of spheres of peddled influence. It's morning. Mourn ingenuity. Flicking overload off its pinions, the twenty-fifth blackbird resonates the mist above the sussurating, suppurating effluvium glittering mega-pied I oughta bite you. Battered by condensate, may one still nucleate?

Homer Clip-Son

"Think of the property values. Now we can no longer say only straight people have been in this house!"

Homer's Phobia

 

As I've frequently noted this is not a current events blog. However, one piece of clickbait did successfully bait me recently: "A student at Oberlin College in Ohio described being "scared" and "angry" after the school announced a work crew would be installing radiators in a "safe space" dormitory for women and trans students, explaining the crew would likely be "cisgender men.""

 

Now, this hits close to home for me, as though I don't live in a dormitory, I do live in an apartment building in a college town and my landlady tends to latch on to excuses to send maintenance workers in to check whether the drunken party animals have demolished the place yet. Unofficial surveillance. And, while she's gotten much better at scheduling the past couple of years, she also used to have a habit of notifying us only one or two days beforehand.

I will confess it pisses me off. It's intrusive and insulting. I have done nothing worthy of relinquishing my right to privacy like some prison inmate. However, never in seven years has it occurred to me to frame this as a genital intrusion! On a personal level, I don't give a flying cisgender fuck whether my uninvited guests are men or women or black or eskimo or click beetles or spiders. Just GTFO! Potential property damage notwithstanding, this apartment currently exists for the use of myself, five aquarium fish, four snails and a handful of plants and that's that.

But, leaving aside the comical image of hiring committees scouring the land for transsexual plumbers and electricians (glass slipper in hand) let's not pretend the little hubbub in Ohio is about privacy or personal space, or that social "justice" activism writ large is about anything other than imposing power over others. The modern incarnation of the safe space a.k.a. cloister has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with exclusive membership in a private club of the morally superior. It's fundamentalist, and the attitude displayed in such complaints mirrors that of superstitious proscriptions against contact with unclean classes, be they jews, gentiles, dalits, burakumin or Scruffy (The Janitor) for fear of metaphysical contamination by the damned.

 

Back in 1997, for all our faults, we were still able to mock and dismiss Homer Simpson's panic over sharing air with someone of the wrong tastes in canoodling. Now, every random apprentice eunuch and bearded lady who demand the rest of us subsidize their very own hareem must needs be applauded as "progressive" heroes for their bigotry.

Adaptive Class-Based Radiation

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is proving relatively good after its attention-grabbing, deliberately shallow first act pandering to snowflake cretinism. Aside from its own problems however it does also showcase some ways the Dungeons&Dragons, twenty-sided dice-rolling system is stretched unavoidably thin. On "core" difficulty, the game's obviously padded for length by raising the level (and especially armor class) of all monsters until they're almost impossible to hit, forcing reload after reload until you're blessed by the randomizer. I'm sure fanboys must already be revving up to call me a scrub noob loser who just doesn't know how to stack hit chance bonuses. For shits and giggles though, I've been playing around with my newfound lich powers and "repurposing" monsters to throw them against their former fellows... with the conclusion that no, bullshit, my stats aren't the problem. They cannot even hit each other!

Now, while yes, I did pick monsters from a zone abounding in high armor class for that demonstration, they're hardly statistical outliers in a game where only statistical outliers count.

You might notice their outlier status in another sense: cyborg implants in a fantasy game. Fictional universes incorporating both tech and fantasy more or less need to be built around that schism between top-down creationism and bottom-up rationalism. Golarion, much like Toril, comes across as an intrinsically top-down setting with feudal governance and precepts of morality flowing from multiversal constants of law and goodness. Which is fine... so long as you stick to it. But every time some genius sputters forth the a-may-zing idea of shoehorning a wacky computer-hacking side trip into Middle-Earth, or any other anachronistic garbage just as an episodic adventure with neither heads nor tails to be made of, it cannot come across as anything but the mindless junior-high fanfiction primadonna bullshit it is. We don't need more modron mazes.

Inability to hold to a theme is neither creative nor a virtue. You're not thinking outside the box. You're just a kindergardener throwing transformers onto the chess board because formal operations defy your undeveloped brain.

But worse than both those issues is the class system.

Fighter, wizard, thief, cleric. For a couple of decades that was the rule, during which time the odd druid, bard or barbarian could fit the interstices between those archetypes. However, the proliferation of new, redundant, overpowered or otherwise nonsensical classes around Y2K was, if memory serves, one of the principal causes for many to abandon D&D in favor of... among other things, Pathfinder. Can you see where this full-circle revolution is headed?

My character is a "witch of the veil" which is to say a generalist wizard with several free spells from feats. It also gives you infinite casts of combo invisibility / teleportation, two of the most powerful spells in the game even individually, once a round... as a swift action. Yeah. At level 8... yeah...

