Plot Hooker With a Hack of Gold

"She sees a mirror of herself

An image she wants to sell

To anyone willing to buy"

Green Day - Extraordinary Girl

 

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Moderate spoilers from The Order of the Stick

Irrelevant spoilers for a badly-written character from Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

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Back when I was fourteen I came up with the best idea for a novel: science fiction, but with no science! It was gonna be, like, space guys, but not in space. Also, monsters. Is that not the most awesomest and most original idea evar!?!

 

One of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous' few well-written moments comes while ransacking the lair of a mad scientist experimenting on demons. You set loose a witch who'd been sentenced to burn at the stake beforehand, only for him (of course it's a him in this particular case; man bad, woman good - repeat the mantra) to say "crusader, didn't you ever consider some of the witches condemned might actually have been guilty?" and proceed to attack you in the name of his demon lord.

Yes, categories are usually established according to some observable (albeit often misinterpreted) trend. Wer-wolfes bite people, damnit!

But that's a one-liner from an enemy redshirt, belying the idiot-friendly tripe pervading Wrath's portrayals of good and evil. Meanwhile Ember, the witch companion you interact with for five variously ludicrous acts is a cheesy, infantile parody of a Mary Sue, a perfect light of goodness and clairvoyance who needs do no more than pout for even ersatz divinities to obey her demands.

 

Because of course your witch friend is an exception to all witchy ways. She's speshul.

And of course the orc is a noble paladin. She's speshul.

And of course the kobold is a mysterious benevolent sage in kobold's clothing. He's speshul.

And of course the succubus is reformed to goodness and an invincible spotlight-stealing plot-trampler. She's speshul.

And of course the female drow you chase down turns out to be good at heart and only victimized by a man. She's speshul.

And of course your aasimar, being male, is a token watered-down "evil" bishonen bad boy. He's the wrong kind of speshul and he needs you to emotionally manipulate him into boyfriend material.

Needing a break from that nonsense, I decided to fire up Vagrus: the Riven Realms instead, a managerial strategy game with turn-based squad combat and a strong role-playing side. Sure, they misspelled my name in the preorder credits, but I'm not nearly shallow enough to complain about that repeatedly and at length every time I mention Vagrus... y'know, that game that misspelled my name in the preorder credits? Anyway, I schlep on over to the first major city and start recruiting companions.

Of course the orc is a noble warrior who doesn't live by his people's code of brutality. He's speshul.

And of course the drow has abandoned his people's underground empire. He's speshul.

That second particularly grates, as Vagrus pedals furiously along the elfemism treadmill.

You introduce a race of antagonists: evil, underhanded troglobites. Call'em orcs or goblins. They sing songs about going down. They're pretty cool. Now readers/players demand more orc characters in the story. Now they want to identify with the badass orcs, since it would give them an excuse to act "evil-lite" and still claim they're better than the average orc. Pretty soon orcs/goblins are looking less and less antagonistic, and comic after comic starts treating them like some beleaguered ethnic minority. They even move aboveground, improve their posture and start dressing like spaghetti western injuns.

Problem: now what are we supposed to slice'n'dice in caves?

Solution: introduce a completely new race. Oooh, let's make them fallen, mutated elves (a very non-Tolkien original idea *wink-wink*) 'cuz that always drums up some drama. "Drow" sounds like a badass title. Make'em evil so the players don't feel sorry for killing them and give them some cave adaptations like shadowy dark skin to blend in the dark and make them dishonest and underhanded and treacherous so they're even more hateable. Cool, huh? So cool, in fact, that readers start demanding more of them, and then start identifying with them and demanding drow heroes who can act evil-lite yet still bemoan their fellows' greater evil.

 

Problem: now what're we supposed to mince and mash in caves?

Solution: introduce a completely "new" race. Make 'em sneaky and underhanded and evil and hateable and cannibalistic ("looks like meat's back on the menu, boys!") and give' em some cave adaptations like pale cadaverous skin for lack of pigmentation. Call 'em "wraiths" because that won't cause any confusion and this completely new and original fantasy wraithsrace will solve our evil-oid humanoid scarcity FOR EVER AND EVER and ev- seriously though, set your clocks.

It's a variation on the red queen hypothesis. Each newly introduced character/category is defined from the start as more extreme than its predecessor, but in reality this only places it in the same niche vacated by that predecessor as it bred out to generalism. How many times this cycle will repeat is anyone's guess, though if the "specialness" inflation of real-world social movements and religions (ever more puritan, ever more vegan, ever more queer) is any indication, the sky's the limit. For now let's just consider the typhoid Marys, the Drizzts and Thralls watering down fantasy races, those speshul little snowflakes. Let me ask you something: was Legolas elvish? Was Elrond? Galadriel? Even the second-stringers like Thranduil, Glorfindel, Haldir, Arwen? Did any of them need to become the antithesis of all things elvish to stand out from the crowd? Did Tolkien go "roight then, first elf I wrote was an ancient, gracious, graceful, wise guardian of the land, so enough of that, next elf must needs be an adolescent vampire!" Or a seraph. Whatever.

 

While I stand by my criticism of GreedFall, there was one character I liked, and surprisingly he hailed from my temperamentally antithetical faction, the theists:

Petrus (at least in the first half of the game I played) didn't need to be holier than all the other thous around him to get his point across. His personality was not defined by either one-upping or renouncing his group designation but owning it, a welcome undercurrent throughout GreedFall but less pronounced in other characters. In fact, he slightly reminds me of another badass grandpa from another fantasy religious order, O-Chul the paladin's paladin from The Order of the Stick... and O-Chul in turn brings us full-circle back to Wrath of the Righteous.

See, O-Chul may or may not have tamed one of the villains (spoiler alert as to which one) while the villains help him captive and tortured him for months on end - with the prerequisite of susceptibility on that villain's part and an extensive build-up of tenuous game-playing metaphors and uncertain rapport. Contrast him to Ember from Wrath, who routinely turns gangs upon hordes upon armies of demon-worshippers and demons themselves from evil to good by no more than flatly telling them to be good - with the writing doubling down by outright commanding you to believe that cheesy platitudes just sound more convincing when they come from this insipid little snot because she's so convincingly good. A witch mind you. The good witch of the worst. *

The descriptor we need to introduce here is "facile" and it applies to both the basic design of characters like Ember and their expected interaction with the world. After his imprisonment, O-Chul delivers his rescuers a list of their common enemy's attacks. How did he get it? By instantly and effortlesly discerning it via telepathy? By just asking and having them tell him their secrets because he's too cute to refuse? By stumbling upon it via heroic luck? No. "One saving throw at a time." He remained a Lawful Good paladin and played his strengths under the circumstances, awaiting the right moment for decisive, unflinching action toward the greater good. He endured, and in enduring not only grew strong but strengthened his allies.

