I kinda want to start going to UFOlogist meetings just so I can wait until the middle of a speech (any speech) yell out "that's what they WANT you to think!" and run out the door screaming in panic.

My Life as a Drowid, 4: Honey? We need to talk about Minthara.

"Things don't have to be this way

Catch me on a better day"

 

Garbage - Fix Me Now

_______________________________________________________________

 

 

That girl ain't right.

Well, come to think of it, she's right about a few things:

 

Though abandoning the alignment system (which is half the point of D&D) BG3 still banks on simpleminded good vs. evil conflicts with spoonfed correct choices. Business plan: validate the stupid for mass appeal. Sure, why not. It's a classic. And sure as superheroes punch ugly people, villains still get the best lines. Minthara, for the uninitiated, is one of your party's later additions, a drow paladin (remember, no alignments - even for classes defined by their alignment) who's defected to the story's main antagonistic cult, and can be re-defected to your side if you're willing to, errr.... prune a few branches in Act 1, so to speak. Of course, most of us will always remember her because her stellar voicing (seriously, chick could be reading the phone book to any number of effects) lends her a commanding presence in any scene where she pipes up. Plus her evil aristocratic background permits her to voice a great deal more sanity than the rest of the cast's constant whining, emotional diarrhea and trite little adolescent rebellions.

Unfortunately, while well written and performed line by line, her every quest interaction or even background exposition tend toward the obtuse, contradictory or just plain misconceived. While BG3 likes hiding half the recruitment options unless you read cheat-sheets, she's the only companion whose very introduction requires nuking multiple plot threads an entire act beforehand. Even picking her side in the first-act conflict requires siding with a random horde of goofy, unreliable goblins against a less numerous but organized and fortified enclave of powerful spellcasters and potentially useful civillians. Forget good vs. evil, the decision doesn't even make pragmatic sense, out of character for anyone willing to deal with drow.

Why would you join her? Presumably many, like myself, may play a Lolth-sworn drow and want the thematic and dialogue tie-ins. But again, her starting situation breaks any roleplaying justification. The problem is that drow actually have even more reasons to kill Minthara than other races, whether because:

1) You're a Lolth-sworn drow and she's an apostate. Make nice with spidey-mommy by offin' tha traitor.

2) You're a rebel and she's a high-value target from a traditionalist family, no matter her conversion.

3) You're any drow, period, and she's a high-value target away from her family's protection; her head would net you no small amount of favor from competing houses.

4) She's now probably enough of an embarrassment to her own clan that even they'd pay you to make her go away.

 

Basically, there's no way you'd actually make the choice unless you know ahead of time that she can be reprogrammed. You could draw a comparison with Heather Poe in Bloodlines, but there the chain of causality flowed naturally from a minor decision with a minor reward, through narrative intrigue into multiple follow-ups. Here, none of the steps in the process stand up on their own. Even the sex scene with her falls apart through political correctness, as no way in hell would she take no for an answer from a low-ranking or no-ranking male - but we can't promote pixelated rape. Then! - packing her off to her superiors after admitting she was ordered to kill you is flat-out idiotic.

Sadly she even lacks a personal quest like the other companions, and so aside from a few off-hand comments her greater potential is abandoned. But even the little she has to say is half refreshing sanity (like pointing out most self-appointed sapients are the sum of their impulses) and half out of character.

 

For example, she officially "disapproves" of me letting Shadowheart be taken by Shar's cult despite myself and Viconia, the only two other drow present, both agreeing on the matter. Only after the trade-off does she voice some unexpected antipathy toward Viconia for abandoning drow society and religion to become a cult leader to lesser races... which is exactly what Minthara herself did? And that realization is never explored?

In fact for all the effort put into her acquisition, she offers few or no approval-building opportunities, and even fewer workable ones. Some of her suggestions, like allying with a backstabbing, weakened ruler of a vulnerable surface city before he's had a chance to solidify power, are intended to sound like drow-ish powermongering but come across more as shortsighted, star-struck naivete. But the icing on the cake was her actually wanting to use The Emperor's proferred super-worm, despite her attitude upon snapping out of her previous bout of wormy brainwashing being "never again" as if she's learned nothing from her ordeal and experienced zero character growth. Again, you could draw a comparison to Wenduag from WotR and her compulsive backstabbing, but Wenduag was a socially inept bumpkin with zero political experience while Minthara's supposed to be a highly educated aristocrat capable of navigating one of her world's most insidious webs of unstable alliances. She should know when she's being played.