While of the scores of such subclasses available in Wrath (tantalizing as they are, I'll admit) not all might be so laughably broken, they do demonstrate the difficulty of expanding the class roster while clinging to the old archetypes. If you want to build a class around something as game-breaking as that, it can't also be a rogue or enchanter.

New classes were needed, undeniably. The system needed to grow. But, in order to clear room for new growth, sadly the old growth must be pruned. Fighters can't be masters of all martial trades and still leave room for classes specializing in rapiers or halberds. If you want a combination rogue / wizard as a basic class, then there's no point in the arcane trickster prestige class. If you want witches and oracles and skalds and shamans, then you need to redefine, to limit wizards and clerics and bards. Druids can't be nature magicians and shapeshifting autoattackers and healers and crowd control and summoners and nukers if you intend to build individual classes around each of those roles. At least not without scaling back.

Slapping a couple of overpowered bonus feats on old clases and calling them new isn't getting anywhere. And yeah, I know I'm not saying anything which hasn't been rehashed a million times over on RPG discussion boards for the past thirty years... so why are we still stuck here? D&D cannot grow, even rebranded as Pathfinder, while fanboys cling to the nostalgia for old labels, the one-size-fits-all fighter/cleric/wizard/thief which prevent finer definitions.

We need to hold to the precept of tactical cRPGs... but we're also twenty years overdue to adopt new systems in place of the thirty years outdated, roll-to-miss, fitfully anachronistic, generic baseline.

Either overhaul it for meaningful complexity or let it die. And, sad to say, the past couple of decades have proven that D&D's own munchkin fanbase will prevent a meaningful revolution.

 

There must be better tabletop systems out there waiting for a computer adaptation.

The Open and Shut Secret World: Proportion

Part of a series on the death of a bad game with excellent atmosphere.

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"And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners. 

But one strange wild dark long year, Halloween came early."

 

Ray Bradbury - Something Wicked This Way Comes

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"Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness."

H.P. Lovecraft - Nyarlathotep

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Welcome to my comfort zone.

 

The Secret World's version of Transylvania's middle-difficulty zone The Shadowy Forest was also a prime grinding spot. To minimize travel times I'd often split the difference between daily quests and log out in the quest location itself, in this case a ruined village haunted by the ghosts of traitors, but I quickly grew to favor this logout spot for aesthetic purposes much as I did Nar's Peak in LotRO. The abandoned church houses no glowing, vibrating holy relics, no chanting cabals shooting magic finger lasers to keep monsters at bay. Dead faith and chill air. It's simply avoided. Outside roams death. Inside, blanketed by persistent impermanence, a weary immortal can find momentary peace. It's drafty, and quiet, and lonely, and forgotten... and safe.

 

Fans trying to advertise the game would often tout TSW's Lovecraftian themes, and in all fairness the Cthulhu clones are pretty hard to miss, as a screenshot below will demonstrate. But if kaiju from beyond the moon were its only aesthetic inspiration it would fall flat. Contrast is key.

It drew heavily from urban fantasy (comparisons to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere are unavoidable given their shared location) and in fact concept art from TSW now features among Google's designated reference images for that subgenre. The starting "social" hubs of New York, Seoul and London were perfectly mundane cityscapes where the masquerade is (mostly) upheld, where unassuming civillians grab a cup of coffee and chat about the weather... and where, just around the corner and down some steps, you can find a necrophage operating a produce stand.

 

It also drew, to the same effect, from Ray Bradbury:

The first third of the original release takes place in New England and banks on the same contrast between quaint, parochial Americana and lurking cosmic mysteries you find in Bradbury's horror stories: hick-descended tradesmen with worn shoes arguing above disaffected picket fences about itinerant witches or how they're getting along with their local ghosts, distracting each other from encroaching inevitability.

All in all, despite some concessions to the medium like higher ceilings to accomodate camera angles (that cathedral above's at least twice as big in every dimension as a simple village church from the 15th century would've been) TSW maintained human proportions throughout, complete with human furnishings and human paraphernalia. While the supernatural is pervasive, it is also consistently intrusive, more alien for appearing next to a coffee pot or a mail van or inside a waiting room with magazines strewn on a glass table. The same juxtaposition extends to NPCs, as many of those you meet lack supernatural powers or training yet are shown foiling Hammer Horror escapees by hook and crook.

What this amounts to is a delightful low-key setup for truly impressive monsters and events to retain their impact, say by bursting out of the ground at Times Square:

Even more importantly, transportation to otherworldly locales is all the more disorienting for shearing away from ever-present normalcy.

 

By maintaining a sense of proportion and allowing simplicity to offset exoticism, TSW kept its magic magical.