If you create a paladin it should be because you want to play a paladin, not a barbarian with better public relations. If you insert a witch class into your game, it should not consist of people wrongly accused of witchcraft! Space dudes not-in-space is not an original idea. "Dudes" is not a fantasy race! Character designs like "orc that doesn't act orcish" or "drow that doesn't act drowish" aren't just facile in their concept but in their interactions' overwhelming focus on the non-issue of their exceptionality instead of more personal motivations. Is it so impossible to create a witch character with her own personality and with actual struggles to overcome by personal choice, effort and sacrifice who still acts like an illicit practitioner of occult magic? Was Dragon Age's Morrigan so unpopular a character?

And yes, it's damn near impossible to discern how much of this idiocy is due to pop fiction writers' professional incompetence or their intellectual inability to move past such clichés or just disinterested pandering to the retard market they believe they can't capture otherwise. I'd bet on the third factor overwhelmingly. And yeah, admittedly, I did think up "space dudes not in space" at fourteen... but after a few pages realized the plot was going nowhere. Within the year I'd abandoned it altogether. Vagrus is now two months old and Wrath three. By June the degenerate munchkin brigade you apparently think requires your undivided attention will be ashamed they ever associated with your brand name... not that you could pry them away from Hello Kitty Online in the first place no matter how hard you Mary your Sues.

 

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* There's an obvious parallel to be drawn here to real-world social activism. A white person declaring all white people are racist, the "one good man" declaring all men rapists, the religious believer declaring we are all sinners, all are implicitly setting themselves up as holier-than-thou... by doing absolutely nothing aside from moving the goalposts.

P.S.: You misspelled my name in the preorder credits!

P.P.S.: If you're going to bring up Fall-From-Grace, I'll get to that, geez, gimme a break.

The Order of the Stick

"Send in your skeletons

Sing as their bones go marching in again

[...]

The page is out of print

We are not permanent"

 

Foo Fighters - Pretender 

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Vaarsuvius: "I deliberately chose to cast the weaker form of Dispel Magic earlier so as to reduce the likelihood of it accidentally unraveling our own spells, which likely had a higher - "

Belkar: "Just say it was magic. Nobody cares about that stuff anymore."

 

(T)OOTS #1247

(mind the small spoiler)

 

As The Order of the Stick launches drifts into its last chapter, I've been wondering at its oscillating relevance to online subcultures during its relatively long lifespan as a chief representative of RPG-inspired comics (D&D 3.5e in this case) and the recent strip quoted above seems to have nailed the shifting baseline. T-OOTS started in the early 2000s, tracking the Infinity Engine series' and Neverwinter Nights' peak popularity, which allowed it to capture not only its implicit audience of tabletop gamers but many like myself with no access to tabletop groups but whose interest was piqued as to the more complex mechanics offered outside computerized hack'n'slash automation. But judging by the complete lack of conversation around roleplaying in online games, the two markets have either diverged again... or one has ceased influencing the other.

Unlike similar comics like Nodwick which drew humor from players' contrariness, tOOTS focused on the inherent absurdity of living and dying by fantasy role-playing gimmicks, at first with regards to specific game mechanics, then widening its scope to RPG campaign storytelling conventions. Meanwhile in pop culture at large, the fantasy / superhero craze legitimized by the Lord of the Rings movies ran its course from initial hype to diversification to watering down by lowest-common-denominator and now regressing to 1970s camp. If the first X-Men flick came out today, they really would be wearing yellow spandex. The supply of gamers who liked computer adaptations and would eat up commentary on original recipe dungeoneering might be running out.

More generally, the referential humor on which T?OOTS initially relied is going out of fashion. From the late '90s to about 2010 the unprecedented personal expression facilitated by the internet built up a tidal wave of "I've heard of that, who says I haven't" material as every little clique and fanatic fringe carved out its turf. Read some early Sluggy Freelance strips for a taste of just how reliant on in-jokes and catchphrases the success stories of the time were, or purportedly scifi strips like Melonpool and Zortic. Unabashedly derivative as it was, (t)oots at first depended on a trend now more or less collapsing under its own redundancy and the various entertainment industries' unfathomable output. Universal references (e.g. Seinfeld, Mario Kart, The Da Vinci Code) are far more easily lost in the shuffle now and World of Warcraft has gone from the game everyone's playing to the game everyone can tell you when and why they quit. Even if a fad peaks high its lifespan is far shorter now and jokes about last year's Star Wars movie will rapidly fall flat. Dungeons and Dragons itself looks more and more frustratingly antiquated, with attempts at modernization in 4e/5e having done more harm than good as far as I can see as an outsider.

On neither of those levels would T-OOTS be entirely doomed, since it rapidly grew beyond strict D&D rule jokes and stopped indulging in other pop culture references around the time of the Dune sandworm jokes. But its audience's mentality may have changed more thoroughly. The devil's in the details and as Belkar so aptly pointed out, nobody cares about that stuff anymore. It presented complex plots and chains of causality hundreds of strips in the making, but nobody wants to figure anything out anymore or kick ourselves for a twist we should've seen coming.

 

Contrast the way hints are given for two random computer games I've talked about in the past month. Whereas The Secret World's fan sites (circa 2012) attempted to emphasize investigation by only gradually unveiling puzzle hints, encouraging you to keep linking as many clues as you can after as little help as possible, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous' (2021) feed you screenshots of the exact tile layout or password sequence, the faster to light up your achievement icon without the onus of independent thought, thereby also motivating developers less and less to fine-tune their creations' logical presentation. Even in terms of combat, instead of addressing the over-randomization of D20 rolls, Wrath leaves it in place and instead feeds you obvious "I win" buttons in the form of mythic feats with infinite effects so you can cheat your way past the numbers altogether and pretend you've mastered the system. Anecdotal examples such as these only fall into place as gradual retreat and capitulation to our loss of fundamental skillsets once you watch an otherwise rather intelligent grad student in the sciences struggle to divide 2 by 0.5 with a calculator.