Both through under-development and being forced into nonsensical attitudes for the sake of cast balance, Minthara's one of the more interesting yet disappointing NPCs I've seen. I can't decide whether she's just a patchwork of miscommunicated design choices or she must've been written by a decent author with zero experience in organizing RPG scripts, but either way, quite the let-down.

Scorched Attention Strategy

I linked to YouTube for my last couple of musical epigraphs, as is my wont, thinking they'd finally given up on their crusade for brainwashing. Apparently they haven't. Apologies. Let's make this clear: if YouTube does manage to completely ban ad blockers, I will no longer be linking to it. I will very likely no longer be using it. If some of you have visited multiple times in the past months, you may have noticed I've been trying other sites as alternatives, but nothing really has the same gamut of content - yet. Maybe that will work, maybe it won't. Either way, this blog has always stayed as commercial-free as I can make it.

I HATE commercials. That's not hyperbole. I hate both dishonesty and mental control with a passion, and the intrinsically, unendingly, cacophonously screeching YOUBUYIT melds both like no other plague of the modern world save perhaps priests and politicians.

Wikipedia's greatest motivator in asking me for donations? "Keep it ad-free." Ten years ago I opted for GoG over Steam not only to avoid DRM, but because its cleaner site layout was less pushy with the ads. This is, again, a main reason why I pay for Netflix and Hulu can go fuck itself. But YouTube? Making money off content posted by individuals? You get nothing.

 

I own two televisions, thanks to my family dumping crap here on moving. One is now a monitor for a laptop whose screen burned out. The other is gathering dust. While, yes, part of the problem is that I just outgrew TV entertainment in its passivity, the second biggest reason for my lack of interest is commercials. If you're ever in the room with me and a commercial comes on, I will at the very least mute the set while it plays, if not turn it off completely. I am viscerally, violently repulsed by the fucking things. The most nauseating part of 1984, for me? It's not the rats eating your face off. It's never being able to turn off Big Brother's speeches.

Let me repeat: if Google manages to ban ad blockers on YouTube, I will no longer be using YouTube. If it tries to force ads onto this blog, I will end the blog. I want no contact with the parasitic filth "working" in the ad industry besides one day being given the honor of pushing the button to have them all drowned in pig shit.

Out-Of-Placers

(suggested soundtrack: Claude von Stroke - Vocal Chords)

_________________________________________________

 

Stop me if you've heard this one: a gutsy turncoat, a horny broad, one and a half rats, a giant bug and a hard worm walk into a bar...

In other words, I may as well follow up on The Integral Trees with another random worldbuilding example, this time in webcomic form. Out-of-Placers came up here once before due to its bad habit of ramming exposition pages through the middle of the action. The author does mention they're meant to be skippable, but of course knowing whether or not one can be skipped depends on already knowing the contents, which a first time reader can't by definition. On the other hand, I'll likely keep mentioning OOPs precisely because it does contain the wealth of detail to warrant pages upon pages of exposition.

Despite overt medieval fantasy trappings, the setting is rapidly unveiled as a science fiction human society, lost, fallen and fragmented in an alien world (presumably after their pretextium crystals or whatever exploded and turned the sky into cotton candy) using the main viewpoint of a man presto-changeoed at the start into a female yinglet, a waist-high, hyperactive rat-bird thing. Other species include standard-issue giant ant-like indrels plus baxxids, which are basically what you'd get if xenomorphs all turned diffident math geek.

 

This unusual restraint in SciFi's customary proliferation of wrinkly forehead aliens leaves room to flesh out each one in admirable detail, to portray different types of inhumanity, to balance each other and stand out without resolving to one-note caricatures. They not only appear different but communicate by different means, occupy different living spaces, eat different, fuck different, breathe different, hatch, grow and die different. Not only individual species but the ecosystem as a whole is developed through cursory glances at pack animals and agriculture to help the reader discern the boundaries of humans' alien presence in the world, reminiscent of Unicorn Jelly's red/green/white life distinctions. The planet's native life is mostly of the molluscoid/arthropoid variety, with the stand-out yinglets suggested to be either deliberately uplifted or human hybrids.