ST: TNG - Blessed from the Past

In an effort to relive my early teens, I am re-watching old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is both better and worse than I remembered it, as was my youth most likely.
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Seriesdate: 2.11

Contagion

 

The Enterprise rushes to help its sister ship the Yamato, just before the latter takes an anti-massively explosive dump all over the big viewscreen. Turns out its captain had been delving the mysteries of a ancient empire which died out about the time Homo habilised. Snatching the relay, Picard commands the Enterprise into a race and stand-off against a Romulan warbird by justification of "archaeology's totes coolsauce, bro" and is eventually proven right by the discovery of weaponizable stargates (amusingly, one of the few times the game-breaking superweapon potential of teleportation was ever acknowledged on Star Trek.)

 

Too bad whatever blew up the first ship also infected our heroes' ride, causing ship system after system to malfunction.

 

Earl Grey, hot, hold the mycorrhizae

It's a computer virus. Or rather a virulent operating system incompatibility.

That might sound a bit trite these days, but remember in 1989 the wider public had just bought its first word processor and was reading about "the matrix" in Neuromancer. To most of us, computer viruses were about as relevant as the space shuttle. It wasn't until the mid-'90s, as TNG ended, that Internet usage exploded - just in time for "Kirk vs. Picard" arguments to fuel the first major forum flame wars. Which is to say a computer program rewriting code sounded futuristic enough, and also explains why the entire plot's resolved by the (now) clichéd tech support expedient of "reboot it, dumbass."

Objectively, the virus filled much the same directing necessity as godlike aliens with superpowers: a genius loci warping our heroes' environment via informed omnipotence which can conveniently be portrayed through reaction shots and flickering lights. Not to say the episode skimped on props or sets, but the effects budget obviously sank into building the alien command center and stargates. So you get scenes of Burton bouncing off the walls of the turbolift or Stewart marvelling at his synthesizer's theobromalfunction... and weirdly enough, it works. The ancient program's haunting of familiar surroundings, played low-key without any singular villain to focus the audience's enmity, allows for a sort of creeping magical realism opening the heroes to harm.

 

Momentarily anyway, because in season 2 TNG was still presumed an episodic affair with no need for internal consistency or continuity, and so finishes with an uncharacteristically nonchalant, even callous quip from Picard "same old routine I suppose" conveniently forgetting (as the audience surely has) that over a thousand humans including Picard's old friend died at the start of this adventure.

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Seriesdate: 4.13

Devil's Due

A devil from the past performs magic tricks. Worf believes her, but Picard doesn't.

But first, watch these suckers run around in panic.

Maaan, Marduk's gonna be pissed at you guys...

Funny huh?

Turns out a thousand years ago their ancestors signed a pact with the devil Ardra, and now they're afraid she'll turn up to collect. Which she does, with claims to human and klingon Satanism to boot. Despite her teleportation and shapeshifting "magic" Picard sees through her (sadly, quite reasonable in Star Trek) argument that the universe being utterly riddled with godlike beings of unimaginable power, the literal Devil's not much of a stretch. After half an hour of "nuh-uh!/yuh-huh!" back and forth, we finally get to the crux of the matter: 24th-century technology is sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic and a confidence artist can effortlessly build a cult around tractor beams, teleportation and holograms.

After all, if you find yourself in a post-scarcity society, whizzing around at multiple light speeds while snacking from a food replicator which only occasionally misconstrues a cuppa tea as a potted plant, wouldn't you get bored? Might as well hoke some jokes on the local yokels or have yourself crowned god-empress of Third Podunk from the Sun. Though the actress portraying Ardra leaned into the inherently hammy role as well as she could, she could hardly mask the relative dearth of plot. We devote ten minutes watching her flirt with Picard and the last fifteen to tedious courtroom drama, leaving a scant couple of expository scenes to lend the whole anecdote coherence.

 

While threadbare as a TNG script, it's yet remarkable for its portrayal of the confidence game. At this point James Randi's second career was in full swing and Picard's explanation tracks Randi's most oft-repeated point: if a miracle can be replicated by a stage magician, it's no miracle. If the supernatural can be created naturally, we are unjustified in any presumption of the superlative. And, as a stage magician well knows, con artists let victims do the work of convincing themselves - hence the 'confidence' part.

 

Devil's Due's critical plot point is portrayed by those panicked pedestrians. To a true believer, every pattern of burn marks on a tortilla is a holy visitation, every alluminum pie pan on a string is a flying saucer, every blurry hiker's a sasquatch, every pond frog's the Loch Ness monster. Once the gullible space-hicks of Ventax II convinced themselves they're due for a devil, they were going to get it, one way or another.

 

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Seriesdate: 5.09

A Matter of Time

A historian from the future performs magic tricks. Picard believes him but Worf doesn't.

 

Ziggy Stardust's pimpmobile

 

First, let's save a planet from asteroid-induced glaciation... ooops, we blew it up... but it's okay, we can suck the blow. Geordi mashes buttons prostyle.

But enough of the far more interesting B-plot.

 

Instead we're going to focus on a smarmy observer who appears via time anomaly in an unscannable tinfoil shuttle and starts bugging the ship's crew about their daily lives, interfering with every proceeding. Things come to a head when he refuses to use his knowledge of future events to guide Picard in saving the aforementioned planet's millions of inhabitants, on pretext of noninterference.