Obnoxious as it could be most certainly was, the L33T subculture pervading game discussions when Rich Burlew started cracking wise about spot checks and baleful polymorphs still accepted the presuppositions that challenges are to be met, skills applied and clever solutions applauded. As Full Frontal Nerdity confirms, Belkar the lackluster ranger is not the only one to have noted the gradual shift away from rules-based gaming to self-gratifying flights of fancy, though I think Aaron Williams is kidding himself by assuming it's because everyone is now comfortable with D20 number crunching. An entire generation has grown up with pervasive cash shops in every electronic game, convinced that cheating by bribing the developers is more important than actually playing. Why sweat the arithmetic when you can just buy a win and bask instead in the parade the NPCs throw for "your" victory? You can't tell me that mentality hasn't transferred from desktop to tabletop as well.

While I myself prefer to focus on analyzing games' world-building, I can do so because others have playtested and nitpicked the practical side of gameplay. Unfortunately the pugnacity inherent in finding flaws where flaws exist back in 2003 has died off as we've traded adolescent boy bombast and abbrasiveness for the mawkish propriety of middle-aged soccer moms.*

So where does that leave Toots? How much of the old special nerdy interest group has it managed to retain?

Will its final volume reaffirm the characters' existence in a modern rules-governed wargame world or regress to preoperational make-believe and prescientific heroics? Will anyone still blurt out "wait a minute, I had a 22!" or figure out how to use INT in the arena of STR/CON or count the number of spell slots before a caster fight, caster fight (caster fight!) or will we simply be treated to characters squinting and grunting as they lob nondescript kamehamehas at each other?

 

 

 

 

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*The fact that even as outlandish a phrase as "mawkish propriety" already shows up on Google only compounds the problem of creativity, but that's a topic for another day.

 Whenever anyone/anything tells me to have fun, I can't help but hear an "or else" implied.

Conundrum Unworthy of Solving

I was chugging along at a pretty decent pace in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, but one particular "feature" sapped my little remaining enthusiasm for its mediocrity: those stupid tile puzzles.

 

The basic idea is arranging a set of two-square (domino-style) tiles along the floor according to a starting pattern. Solid basic notion, idiotically implemented for several reasons:

1) They can be slotted forwards or backwards, but nothing indicates the position they'll take once laid down. There is no rationale behind discerning this by trial and error.

2) Instead of universally recognized ideograms (plus signs, hearts, etc.) they use their own script... which is actually a great idea I'd be glad to support (I've even requested an alienese keyboard) if the resulting characters weren't so similar as to blend together, making them an unwieldy chore to memorize.

3) The tiles are too small to see in your inventory, and for some insane unreason were drawn with a pointless reflection effect in the middle further obscuring details.

4) Even if you understand the basic idea and know how to start, you're left with at least four paths to suss out by mindless trial and error (due to the second symbol on each tile) requiring several clicks to open a slot, select a tile, confirm your selection, then when it turns out it was the wrong one, select the slot, pick up the tile, confirm your de-selection, backtrack thus a few tiles, etceteree, etceterah

5) According to online chatter, in order to get even the slightest hint as to their meaning you supposedly have to drag along one of the most annoying companions in a very annoying roster, meaning you're arbitrarily punished for unrelated roleplaying choices.

I would've been willing to put up with all that nonsense. I did the first, simple, introductory puzzle and returned three acts later for the second, only to be completely stumped... only to be told by an online cheat-sheet that the instructions were in this case a red herring.

... yeeaaah. Fuck it.

At this point even the infamous "rubber ducky" puzzle from The Longest Journey made for better gameplay, and I finally realized they're doing it on purpose. It's meant to waste your time squinting and randomly ignoring one instruction or another. This is not a puzzle at all. It's an interface timesink. Instead of intellectually challenging and rewarding problem-solving, this is yet another pure playtime padder like the fights requiring 1/400 odds opening dice rolls. Skip it. Despite having more than enough content for epic-length run-throughs, Wrath's developers still patheticaly, insecurely padded out the campaign's length by mindless repetition every chance they got.

Come on, Owlcat. You're far from the pinnacle of your creative field... but you're better than this.

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edit 2021/11/23

What really singes my tail hairs is that just a lope and poke later I ran across a truly entertaining puzzle in Wrath of the Righteous:

Pulura's Fall took me about five tries and ten minutes to solve and aside from being a reading test instead of visual pattern matching, gets right every single error in execution the other got wrong.

1) No uncertainty as to which symbols light up when you click something.

2) No unnecessary overlap or similarity between symbols (i.e. no "daughter" "doubter" and "draughter")

3) No graphic fuckery.

4) No multiple clicks to execute a single action.

5) No depriving you of information for having better taste in companions.

(Kestoglyr did groan at one point, but that may have been more related to the unremitting horror of his tortured existence than a puzzle-solving hint to his halfling overlord.)

 

It even includes a possible red herring depending on how you interpret the hints, but this can be eliminated methodically.

So... yeah, Owlcat. You really are better than that!

"Through a Feminist Lens"

"I have learned two ways to tie my shoes. One way is only good for lying down. The other way is good for walking."

Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

 

 

Primitivists, religious apologists, Rousseauists, conflict theorists and other simpletons will often point to misapplications of scientific principles (scientific racism, social darwinism, etc.) as proof of technocracy and rationalism's evil. A trite little insult. We already know any new technology can be used in a smart or stupid way. You can use your automobile to drive to work or to drive over your neighbour's dog. One is generally considered better than the other (depending on the dog) and we don't need fifty pages of circular deconstructionist masturbation to arrive at that conclusion. Nuclear fission can make bombs or power plants. Why should it surprise us then that science itself, when it was a new invention, was also subject to the same test of applicability?

Moreover, why do we not apply the same distinction to social critique? Why not admit that mindsets adopted for dissecting fiction novels in the 1960s lack the same relevance to geopolitics or mammalian sexuality? Why not admit that the test of applicability was already applied to postmodernism... and the stupids won. We are now stuck cleaning up fifty years' worth of radioactive anti-intellectual fallout.

The Open and Shut Secret World: "Multi"player

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

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"Screaming stars, impale me with beauty!"

Dance, monkeys, dance.

 

The Machine Tyrant was the last boss of The Secret World's second group instance, Hell Raised, and on hard difficulty served as a litmus test of players' expertise. Many a group spent many an hour wiping repeatedly only to finally give up. Even more groups were sabotaged by spineless little millennial twerps who died once or twice and immediately ran away instead of trying to figure out the fight. To be sure, it could look like a stroll through Castle Heterodyne at first glance.