That attention to detail holds for individual characters as well, with divergent social paths detailed for each species and individuals displaying varied attitudes, aptitudes and platitudes. Even the bit player extras' distinctive personalities drive both drama and comic relief. As one funny example, take the cosplay angle. I'm quite impressed by how much narrative mileage you can get out of a seamstress brigade. In an autocracy ruled by merchant princes who advertise their military presence sartorially, recurrent uniform fitting scenes have elevated the needle-and-thread enthusiasts to the story's unofficial interspecies ambassadors while still holding up their comic relief function. Weirdest possible recurring theme, but in context it works wonders. Which, incidentally, makes OOPs an eloquent answer to my complaints about nudist aliens.

Which is all to say OOPs has established some of the most intriguing intrigue around, but it remains to be seen whether it can resolve same satisfactorily. Its many viewpoints are rapidly becoming as unwieldy as A Song of Ice and Fire's, with the added complication of constantly stopping to explain various points of biology or sociology. Starting with an accepted boilerplate like medieval stasis or space cowboys would be one thing, but detailing an entire world in one contiguous narrative is almost impossible while also keeping an engaging pace.

 

Already characters appear willfully ignorant of some obvious problems. The seemingly goofy, lovable loser yinglets for instance, with their two-year generation time, hen-inspired productivity and every colony a dedicated breedery, obviously present both a ticking population bomb and a potential instant army for the first megalomaniac to successfully harness them. You'd think we'd see a baxxid crunch those numbers at some point, but if this is being held back as a grand reveal, it's getting too obvious to ignore.

Neither is OOPs immune to our time's self-flagellating social activist idiocy, as the main character's transformation is repeatedly leveraged for generic bemoaning of women's supposedly inferior and victimized status - even as males mangle and butcher each other every few pages for our oh-so-anti-female entertainment. But then again, with under three hundred pages published over nine years, most such parroting came years ago during the explosive proliferation of wokey paranoia. Hopefully now, with formerly indomitable feminist propaganda showing the odd crack here and there, OOPs may ease off the trite, obligatory male-bashing to focus on relevant storytelling.

Time and the fickle winds of (self-)censorship will tell. I do notice the author will not deign to allow my comments to post, despite having no compunctions against taking my money.

Was it something I said?

The Integral Trees

(suggested soundtrack: Ellen Allien & Apparat - Jet)

_________________________________________________

 

 

This should've been a comic book.

 

Long story short, if you want a good example of how to flesh out a fantastic ecosystem, read TIT.

If you want a bad example of how to lose readers in explanations... also read TIT.

While we're at it, if you're a profitable enough writer you can apparently title your book TIT and the censors don't even flinch. Go figure. (Don't even try to tell me he didn't do it on purpose; it's not like you really need the "the" in there.)

Side-note: given I don't know anyone and rarely want to, test readers are hard to come by, especially as I can't offer real entertainment. A bit of feedback after posting Deliver though did point out I failed at describing my alien landscape intelligibly. Well, at least I can take comfort in being similarly bemused at similarly confounding descriptions by actual, published, famous authors like Niven. If not for the occasional diagram or lexicon, you'd be completely lost.

 

But then I suppose you're forewarned of diving into nerd fiction when the very title references calculus symbols. Granted, the environment isn't too hard to wrap your head around once various details have been reiterated a few times. A gas torus around a neutron star, left behind by an orbiting gas giant gradually losing its mass to the star's tidal pull, within which torus float trees a hundred kilometers in length, leafy at both ends of their trunks. Unfortunately The Integral Trees starts and continues its action from the viewpoint of human remnants of an interstellar expedition, fallen back on preindustrial tribal structures. Either the setting or the viewpoint by itself could have been charming, but their combination renders a first read-through gratuitously obtuse. Imagine trying to describe Ringworld from the point of view of a ghoul or giant. 'Nuff said?

 

Doesn't help that the best expository character, Kendy, is mostly relegated to deus ex machina and sequel hook. Some of the nomenclature could've been better chosen, too. I spent half the novel mixing up "Gold" and "Voy" because one suggests golden light and the other voyaging... and it's the other way around. A few plot points like the original importance of the giant mushroom are glossed over. Best not get into characters' constant shifts in allegiance wedged into one or two paragraphs each, to build up the adventuring party and keep the action flowing.