The solid precept here is marred by a single consistent flaw: every step of production, from the script to the directing to the guest star's acting, over-played the character's intrusive, grinning abrasiveness in order to prime the audience to dislike him in preparation for the revelation that he's a 22nd century charlatan who hijacked a 26th century shuttle. To the point an overextended scene of him hitting on Crusher is played for inept creepiness in contrast to Ardra's femme fatale seduction attempt of Picard, where she's shown to have orchestrated a masterful control of his environment. We default, as previously noted, to the usual man-bad/woman-good contraposition:

female sexuality = radiant fertility goddess

male sexuality = stumbling schlub

 

Moreover, playing up his buffonery saps the central message about unmasking a confidence artist, leaving the impression that if he'd just been a smoother operator he would've gotten away with it, meddling kids notwithstanding. Instead of, as in Devil's Due, focusing on the ship's crew as competent, rational minds who's can't be glitzed into gullibility, they must instead be provided with an inept antagonist the better to flatter the audience's lack of perspicacity at distrusting him.

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Seriesdate: 6.23

Rightful Heir

The second coming of Klingon Jesus fails to perform magic tricks.

Worf believes him, then he doesn't, then he does, then he doesn't.

Picard would rather get back to business.

 

We open with Worf late for duty, only to be discovered enacting a surprisingly creepy seance in his quarters. Everything from Riker and his cronies' martial traipse along the corridors to Data's shift report to the careful decoration of Worf's room immediately establish a more professional tone than TNG had often demonstrated. They even made his forehead prosthetic sweat. Now that's attention to detail!

 

The plot on the other hand was poorly conceived and has aged even worse, wasting a damn fine performance from Dorn. Worf is having a crisis of faith, and goes to a religious retreat to seek visions of the unifying Klingon prophet Kahless, dead for 1500 years. Details of Klingon society thus revealed are better discussed in their own context some other time. Long story short, Kahless himself appears, in flesh and blood, and before long has everyone chanting We. Are. Klingon! - Yes. We. Noticed! (The. Forehead. Ridges. Were. A. Strong. Indication!)

But, after noting the great prophet's memories of his own previous life are a bit sketchy and his martial abilities nowhere near supernatural, Worf threatens the high priest who orchestrated the whole spiel to come clean: "Kahless" was cloned from the original's tissue samples and implanted with false memories to believe himself the real deal.

Yeah... I know, it makes a lot less sense than innertialess acceleration or force fields.

Despite the fraud, in a cynical bit of realpolitik, they set the clone up as a puppet emperor, a hopefully unifying symbol of the empire, on the assumption people will ignore facts and flock to a flimsy supernatural pretext and pretense of recaptured glories. We end in a heavy-handed analogy to the second coming of Jesus.

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Seriesdate: 6.04

Relics

The one with Scotty.

 

Proof that engineers should never moonlight as nurses.

Basically, if you hold a soft spot for the original series, this is greatness; if not, half an hour of fanboy masturbation crippling fifteen minutes of wasted mega-engineering potential.

Our valiant vessel tracks a distress call to the surface of a Dyson sphere, where a 75-year-old wreck holds the transporter pattern of one Montgomery "ah'm givin' 'er awl shae's gawt!" Scott(y) who immediately sets to making a nuisance of himself spouting outdated technobabble and long-winded grandpa tales of the good ole' days. Weirdly enough, both the A and B plots are good! The Dyson sphere and the solar wind prompting its abandonment fill the star trekkin' quota, while Scotty's mournful toast to a hologram re-enactment of the original series' beeping, technicolor bridge has no doubt brought a tear to many a fan's eyes over the years. There are times when Scotty's dialogue sounds less like Star Trek and more like meta-commentary on actors' lives pulled straight out of Limelight.

 

Unfortunately, those halves never truly mesh. It could've been any distress call leading our heroes to the sphere, and Scotty's transporter pattern could've been discovered in any foundered freighter. Moreover, the classic precept of a grizzled old veteran passing the torch to a bright young hotshot was overplayed for initial conflict between the two to the point Geordi spends the first half sounding like a petulant, insecure teenager who's dropped an IQ bracket to facilitate dramatic tension.

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Seriesdate: 6.20

The Chase

"the past is a very insistent voice inside me"

 

The gang's all h - wait, no Vulcans? I demand Vulcans!

 

Four billion years ago, an alien species seeded numerous worlds' protoplasm with DNA code to guide evolution toward the humanoid form. That's the climax. Granted most of the plot is about the build-up. Picard welcomes his old mentor, an archaeologist, hints at the transformative power of memetic infection via a matrioshka, then picks up the dead mentor's mission to find a message encoded piece by piece in the DNA of species scattered all over the quadrant, dodging and racing against backstabbing Cardassians, bloviating Klingons and as it turns out, lurking Romulans along the way. While it's far from ideally orchestrated due to some blatant filler with the old professor and the klingon captain challenging Data to arm-wrestle, I would still rank this one of the most memorable episodes, albeit sadly under-appreciated by fans.

