Rot of the Self-Righteous

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

 

Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

 

 

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

 

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

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

I take issue not with form, but with content.

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

- an ineffective old fart with a lisp

- a murderous raving fanatic

- a traitor

- a liar

- a thief

- a pervert

etc.

 

The females on the other hand:

- a hypercompetent paladin

- a hypercompetent secret agent

- a hypercompetent military leader

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

There's your first impression.