 

Much like Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky, this is quite noticeably a Romantic Age high seas adventure story, down to the bioship-to-bioship boarding scene. And, much like Heinlein, Niven nevertheless secured a solid SF footing by carrying through on his premise. The world itself is fascinating. The trees, the migratory life, the cultural and biological adaptations to a free-fall, fragmented, windblown ecosystem permeate the story, from jet-powered seed dispersal harnessed for transportation, to everyone carrying grapples at all times, to prehensile toes, to the weaponry eschewing gravity-powered blunt trauma to focus on projectiles, to animal life almost entirely favoring wings, to gas concentrations at different positions in the torus' core making the difference between life and death.

What can I say, I does loves me sum worldbuilding. You could nitpick various elements (especially the suspiciously earthlike evolution) but more than enough work was put into it to compensate.

Still, I have to note that much of what grinds and stalls in verbal decriptions of the otherwise captivating setting would benefit from a more objective viewpoint. Even if you turn up your nose at narrator exposition, read The Integral Trees and tell me it wouldn't've have been more warranted in this case.

Self-Sealing Spell

"As Jared Diamond shows in Guns, Germs and Steel, it was European germs that brought Western Hemisphere populations to the brink of extinction in the sixteenth century, since those people had had no history in which to develop tolerance for them. In this century it will be our memes, both tonic and toxic, that will wreak havoc on the unprepared world. Our capacity to tolerate the toxic excesses of freedom cannot be assumed in others, or simply exported as one more commodity. [...] The field of public health expanded to include cultural health will be the greatest challenge of the next century."

Daniel Dennett - Breaking the Spell

 

 

In penning my cogatayshuns on DDdruids, I found myself digressing into a weird apologia (deleted for brevity) of Gygax, Arneson &co. for what might now appear poor scholarship on the attributions of words like druids. While I cannot speak for the level of education at old TSR, I do know the '80s/'90s audience they were addressing. Nobody knew what druids were! Basically, back then, the only people besides historians who knew anything about ancient practices were random goofballs like The Society for Creative Anachronism. One of the few points on which public discourse has improved in the past few decades is awareness of religions. Sadly that also comes with a major reactionary spike in religiosity, but y'know... still...

As a tool of social control, as psychological leverage for powermongering, any and every faith thrives on willful, enforced ignorance. You need know naught but you are "saved" by obeying the dictates of religious authority. The world consists of only two groups: us versus them, the saved versus the damned, faithful and heathens, pure and unenlightened, righteous and sinners, good and evil. You're not supposed to be aware of what you profess to believe, only to allow yourself to be harnessed by your social superiors based on shared belief. You're especially not supposed to notice that others elsewhere believe different gibberish than your gibberish just as fervently and irrationally. You're especially especially not supposed to discover that others are living perfectly ordinary or extraordinary lives without believing themselves subject to any supernatural oversight whatsoever.

 

Attempts at breaking out of Christian control in the '90s were mostly fumbling adolescent rebelliousness like the surge in popularity for Wicca. It was eight-year-old Lisa Simpson declaring herself Buddhist, or heavy metal bands claiming to be Satanists for shock value, or stock edgy TV characters like the angry doctor mouthing off to a priest as pretext for the priest to browbeat and put the nerd in his place. It wasn't supposed to happen in real life. Keep in mind even those improved on previous decades' scaremongering about bloodthirsty pagans/heretics like The Wicker Man or Children of the Corn.

Atheism did not exist. Not as a popular concept. Not as an acknowledged stance. Not as a topic for polite conversation. Oh, atheists existed, sure, plenty of us, but each and every one stranded in a sea of rambling mysticism. Atheism was an outlandish concept you'd hear joked about on TV in MASH - "let's make him an atheist" - "I don't believe in atheism" or danced around in a few episodes of ST:TNG. In fact I only learned the word "atheist" right before moving to the States when I was nine years old from a booklet of Christian parables handed out to us as part of our state-mandated religious indoctrination class at public school. For context, the anecdote in question started "an atheist doctor who went to Hell" and you can probably fill in the general tone from there on. Only in my late teens did I finally connect the word to my own stance, despite having been functionally free of supernatural belief since twelve at the latest, despite having been a Star Trek and Rahan fan all my life and having read Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Atheism, even if you knew it existed, was simply not an option.