It's all about the grand reveal.

The technobabble is... pretty terrible. Suffice to say DNA does not work that way, evolution does not work that way, fossils do not work that way and I'm pretty sure neither do computation or holograms.

But, the whole thing revolves around having the balls to try explaining one of the great unspoken, popularly ridiculed "mysteries" of Star Trek, the innumerable wrinkly forehead alien species littering the galaxy and lightening the props, costumes and special effects budget.

 

While I can understand many fans would rather have left the matter hand-waved and suspended their disbelief, and even though I paradoxically despise midichlorians, I can't but applaud this bit of attempted rationalization. For my money, for its time, the episode just barely pulled off a refuge in audacity effect in tackling one of the franchise's major bugaboos.

 

It carries the same existential poignancy ("a monument not to our greatness but to our existence") the same hope in communicating ideas ("perhaps... one day") as other classics like Darmok and The Inner Light.

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Star Trek was a title with history. Both the shame and the mystique of the past weighed heavily on TNG's development. The past poisoned early seasons with Roddenberry's outdated ideas and at the same time kept the show afloat by the original series' cultural significance. See Whoopi Goldberg requesting a bit part even if all she did was sweep floors. Recalling the Utopianism that gave people hope in the '60s and '70s did much the same for the nihilism of the '90s. But how fitting a plot device might the past serve in a show about the future?

 

To a large extent, Picard's established archaeology hobby simply made a nice segue. Priceless and unique artifacts having a physical presence and being by definition undefined until acquired, provided a justification for the Enterprise to jet off in search of mystery every week. Contagion and The Chase in this respect mirror each other. The first feeds us a standard Dungeons and Dragons scenario of unveiling a superweapon while the second (four years later after the show matured and was beginning to decline and recycle plots) toys with the notion, with only the Klingons characteristically jumping to that unjustified assumption. Nevertheless, it did get a bit repetitive seeing one after another of Picard's archaeology colleagues, archaeology professors and archaeology acquaintances drop by to dangle plot hooks.

 

The precept of technological one-upmanship also lent Crusher and LaForge's roles more weight, as evaluating these finds, be they from the past, from the future or from the confidence game, fell to their respective fields of expertise. In contrast, Data and Riker were more or less replaceable / interchangeable and Troi just had a few lines about lying. Worf's an interesting case, as the primal warrior angle lent itself to mysticism or gullibility which puffed up those hinted past glories but would've seemed utterly incongruous from the post-religious humans.

 

More importantly, the aforementioned mystique of antiquity had to be reconsidered from a 24th-century point of view. While we currently live in a society willing to buy any amount of bullshit about ancient wisdom (remember that time the world ended?) and ancient Chinese secrets and searching for Atlantis, and Timbuktu building starships and Babylon descending from starships and perfect matriarchal pre-historic feminist utopias and fucking paleo-diet fads... can you really see that shit flying in a truly functional society? Aside from the more simple-minded early iteration in Contagion, every one of these episodes holds to a recurring theme that the power and wisdom of the past (while far from irrelevant) is either inapplicable (Relics) or symbolic (The Chase) or a tool of social control (Devil's Due, Rightful Heir.) A Matter of Time stands out for attempting to flip this around, with the conman gaining our protagonists' support by flattering them, casting them in that mystical role of historic heroes whose deeds must be immortalized in the finest minutiae.

The psychological need to feel a part of some grand continuity is only too rarely addressed in fiction (or for that matter, non-fiction) for its destructive potential, and TNG distinguished itself by its awareness of a trope contemporary shows only utilized in an automatic fashion. Scotty's tearful recreation of the old Enterprise's bridge is a familiar enough scene for any TV audience... less so his conscious decision to quit wallowing, step out of the simulation and cease living in the past.

 

In a wider sense, continuity was also a necessary growing pain of TNG's. The original series had lived and died in episodic, inchoate isolation, and the first season of TNG largely followed suit. As a fictional universe grows, however, it requires more and more framework to sustain it, both spatial and temporal. Tolkien's success for instance depended in no small part on the map and timeline of Middle-Earth, a lesson no modern Fantasy / SciFi writer can naively ignore as demonstrated by the endless maps and timelines produced in service of such works.

And so, while shipboard life gained more continuity by detailing the characters' life histories, the Federation and the galaxy at large also began to be fleshed out during TNG. Saying the words "24th century" sounds immediately impressive to a viewer in 1988, but pretty soon you start wondering how meaningless that century might sound to... Klingons, for example. Or to The Crystalline Entity. Episodes like these established a necessary feeling for the flow of life in the Alpha Quadrant. Darmok and Contagion both entail decyphering communication from its related or descendant language group, driving home the idea that these civilizations are not static, but rise and fall and flow into each other as naturally as tribal migrations. Several races are introduced not only by a core characteristic (e.g. Klingon warrior culture) but as being in a transitional stage (e.g. Cardassian military dictatorship, or to a lesser extent the Mintakans dragging themselves out of the Bronze Age.)