 

First off, he hit like a motherfucking truck full of trucks (I say that as a habitual healer who had to struggle to level off tanks' constantly rubberbanding HP bar) and could PBAoE one-shot anything in a medium radius, requiring the tank to "active dodge" out without error - while maintaining aggro... and many a group wiped five seconds into the fight because DPS didn't slow their roll while the tank dodged. MT also periodically gained a nigh-invulnerable shield and ran to the middle of the arena, after which the tank had to aggro him into the yellow light pillar up above.

That red AoE circle? It locked on to one player and chased him. They increased in frequency as the fight went on.

Those orange AoE circles? They almost filled the arena and MT cast them when running to the center, which increased in frequency as the fight went on.

That yellow AoE pillar? The one the tank needed to drag MT into? It did enough damage to kill anyone but the tank in a couple of seconds and could spawn right on top of you without warning.

If he stepped on you, you died.

If you DPSed while his (damage-reflecting) shield was up, you died.

If you stood next to the tank for even one (cleaving) basic attack, you died.

Oh, and he continually stacked a DoT at infinite range, requiring constant group-wide cleansing and healing... while you were often scattered out of range by the constant one-shot-kill AoEs.

Oh, and did I mention it's a DPS race? If he activated his enrage timer, everyone died.

Fun!

No, really. MT was a blast. Technically it was several kinds of blasts all at once, but you catch my drift.

TSW was a single-player, linear adventure game. Almost all content was solo, its skill system was an unbalanced mess largely due to the shoehorned, gratuitous, pointless PvP and PvE advancement consisted of mindlessly grinding the easiest, quickest five-man instance (usually Polaris or Darkness War depending on the patch) for hundreds upon hundreds of times. That being said, it also included some truly excellent fights, albeit overusing ground AoE. Multiple phases, twin bosses, triplet bosses, adds, exploding adds, blocking terrain, chase scenes, enrage timers, body-blocked buff beams, splitting and stacking the team, shrinking fields of play, persistent AoEs requiring careful positioning, invulnerability, what TSW lacked in terms of player abilities' interaction it made up for in its imaginative use of enemy abilities. Very few fights felt like the standard tank'n'spank of MMO infamy... despite being exactly that. Some bosses introduced in the Tokyo patches (The Manufactory) made MT look trivially simple by comparison.

 

Machine Tyrant's worst and best feature was that it could not be taught. You had to know the limitations of your skillset and time cooldowns appropriately on a shifting battlefield. Nobody could tell you "stand here and click this button" to give you a false sense of accomplishment for obeying orders like a mindless grunt. Sadly, in most fights, three of the team's five players could do exactly that. Instructions compiled by various player groups for each dungeon were usually written separately for the tank, the healer and the three DPS.

- Tank instructions read like some twisted pages-long time travel short story where interweaving sequences of events had to either be performed with the grace of a minuet or disrupted precisely when the bomb timer flashes zero.

- Healer instructions reduced to a couple of paragraphs mostly detailing when a special ability (e.g. Cold Blood) had to be used and foreseeing aggro spikes.

- DPS instructions just read "don't stand in the flaming puddle of death, dumbass" and a second line about hiding/stacking during phase transitions.

 

Funcom obviously anticipated most of their customers would be idiots and set up a system allowing oligoi to carry polloi. However, requiring only one and a half of five participants truly understood what was happening had the predictable effect of further splitting a customer base already divided between puzzle-solving, PvP, number-crunching and immersive adventuring. Many never bothered playing any role but damage and claimed expertise based on gear levels for pressing three buttons by rote as per some wiki's cookie-cutter build. Their underlying incompetence grew painfully obvious whenever they hit a fight like MT requiring them to direct their own movements.

 

For as long as the right customers stayed and continued to carry the idiots, things looked superficially good. But whenever the lynchpins went AWOL, the various times TSW's multiplayer interest crashed, it crashed hard and fast.

Hell in Earth

"I look for you in heathered moor, the desert and the ocean floor

How low does one heart go?

Looking for your fingerprints I find them in coincidence

And make my faith to grow"

 

Suzanne Vega - Penitent

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"But above this gate, and behind it even to the mountains, he piled the thunderous towers of Thangorodrim; and these were made of the ash and slag of his subterranean furnaces, and the vast refuse of his tunnelings. Before the gates of Angband filth and desolation spread southward for many miles. There lay the wide plain of Bladorion. But after the coming of the sun rich grass grew there, and while Angband was besieged and its gates shut, there were green things even among the pits and broken rocks before the doors of hell."

 

J.R.R. Tolkien - Quenta Silmarillion (1938?-39?)

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"Thus it can be said that in 'The Silmarillion' there is no 'religion', because the Divine is present and has not been 'displaced'; but with the physical removal of the Divine from the World Made Round a religion arose (as it had arisen in Numenor under the teachings of Thu [a.k.a. Sauron] concerning Morgoth, the banished and absent God), and the dead were despatched, for religious reasons, in burial ships on the shores of the Great Sea."

 

Christopher Tolkien - 1987 commentary on his father's first draft of The Fall of Numenor (1936?-37?)

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Continuing my perusal of The History of Middle-Earth on and off this past year, I'm nearing the focus shift from First Age plots (Beren and Luthien, Turin Turambar, etc.) to The Lord of the Rings, after the success of which the author grew reticent to ever publish his earlier stories for fear they would kill the looming sense of mystery, trivialize the glorious past defining Frodo&co.'s world.

 

Leafing through these old drafts though made me realize one reason the Land of Murder and its precursor, Hang-banned, still impress the reader with their presence more than similar realms of eee-veeeel fantasied by Tolkien's copycats. They have a presence. Important plot point: you can backpack to Mount Doom!

To illustrate that, let's utilize one of the aforementioned copycats. Actually, since Wrath of the Righteous is an adaptation of Pathfinder, itself a spin-off of D&D, itself largely inspired by Tolkien(tm), this would be a copycatcubed but let's not wrangle over scientific jargon here.

While Wrath's writing and atmosphere don't exactly overflow with talent or inspiration, I do like the Worldwound itself (presumably described in detail by the tabletop campaign setting) for its sheer scale. Taking up half the playable area, a Hell On Earth the size of a country really conveys that overwhelming menace which a simple magic portal cannot, no matter how many skulls and green flames you slap on it.

And, loathe as I am to admit any debt to the company which more than any other has ruined online games (and a fair proportion of offline ones by extension) Blizzard Entertainment in its early years also grasped this space-filling impact of physical presence. Albeit positioning its labyrinthine highway to Hell vertically, the first Diablo game never failed to remind you you're pacing atop the legions of the damned even among the peaceful, melancholy grisaille of Tristram.