 

Here's a question which comes up constantly here when discussing religious trends: why is America so much more backward and superstitious than other developed nations? One tends to ignore the obvious answer: it was always that way. The romanticized version of American history taught in schools, of religious pilgrims fleeing England for religious freedom, ignores the little detail that the freedom they sought was to impose their own puritanical tyranny upon a society they could isolate and brainwash away from the increasingly educated Europe, much as Jonestowners would later flee sunny California for the conveniently darkened jungles of Guyana. When the American colonies finally established a national government, flatly excluding religion from rule was less a matter of idealism than pragmatic observation of its citizenry's fanatical undercurrent, which if not kept in check would inevitably flare up into theocratic repression.

But that undercurrent is not American or Protestant, nor limited to the founding of a colonial federation. It's universal, and innate. The underlying human feeblemindedness which allows for religious inculcation (general emotionality, our neotenized dependence on parental figures, our herd mentality) is universal. To instill any sanity in the human ape means fighting against an eternal, superstitious, emotionally manipulative undertow. It was not only Wikipedia or online forums which allowed for new atheism in the 2000s, but the ready availability of individuals willing to break the spell, to scrutinize religion just as any other facet of behavior, under which light it cannot help but reveal its stupidity and insanity.

 

You have a few lingering atheists now, but do you have atheism? Back in 2015 I tried to warn that developing viral meme herd immunity depends on interposing the immune between diseased minds, between indoctrinators and indoctrinated. But try to find, now, those necessary living sanity checks. Looking up fictional atheism on Wikipedia or TVTropes reveals most examples painfully dated, even in Science Fiction. The only ones relatively new and famous enough for me to have heard about are Rick&Morty plus whatever Seth MacFarlane is doing at the moment. Apparently they've even turned Dr. Who into some breed of troglodytic bible-thumper. Otherwise promising shows like Lost or Dark wind down their plots into moronic supernatural babble. The less said of what happened to Star Trek post-TNG, the better.

 

Scattered, ridiculous and fumbling may have been the scrutiny of religion in the '90s, but it was at least willing, and yielded a greater willingness to learn mythology as mythology. Where are the Roddenberries now? I find Dennett's warning of free thought's epidemic potential interesting in one respect he probably did not intend. If Eurasians had developed greater resistance to smallpox by the sixteenth century, they had done so the hard way, the natural way: by dying. For millennia on end. Yet the result was nonetheless a more resistant society. If free thought kills, maybe there are ways to inoculate societies... but if the only way that works is continued exposure,

then

continue

EXPOSING!

'Cause I ain't seein' near enough plague rats running around.

Classes&Cogitations, 6: Da Drood

Call me nitpicky, but the druid class' biggest problem is its name. When implemented, it appears to have wound up by default (in contrast to clerics) a catch-all for paganism, laden with noble savage hippie claptrap alongside a smatter of animism, shamanism and that old tree surgeon joke from MASH as the definition of druidism. Plus, much as it pains my lycanthropic self to admit it, it doesn't mesh well with what became druids' most famous class feature, shapeshifting.

Animal skin-changing (or inducing such changes in others) is a pretty common storytelling trope in most early religions, and a power claimed by many of those religions' mystics... but it's usually associated with the concept of shamanism. Granted it's a largely semantic difference, and there's plenty of overlap between Celtic druids and the widespread shamanistic beliefs of Eurasia (or the little we can glean archaeologically after Christians' and Muslims' unending cultural genocide campaign) but once D&D (and its copycats) decided to expand via classes actually called "shaman" etc. then the skin-changing or skin-walking or inhabiting the bodies of animals should mostly have migrated over to them.

And it's not like you wouldn't have plenty to work with to flesh out a druid class without (or with heavily reduced) shapeshifting, even from my meager knowledge of Celtic religion. The idea of druids forming secretive cabals out in the wilderness (to protect their oooohhh-spoookyy forbidden knowledge) was actually historically true as far as I know, and combined with a similarly secretive aversion to the written word and reliance on oral tradition this could make for some pretty memorably conspiratorial druidic cults without anyone ever growing a single extra hair. But aside from living outside the main community for the sake of secrecy, the druidic priesthood was concerned less with wild animals than with natural cycles of life/death or the seasons (to the point of obsessing over the turning wheel as universal motif) and come on, what director worth his salt can't make a visually stunning scene out of wagon burials?