Antiquity is relevant to the future so long as it's illustrative, not constraining.

The Open and Shut Secret World: On Its Last Whale

"the children of the night are calling"

Juno Reactor / Ed Wood

 

I've been putting off my farewell to The Secret World long enough. A bittersweet topic for me, not merely because despite myself I found much to enjoy in TSW's mangled mix of brilliance, tedium and ineptitude, but because it's been a staple here at the den since its inception and fed me more references than any other game. Even my MMManifesto, half the motivation for starting a blog in the first place, began as a Dark Days Are Coming forum post. In late 2011 I was still playing City of Heroes and dreaming still that I might find a single virtual world into which I could finally lose myself, a worthy matrix to Case, a cure for meatspace. I'd been keeping an eye on TSW's development ever since 2007, pre-ordered it with a lifetime subscription and dove in with uncharacteristic glee.

I've ranted more than enough about its failings. Rumor has it that albeit pretty at face value, its underlying code was a mess and every new patch brought new bugs. Perhaps that explains the snail's pace of post-launch content, and unfortunately instead of investing in a much-needed overhaul, Funcom decided just to let it hobble along and try to milk it for however long it lasted, saddling players with timesink after timesink in place of actual development. From the start, TSW was, even more obviously than other such cases, a single-player game with a multiplayer pretext for forcing digital rights management.

 

It went far beyond the usual MMO grind of farming ten thousand zombies a thousand times over, or the terrible, tacked-on PvP minigames meant to keep players invested by keeping them at each others' throats to no synergistic effect. The Tokyo expansion, while good in many ways, also introduced a secondary leveled-loot grind akin to LotRO's "legendary" gear. Development time sank more and more into funny hats and other cash shop adventures. Players were given an irrelevant "museum" to build up purely by grinding. Even when so-called content was released, it consisted more and more of text adventures or dull walls of text (bestiary lore) unlocked by combing old zones. Open world locations were recycled into grindable "virtual reality" instances. The Legends relaunch forced players back down to zero, gutted instance variety, dumbed down gameplay and lengthened the grind, and at the same time diminished lifer benefits. An entirely new minigame consisted of shuffling static portraits around. A new daily grind pitted each player solo against series of damage sponge minibosses each taking minutes to put down. To add insult to injury, Funcom started releasing separate spin-off games (The Park, Moons of Madness) to bleed its few remaining adherents with "new" products instead of delivering their much-awaited further chapters.

 

And now?

It's been a couple of years since I bothered even logging in for my daily rewards but for nostalgia's sake had always intended to write up some kind or another of post-mortem, and now's as good a time as any. For one thing, given TSW's emphasis on dark fantasy slews of mythical monsters, Halloween has always been its magic time. For another, I logged in a couple of months ago and realized its profitability has likely dipped far enough into the red to be scuttled entirely.

There's only one account selling amusement park currency in the cash shop, implying they're either down to their last whale or even sadder, forced to seed the market themselves for lack of interest.

While I've done plenty of bitchin', I've rarely mentioned the high points which kept me and others coming back. So join me, if you will, over the next month, as I shed a lycanthropic tear for one of the most engaging piles of wasted potential in video game history.

Rot of the Self-Righteous

"'You were very considerate of me.'
'You know' said Roark 'I haven't thought of you at all. I thought of the house.' He added: 'Perhaps that's why I knew how to be considerate of you.'"

 

Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

 

 

For lack of tactical cRPGs on the market, and against my better judgment after Kingmaker's mediocrity, I pre-ordered Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. I'm not too far along into it (storming Drezen at the moment) but for once it seems fitting I write this post before I get a complete idea of where the plot's going.

 

Sadly, while it's significantly less buggy than its predecessor and does boast a few gameplay improvements and closer attention to mob/loot population, its grasp on roleplaying so far is somewhat tenuous. For now, let's focus on writing quality in the first couple of acts, both expanded and dumbed down compared to the original. I'm more flattered than I thought I'd be to see my little tirade du flavor text on the topic of "weird magic things" mocked by the skeletal salesman's "magicional mysterical spellthingies" and I'll concede Wrath's various dialogues, lore books and quest descriptions no longer feel lazy... but they do still feel amateurish compared to major cRPG reference points. Where Kingmaker 's texts were mostly just lacking, Wrath of the Righteous' indulgent pandering is outright exasperating. And hey, if I truly wanted to nitpick:

But alright, alright, them's small potatoes and I have no intention of going all-out grammar nazi, except as a joke.

I take issue not with form, but with content.