 

Still, demonslaying yarns like this ultimately place a magic portal at the bottom of the maze, at the center of the rifts and that boils the whole story down to the logical imperative of closing the gateway of evilosity, after which, no matter how powerful the devils are they'll be powerless to reach our world. Makes for a nice climax, but at the expense of sustained tension. Which brings us back to Tolkien.

 

In early drafts Angband (the second fortress of Sauron's old boss Melkor/Morgoth, for the unsilmarillionitiated) was not merely a euphemistic "hell of iron" in some obscure Sindarin translation but referred to literally as Hell in the main body of the text. Just as Melko himself read in early drafts like a direct copy of Milton's brooding, decadently noble prince of darkness, Angband simply took fifteen years longer to lose its literal interpretation as hell... but not its significance as such. And it was located in Middle-Earth, vaguely north-west of the Shire's future location. Forget Mordor; you could backpack to literal hell. (And, presumably, back again.)

I find two aspects of this interesting.

1) What if the limits of evil were geographic?

Remove the designation of super-supernatural, flatten the multiverse back down to a universe, and position infernal might contiguously (albeit superlatively) with more mundane magic. You might say that takes some of the excitement out of it, but it's basically the world in which religious believers already live 24/7, imagining they've witnessed a miracle every time their local priest does a thumb trick or somesuch. And, while I'll gladly condemn their abject stupidity, one certainly can't fault the faithful's enthusiasm. Would Hell itself be less or more impressive if it were situated in our own world istead of another dimension?

What if Hell were in Chicago... say, West of Ashland along the Eisenhower maybe?

As the elvish saga goes, they crossed the Helcaraxe from the garden-of-probably-Eden, kicked Morgoth's ass and locked him in his stronghold. For four hundred years. For four centuries the ersatz devil lurked just beyond the gates of Angband. What if the "gates of hell" were neither hyperbole nor allegory but a literal set of doors you drive past on your way to work, and The Devil could invade as easily as unlocking his deadbolt? You really would need eternal vigilance. Cultures living near the perimeter where grass wilts from mere proximity to malice would by necessity be shaped by their vigil, markedly different from more peaceful lands. They would get less opportunity, less room to develop naturally.

 

To a small extent you do encounter situations like this in fantasy stories, but they're rarely taken to their logical conclusions. Would there be a worldwide, pan-species draft for wardens of evil? (See: Dragon Age: Origins and the Wardens) Or would farther cultures simply take advantage of nearer ones' lack of alternatives, like Western Europe letting the Eastern half suffer every Asiatic invasion? (See: DA:O and the dwarves (come to think of it, that game did pretty good on this topic)) And, if the devil is truly immortal and would simply escape and set up shop somewhere else if defeated, would the guardian cultures put much effort into beating back the armies of evil or focus merely on containment? How would they handle contamination? Would customs agents wave evil-detecting wands at every port town to detect orcish contraband? Would they need to import protective amulets? And if they were getting subsidized by the entire rest of the world, would they never want the siege to end, in order to maintain their revenue stream?

Minas Tirith's militarism was defined by this sort of never-ending struggle: a city of captains and guards, passworded gates, hilltop beacons, concentric defensibility all hammered home its plot relevance as bastion against the darkness. The elvish enclaves of the first age equally so, as each seems defined by natural defenses or concealment be it caves, encircling mountains or impenetrable forests plus confounding enchantment. But Tolkien's copycats too often rattle off grandiose locations (e.g. the Worldwound) then forget to think through the sociological ramifications implied, settling for generic medievalism and towns which, aside from maybe a garden fence, seem to have put no more thought into defending against THE EMBODIMENTS OF CHAOTIC EVIL SET LOOSE UPON THE WORLD than they would against a dozen half-starved kobolds.

2) Would the devil then still be a religious figure?

This has been a constant point of contention in RPG lore at least since I started looking into the genre from around Y2K, and I still remember the quizzical tilt of my head when I found myself walking up to Vivec himself to ask him what it's like being a god. Faith, cult, religion would not carry the same meaning in a universe of verifiable supernatural beings, where you can sit down for a mug of ale with Thor at your local tavern. Atheism would be an untenable viewpoint in such a world (and for how ridiculous it sounds, I refer you to your companion Is0bel's comments in Shadowrun: Hong Kong) but neither would unshakeable blind belief be required except for absent gods. As his son so wryly noted, it's a bit ironic for J.R.R. Tolkien the practicing Christian to have cobbled together a world in which, for much of history, the only religion in the usual sense of the word was Numenor's Satanism. (Or maybe it was a carefully weighed reinterpretation of antediluvian decadence; either way, the distinction stands.)

Faith is necessary to prop up the unprovable, misinterpreted and illusory. A congregation praying at a stained-glass window depicting an angel exhibits faith, but if the same angel were to burst through that window, it would remove the need for belief. So how can you reconcile both religious faith and extant, pinchable deities in the same universe?

Make the gods lying and/or incompetent bastards, elusive to the point of frustration or simply misinterpreted by their believers.

If their existence is not in question their deeds and influence (and possibly even identity) must be. The problem with most of these fantasy worlds is the absolute certainty with which lore books declare deity X created relic Y in year Z. Let there be ambivalence! Let there be confusion! Torment: Tides of Numenera actually provides many fine examples, as the hapless inhabitants of a world suffused with Clarkian sufficiently advanced technology are constantly founding one cargo cult after another around heroes, monsters or places, disagreeing not on the observable existence of these but on their respective sway upon reality. If you seal an evil in a can, people will worship the can, but a reliable, certain god would rob them of the chance to supply their own certainty. Faith, as an un undisprovable declaration of self-importance by proxy, cannot survive independent verification.

 

For a brilliant example of the greater fantasy world dramatic potential of unverifiable divine intervention, see Durance's dilemma in Pillars of Eternity 1 (the one worth playing.)

Jokers Wild

The deck of many things.

 

They deck of many things.

Thee deck of many things.

Thy deck of many things.

The dreck of many things.

The duck of many things.

The dick of many things.

The deck oaf many things.

The deck off many things.

The deck of mainly things.

The deck of manly things.

The deck of many tongs.

The deck of many dings.

The deck of many thongs.

They deck off many things.

Thy deck of mainly things.

The dreck off many things.

Thy deck of manly things.

The duck of manly things.

The duck of many dings.

The dick of mainly things.

The dick of manly things.

The deck off mainly things.