 

Speaking of oral tradition, while more modern religious education may be carried out in organized edifices with written stores of official dogma and objects of devotion or study, earlier religions around the world routinely localized their stock of lore squarely in the pin-head of the tribe's one official witch doctor. That one, in turn, would keep an apprentice or two. While for monks, clerics, paladins, etc. I've constantly been emphasizing the need to flesh out their monasteries, churches and other trappings of their order, for the wilder types much of their existence would revolve around the direct master-student relationship. If you want a brief but lovely example of that, run a mage through Old Mebbeth's quest chain in Planescape: Torment. In fact, quite a few of that game's backstory interactions centered on long-term apprenticeship (Dak'kon / Ignus / Ravel) for good or ill...

Calling upon animals to help could still be in the druidic wheel-house (but I'll get to the Conjuration school when I talk about wizards) alongside light and darkness, seasonal effects, maybe calling upon dead souls to inhabit animals if you want to stretch it a bit, augury whether based on the behavior of animals or on entrails, empowering warriors, you name it. Let's not forget that rather infamous druidic predilection for human sacrifice, which I've found conspicuously absent from cRPGs. For some strange reason.

 

Where you split the difference between druids, witches, shamans, voodoo and other "natural" or "spirit" magic as opposed to organized churches depends on your particular game's system, but to ensure a difference, split you must. If not, well, look at something like NWN2 and tell me whether druid/shaman/warpriest/etc. actually feel like different classses.

 

In practical terms, druids work best as a summoning and crowd control class (brambles, ice, stone, sunlight) and many of those spells beautifully complement that Celtic turning wheel motif, through waning/waxing growth and decay, changes and cycles. But for physical control to stand out, games in general need to give up their obsession with telepathy and mind control, and that's a topic to be revisited some other time.

"THE" news

Now about those D&D druids...

- hold on a sec, fam wants to chat...

 

...ah-huh... the family dog barfed up part of a chew toy... neighbours took down their holiday decorations... yet another family member has acquired a bad hip... wait, wait, what's that last thing again? It's raining in Europe? Which country? Oh, all of them?

It is apparently raining in Europe. And snowing. And freezing. And flooding. For a week now. Huh. You don't say. Apparently Sweden even had to close roads due to snow and cold, which is like hearing Neverland pirates can't sail through all the fairy dust. Yes, we knew there was a problem, but has it gotten that bad? Seems like the sort of thing that usually pops up in news summaries. We sure as hell have heard of Japan's latest earthquake, even though... it's Japan... why do you think anime has so many one-panel scenes? The ground your screen is sitting on should be supplying the motion. We even heard about the earthquake in Afghanistan months ago, even though, hell, that's the least of THEIR worries. Last month we heard about the Siberian winter being winter in Siberia. Quakes, floods, blizzards, tornadoes, reporters love talking about natural disasters, and the weather in particular. It's sensationalism and human interest with no need to piss off any crime syndicates by reporting on their misdeeds and no-one can argue that it is, legitimately, news.

Yet for once, they're showing uncharacteristic restraint. All of them. All. Of. Them. At least here in the States, Europe getting increasingly flooded from the fjords to Bosphorous warrants barely a curt, bashful glimpse, if that. Oh, they'll have one article buried somewhere in page fifty-seven, nowhere near as important as "thirty years of Golden Globe fashion." You can't accuse them of not doing their jobs... technically. But front pages conspicuously avoid treating this as an over-arching problem, like, say, maybe, atmospheric currents driven by temperature gradients might be shifting. I'm not surprised by our "big three" (CBS/NBC/ABC) as their idea of international news has always treated even Canada like some strange, exotic netherworld. But Reuters, CNN, BBC, hell, even Wikipedia's front page ongoing events? Nothing up front? Anywhere? The Associated Press site did run a couple articles three days ago. EuroNews presents the problem as "across Europe" though I suppose with "Euro" in the name that's the only one that couldn't avoid it.

 

Otherwise it hath been decreed, to journalism as a whole, that Americans shall pay no attention to the rains in plain.

Meanwhile, my local squirrel population is still busily rampaging through leaf litter in January like it's November.

Oh, look, someone built a highway to hell-if-I-care-what-season-it-is.

Players as product? Needs quality control.

"If you need some conversation
Bring a magazine to read around
Our broke-down transportation"

 

Modest Mouse - Fire It Up

 

 

You know what I hate about League of Legends? Lots of things, and if any of the better AoS games like Paragon, Demigod, Gigantic or HotS were still active, I'd be getting my lane-pushing fix there instead. But for the moment, let's focus on this:

I've set the damn game to display hero names fifty times over and it's kept resetting itself to player names. I don't give a flying fuck what these little cretins call themselves! It's an auto-matchmaking class-based game with premade characters. Nobody gives a shit about you. You are <ROLE> therefore perform <ROLE> and be judged as <ROLE> then go fucking kill yourself for all anyone cares.