 

For one thing, it's generally generic. Though Wrath's gaggle of knightly orders set up an ideal ground for internal squabbles a la Tyranny, you instead get sewer mutants waiting for a "so the legends foretold" moment, plus generic decadent nobles and a slew of blandly verbose, interchangeable twenty-ish yuppies and reams of background lore lacking a coherent scope or time-frame. We shouldn't have to wait until meeting Nurah for a relevant framework to contextualize the initial lore dump about deities/heroes/villains.

One of the more amateurish moments comes after your paladin starter cohort sends you to rescue her incredibly tedious friends in her alternate adventuring party, who sit you down so they can all recount their pointless life stories - and I do mean extra-pointless, since being an NPC's NPCs, their plot-dissociated concerns sound superlatively irrelevant. For bonus points, you get automatically pulled into this conversation upon return to base, just to ensure prioritizing the tedium. 'Course, I may be biased against the paladin in question since her voice actress somehow managed to Shatner the straightforward battle cry "The Inheritor guide my blade!" into "Thee, in heritor! Guide: my blade!"

 

For another example, take a side-quest to a peaceful village with some kind of Innsmouth-caliber dark secret looming in its background. Makes rather a nice side-trip until you're explicitly told: "Heroic acts are important, but sometimes it's good to leave the front lines, and talk to ordinary people living ordinary lives" which amazingly enough, reads less like a village priest's musings than precisely like something a game master running his second ever campaign might slip into dialogue to make himself sound masterfully "meta" to the players. Maybe it was a reaction to some other blogger complaining about the lack of weirder magicker thingies?

 

For the most part though, Wrath's introduction is plagued not by incompetence but by developers' tragicomic desperation to reaffirm their fealty to political correctness and prove just how obediently they're toeing the anti-male feminist line. All pronouns are feminine unless associated with villains, and though not nearly as fanatical as Deadfire, Wrath still opens with gender-based beatification and demonization from the very first scene of a good female dragon being murdered by an evil male bug-demon. The males you initially meet fall into a general pattern of:

- an ineffective old fart with a lisp

- a murderous raving fanatic

- a traitor

- a liar

- a thief

- a pervert

etc.

 

The females on the other hand:

- a hypercompetent paladin

- a hypercompetent secret agent

- a hypercompetent military leader

- a perfect moral paragon street waif all-seeing tween sage and infinite font of kindness and forgiveness, and a literal martyr to boot

- a poor innocent victim of a man's slander, and a good-aligned drow at that... because of course she is. (For bonus points, you later meet a good-aligned succubus as well. Because of course she is.)

- a brilliant young scientist who addresses you as "boy" and constantly condescends to you, with all your dialogue options on meeting her forcing you to either meekly accept her abuse or make yourself sound stupid to play to the writer's expectations, with one token "evil" option to attack her. "Evil" here being defined as opposing someone who repeatedly insults you after having instigated cultists to attack you.

- a well-mannered half-elf who at one point actually feeds you the unforgettable line "You've discovered my most terrible secret. [...] Father raised me in our mansion" as proof of how put-upon she is. Oh, the poor darling! How does she bear it? For bonus points, she later delivers a one-liner about "strong female warriors" while pronouncing "eschew" as "esh-queue" with perfectly crisp upper-class enunciation. Starting to love this bitch for a post-ironic caricature of pandering.

 

Side note: while I may no longer count among the 20-ish core demographic, given I've been gushing about female video game characters on and off this blog for decades now, from Morrigan to Susan Ashworth to April Ryan to The Grieving Mother to Kills-In-Shadow to Heather Poe to Jaethal to Deirdre Skye to Karan S'jet to Viconia, etc., maybe take it as a litmus test of your design when you toss a dozen action girls in my lap and my only reaction is "ugh, how soon can I ditch these bitches?"

Aside from sheer overabundance of primped-up amazons promoting the demented pretense that women by and large would ever assume fair risks or blame instead of throwing their tribe's males under the bus, Wrath pushes homosexuality almost as desperately. Romance options in RPGs are stupid enough as a rule, moreso when they're hooked up to conversational hair triggers. An achievement informs me that I apparently instigated a homoromance with the above-mentioned bishonen sadomasochist simply by asking what he thinks of love. Now... granted ah dunno much from homo-sexin' but no way in hell is calmly asking another guy whether he sees himself as causing or suffering the disaster of love a secret code-phrase for "drop your pantaloons and let's make like the beast with a redundant back." There is such a thing as dispassionately discussing the topic of passion.

 

However, the most decisive moment of inexcusable political pandering comes as soon as you exit the prologue. Your first questgiver stops to introduce you to her interracial lesbian spouse (the half-orc above) then tell you how much they love each other, then immediately packs you off to a side-quest to salvage goods from their house, making sure to specify, once again for extra bonus redundancy, that it's the house they share, together. Oh, for lack-of-fuck's sake. I should never have to give a shit how NPCs get themselves off. The Neverwinter Nights games were trite little self-parodies of roleplaying, but at least the Aribeth/Fenthick angle was played for plot relevance and Lord Nasher didn't stop you before your first quest to say "Hold on a minute. Before you save the world, it is vitally important that you meet my wife. My female wife. My wife whom I fuck with my penis. In her vagina. In the house where I sleep in the same bed with my female wife. Because I am heterosexual. Make a note of it."