The deck off manly things.

The deck of mainly tongs.

The deck of mainly thongs.

The deck of manly tongs.

They duck off many things.

They dick of many dings.

Thy duck of manly things.

The dick off many dings.

The dreck off mainly tongs.

The duck of mainly thongs.

The duck of manly thongs.

Thy duck of manly thongs.          <--- winner

Thy dick of manly tongs.             <--- runner-up

Thy dick of manly thongs.

Thee deck oaf many tongs.          <--- bronze (to make the tongs)

 

Thy dreck off mainly thongs.       <--- honorable mention (also, ew)

Thee dick off mainly tongs.

Thee duck off manly tongs.

The Open and Shut Secret World: The Lighter Side of Apocalypse

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

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Damnit, I've got 321 unused screenshots from V:tM-Bloodlines saved up (which is how I was able to illustrate my calling out Bloodlines 2's devs so aptly) and not a single one of Arthur Kilpatrick cackling with glee at watching Santa Monica "sliiide down the tubes" from his bail bond business. Oh well.

Drama!

Zombies ate my parents!

Drama!

Daddy ripped my heart out!

Drama!

Ghouls sludged up our tree roots!

Drama!

Werewolves ate our boyfriends!

Drama!

I was suckered into joining a cult, stuffed full of evil then discorporated into the eschatological conduit for anti-being itself!

DRAMA!!!

And now, this:

A beyond-ancient spirit of bygone ages wants you to help her figure out her Commodore 64 so she can keep up with the times. (Steampunk magitek was so much more user-friendly.)

No matter how fitting, how well executed a dramatic backdrop, the lengthier it grows the more it will require comic relief, even as the main plot waxes grimmer and grimmer. The main difficulty lies in properly incorporating humor into the setting instead of piling on random nonsense and pop culture references. Unlike most game designers, TSW's writers held a firm grasp on the difference between telling a joke and being a joke. For a game which incorporated so many external references that it could easily have devolved to a TVTropes article of itself, it also serves as a master-class in keeping humorous asides in-character.

And yes, that is entirely in character for bureaucrats.

For instance, from the moment you set foot in the game as a Templar, you're introduced to your new powers "through the medium of unreliable narration" by a character who could've stepped out of the TV miniseries version of Neverwhere:

But then again, it's entirely believable for a secret society to transmit introductory visions to new recruits by an easily-dismissed, inconspicuously conspicuous public figure. A jester.

 

So it goes. Characters make bleakly humorous assessments of their usually quite desperate situations, snap and snark at each other like the overstressed conscripts they are, stammer and stutter in the face of the inexplicable.

Marianne Chen there is aware of the humor in her statement. She's making a funny. She, the character, not merely her writer poking fun at her expense. A strained, awkward, terrified, Apocalyptic funny. Maintaining that level of awareness without descending into grandstanding adolescent feigned nonchalance elevated TSW far beyond the game industry's open disdain for good writing.

Good Bug, Bad Design, Ugly Advice

"Pearls of wisdom from brother [Werwolfe] ! "

 

Partway through Act 5 of Wrath of the Righteous at the moment, I must say that while bugs crop up frequently, Owlcat's obviously investing a great deal more effort into addressing them promptly. Compared to Kingmaker which was borderline unplayable even six months after release, Wrath is clearly treated more professionally. Sticking with tried-and-true technology probably helps. And, as happens every so often with computers, you occasionally run into a good bug. Act 4 makes a big gimmick of the terrain shifting and recombining as you rotate the camera to create a chaotic, unsafe, disorienting feel apt to its setting. Except corpses apparently don't track the terrain's shifts, leading to:

- floating corpses! Which I sincerely hope is the one bug never to get fixed given how harmlessly it adds to the zone's surreal whiplash.

 

Sadly, the relatively low number of bugs shifts focus onto Wrath's worse design decisions, and while a topic for another time I do want to draw attention to the overuse and abuse of contriving perceived difficulty, especially via timesinks. (Apologies for the minor companion quest spoiler.)

Whoever designed this managed to combine almost every stupid cRPG combat encounter gimmick:

1) difficult fight you're thrown into with no warning just by walking forward

2) forced placement in the middle of enemy ambush

3) no autosave before the fight itself

4) trudging through five fucking cutscenes in a row every time you reload

And yes, you can probably talk your way out of it by accepting a worse outcome, but it's still ridiculous level design.

Though a more condensed example than most, that's not much of an outlier in a campaign built around munchkin game-breaking awesomesauceness with only a cursory nod toward balance, proportion or narrative coherence. So I'm taking the opportunity of (for once) playing a game near release to cobble together a short list of useful spoilers and tips for anyone who's bought this but hasn't gotten around to playing it yet. Many of these little "twists" are just too nonsensical, abrupt or inexplicable and make your life much harder than necessary. They're basically "rocks fall; everybody dies" material. Also, this is by no way meant to help you finish the game or beat the hardest encounters; just a few pointers to help in the first acts.

 

_______________________________*SPOILERS*__________________\/

 

Unlike Kingmaker, you're not on a strict clock here. Just crusade-murder an enemy army or fort once in a while in Act 3 to keep your morale up, and farm them for gear or open up your party's adventure routes at your leisure.

 

This is a theme campaign, and unfortunately for any semblance of balance, you'll be fighting 80+% demons in every act. Their resistances usually negate acid flasks, alchemist's fire and most level 1-2 damaging spells. Poison is useless. If you must use magic damage, sonic seems the way to go early on (later you can use the Ascendant Element mythic feat) but you're better off using magic to debuff enemy defense so that holy-buffed weapons can hit them. Also, their armor is so high that often the only way to land a hit is to level-drain them. I've been abusing Eyes of the Bodak.

 

Bonus bosses tend to be built with a couple of specific weaknesses. Some have feeble touch saves, others can be polymorphed, others are nothing without their buff spells, etc. Inspect them carefully and pay attention to what's not showing. It may take two dozen tries and prayers unto RNGesus, but even with my characteristically unoptimized party I haven't found anything unbeatable on core difficulty.

Due to an abundance of high-damage enemies, summons are (as always in these games) overpowered damage sponges. Watching a marilith waste her fifty attacks per round or whatever on a level 1 puppy-dog or an incorporeal summon never gets old. Summoning trinkets included.

About half your companions already come with weapon feats: longbow, rapier, scimitar, glaive, longbow, falchion, dwarven waraxe, longbow, etc. Be prepared to plan around them. Did I mention the re-redundant longbows?