Boy I tells ya, nuthin' ruins a multiplayer game like the multiple players. (Which reminds me, if any tabletop groups are looking for a GM, I have zero experience and I'm very inflexible.)

But hopefully this isn't a sign of some larger trend to force contact between players again... is it? Please no.

 

 

My last Warframe clan (whatever it was called) kicked me out for inactivity some indeterminate number of months ago. Teammates are even less relevant in Diablo-inspired loot grinds than in AoS, except as space-fillers. Even the <ROLE> matters very little. Yet from the start, Warframe has forced players to join clans in order to access gear recipes, flight travel mode, even the entire spaceship game mode for a while. Having picked up most of that already, I'm set, and for the next few years can hopefully avoid associating with anyone else for more than twenty minutes at a time. If your new event requires clan membership, then fuck it, fuck you, fuck off. I'm not putting up with a hundred retards for one piece of loot or whatever you're offering.

 

I briefly enjoyed online guilds back in the early 2000s, when computer games were still a somewhat nerdy, maligned pursuit and the apes one met online were of above-average intelligence... or at least a distinguishable minority of them were... or if not, at least atypical enough to display some interesting quirks. That interaction hinged on online culture's superiority to human culture at large. Once the mainstream vermin poured in during the late 2000s, once the nerdiness was diluted out to homeopathic irrelevance, once online chatter lost any quality over offline, once the only conversation you could hope to strike up concerned what you had for lunch, any appeal guilds, clans or friend lists once held also died.

Regardless of the countless hordes cramming into Fortnite or LoL, multiplayer as a style is dead. It died last decade with the likes of City of Heroes and The Secret World and Team Fortress 2 and Planetside 2. Players are now worth only a slight, ever-dwindling edge in behavioral diversity over AI, and the faster we can obsolete them altogether, the faster AI can replace <ROLE> the better. Any RTS with a multiplayer mode like Northgard will have something like ten players online at any one time, all cursing each others' existence. It is absurd for Larian and other imitators to keep trying to cram multiplayer modes into cRPGs, meaninglessly sidelining the genre's main purpose of personal decisions/adventuring. Consider the monstrous waste of funding this presents compared with how few must actually be using such a feature. Baldur's Gate 3 is currently still enjoying its fifteen minutes of fame, applauded and awarded and talked about and selling like hotcakes - for an RPG at any rate. Let's peek at the hottest thing on the single-player market's multiplayer.

 

the entire robot mafia

This is what half a million concurrent players looks like.

9 p.m. EST (GMT -5) while the highschool and college shits are still on holiday no less.

27 lobbies, 22 of which have no business being online since there's nobody actually in there with you!

I also tried this eleven hours earlier. Predictably weaker results, with some lobbies (Eve/Steve) apparently being on around the clock. Unless you dragged half of Belgium online during west-European peak time when I blinked, this in no way justifies the developer work-hours you charged us to design the game for multiplayer.

What, this is supposed to justify wrecking the complexity and pacing of the single-player adventure? This is what's supposed to justify the clunky outdated chore of an individual character inventory system? Five fucking multiplayer matches for every million sales?

 

Companies love getting players to form attachments through their product because that way they'll keep paying into the activity by which their interaction was initially defined. They'll keep chasing that validation. Or so the Facebook theory runs, anyway. Except more might be noticing that even if you like the book, the faces are stupid. We're not hating the game. We're hating the players, and with good cause.

 

If multiple players are a sellable feature, then the feature is subject to quality control and quality assurance. What quality of players can you offer? Admit the vast majority of humans are sub-humans. You are trying to sell me on the golden opportunity of mind-melding with creatures which stopped reading after Harry Potter, which consider the Kardashians the pinnacle of cinema, which copy their character builds off online guides, run from every fight to pad their precious K/D ratios and cannot converse in anything but a random mish-mash of slang and re-posted memes. The vermin have nothing to say!

I bought your product precisely to avoid any more contact than strictly necessary with that disgusting eight-billion-headed, no-brained pile of degenerate subhuman filth!