 

Suffice to say I bought myself a couple of custom mercenaries just so I could avoid being forced to amble through a pastel cherry grove sighing and struggling to confess our feelings for each other or go questing for the magic 8-ball of wondering whether senpai noticed me yet.

 

That a world composed entirely of hetero-curious adolescent prodigy homosexuals is a narrative non-starter should be obvious, and it is outright grotesque to have gone from the unrealistic extreme of never including even one gay interaction in fiction two decades ago to the even less realistic forced bisexuality of our current marketing paradigm. Heterosexual behavior will vastly predominate in any sexually reproducing species. By definition. I don't care if they're elves or yetis or vulcans or manticores, that's how you make more baby adventurers and NPCs and walking lumps of XP. It is no more ethical, perceptive or artistically sound to deny reality/plausibility for the sake of female chauvinism or for the sake of homosexual conceit than it would be to deny it for the sake of male chauvinism or for the sake of heterosexual conceit. This is no different from those trying to claim that no supernatural power in fiction should compete with almighty Geebus. Nobody should be obligated to bow and scrape before the glory of your fetish, religious or otherwise. Anyone demanding moral supremacy via such superficialities should be slammed down, immediately, brutally, mercilessly; you don't get to rewrite all of culture to suit yourself.

 

Now, as for Wrath of the Righteous, I will say the writing improves, not tremendously but clearly, after you finally exit newbietown. Even from the start your first choice of companions is between a good male and evil female, drowned out as they were by the chorus of p.c. garbage. The longer I go, the more dignified or complex male NPCs begin to trickle into quests: Sosiel, Staunton, Regill, even little Crinukh, and conversely the females' grandstanding gets toned down, their behavior less blandly idealized. Which means the initial wave of NPCs can be viewed as both youth appeal, pretty girls and boys in line with the animesque classes and character models / behavior, and as an auto da fe, for fear of being targetted in SJWs' next pogrom, a smear of lamb's blood on Owlcat's door to ward off the social plague of our times. This is the first impression the developers felt they needed to make, to denigrate the majority of their customers... who have been indoctrinated all their lives into self-hatred and idolization of femininity as superiority. Masochism sells.

Do you find it at all odd that nothing can be published now, be it book, movie, game, what-have-you, but that it must kow-tow to the notions that homosexual behavior is expected of everyone and females are always superior to males, morally and pragmatically, in all things? If every single piece of fiction needed to shoehorn in a morality play on the turpitude of hook noses and yarmulkes for fear of censure and censorship, we might well question the direction our zeitgeist has taken and the validity of its pop culture. Try thinking of the game you're writing, not your customers. I applaud the effort to provide more flavor text, greater depth and breadth of lore, but those also need relevance to the plot at hand. When describing disjointed, boring events, boring places and boring people you end up with boring descriptions, and personalities defined by their genitals are inherently dull.

Moreover, games are not for children; children are for games. These bisexual bishoujo drama queens fit the plot of a crusade against the infernal realms about as well as Corynthian columns on Howard Roark's house. Did each and every one of us need to be a blue-skinned lummox covered in scars and tatoos to idenitify with The Nameless One? Did only people from Santa Monica enjoy V:tM-Bloodlines? Did only horny teenage boys play Tomb Rai - ok, bad example. But the good examples, the ones which stand out from a crowd, are the ones built around the necessities of their core concepts, not glorifying the fops of the month. Alpha Centauri was built around the precept of environmental impact, but made it entirely possible to build a functional society filled with happy humans and nonetheless treat Planet as an enemy, stripmining for the greater good. If you want to make your customers feel considered and included, give them a solid narrative into which they can project their minds, not their gonads.

And, with few or no tactical RPGs coming out, especially not story-based ones, and with Microsoft having gobbled up 3/4 of the big-name American RPG developers, with the genre being snuffed out, companies like Owlcat should be fighting not for popularity but for legitimacy. We needed a more playable version of The Age of Decadence, not Glee with character classes. I get it, you're building yourselves a customer base, getting them young, whetting their appetites, appealing to their lowest common denominator... but will you remain interesting in the long run, or just something they abandon as soon as the anime tropes run out? Will your product stand on its own merit, pandering aside?

 

I said I wanted to write this before getting too far into Wrath of the Righteous' plot, my first impression of the first impression you tried to convey. For all I know plot lines may very well continue to improve as they have in act 2 and the whole edifice stand on its merit despite its undermined foundations. The writing team as a whole might have taken a page from Avellone's history of introducing infuriating characters which nonetheless demonstrate admirable or tragic depths through continued interaction, and even deliberately subvert their basic concept.

Unfortunately, nothing about this litter of mewling modern major generals encourages me to keep interacting with any of them.

There's your first impression.