 

Perception checks are performed on movement, so if you just crossed a doorway, turned a corner, teleported in, etc., you may want to take a step sideways before moving forward.

 

The campaign's core conceit is that you gain "mythic" levels after certain main quest steps. These aren't a class, just a bunch of stupidly overpowered freebies without which you'd never be able to beat the stupidly unbalanced mobs thrown at you. Your first two mythic levels aren't tied to a particular path.

 

Enemies tend to be so much higher level than you (or perhaps have their stats fudged) as to often deny you any chance of rolling a save. "Mythic" feats exist to let you cheat your way past the entire system. Invest early on in Last Stand (lets you soak infinite amounts of damage for two rounds) for any character which might fight in melee, as well as Rupture Restraints and any other relevant cheats allowing you to ignore dice rolls.

 

Overused gimmicks:

- level/attribute drain. Keep death ward and massive amounts of restoration handy. Massive. You have been warned.

- unlike most campaigns where you just mow down grunts, here you run into a lot of spellcasters with a lot of magical buffs. You will need dispel after Act 1.

- swarms can't be tanked. They're programmed to randomly cycle between your characters, making AoE largely useless against them unless you also ward your entire group against that damage type. But, that AI also makes them highly susceptible to attacks of opportunity. Position a big bruiser with a two-hander as the monkey in the middle of your party to swat them. You will need to fight a large number of swarms early in Act 2.

- Dimension Door is not an absolute must, but highly recommended, especially for Act 4.

 

Scour the marketplace zone in Act 1 for the Covenant of the Inheritor usable medallion and do NOT give it back to the queen at the beginning of Act 2. Unless you build your entire party around holy damage, you'll desperately need its Cold Iron buff for the first 2-3 acts.

 

Bezoars are pure gold for scroll scribing. Buy them.

 

Materials for restoring the Storyteller's items are found via exploration, not in shops.

 

While several of your companions can be nasty, high-damage bruisers, Seelah's about the only real tank you'll find in the initial roster, so if you don't plan on listening to her Shatnerian vociferations your very first purchase should be a front-line mercenary. Even if you ditch him later, you'll be glad of an extra meat shield throughout acts 1 and 2. I do want to run through the whole moronic companion roster, but that'll have to wait.

Woljif disappears from late Act 2 until early-mid Act 3. Have a backup trickster ready.

Clear the Wintersun map before stealing the ghost's trinket. It respawns seven times in seven locations, and can make various fights impossible by doubling up.

 

Refusing the Lexicon of Paradox' power (like I did) in Act 3 might lock you out of picking up the second half at the end of Act 4, and therefore out of one of the more favorable endings (even though everything about that situation screams "ITSATRAP!!!") but then again, there are quite a few paths to the end so meh... no regrets.

 

Midnight bolts have plot value. Probably a bad idea to use them as ammo. Not that you're given any hint about the first couple you find.

 

The Blackwater location (aside from being a stupid genre crossover) can potentially lock you in if you don't have a high Use Magic Device skill. Come prepared for a long haul, and bring some way to flatfoot the cyborgs. It's one of the few places where Hold Person is worth a damn.

Tile puzzles after the first are meant to be finished in Act 5.

 

In acts 2-3 you can farm small amounts of XP and cash by wandering your adventuring party back and forth past enemy armies for "random" encounters. In act 4 you can farm the arena for XP after you become champion.

 

Wenduag vanishing upon sleeping at the Nexus in Act 4 is not a bug, just lackluster quest writing. Try to imagine where she might've gone.

 

Crusade mode is basically a simplified Heroes of Might and Magic, making avoiding attrition a top priority. Ensure at least one of your generals has Cure Wounds, even if you're a lich.

Instead of rushing to spend your valuable crusade income on teleporters right away, invest in some fish-on-a-stick and cheese crostata so you can walk to your destinations at the start of act 3. It takes time to build up your army anyway.

 

Don't be afraid to buy 1000-2000 materials points to jumpstart your city building early in act 3, after you stock up on fresh gear from the new merchants. Keep in mind unit production buildings have adjacency bonuses.

At the end of act 3 you lose control over your crusade (after the dungeon beneath Drezen.) You regain control of your towns but not your armies at the beginning of act 5. So don't bother investing in more troops than you need to defend yourself (one or two armies) in act 3.

Yes, that last one is a particularly stupid gimmick for any game. Limiting player choices can be excused by a project's limitations, but never invalidate the player's choices after the fact.

Naked Female Lady Bones

"As long as he loves me he'll answer his crime

The door stays wide open, I know that he's mine"

 

Caro Emerald - I Know That He's Mine

________________________________________

 

Girlfriend: "You have this [body scan of herself] in X-ray mode. It's only showing bones."

Boyfriend (panicked): "Naked female lady bones!"

Freefall #3141

(minor interpersonal spoiler alert)

________________________________________

Running an Illuminatus through the tutorial for a screenshot for my last post (don't you love how committed I am to my art, gentle reader?) reminded me The Secret World doubled that tutorial length with the Legends relaunch. Since 2017 players' first introduction to the game is narrated by two voices, one good, one evil. No bonus points for guessing which sex is which.

Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.

 

I've also been watching Last Tango in Halifax recently. Not my usual cuppa' but the dialogue's refreshingly apt to its setting and the acting's far better than you'd expect on television. Hell, it only took the notion "Cadfael gets hitched" to lure me in. Still, after a few episodes I can't escape the realization that Jacobi plays the only positive male character, a caretaker daddy figure who spends most of his screen time buying his daughter a new car, bringing his fiancee a meal, forgiving his first wife for sabotaging his relationship with one of their friends in their teens, etc. The other men are introduced as

- a teenage boy who falls off his dirt-bike then stops riding it so as not to worry his mother

- a husband who crawls back to his wife after separating because he fell for another woman

- a conniving twit trying to blackmail his female boss over her lesbian relationship

- a brother-in-law falsely accusing a female of her husband's death

with the flip-side:

- a saintly black lesbian betrayed by a male friend

- a career woman who can't ever be blamed for her selfishness because she's overworked

- a lush who broke up a marriage but is nevertheless shown browbeating her male fling over his insecurities

- a strong woman who not-quite-murdered-her-husband but it's-ok-he-was-bad

Special mention must go to the brief fling between that last and an asshole of a man half her age, after which she gets a few raised eyebrows and snide comments and a new boyfriend who realizes she's available, and the young man gets beaten to a bloody pulp by his fiancee's brothers for cheating on her and is thrown out of the house by his own mother for being nothing but trouble. Special special mention to the scene in which he's literally crawling on his bloody, broken hands and knees, groaning in agony, a beggar before his middle-aged fling for the mercy of a couch to sleep on. Special special special mention to his every scene afterwards revolving around everyone continually sneering and condemning his broken, pathetic self, immobile for trauma, for... in retrospect, what crimes exactly?

Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.

Freefall is a very interesting hard Science Fiction comic mostly revolving around the rise of artificial consciousness with a secondary interest in space travel and terraforming. The author also happens to love old-fashioned humor (pratfalls and Benny Hill chases included) so perhaps unsurprisingly when he started writing a romance he fell back once or twice on the stereotype of the male making nominal blunders so the audience can side with the female "putting up" with him. It's cute. Right? When he panics at having seen an image of his girlfriend's body without her explicit notarized consent... even though having it accidentally e-mailed to him and closing it upon seeing the first x-ray in no way consitutes voyeurism. His guilt reassures us that he's a good guy. Good guys self-flagellate and grovel at women's feet. It is *ADORABLE* for a man to be so heavily indoctrinated into self-hatred that he reflexively panics at the thought of satisfying his own instincts, even by accident.

 

You don't get to blame such storytelling and directing decisions on the media when the pretext of male guilt sells so well, in every medium, year by year. To paraphrase and repurpose a quote by Ayn Rand I've used here before, there's no way to rule innocent men, but creating so many rules that they cannot be observed allows you to cash in on guilt. For almost a decade now I've chuckled inwardly at men's exasperated rejoinders to the latest accusation by women of some make-work crime against the fairer sex, at men's desperation to fit themselves once again to the latest set of arbitrarily moved goalposts from uncrossing your legs on the subway to somehow being complicit in how many groupies throw themselves at multibillionnaires. You're missing the point. It will never be enough. You will never be compliant enough. She doesn't want you to perform any particular feat of chivalry to her expectations. She needs you to fail. She needs you to be guilty. She wants to hang a noose around your neck, because that's what instinctively reassures her of your service to her in perpetuity. The point of female disapproval is to instill slavishness, to cast men perpetually in the role of beggars and penitents.

Why should she wait for you to actually do something wrong when she can bank on our instinctive plains-ape favoritism, our presumption that her voice is by default pleasant and good while yours is by default ugly and evil, your every action, every thought, every breath a crime for which she will secure penance and recompense, in which you, by the informed wrongness of your sex, are deserving of abuse and outright physical torture and can expect only to be mocked for your suffering while she claims the moral high ground.

The whole point is to fabricate a reality in which you always have a crime to answer for, and all she needs to do is leave the door open and let you do the legwork of subjecting yourself to her condemnation.

The Open and Shut Secret World: Fractionalism

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

__________________________________________________

 

Let's talk factions.

It is by now a largely unexamined tradition for MMOs to divide players into factions as a way of ginning up some imitation of competitive spirit, regardless to what little extent these reflect the functionality of sports/game teams. The Secret World featured three playable "secret societies":

From top to bottom: the Dragons' mystical temple of abstruseness, the Templars' stately mansion of respectability (lycanthrope on zombie horse not included) and the Illuminati's subterranean techno-brutalist bunker, appropriately enough under a skylight. Get it? Illumin-nevermind.

In practical terms, the factions held absolutely zero relevance to the bulk of gameplay being mostly single-player with a small-group PvE endgame timesink. But, as TSW made a point of slavishly copycatting as many WoW-clone "features" as it could it also included the timesink of PvP instances divided by the factions into a three-way fight to out-score each other in various point hold, capture the flag and other standard team game scenarios. Now, PvP was a terrible idea from the start and was always going to be a half-assed affair. Tellingly, the Legends relaunch barely bothered pretending to include it.

1) As fundamentally a puzzle-solving, interactive fiction title, TSW was farther removed from team-play than either WoW-clones with their RPG-inspired classes or FPS series. The PvP and PvE fan bases were irrevocably split from day one, and the former rapidly realized it could find better gameplay elsewhere.

2) Its graphics and character models, while aesthetically superior, were neither fluid nor distinctive enough to ensure playability in a fast-paced, unpredictable PvP environment.

3) A game system can be designed either for PvP or PvE, but crowd control, healing, damage output and other considerations simply work differently depending on whether you're fighting adaptive, self-interested equals or an overblown monster with a specific set of abilities whose job it is to provide a fixed challenge and look impressive before taking a dive to boost customers' egos. TSW's skill system was borderline workable for PvE, but utter crap for PvP.

4) The instability ensured by a three-way divide can work well enough in games like Planetside which establish stable, large-scale objectives and rely on a few players coordinating groups of forty others. But mixed with ephemeral, ten-minute fights in randomized matches, the same instability largely guarantees one side will rapidly capitalize on the other two tripping over each other. From my recollection, the power-mad Illuminati would routinely trounce the more idealistic, adventurous Dragons and Templars.

Ah, but that little tidbit brings us to the flipside: character.

While TSW's factions were ultimately merely cosmetic, the quality of mission writing, dialogues, backstories and general atmosphere mapped more successfully onto player personae than in most games' "pretty vs. badass" or good vs. evil split. Here you're all antiheroes to some extent, powermongers staving off Ragnarok #4, split instead between different flavors of spy movie villainy. The Dragons play the long game, foregoing straightforward attrition in pursuit of ultimate cheat codes, the Illuminati relatively shortsighted and pragmatically snatching at every advantage, and the Templars ruthless, dyed-in-the-wool aristocrats tending toward reliability and draconian judgments.

You'd be hard-pressed to find these attitudes expressed during gameplay. Usually, all you'd get is snippets of flavor text at the beginning and end of each otherwise identical mission, flavored differently for each faction, plus occasionally a short cinematic. Nevertheless, the distinction came through in wording and voicing, consistently and insistently marrying a mere cosmetic difference to human tendencies whether it's nouveau-riche swagger, pointed nonsense or peremptory declamations. They did a good enough job to even lure me away from my usual Chaotic Neutral mindset to the only faction with enough integrity to own its nature. Look again at the pictures above, for instance. All three advertise opulence in some form, whether it's maintaining low-density real estate in the middle of a metropolis like Seoul (note apartment buildings in the background) or displacing New York's subterrane to hide a bunker the size of a village, but only the Templars just built. a. fucking. palace. like they mean it.

Respect.

 If morbidity is a fascination with death, what do you call a fascination with morbidity?